#171 Naval Ravikant: The Angel Philosopher (2017) | The Knowledge Project

All of society does that to some extent.

In some sense, people chasing thrills, action sports, flow states, orgasm or any of these states that people really strive to get to, a lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head.

They're trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self.

At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older.

I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present, everyday reality and appreciate it very much in the childhood, and then not have to seek happiness us through external circumstances, chasing the fits of preconceived notion that I have. Welcome to The Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life.

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This episode is a rerelease of Episode 18 of the Knowledge Project, The Angel Philosopher, with one of my favorite guests of all time, Nival Ravikant.

This is the most downloaded and shared episode we've produced to date, and it dawned on me that for many of you, you've never heard it because you've found the podcast later and haven't gone back.

The goal with The Knowledge Project is to get at wisdom that never expires.

Aside from the audio quality being different, this episode resonates like it was recorded yesterday.

today. The topics, timelessness, and lesson stand as true today as the original recording over five years ago.

This conversation is wide -ranging, covering mental models, habits, decision making, education, but it's also full of insights you can put to use, like his brilliant two -factor calendar authentication concept to keep him focused on only the most important projects, reading methods, and habit stacking.

It's time to listen and learn.

Naval, welcome to the show.

I am so excited to get to talk to you today and ask you a whole bunch of questions that I have on my mind.

Thanks for having me.

I'm excited to be here.

I've been a long -time fan of your work.

Thank you. Let's get started with something simple.

Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?

It's actually not that simple.

I have a hard time saying what I do.

My day job is that I am CEO of AngelList, which is a company that I started almost seven years ago now.

And AngelList is sort of this platform for startups in the tech industry.

And we help entrepreneurs raise money.

We help entrepreneurs recruit talent into their startups, and we also help people find jobs into startups.

And now recently we acquired Product Hunt.

So we also help companies launch their customers.

So it's basically a one -stop shop for the early stage tech ecosystem.

Whether you're raising money or you're investing money with the largest online platform for that.

Whether you're recruiting talent or whether you're being recruited with a large online platform for startup recruiting.

And then whether you're looking for a new product to try out or whether you're looking for customers who are your product were also the largest online product platform for launching that.

So it sort of become this bigger thing.

And that's sort of my day job.

but I'm also involved in a bunch of other things.

I'm an investor personally in about 200 companies, advisor to a bunch on a bunch of boards.

I occasionally blog and tweet.

I'm also a small partner in a cryptocurrency fund, because I'm really into these coins, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and so forth.

And I'm always cooking up something, you always have a bunch of side projects that ever again.

How do you keep track of that all?

What does your typical day look like?

Well, that's the good part.

I don't have a typical day, nor do I want a typical day.

You know, if there is a typical day, I'm usually inside my office at AngelList, but I'm basically just operating mostly on email or phone or meetings or scrolled up at home.

So there are days where I just work completely from home.

There are days that I don't work.

I'm actually even trying to get rid of this concept of having to be in a specific place at a specific time.

And all I care about is, am I doing what I want to do?

And am I being productive, and am I happy?

And I really want to break away from this idea of 40 hour weeks or 60 hour weeks or 80 hour weeks or 9 to 5 or logos or jobs or identities.

It just all feels like a straitjacket.

You're one of the most ferocious readers I know.

You've called yourself a conscious bookworm.

And you've read a ton.

How did you first get interested in reading?

Reading was my first love.

You know, I know that in my childhood, when I was around nine, ten, eleven years old, I was a latch key kid.

My mom was working multiple jobs, and then she was going to school at night.

We were raised by a single mother.

My brother and I were in New York City and we were in a part of New York City that has been very safe.

So, I basically, the library was my after school center.

So after I come back from school, I just go straight to they closed and then I'd come home.

That was just my daily routine.

But I think even by that point in time I'd already loved books.

I was reading books to the child.

I remember my grandparents' house in India.

I'd be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather's Reader's Digest, which is just all he had to read there.

Now, of course, there's a smorgasbord of information out there.

Everybody can read anything all the time.

But back then it was much more limited, so I would read comic books, I would read reader's digest, I would read story books, you know, whatever could get my hands on mysteries, I was big into mysteries.

So I think I just always love to read because I'm actually an antisocial introvert.

And I was just lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age.

I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young, nobody forced me on what to read.

I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say, oh, you should read this, but don't read that.

