Josherich's Blog

#473: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy

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 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/Naval.

Naval, welcome back to the show.

“Yeah, thanks for having me. If I recall correctly, I was crushed in Podcast of the Year by Jamie Fox. So that’s right. So 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 Fox 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 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 suck, right? You look at sequels in movies and whatnot, they’re usually pretty bad. They cost three times as much. 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 maybe in the first run, they took an idea they’ve had for a decade or three decades, and they expounded on it, and it sounded great. And then in the sequel, whether it’s a book or a movie, they have to come up with something equally good, but they only have two years to do it. And it’s just really difficult to do. So I think sequels just make everybody look bad, and I’m not a fan of sequels.

Yet here we are. The thing about sequels is they make money. People want them. People crave them because there’s a certain 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 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.
• 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 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. 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, including Feynman path integrals. He was part of the Manhattan Project. Brilliant, brilliant guy. And I loved him because Feynman was one of the first characters I encountered who did science and serious work, and was accomplished in so-called real life, but was also a character. He was a happy person. He was deeply philosophical. He didn’t take himself, nor life, too seriously. He appreciated the mysteries of life. He appreciated living life, and he had a lot of fun along the way.

To me, he was like a full stack intellectual hacker of life and was just very inspirational to me as a kid growing up. You know, even though I read a lot of philosophy and normal nonfiction, my hero—though I’m in the business world and the tech world—my heroes are scientists because I think applied science is the engine that pulls humanity forward. It eventually becomes technology. That technology allows us to engage in all kinds of pursuits around civilization rather than be scrapping for just basic subsistence and survival. Therefore, I think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of human history. And Feynman was one of the greats; he was admirable in many regards as to how he lived his life.

Although I think recently they tried to cancel him, 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. I actually collect very few things, but I managed to buy some of his papers and drawings at auction a handful of years ago because it was the first time they had been made available.

So I can show you some of his equations from the Manhattan Project, which is wild to think about. My fascination, though, is in many respects uninformed because I don’t have the scientific literacy to fully appreciate the genius that he brought to bear on physics, for instance. But I could appreciate his cleverness and his questioning of assumptions, as well as his distaste for uniforms and other accolades, most notably some of the prizes that he was awarded, which he seemed to have a particular dislike for on some level.

He famously said that “science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.” It’s so funny because these days, many people are on Twitter saying, “believe in science” or “according to science.” You have to realize there’s no such thing as science with a capital S. The foundation of science is doubt. It is all about falsifiability.

David Deutsch, who is one of my current modern living physicist heroes, is a Popperian. He subscribes to Karl Popper’s philosophy and basically says that if it’s not falsifiable, it’s not scientific. If you can’t prove it false, if there’s ambiguity—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. You shouldn’t be able to, after the fact, change the goal, move the goalposts, or change how the predictions were set up.

So those are the hallmarks of good science:

• Falsifiability
• Independent verifiability
• Risky and narrow predictions with details that are hard to vary both before and after the fact.

That’s how you end up with good science and good explanations—not by people on Twitter voting. That’s politics. It seems everything has become politics. Now science has become politics too. People politicize, and there’s big science, but I think Feynman would be very unhappy with that. Although he was generally a happy character, and non-political—he intended not to get involved in these things—I think he would realize that that is not actually science, but it’s masquerading as science. It’s almost becoming social science.

You know, going to Twitter, Nassim Taleb is one of my favorite Twitter follows, even though he’s a bit cantankerous. He annoys people for sure, but… You want to hear the truth. You gotta 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 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 kind of suspect to some deep level there’s a part of that that’s true.

So I think the same way with social science. It 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. 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 is in large groups.

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 a capital S is dangerous. Very dangerous.

Yeah, it’s propaganda. And then it becomes like macroeconomics. Again, another Taleb line, he says, “It’s easier to macro bullshit than it is to micro bullshit.” So big science is the equivalent of macroeconomics, whereas the equivalent of microeconomics is little science, which is, you know, me in a lab or me with my computer and trying out various things.

And so you can, just like with macroeconomics, pick and choose whatever data you want to prove whatever point you want. With big science, you can pick or choose whatever papers you want.

• Look at the fights right now on the internet about what COVID means.
• You can go down that hall of mirrors and find scientific quote unquote substantiation for many points of view, depending on which papers you choose to cherry pick.

And so then we reduce back to consensus. But again, science isn’t done by consensus. It should be done by experimentation, verifiability, falsifiability, rigorous testing. 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.

Unfortunately, I think that the nature of what science is, is being corrupted. And that started the day we let the so-called social sciences masquerade as sciences. You know, the day we said psychology is a science and politics can be a science. If you can apply the scientific methods to those things, then I think that’s the day we started to corrupt science, or at least the word science.

So real science, you know, these days is relegated to a very small corner: physics, maybe molecular biology and chemistry, mathematics, theory of computation, but it’s a fairly limited set.