The reality is I just read a lot that by today's standards would be considered mental junk food.

But eventually you just get to like reading, you run out of junk food and then you start eating the healthy food, right, or your tastes kind of gradually.

So I think to some extent that's what happened with me because I started from comic books and then run from that into mysteries and went from that into fantasy, then into sci -fi.

And then from sci -fi, made it into science and then mathematics and then philosophy.

So it just kind of kept climbing up the stack.

But I'm lucky that there was no one around when I was seven years old or 16 years old saying, oh, you shouldn't read that.

You should read this instead.

Is most of what you read today physical or on a computer Kindle?

For convenience, it's mostly Kindle.

It's not the Kindle device.

It sucks on an iPad.

But for books that are really, really like, I will also buy a physical copy.

So I have both so there's no excuse not to read it You know a really good book cost ten or twenty dollars and you can change your life in a meaningful way So it's not something I believe in saving money on and this is even back when I was broken.

I had no money I always spend money on books.

I never viewed that as an expense That's an investment to me, and I probably spend Ten times as much money on books as I actually get through so in other words like for every $200 worth of books I buy actually end up making it through 10 % So I'll read $20 worth of books, but it's still absolutely worth it.

You and I had common Yeah, and anything that's one of the greats like if I read a book and I know that it's amazing I'll buy multiple copies partially the giveaway partially because I have the line around the house And these days I find myself rereading as much or more as I do reading Because I I think this was a tweet from an account on On Twitter that I saw this guy ill assertus and he basically said, you know, I don't want to read everything I just want to read 100 great books over and over again.

And I think there's a lot to that.

So it's really more about identifying what are the great books to you because different books speak to different people, and then really absorbing those.

Because I don't know about you, but I have very poor attention.

I have to—you know, I skim, I speed read, I jump around.

And I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books.

but at some deep level, you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche.

So they do kind of weave in there.

There are books that I'm sure you've had this feeling where you pick up a book, you start reading it, you're like, oh this is pretty interesting, this is pretty good, and you're getting this increasing sense of deja vu and then about two -thirds or halfway through the book you realize, oh I've read this book before.

And that's perfectly fine.

It means you were ready to reread it.

What are the books you're rereading now?

It's a good question.

I'll pull up my Kindle app as we talk, but usually I'm always re -reading some books on science.

I read seven brief lessons in Physics, I think that was the name of it.

I read that one at least twice.

I've re -read Sapiens again because I love that book so much. I'm pretty much always re -reading something by either Jadu Krishnamurti or Osho, those are kind of my favorite philosophers.

philosophers. I'm reading a book on Renee Girard's Mimetic Theory, it's more of an overview book because I couldn't make it through his actual writings.

I'm reading Tools of Titans.

Tim Fares's summary book, what he learned from a lot of gay performers, I'm rereading Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang.

It's one of my favorite sci fi novels.

I'm reading a book on called Thoroughed Book Complexity.

It's actually by a friend of mine, it's not published yet.

I just finished reading Presuasion.

Let's just say I finished giving Presuasion, Robert Kaldidi.

I don't think I needed to read the entire book to get the point, but it was still there to read it to read what I did.

I recently reread The Lessons of History by William Ariel Durand.

It's a great little book, true book.

I am currently reading Story of Philosophy also by Will Durand.

I have a young kid now so I've a lot of child raising books that I use more as reference materials than anything else.

Recently read some Emerson, some Chesterfield, let's see.

I've got a Leo Tolstoy book here.

I've got another Osho book, I've got Delusion Damage, this is the blog that I used to love.

I have pieces of it saved up.

Alan Watts, you see Scott Adams. I reread God's Debris recently.

Tao Te Chiang a friend of mine is rereading it, so I picked it up again.

There's tons, maybe just go on and on.

There's one Mises book here, there's the Undercover Economist, the Richard Bach book, there's some Jed McKenna books.

I was recently trying to reread Moby Dick in Hamlet just to try and get back in fiction but I didn't make it through either one.

Do you set aside time in your day to reread or like to read it all or is it like a consistent thing or do you that you have considered in when you have time?

I read when I'm bored of everything else.

But the good news is I get bored very easily.

So there's always a book to capture the imagination, usually at nighttime before I go to bed I'll read, but it's not a flawless thing.

When I'm on vacation, I'll read.

But if I'm sitting in a lift or an Uber, I'll read.