Yeah, yeah. A very quantitatively literate friend of mine said at one point, most of the disciplines that have science at the end of them are not actually science, although there are some exceptions, right?

• 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 Karl Popper.

If there isn’t some experiment that could theoretically disprove it, then it’s not science.

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. 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 quote from Feynman is:

“I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.”

Yeah, this is a very deep point. And I think that a lot of times 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… You want to be able to describe it in 10 different ways in simple sentences from the ground up and re-derive whatever you need. If you’ve just memorized, you’re lost.

So I think this is one of the things that I get stuck on a lot, which is just keeping going back and reading the basics over and over, trying to understand them. Don’t necessarily have that tall edifice of knowledge that is very seductive in academia. But as anyone who’s operated much in the real world knows, in the real world, you get paid for making good judgments and decisions based on the basics.

For example, if you know arithmetic, statistics, and 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. Too much of it is reduced to memorization and understanding things as names and definitions.

I think the Feynman example is, you know, his dad would take him for walks and they would see birds. His dad would say, “this bird is such and such a warbler,” but that doesn’t tell you anything about the bird. That tells you about humans. Humans gave that bird that name. Really, the bird likes to stand on one leg at this point, it likes to pick at lice in its feathers doing this, it likes to eat these kinds of things, and it flies this way for that reason. These are its predators and these are its prey.

Those are the kinds of things that really give you understanding. Who cares what the bird is called? The name of the bird is irrelevant.

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, “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. Even many 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.

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.

I just want to point out, developing that foundational knowledge is akin to learning the basics of shooting foul throws in basketball. It is not becoming Michael Jordan. 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 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 a limited stand. It will teach you better accounting than out of a textbook. Now you may need to learn certain conventions because you need those to communicate with other humans so that there’s efficient communication. When you say one thing, they understand that thing.

That’s where jargon can be useful because it can be a compressed way of communicating knowledge rather than having to 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; 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. People are saying, “hey, I can make up really plausible sounding writing.” So the AI is going to take all the jobs.

Well, 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 rearticulate 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. While we’re on the topic of Feynman, one of the phrases, the quotes from him, is he says, “nature uses only the longest threads to weave her tapestry.” What he means by that is that there are only a few basic principles that you have to understand to kind of grasp the sum total of our knowledge in physics. There’s not a lot.

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. Those turn out to be one thing. We are attempting to do the same currently with gravity and quantum mechanics. We’re trying to reconcile them in quantum loop gravity or in string theory, or what have you.

You just kind of have to understand a few of the basic things, and then you’ll see them recurring over and over again. For example, I study and read physics and computer science just for entertainment. There’s no practical application for me, but there’s this really interesting theory I was reading about called Solomonoff induction. It basically formalizes Occam’s razor, which states that the shortest answer is the correct one.

However, it’s more advanced than that. It says that if you want to figure out why something happened, you take all the different reasons why it could have happened— all the different theories— and then you weigh each of them based on how compressed they are, how short they are, and how likely they are. That gives you the probability that provides an explanation for why that theory happened.

Now, Feynman has a very similar and elegant concept in a completely different field where he basically says, if you want to understand why this particle took that path, why did this photon take that path? What you do is you look at all the possible paths that the 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; one is about photons traveling through space-time, and the other is about causality and why an event may have happened and what the theory is behind that. These are two completely different fields with two completely different characters thinking about different things.

Yet, these are very, very fundamental theories in their fields. Deep down, they are actually the same, which is fascinating. It just shows how much of what we look at as complexity actually emerges from a set of very simple rules. Understanding is the thing to strive for, not the words. Even though I use fancy terms like Solomonoff induction and Feynman’s path integral theory, the actual names are irrelevant. It’s the concept that’s fascinating.

You spoke to learning accounting through building a business. Let’s segue to business. Your pin tweet is a tweet storm, a series of tweets the headline of which is “How to get rich” (without getting lucky). It has, as we record this, 44.8k retweets and 110k+ favorites.

We’re not going to go through this whole thing; it’s quite long. I’m curious to know what parts of it you think people are paying too much attention to or overemphasize. What parts do you wish 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 was trying to figure out how to make money. It came with a framework of how to be rich, but not by accident— to do it in a way that I could repeat over and over. I would leave very little up to chance.

There’s this belief that, to make money, you either have to be born rich, or you have to be privileged, or you have to be in the right circles, or you have to get lucky. I believe there are still ways to accomplish the original American dream, which is to make money but do it in a deliberate, systematic way.

When I say money, I mean wealth. I don’t mean like a law firm where you make a couple of hundred bucks an hour but are still tied to the clock. I mean when you wake up when you want, you go to sleep when you want, you live where you want, and you have freedom. To me, the purpose of money is freedom. For that, you need to create wealth. Can you do it ethically? Can you do it sustainably? Can you do it reliably? with people that you like and 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. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger are examples of others. Not that I’m in their status or their league, but other people have done it. So that was the whole point of that framework.