Sometimes in the morning, at home, after I worked out, I'll just read.

Sometimes when I wake up, I'll just grab my phone and read.

I just, I'm not a very disciplined person.

So I don't really set these hard and fast rules for myself because I'm, but the good news is I just love to read and because I love to read, whenever I'm bored and I have time, I just do it.

And thanks to the The iPhone and the Kindle and the iPad, you know, they just make it really easy.

Oh, I've got two books here in Feynman, Perfectly Reasonable Deviation, which is by him and then Genius, which is the Jane MacLac book about Feynman.

So this is where we're talking.

I'm flipping through the book in more evolution of everything.

My Matt Ridley's one of my favorite authors I've read everything of his we read everything of his little Dale Carnegie in here The three body probable man search for meaning there's lots sex at dawn in a lot of books up there Kindle sounds like my dream.

Well, I'm going through right now.

It's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books or download It's not even like I mean, we could sit here the entire podcast What do you like to think about?

You've said before you think of books as throwaways, how did you come to think about books like that, and what impact has that had on what you read?

I mean, that's really an impact of the internet.

Once the internet came along, I think it's destroyed everybody's attention span because now all of humanity's works are available to you at any given time and you're being interrupted constantly.

So just our attention span goes down, our bit of focus goes down.

But at the same time, we just become more judicious.

is we also want, we want the meat.

And the problem with books is that to write a book to publish it, publish a physical dead tree book, just takes a lot of work and effort and money.

So sometimes people start putting long, wrapping long books around simple ideas.

Those are probably my least favorite books.

That's kind of why I avoid the whole business and self -help category, because you generally have one good idea and it's buried in hundreds or thousands of pages and lots of anecdotes.

So what happened was, I just noticed that, sometime in the late 90s, I stopped reading as much as I used to, and I started reading more blogs.

I started reading less books or more blogs.

And great blogs like Farnham Street, Kevin Simler's blog, Melting Asphalt and so on, you get incredibly smart people digestifying, simplifying, and writing these great things.

But it's only a page or two or three pages.

So I got really into blogs.

But then I'd stop reading books and a lot of the oldest wisdom is actually in books.

And with books, you're now talking about the combined works of all of humanity as opposed to just who happens to be blogging right now.

So I realized I missed that.

And then with the Kindle and iBooks coming along, that allowed me to start treating books like I treat blogs, which is when I go to a blog, I'll actually skim through lots of articles until I find one that looks really interesting and I'll read that whole article all the way through it, maybe take notes.

So now I treat books the same way, which is I'll skim through a large number of books, I'll put them down, I'll jump around back forward middle, until I find a part that's interesting, then I'll just consume that piece and I won't feel guilty about having to finish the entire book.

Because there's this view, it is a blog archive, right?

It's like a like a blog might have 300 posts on it.

And you can read just the 235 that you need right now.

And I think you can think of a book the same way.

And then that opens the world and web of books back open to us, instead of it being buried somewhere.

I think you know, like many people, I know of a lot of friends who are currently stuck on a book somewhere.

And if you ask people if they read, everybody says they read, everybody says they're reading a book, they can answer which book they're reading, but the reality is very few people actually read and actually finish books.

Yeah. And I think, Yeah, and I think that's probably because of all these societal and personal rules that we've put up.

Like you must finish a book and you must read books that are good for you, and you can't read junk food books, and this is a hot book right now, and so on.

The reality is I don't actually read that much compared to what people think.

Like I probably read one to two hours a day.

Which, and that puts me in the top .00001%.

I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and the intelligence that I might have because real people don't read an hour a day.

Real people I think read a minute a day or less.

So making it an actual habit isn't the most important thing.

And how you make it a habit doesn't matter.

It's very much like exercise or working out.

Do something every day.

It almost doesn't matter what you do.

So the people who are obsessing over like, should I be weight training or should I be doing tennis?

Or should I be doing Pilates?

Or should I be doing the high intensity training method versus the happy body, versus whatever?

That makes them the point.

The important thing is to do something every day.

It doesn't matter what it is.

So the same way I would argue the important thing is to read every day.

And it's not that doesn't matter.

It almost doesn't matter what you read, because eventually they'll read enough things.

And your interest will lead you there that will dramatically improve your life.

So just like the best workout for you is the one that you're excited enough to do every day, the same way I would say the best books to read are the ones that are books or blogs or Twitter or whatever, anything with ideas and information and learning.