And the tweet storm, I just wrote it down one day. And it’s funny because 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’d been thinking about it and I wrote up the whole tweet storm almost exactly like you see it. There are lots and lots of missing pieces.

Like, obviously that is just like 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 and just read a few of them. This is from May 31, 2018. So a few examples, and you don’t have to comment on these specific examples, but just for people who haven’t seen this, I want to give them an idea.

• 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.”

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, 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, where the cost of distributing something is very close to zero.

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 a Tim Ferriss podcast and the Tim Ferriss brand, right? 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. You’re taking on big accountability and their specific knowledge. Only you know how to be Tim Ferriss, the learning machine who can then connect to other learners and extract value out of them and share that with the audience.

So that’s an example of you having productized yourself. But ultimately, you own the Tim Ferriss business. Now, you can go lower levels down from that. You don’t have to own the entire business. You could be an investor in public equities or private stocks, you could be a partner in a private business, you could be an employee of a startup where you 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 as 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’ve kind of been sweeping under the rug, and you’ve sort of been suffering along, but you’re sweeping on the rug, and then you get divorced. At that moment, you can no longer unsee all the damage that was in the relationship and what all the consequences are; they’re real.

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. Example: If you went and you got a PhD in a social science, now I’m basically saying,

hey, learn to 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 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, people always ask me, “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; it’s the unlearning. It’s not 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.

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.

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 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 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 in AngelList, 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 that you follow.

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.

I haven’t had like one gigantic payday that set me up forever. All that depends on your standards, right? I’m talking about by Silicon Valley standards; obviously for most parts of the world, I’ve had many of those gigantic paydays, but they’ve been consistent and they’ve been varied.

Varied in the sense that there are completely different kinds of investments and endeavors, but consistent in that I get one every couple of years.

Which would, I just want to interject for a second, suggest that there are principles guiding your approaches or some systematic approaches, right? 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. I strive to be an interface between great programmers, developers, designers, the capital markets, and consumers. I am using that to put myself in a position where I can identify great trends as they’re emerging, invest in those companies, or help start those companies, own equity in those things, help bring them to market, and strategize on how to navigate the worlds of fundraising and exiting, recruiting, company building, culture, and technology development.

And I have a brand around it. 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.
• I’ve started funds and all kinds of things.

But I don’t, it’s funny, I don’t really follow my own principles anymore. For example, the whole podcast thing and the whole Twitter thing, even though I’ve got reasonably good brands and followers, I’m not monetizing them at all. I’m not charging anybody for anything because I’m not trying to make money anymore.

To me, making money is like becoming the kind of person that makes money. 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 whom I know and trust to do business with for the rest of my life. They’re very high integrity people and very capable, which 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, 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, or 10 a.m.
• I go to sleep at 2 or 3 a.m.
• I don’t work a lot of days.

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 asking 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, sitting in a meeting, or in front of a computer. I want to be on a beach if I don’t feel like it. The ideal would be to make money with your mind, not with your time.

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. Your judgment gets multiplied through this massive force multiplier—through code, capital, community, labor, and what have you.

If you’re smart and know what you’re doing, you don’t need to work hard. Working hard is the least important thing. You have to pay your dues and 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 that judgment comes from clear thinking.

• Clear thinking comes from having time to reflect and pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity.

You’ll see that a lot of great investors, for example, just sit around reading most of the time. Or Warren Buffett famously plays a lot of bridge. Obviously, not everyone can just be an investor, although that is becoming more and more democratized.

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.

If I make so much money that I’m donating hospital wings and universities and all that stuff, I overshot. I’m not trying to have some influence on the world through money. Ironically, I have more influence on the world through podcasts like this. 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 anyone or anything. I’m not trying to persuade anyone of anything. So if people don’t like it, 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 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?

Yeah, 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, 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. One of the things you learn after you make money is that money doesn’t make you happier. It takes care of your money problems, but it’s 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 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. 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: would I have been as successful? And it’s hard to do the counterfactual, obviously, if I wasn’t as anxious because anxiety comes from fear. It’s also a motivator. It makes you get off your butt. And one of the ways to make the anxiety go away, at least until the next piece of anxiety comes along, is to go do something about it.

So what is the role of anxiety?

Well, firstly, I noted that pretty much everybody’s anxious all the time. It’s a rare human being who isn’t anxious. And it makes sense. We are alpha predators. You know, we took over this earth and domesticated or killed all the other animals. We did that by being the most paranoid, the most fearful, and the most angry predators this world has ever seen.

So anxiety is built into the core of who we are. In fact, you could argue that all the mind does all day long is fear-based scenario planning for survival and then maybe a little bit of greed for replication. So anxiety is at the core level of who we are. But certainly, some people are more anxious than others. There’s no question. And some people seem to be much calmer about it.

So which is more useful for effectiveness? Assuming that your goal 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. We all intrinsically know this.

Like if you look at samurai 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 can be 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, anything else.

So, if you want to change your life, you have to change these conversations. You have to examine your thoughts and figure out where they’re coming from.

• Reflect on your past experiences.
• Explore your beliefs.
• Spend time in solitude.

When it comes to anxiety, it often stems from unresolved issues and the inability to understand what drives those anxious feelings.

A lot of the time, we project our fears onto the future, creating scenarios that may never come to fruition.

This is why becoming calm and centered is such a powerful tool. The more you can manage your inner dialogue, the more control you gain over your emotional responses.

As I mentioned earlier, meditation has played a significant role in my journey.

“Self-examination and meditation is a great way to do that. Self-therapy, it’s sitting there with your thoughts.”

This is key. It allows you to sift through the noise and uncover the root of the anxiety. Remember, it’s crucial to confront these thoughts rather than suppress them.

In conclusion, if one of your kids approaches you with anxiety, encourage them to explore their thoughts.

• Suggest techniques like meditation or journaling.
• Recommend reading philosophical texts.
• Advocate for spending time in nature or engaging in creative activities.

By nurturing a healthy relationship with themselves, they can pave the way for a more fulfilling life and tackle anxiety head-on.

The journey to understanding oneself is ongoing, and the rewards are immeasurable. 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, to sit down, “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 that those problems have gone away. It’s that they’re just there. They’re there, but they’re provoking anxiety.

What you think of 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 feel trapped.

So, proper meditation, proper examination should ruin the life that you’re currently living. It should cause you to:

• Leave relationships.
• Reestablish boundaries with family members and colleagues.
• Quit your job.
• Change your eating patterns.
• Spend more time with yourself.
• Change what books you read.
• 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, 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 you just said you do not do, like the mantra-based meditation or following the breath.

You and I have meditated before. I don’t know if your approach is still similar, but it is quite a, I 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 of it? Because it was such a burden lifted in a sense when the pass-fail is removed and the experience that I had after, say, a week of doing this twice a day, which is not necessarily what people would do in normal life, but 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, because everyone has in their mind a preconceived notion of what meditation is. Let’s not even call it that. I would say that there are two self-examination practices that I do. And I don’t even call them practices anymore, because sometimes I do them because I feel like them, and I enjoy them, or because it feels right, and sometimes I don’t. Because anything done routinely sort of becomes its own trap, and it’s 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?

Yeah. 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, Maxims? Who are we talking about?

Yeah, Schopenhauer Western philosophy is my current favorite, although I’ve definitely moved around in that one. Eastern philosophy, I’ll read everything from Osho. I know he’s discredited and been canceled, but fantastic. That makes me like him even more. Krishnamurti, I don’t know, 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, 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, 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. 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? I’m not even questioning it so much, but more just kind of seeing it.

And after a while, when you see it, you start seeing through your own BS. You start seeing how you’re 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 half lotus with your eyes closed? What is that? No, it’s literally just walking around. It’s just life. 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. When the mind sort of sees me chattering, it quiets down a bit, right?

And like I said, it’s back to that crazy roommate analogy, which I originally picked up from Michael Singer, by the way. He has a good book called The Untethered Soul. But the crazy roommate analogy, 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, slowly dismiss them for just kind of rambling all the time in this fear, paranoiac mode.

So I think just kind of viewing your thoughts as sort of these unbidden things that arise from within you, but aren’t really necessarily the whole story, should be viewed with the same level of skepticism that you would apply to an outside observer. I think that framework is helpful.

If you find it to be true, then you’ll find yourself doing it more often. If you find it not to be true, if you’re like, “no, actually I choose these thoughts and I 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. On that one, I learned from an Indian gentleman, the 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.

You sit there for 60 minutes. Unfortunately, not less than an hour at a time because it takes 30 to 40 minutes to sink in past the initial chattering to get to the good part or the so-called runner’s high equivalent. You sit for 60 minutes every day and do it for at least 60 days. You do it first thing in the morning when your mind is clear, you’re alert, and you’ve had a good night’s sleep.

You sit up with your back straight and you can use cushions or 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 it wants to fight, you let it fight. If it wants to be quiet, you let it be quiet. If it wants to chant a mantra or pay attention to breathing, you can do that, but you don’t force anything. You just kind of let it happen.

So you don’t fight it. You don’t resist it. You don’t argue with it. You don’t double down on it. We just kind of let things happen. 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. Some will be self-examination. Some of it you just get tired of. Some of it just needs… To be heard once and then it goes away. And eventually, you’ll get to a mental state of inbox zero, where now you’re just thinking about what happened yesterday. You’re kind of caught up, and your mind is relatively clear. Your anxiety level goes down, and you’re living more peacefully.

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. I will tell you that this is the single most important thing that I do. It is a sheer joy. Much of it is highly entertaining, pleasurable. Sometimes it’s just flat. It’s nothingness. I can’t even tell you why I do it. I can’t even tell you what’s going on in that state.

But I will tell you that that time spent by myself is the most important time that I have. Thanks to that, I am now much more self-contained. I don’t feel like I need other people. I don’t need external sources of pleasure or happiness all the time.