The best ones to read are the ones that you're excited about reading all the time.

This the people that I know that read quite a bit, they have a reading habit like you.

You're described as a very habitual person.

Where did that come from?

That might have come from the Tim Ferriss podcast. I don't think I'm more habitual than anybody else.

I think human beings are entirely creatures of habit, you know, as a young children are born with no habit loops, they're essentially born as blank slates and then they habituate themselves, the thing they learn patterns and they get conditioned and they use that to get through everyday life and habits are good, you know.

Habits can allow you to background process certain things so that your neocortex, your frontal lobe stays available to solve brand -new problems. But we also unconsciously pick up habits in the background and we keep them for decades.

And we may not realize that they're bad for us.

So we're ready to move on from them.

To some extent, you know, our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels, these are also habits.

Do we judge people?

How often do we eat?

What kinds of food do we eat?

Do we walk, or do we sit?

Do we move? Do we exercise?

Do we read? These are habits as well.

And you absolutely need habits to function.

You cannot solve every problem in life as if it's the first time it's thrown at you.

But what we do is we accumulate all these habits.

We put them in the bundle of identity, ego ourselves, and then we get attached to that.

I'm Shane. This is the way I am.

I'm Deval. This is the way I am.

And it's really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, Okay, well, that's, that's a habit that I probably picked up from when I was a toddler, and I was trying to get my parents attention.

And now just reinforced and reinforced and reinforced it, and I called a part of my density.

But is it serving me anymore?

Is it making me happier?

Is it making me healthier?

Is it making me accomplish whatever I want to set out to accomplish right now?

So I don't think I'm any more, in fact, I would argue, I'm less habitual than those people.

Like, I don't like to structure my day.

But to the extent that I do have habits, I'm trying to make them more deliberate.

around accidents of history.

So what's a habit that you're trying to change right now?

What are you working on?

I'm ready for my life to change.

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Well, I did a lot of habit changes over the last few years.

So I've now got a daily workout that I do, which is a great habit.

I cut down heavily on drinking.

It's not fully eliminated, but it's mostly gone.

I drop caffeine. I'm not on a paleo diet, although I like to be.

So I'm on a variation of it that I call the failure diet, which is I try to be paleo but I failed constantly, but I don't beat myself up over it because I feel that even approximating to where I have been historically.

So, you know, like that, I tried to build a meditation habit, but I failed, but I have made a habit of being meditative.

So I've gone through lots of habits.

Probably the one that I currently would like to cultivate is doing yoga more regularly, but I haven't formatted a plan around that.

And, by the way, I reject a lot of the stuff that's being peddled around today about how you perform and break habits.

I know there's this very popular book one that I even recommended, which talks about the science behind habit.

And one of its depressant conclusions, I think this came out of Stanford was that you can't break habits.

You can only replace them.

And that's BS. I've definitely broken habits completely.

And so I think you can uncondition yourself.

You can untrain yourself.

It's just hard. So it just takes work.

It takes effort. And usually the big habit changes come when there are strong desire motivators attached to them.

So, you know, the yoga one I'm going to work on, I don't yet have a great plan on that one.

I haven't tackled that one properly yet.

A big habit that I'm working on, which is going to be really hard to explain in any way that any normal human being will understand this, but I'm trying to turn off my monkey mind.

You know, it's like, I think we are, when we were born as children, we're pretty blank slates.

we're living very much in the moment, and we're essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts.

And we're living in what I would call the real world.

And then when puberty comes along, that's the onset of desire.

It's the first time you really, really want something.

And you start long range planning for it.

And then, because of that, you start thinking a lot, and you start building an identity and an ego to go and get what you want.

And this is all normal and healthy, it's part of being the human animal, but I think at some point it gets out of control.

Then we are constantly just talking to ourselves in our heads.

We're playing little movies in our heads, walking down the street and no one's actually there.

Now of course we started voicing this thought in your head that you're always having, you'd be a madman and they'd lock you up.

The reality is if you walk down the street and there's a thousand people in the street, I think all thousand people are talking to themselves in their head at any given point.

They're constantly judging everything that they see.

They're playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday.

They're living in fantasy worlds of what's going to happen tomorrow.

And they're just pulled out of base reality.

And that can be good when you're doing long -range planning.

It can be good when you're solving problems. It's good for the survival and replication machines that we are.