• I drink less.
• I’m not attracted to trying any drugs whatsoever.
• It’s just life is easier.
• It’s more pleasant.
• I don’t take things as seriously.

I’m not afraid of my mortality as much anymore. I don’t fear aging. I don’t 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.

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. 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 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.

A 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 DeMello also.

Yeah, I actually don’t like him 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. There’s also The Book of Life. He’s very cerebral, very intellectual, and a little confusing. But he definitely speaks truth. He walks the walk.

Anthony DeMello, The Way to Love, Osho’s book, The Great Challenge. I know people think Osho’s a fake guru and all that, but he had some real stuff too. He’s very articulate. He understood a lot. There’s a great clip from him on SoundCloud that says, it’s called Life Has No Goals, No Purpose. I listen to that one a lot.

There are 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 Counsels and Maxims. These are smart people self-reflecting. But overall, the point is not to read. The point is to inspire so that you yourself can reflect.

Kampal Gupta is an accountant on Twitter. He has a couple of great books. Direct Truth is a fantastic book, written very recently and pulls no punches. But all of these are basically there to inspire you to self-reflect. If you’re not interested in self-reflection, if you’re not at that stage in life, then don’t do it. It’s a waste of time.

In fact, I would say the reason to do these things is just because they make your life better, because they make you more effective, because they have some utility to you. If they do not have utility to you, if they don’t make your life better, then drop it. It’s useless.

I will also second the reading of philosophy. 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.

It alleviates some of the manufactured emergency and urgency 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.

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 have tribal wars going on, zombies battling each other, and they want to pull you in, where even non-participation is not allowed anymore. 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. The old questions all have old answers, and they’re best consumed from the old practitioners because they were very clear-minded about it. They weren’t busy trying to fit into the politics of this time. They were fitting into 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 -

No kidding.

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 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 tacks 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 the 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.

I wanted you to explain one of your recent tweets. This is just from the last few days. And it is crypto stable coins, dash, choose 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.

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. One of the areas that has been protected by technological innovation from technological innovation is Wall Street, because they have regulatory capture, very bureaucratic, the money industrial complex that runs a lot of our economy and runs a lot of Washington, D.C., where 20% of our GDP goes into financial engineering and into the Wall Street casino.

So cryptocurrencies are kind of how we get around that. They are 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 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, the best-known cryptocurrency is Bitcoin. And Bitcoin is trying to be the new gold or the new Swiss bank account kind of all rolled into one. And it has some advantages, you know, as a store of value. It can be stored digitally, so it’s hard to seize. It’s very easy to verify, technologically speaking.

Unlike gold, it’s easy to send across national boundaries and electronically over the internet. It’s easily divisible and verifiable down to its authenticity is very verifiable where gold is hard to do. It can be divided down to millions and trillions of a Bitcoin very, very easily. It is somewhat programmable, so you can put it inside smart contracts and you can do some intelligent things with it.

So it has a lot going for the store of value. What’s difficult about it is it’s not really private. It doesn’t, although there are parts of it that are private. It’s not completely private, and it’s untrusted. It’s brand new as far as stores of value go. It’s only from 2009.

And so people don’t know if it’ll be around forever and how dependent it is on the internet. People aren’t really certain about the proof of work mining algorithm that makes it possible. Can it be hijacked? Can it be centralized? Can it have a bug? Can it break?

Every year that Bitcoin survives and goes through one of the various challenges facing it, it gets more valuable as people entrust it a little bit more and more. But it is extremely volatile.

You buy Bitcoin; you’re buying a very speculative asset at the moment. You’re speculating that it will become digital gold or possibly even the all-store of value, so it’d be incredibly valuable. But along the way, there are lots of hiccups. At any point, it could break. It could go to zero.

A lot of people who are now participating in the crypto world are building a decentralized Wall Street. They call it DeFi, D-E-F-I for decentralized finance. But I actually think it’s more like DeFi as in just defy the government, D-E-F-Y.

So, I think we’re seeing…

Yeah, governments love that.

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 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—there are Flash Boys and all that craziness that goes on. 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.

I think we’re building a better Wall Street using cryptocurrencies. However, everyone who participates in that doesn’t necessarily want to take on the volatility of these cryptocurrencies.

So we’ve created these things called stablecoins, which track the value of the US dollar. This way, when you’re trading, for example, you can still do it in dollar-denominated terms.

This is a tricky thing because the moment you’re now trying to track some asset in the real world—like dollars—you have to peg the value somehow to something that exists in the real world. Cryptocurrencies do best when everything is on the blockchain, when everything is electronic and digital and controlled by computers in the cloud.

So these stablecoins come along that mimic the value of the US dollar. The best-known ones are Tether, USDC (which is Coinbase’s coin), and Make or Die, which is an algorithmically stable coin.

But there’s no free lunch in life.

Now, pause for one second.