But I think it's actually very bad for your happiness.

And so, in my mind, the mind should be a servant or tool.

My master, it's not something that should be controlling me and driving me 24 -7.

And so I've taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard because if I say that you don't think of a pink elephant and just put a pink elephant in your head.

So it's an almost impossible problem.

So it's more something that has to be guided by feel than guided by actual thinking or thought process.

But I'm deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind locations, activities that will help me get out of my mind.

And I know, you know, all of society does that to some extent, in some sense, the, the people chasing thrills and action sports or Flow States or orgasm, or any of these states that people really strive to get to.

A lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head, they're trying to get away from that voice in your head, and this overdeveloped sense of self.

At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live much more in present every day reality and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much as a child would and then not have to seek happiness through external circumstances chasing to fit some preconceived notion that I have Wow, there's a lot there, I want to ask questions on is there yeah, that's the tough one.

That'll take years.

That's not a six month habit.

That's a ten year habit.

Do you think there's a difference between turning off versus suppressing your monkey mind?

Yeah. Suppression doesn't work because when you try to suppress, that's the mind suppressing the mind.

That's just you playing games with yourself.

So I think it's a very hard problem.

I want to go back to kind of unconditional.

You basically stop drinking alcohol.

How did you work on deprogramming yourself from the social settings and environments that you're in where alcohol is probably available all the time?

And what benefits have you seen as a result of, like, are you isolating these habits when you're changing them?

So you know, oh, I sleep better because I'm not.

Yeah, you know, the the alcohol one is an interesting case study, because the alcohol habit came from two things.

One was availability, just being in situations where alcohol is available and accepted and something you're supposed to do.

And then the second is the desire, right?

You want to do it because you're trying to accomplish something else.

So when I unpacked that, I realized a couple of things.

The availability came from I'm just, if I'm out at night in an environment where alcohol has been served, that's the availability.

So if you want to avoid that, stay in, staying in is not fun.

So what do you do? Well, I started this daily workout regimen in the mornings.

If you're working out in the mornings, then you can't stay up too late at night.

You can't stay up too late at night you can't be drinking too much, you screw up a few times, and your morning workout is terrible.

You have a headache, you feel bad, you don't feel as ...

And when you're working out every day, you can checkpoint yourself very easily, like, oh well, this exact thing that I do every single morning is suddenly harder, so therefore, I'm weakened from the alcohol from last night.

So the morning workout checkpoint really helped me understand the consequences of consuming alcohol before.

And then the more interesting question is, well, why am I doing it?

And that's basically boils down to I was doing it to survive longer in social environment that I wasn't particularly happy in, I essentially had to stun my brain into submission.

So there are better ways to do that.

One of those is only associated with people where you don't have to drink to be about them.

And that really narrowed my friend circle and narrowed the kinds of events that I go to.

There's a little bit of a substitution effect.

And some of what the substitution effect was, I was drinking so that I wouldn't be thinking, because, and so what I went back to is like, well, can I cultivate these states of not thinking too much?

And if I can get there another way, then that will take away some of the urge to drink.

And then there's some substitution, for example, I switch from hard alcohol to red wine.

And red wine is inherently self limiting, you know, you have two cocktails, the next thing you want is not a cocktail.

You have two glasses of red wine, at least for me, I usually have a headache.

So I'm done at that point is very self limiting.

That some of it is this function of age, I mean, I'm 43.

Now, I don't think I can make it through a single glass of wine without having some negative consequence buildup.

So I still I still drink I don't I don't believe in the words like never in all ways, because I think that's that's a way of limiting yourself and self discipline yourself makes you less free and less happy at some level.

But I just want to be naturally in a position where I I don't need it, and I don't desire it.

And so that's kind of what I've been working more on.

What habit would you say most positively impacts your life?

I think it's the daily morning workout.

That has been a complete game changer.

It's made me feel healthier, younger.

It's made me not go out late.

And it came from one simple thing, which is, everybody said, I don't have time, right?

Basically, whenever you throw any so -called good habit at somebody, they'll have an excuse for themselves, and usually the most common is, I don't have time.

I don't have time, just another way of saying, it's not a priority.

So what you really have to do is to say, is it a priority or not?

And if something is your number one priority, then you will get it.

That's just the way life works, but if you've got a fuzzy basket of 10 or 15 different priorities, you're gonna end up getting none of them.