Is this something people should think of? What would be a comparable that people might be more familiar with?

It’s not an index; it’s like an ETF.

How would you think about it? Is there another way to describe it?

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.

If you want to hold a dollar in crypto land, the way you do it is by buying one of these so-called stablecoins. But all my tweet was observing is that there’s no free lunch. What you’re actually doing underneath is you have crypto, and crypto is incredibly volatile.

You’re trying to convert a volatile asset into a stable asset. So there has to be a cost for that. What is that cost?

Well, it’s like the subprime mortgage crisis, right?

Exactly. There’s no free lunch.

So what is that cost? I was saying that the three main categories of stablecoins today each impose one or more of these costs.

• One cost 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.

So now you’re…

Underneath meaning they would have actual physical dollars, much like you would have physical gold.

Correct. Yeah.

So for every Tether they issue you, they claim to have a dollar somewhere, but what if they don’t? And you just don’t know. So you’re trusting them, and there could be fraud underneath. I’m 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 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… Turning off your USDC account and your stablecoin has basically been seized. You’re no longer decentralized and sovereign like you are with Bitcoin. The last kind of risk is a blow-up risk. Something like a maker is collateralized, but it’s collateralized with Bitcoin and Ethereum. What they’re hoping is that the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum won’t move so drastically if the peg breaks and you lose money on your so-called stablecoin.

It’s just an observation. There’s no free lunch. 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. 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, censorship risk, blow-up risk, or some combination of them.

If you’re advising, and this is not financial advice, this is just two friends talking, obviously, for informational purposes only. If you’re talking to a friend who has a fair amount of savings or investable capital and they say, “Naval, I want to do something with crypto. How can I get started or how should I get started?” What do you say to them?

Because there’s such a broad spectrum of options. Even though it’s been simplified a lot, crypto is still quite confusing.

It’s very complicated. Two people who are very smart, I would consider, still find it quite confusing. Incredibly confusing. Yes, 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 and manage. It’s dangerous.

I can’t hold my own crypto. I have to stick it inside funds and custodians because I’m a known public figure. It’s a bearer asset. So ironically, I can’t actually bear it.

And you say it’s dangerous. You don’t hold it because you’d be—

I’d be robbed.

Kidnap risk?

Yes, exactly. It’s a bearer asset. You don’t want to bear a bearer asset. You have to put it inside vaults, the equivalent of Goldman Sachs in this space. There are custodians. Anchorage is an amazing one. There’s BitGo. There’s Coinbase. 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. You can carry it yourself. You can put it on your laptop, which is kind of crazy and risky and hard. You can do it through a hardware wallet like a Ledger or a Trezor, which are pretty well-known hardware wallets, where you have a small, specific device 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. You’re replacing all that and all the control that comes with it. So of course, it’s going to require some level of sophistication. You’re literally building your own Swiss bank. So it is quite complicated.

Where to start? Well, 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. 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? Should I sell?” You don’t know that.

It’s a really, really important observation.

Right. So you have to fundamentally understand it yourself.

I would say the first thing is go down the crypto rabbit hole.

• Listen to the interview we did with Nick Szabo.
• Go online and start reading up on Bitcoin.
• Read up on Ethereum.
• Read up on the privacy coins like Zcash and Monero.

Learn about the different high-level stuff in the crypto space. Decide how much exposure you want. Go buy it at CoinList or Coinbase or what have you. Figure out which custodian you want to use. You know, put it somewhere safe, probably in the cloud, unless you really know what you’re doing.

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 you’re attacked or kidnapped or someone comes to your house or steals your computer. 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, if you ever have to flee the country—like the Jews had to leave Vienna back in the 1930s—you’re not scrambling for gold. You’re using crypto.

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 U.S. 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.
• Settling international transfers.
• Hiding money.
• Protecting 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 U.S. government’s kind of figured this out. We printed $6 trillion to fight the coronavirus.

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. They’re going to keep doing that until, at some point, the rest of the world throws in the towel and says, you know, this dollar thing is not working for us.

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 always true. I think there are well-managed currencies like the Swiss franc and the Singaporean dollar.

There’s also hard assets like gold, crypto, and real estate. 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. Someone like Google can just raise prices 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 is a flight into hard assets to get away from inflation. 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.

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-backed, and that went away.

So it’s not inconceivable that it’ll happen. If it were to happen, then you would basically have the true reckoning. Then our ability to print our way out of recessions would go away. You would probably have an inflationary collapse in the U.S., 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. There are scenarios where the internet goes down too, and then all hell breaks loose, and you better have gold and guns. But we’re not talking about that.

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 new gun owners in the U.S. 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, 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, right?

Or a hardware wallet, rather. So I have this thing. The U.S. is going to hell in a handbasket. I somehow managed to get that to fill in the blank. I’ll just arbitrarily choose Spain.

Like 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? Do you know what I mean?

Even smart people can’t quite figure it out. But what would you, how would you, if that were two years in the future, I mean, I think that’s unlikely. But let’s just say.