So what I did there was, I basically just said, my number one priority in life above my happiness, above my family, the above my work is my own health and starts with my physical health and then second is my mental health and then third is my spiritual health and then it's my family's health there's my family's well -being and then after that I can go out and do whatever I need to do the rest of the world so there's a series of concentric circles starting out for me and so because my physical health became my number one priority then I could never say I don't have time so in the morning I just

work out and however long it takes is how long it takes and I do not start my day and I don't care if the world is imploding and melting down, I can wait another 30 minutes until I'm done working out.

Do you take any breaks from that or is that every day?

It's pretty much every day.

There are a few days where I've had to take a break because I'm traveling or I'm injured or sick or something.

But I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year.

You mentioned happiness being one of your top priorities.

What is happiness to you?

What does that mean, what does that word mean?

Can you unpack that?

Yeah, it's a very evolving thing.

I think, like, all the great questions, you know, when you're a little kid and you go to your mommy, say, what happens when we die?

Is there Santa Claus?

Is there a God? Should I be happy?

Who should I marry?

Those kinds of things.

There are no glib answers to that, because there are no answers that apply to everybody.

So these questions, the search for truth, these kinds of questions, they ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers.

So the answer that works for me is going to be nonsense to you and vice versa.

So whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you and it means something different to the listener.

But I think it's very important to explore what it is.

And for some people I know it's a flow state.

For some people it's satisfaction.

For some people it's a feeling of contentment.

The best, my definition keeps evolving.

So the answer I would have given you a year ago be different than what I tell you now.

But today, I believe that happiness is, it's really a default state.

It's what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life.

And we are highly judgmental survival and replication machines, we're constantly walking around, thinking I need this, I need that trapped in the web of desires.

And happiness is that state when nothing is missing.

And when nothing is missing, your mind shuts down, your mind stops running into the future or running in the past to regret something or to plan something and then in that absence.

For a moment, you have internal silence and when you have internal silence, then you are content and you're happy.

I think people believe mistakenly.

You know, feel free to disagree because again it's different for everybody, but people believe, mistakenly, that happiness is about positive thoughts and positive actions.

But the more I read, the more I've learned, the more I've experienced, because I've verified this for myself.

Every positive thought, essentially, holds within a negative thought is a contrast to something negative.

The Daude Ching says it's more articulate than I ever could, but it's all duality and polarity.

So if I say, I'm happy, that means that I was sad at some point.

If I say he's attractive, then that means that somebody else is unattractive.

So every positive thought even has the seed of a negative thought within it.

and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering.

You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and then appreciate the positive.

So all of that said, long -winded.

To me, happiness is not about positive thoughts, it's not about negative thoughts.

It's about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things.

And so the fewer desires I can have, the happier I can, or the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving, because the mind really the existing motion towards the future or the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.

But if I latch on to that, if I say, oh, I'm happy now and I want to stay happy, then I'm gonna drop out of that happiness because now suddenly the mind is moving, it's trying to attach to something.

It's trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation.

So happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future of the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is the way it is because nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness.

To a tree there is no right or wrong.

There is no good or bad.

You know nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the big bang to now.

And everything is perfect exactly the way it is.

It's only in our particular minds that we're unhappy, you're not happy and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

But I think I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self and I think that helps a lot like for example if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe then you would have to bend the entire universe to your will because if you're the most important thing in the universe then how could it not conform to your desires and if it doesn't conform to your desires something's wrong.

However if you view yourself as a tempeteria or an amoeba or if you view all your works as writing on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation from how life should actually be.

Life is just the way it is, and then you accept that and you have no cause to be happy or unhappy.

Those things almost don't apply.

And what you're left with in that neutral state is not neutrality.

I think people think, oh, that would be a very bland existence.

No, this is the existence that little children live.

And if you look at little children on balance.

They're generally pretty happy because they're really immersed into the environment at the moment without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires.

So I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state and one can be very happy as long as one isn't too caught up in their own heads.

What does your internal monologue go like when you find yourself trying to attach to something by default?

Yeah, I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue.

It doesn't always work but in computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in debugging mode as much as possible and when I'm talking to someone like I'm talking to you right now or when I'm engaged in a grouped activity it's almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle but if I'm by myself like just this morning you know I'm brushing my teeth and I start thinking forward to the podcast and I started going through this little fantasy where I imagined you asking me a bunch of questions and I was fantasy answering them and then I caught myself I put my brain in debug mode

and just watch every little Instruction go by and I said why am I fantasy future planning?