Yeah, for most of my friends, the scenario I recommend is like you go buy it on something like Coinbase, Coinlist, whatever. You move it into a dedicated custodian like Anchorage or Bitco. 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 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.

But in theory, you can log into a local crypto exchange, 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 and groups, the enthusiasts, the so-called maximalists, the diehard believers, and the holders. 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 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 are 5,000 or 50,000 wealthy, brilliant people, that wealthy part is really important. They will always trade it with you for hard assets. You know, I think recently MicroStrategy started moving half of its treasury into Bitcoin. 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, you know, 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.

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 U.S. 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 U.S. dollars, the world would switch to Bitcoin.

It’s a story. It’s a consensus belief. And the beauty of Bitcoin is that there are these diehard maximalists. 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. 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 in data centers and data centers 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, just as well or better. But there are always potential problems that are not completely resolved.

However, every time we face one of these reckonings and that problem gets resolved, the value goes up, and the story becomes stronger. The same way when Paul Tudor Jones or MicroStrategy buy Bitcoin, the story is becoming stronger. The set of believers is increasing, and the validation is increasing. 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. The early people then get rewarded for it.

One way to think about Bitcoin in particular, or even actually any of the cryptocurrencies, is it’s a Swiss bank account. But it’s a Swiss bank account with finite space. 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.

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. If you want one of those safety deposit boxes, you have to buy it from someone who’s already there.

As long as the demand for new people trying to get into the Swiss bank account is greater than the supply of people who are trying to get out, then you’re going to have to pay more for that box. That’s where the speculative power of it comes from. I think it’s going to take a good crisis to really see what crypto is worth.

So far, it’s been weird because people have said that crypto failed the crisis test with COVID. It did and it didn’t. What it didn’t do was skyrocket; Bitcoin didn’t go to 100K as everybody fled the US dollar. But that kind of shows you how resilient the dollar is and how far we are from losing global reserve currency status.

At the same time, it didn’t collapse either. It went down briefly as people needed cash to meet various margin calls and loans, but overall stayed very stable. 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.

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 a bunch of people leaving and losing faith in it.

That’s why 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. I kind of feel like we’re around the $10,000 level. Who knows? I don’t want to make price predictions, but I feel like there’s a stronger base of holders now than there has ever been.

Each one of these people comes and validates it. Paul Tudor Jones validates it for other hedge fund managers. Hedge fund managers validate it for sovereign wealth funds. Sovereign wealth funds will validate it for central banks. 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 be clever and buy up a bunch of Bitcoin and then announce we’re going to use Bitcoin.”

Then Bitcoin will skyrocket and we’ll all be rich. 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. It’s not going to be like, necessarily, in one fell swoop until it is. That’s the nature of black swans. You can’t predict them; it happens suddenly.

I had a friend who used to tell me he’s now a hardcore Bitcoin enthusiast. It’s funny; he actually helped write a book on Bitcoin now. But when I first talked to him about Bitcoin years ago, he said,

“What’s the big deal? If I ever have to flee the country, I’ll just buy Bitcoin then.”

I said, “Yeah, when you have to flee the country, your entire fortune is going to buy you one Bitcoin.” That’s the problem.

It’s scarce. 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.

I think the psychological dynamics of crypto volatility are a lot like 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 markets. Even Wall Street, at some level, is a big casino with a potential positive expected value, creating some value for society in terms of hedging and liquidity for companies raising money and so on. And crypto is doing the same thing.

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. So all of these things are coming up.

• Like we now have insurance in the crypto markets.
• We now have lending in the crypto markets.
• We have shorting in the crypto markets.

You know, we have computation going on that requires crypto underneath. Look, if two computers are talking to each other, if two mini AIs are talking to each other and high speed exchanging resources to run a company, how are they going to exchange money? You think they’re going to send U.S. 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, it’s like saying the internet is going to use email through the USPS, you know, U.S. 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? It’s an entry in a virtual ledger, and that virtual ledger is maintained by tons of machines running across the world.

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. I can make one podcast and ship it to everybody. I can make one web page 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 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, around 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 of cryptocurrency, which is endlessly fascinating, just Google Nick Szabo, S-Z-A-B-O.

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, that all truly effective self-help boils down to choose long-term over short-term. I mean, that is the entire challenge, which is long-term thinking gets you long-term results.

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 addictions and just dealing with the avalanche of all the abundance of things that are thrown at you that are really traps, like video games are a trap. There’s a shadow career that substitutes for your real career, or smoking weed or drinking alcohol substitutes for pleasure through simpler 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, no, we’re talking. Yeah, that sounds about the trifecta. So another related tweet I had is, the modern devil is cheap dopamine.

And some interesting people on Twitter pointed out to me, actually, the ancient devil is cheap dopamine as well. But in modern times, we’ve just hyper, hyper accelerated it. The modern mind is overstimulated. The modern body is understimulated. We’ve just taken all the creature comforts and 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 hold off in the evening the marshmallow for 15 minutes in exchange for two marshmallows? 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, it just boils down to long-term versus short-term.

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 Gregorek, says, “hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.” That’s it, right? So 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?

I think a lot of it boils down to just choosing the long-term or the short-term. All the hacks, the good hacks, basically help make the long-term choice palatable. Or they help inspire you to keep your eyes focused on the long-term.

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. 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 used to play that video game all day long.

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, at this age, I pick up a video game to get away from suffering, and I’m not really getting anything out of it. I could play the video game of investing. Or I could play the video game of starting companies. Or I could play the video game of, you know, going and playing tennis, and that would be good for my health.

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 sustains you for the long term.

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 has a 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 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.

I don’t want to sound preachy, but I will just say that my love for reading came from another one of my tweets: “Read what you love until you love to read.” So, just fall in love with the idea of reading itself. 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.

I love to read enough that I don’t like watching TV. I don’t watch movies. You know, people start talking about shows that they’re watching on Netflix or what have you, and I give them this empty look. I don’t watch shows on Netflix; they’re not interesting. It’s far more interesting to me to go for a walk and be meditative, and I’ll be in a very happy place, or to read a book, which will be intellectually stimulating.

Sure, once in a while, I’ll 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’m not, 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 like finding the hacks, finding the things that make the long-term feel effortless to you and then you win.

Okay, last question. First, a recommendation. If you ever do decide to watch something. Sorry, before we finish that topic. Very important on people. Find the people that it doesn’t take work to be around.

The best relationships don’t feel like work. You make the other person happy being yourself. They make you happy by being themselves. Everyone’s honest. No one’s putting on an act they can’t carry on for the next decade.

Same thing with friendships. You know, the best friendships are friendships that were formed over nothing. It’s not because you went to school. It’s not because you studied 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 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. 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 criterion I look for in a relationship is that a person has to be kind. They just have to be a nice person. And because eventually, 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. 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 the 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. 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. 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 they are to a large number of people. And to the degree 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 that 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, 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 predictive.

So speaking of games, this is the final tweet in the podcast based on tweets. Final bots. 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 are 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. The making money game. The having a career game. The getting famous game. The dressing well game.

It’s so much of a social game. 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 that suck you into society and into anxiety.

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.
• When you win them, this is the hard part. Realizing you’ve won and stopping at 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 and they continue to try to make money, and they just don’t seem very happy about it. It’s fine if they’re happy. If 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 can’t see past that, then I would argue you’re playing the game too far.

So there’s kind of two ways out of the trap.

• One is: not wanting something is as good as having it, right? I think it was Liat Chabot who said this on Twitter. I thought it was really good.
• Or there’s a recent Socrates quote that I retweeted where he was taking to a… 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.

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 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 are so many things that I don’t want,” it’s not true. I want the money. I want the girl. You know, 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 are 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. If I get it, it’s fine. It’s part of the craft. It’s part of the bonus. You know, I have to be careful 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 not just trapped playing that game forever? 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 saying is, 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 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, “I did all that work for what? 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, 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, the adult games are very cleverly designed. You can keep playing them infinitely. And they’re all ups and downs and ups and downs. 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 an 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’ve won the game and say, “I’m done with this.”

So 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 part. 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 unconsciously. 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 James Kars is an interesting read. 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.”

I love that quote. I love that quote. I read it when I was 9 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.

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 that you lose self-awareness. You stop realizing that you are 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 myself because, you know, politics is a man-made game. It doesn’t really exist in the real world. There’s no tree that is 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, an unexamined life. So it just gives you kind of a leg up.

And I agree with you in that you can always, like, 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 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. Although it’s hard to do that, at least externally, it seems like Elon Musk is doing that. He’s, you know, building rockets to get to Mars, not to make money or to be famous, although he’s doing those; 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 drawn intrinsically for you 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’re having a lot of fun. I still like that, right? Now, obviously, a loss has been a lot in 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 reasons why I do like Osho. You know, people give Osho a lot of flack and they should. He was a little crazy in some ways, but he was having fun. He had a good time.

And, you know, 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 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. You carrying their cross isn’t making their life any better. The better way is for you to be happy, 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. And he just seemed to be able to laugh it off.

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 and adopt his lifestyle. He had an okay life, but he was just happy and not in a forced way; 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 around setting up events for Tony. He was always sitting in the front row and taking notes and setting things up and learning and listening.

He just kind of started seeing through his own internal BS. He got to this point where, like you say, 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.”

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, I want to be that guy who is successful, peaceful, happy, enjoying life, blissful, meditative, spiritual, and rich. And I aspire to be as healthy as I can be, and not give a damn about any of it.

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 as Naval. 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 podcast, the blog N-A-V-A-L.

Previous conversations we’ve had, and we’ve had quite a few. You can just search Naval on the website, tim.blog/Naval.

Anything else you would like to add? 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. I wish everybody a wealthy, healthy, and happy life. 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.