Why can't I just stand here and brush my teeth?

Right and it's just a just the awareness that my brain was running off in the future and planning some fantasy scenario out of ego That that I was like, well, do I really care if I embarrass myself and Shanes podcasts, who cares?

I'm gonna die anyway 0, and I won't remember anything because it's pointless.

So at that point I shut down and I went back to brushing my teeth.

And then I was noticing how great the toothbrush was and how good it felt.

And then next moment, I'm often thinking something else.

And then I have to look at my brain again and say, do I really need to solve this problem right now?

And the reality is that 95 % of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don't need to tackle that exact moment.

In fact, if it's a muscle, then I'll be better off resting it, being at peace, and then when when the particular problem arises, immerse myself in it.

So what I would rather dedicate myself to is, for example, right now, as we're talking, to be completely lost in the conversation and to be 100 % focused on this as opposed to thinking about, oh, when I brush my teeth, do it the right way or you know, planning something else in my mind.

So I think the ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present happy and actually, ironically, more effective.

That's fascinating.

It's almost like a relativity issue where you're taking yourself out of a certain frame and you're just moving over to another frame and watching things from a different perspective even though you're in your own mind.

Yeah I think that a lot of the, for example, what Buddhists talk about is awareness versus the ego.

What they're really talking about is you can think of your brain, your consciousness as a multi -layered mechanism and there's kind of a core base kernel level OS that's running and then There's applications that are running on top.

I like to think of it as computer geek speak.

I'm actually going back to my awareness level of OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content.

I'm trying to stay in that mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried, frightened, and anxious, but serves incredible purpose.

But I'm trying not to activate that program until I need it.

Because when I need it, I want to just focus on that program.

But if I'm running it 24 seven all the time, I'm wasting energy And it's just and it becomes me and I am more than that, right?

I think like another thing that spirituality or religion or Buddhism or any any anything you follow Will teach you over time is that you are more than just your mind You are more than just your habits.

You're more than just your preferences your your level of awareness.

Your body and you know in modern humans we don't live enough in our body, we don't live enough in our awareness, we live too much in this internal monologue in our heads.

All of which, by the way, is just programmed into you by society and by the environment from when you were younger.

You're basically a bunch of hardware DNA written that then reacted to the environmental effects when you are younger, then you recorded the things that were good and bad, and you use that to prejudge everything that's going to be thrown against you.

And then you're using that to constantly try and predict and change the future.

But as you get older and older, the sum of these preferences that you've accumulated is very, very large.

That some of these reactions, habitual reactions that you can do that is very, very large, and then they end up as runaway freight trains that control your mood.

Well, we should control our own moods.

Why don't we study how to control our moods?

What a masterful thing that would be.

If you could say, well right now, I would like to be in the curious state.

And then you can genuinely set yourself into the curious state.

Or you say, I want to be in a morning state, I'm morning a loved one and I want to grieve for them.

But I really want to grieve, I really want to feel that.

I don't want to be distracted right now by my computer programming problem that's due tomorrow.

So, I think that the mind itself is a muscle, and it can be trained and it can be conditioned.

It has just been haphazardly conditioned by society out of our control.

And if you look at it with awareness and intent, and it's 24 seven job, you're working at every moment of every day, I think it can unpack your own mind and your emotions and your thoughts and your reactions.

If you start reconfigurating, you can start rewriting this program to what you want.

You mentioned before in one of your interviews that you have foundational values, but you didn't elaborate.

So I'm curious, what are those?

Yeah, I it's a good question.

I've never actually listed them or articulated them.

But to define values, first of all, as a set of things that you would not compromise upon.

So foundational values to me are things that I've looked at very, very carefully about myself.

And I've deliberately chosen and said, you know what, this is a habit, this is a way of life, and I'm not going to compromise on it.

I'm going to stay this way forever.

I just don't want live life any other way.

Now I've never fully enumerated them but you know examples of them like I think honesty is a core core core value.

To give you examples of what I mean by honesty is I want to be able to just be me.

I never want to be in an environment around people who have to watch what I say because if I disconnect what I'm thinking from what I'm saying that creates multiple threads in my mind that means that I'm no longer in the moment, And that means that I now have to work future planning or past regretting every time I'm talking to somebody.

So anyone around whom I can't be fully honest, I don't want to be around.

Another example of foundational value is I don't believe in any short -term thinking or dealing.

So if I see anybody who's even around me, like let's say I'm doing business with somebody and they think in a short -term manner with somebody else, then I don't want to do business with that person anymore.

Because I think all the benefits in life come from compound interests, whether in money or in relationships or love or health or activity or habits.

So, I only want to be around people that I know I'm going to be around with for the rest of my life.

And I only want to work on things that I know have a long term payout.

Another one is I only believe in peer relationships.

I don't believe in hierarchical relationships.

So, I don't want to be above anybody and I don't want to be below anybody.

If I can't treat someone like a peer and if they can't treat me like a peer, then we have, then I just don't want to interact with that human.

Another one is I don't believe in anger anymore.

I mean, that was something that was good when I was young and full of testosterone, but now I always like the Buddha saying that anger is a hot coal that she holds in her hand while waiting to throw it at somebody.

So, you know, I don't want to be angry, and I don't want to be around angry people, so I just cut them out of my life.

And I'm not judging them.

I mean, I went through a lot of anger too, and so, you know, they have to work through it on their own, but go be angry at someone else somewhere else.

So I don't know if that necessarily falls into the classical definition of values, but it's a set of things that I won't compromise on, and that I just live my entire life by.

And I think everybody has values, and a lot of finding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands, is finding other people where your values just line up.

And then the little things don't matter.

Generally, I find that if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it's because their values don't line up.

If their values lined up, the little thing wouldn't matter.

How is radical honesty?

How radical is your honesty, and how has that impacted your life?

I mean, it's pretty honest. I'm not – I think Ray Dalio from Bridgewater is famous to be radically honest, so I'm not going to go and call somebody ugly to their face.

I'm not trying to make a big show of it.

I'm not trying to say, hey, I'm so honest that I'm gonna shock you.

What radical honesty just means that I want to be free.

Part of being free means that I can say what I think and think what I say they're highly congruent and integrated.

And it also means, you know, Richard Feynman famously said, you should never ever fool anybody, and you are the deepest person to fool.

So the moment you tell somebody else something that's not honest, you've lied to yourself, and then you'll start believing your own lie and then that will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.

It's really important for me to be honest but I don't go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things.

I would combine radical honesty with an old rule that Warren Buffett has which is pretty specifically criticized generally.

I try to follow this.

I don't always follow it but I think I followed enough that made a difference in my life, which is if you have a criticism of someone, then don't criticize the person, criticize the general approach or criticize kind of that class of activities.

But if you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who best, who's the best example of what you're praising, and then praise that person specifically.

And that way people's egos and identities which we all have don't work against you, they work for you.

Have your values changed at all?

Or have you given more thought them since becoming married and becoming a parent.

I mean, how has that changed you?

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Values almost by definition don't change that much over time but it takes some time for you to figure out your own foundational values.

I think everybody has them.

It's just that maybe we're not that aware of them until later and so might have changed a little bit, but not a lot.

I mean, my my wife is an incredibly loving family oriented person and so am I.

And so that was one of the foundational values that brought us together.

The moment you have a child, it's this really weird thing, but it sort of it answers the built in meaning of life purpose of life question.

All of a sudden, the most important thing in the universe moves from being in your body into being moving into the child's body.

So that that changes you, and your values inherently become a lot less selfish.

You know, I would say that, like, probably the biggest such change was, when I was younger, I really, really, really valued freedom.

Freedom was one of my core core values.

And ironically, it still is.

It's probably one of my top three values.

But it's a different definition of freedom.

My old definition was freedom to freedom to do anything I want freedom to do whatever i feel like whenever i feel like and i would say the freedom that i'm looking for internal freedoms is freedom from its freedom from reaction that's freedom from feeling angry freedom from being sad freedom from being forced to do things but i'm looking for freedom from internally and externally worse before looking for freedom to.

Like that a lot what's the biggest mistake you ever made in your life and how did you recover.

I've made a class of mistakes that I would summarize in the same way and I made this class of mistakes.

And it was obvious to me that these mistakes were only in hindsight through one exercise, which is you probably heard the, you know, when you're 30 what advice would you give your 20 -year -old self?

Yeah. I mean, you're 40 what advice would you give your 30 -year -old self?

So if you do that exercise decade by decade or maybe you're younger, you can do it in five really sit down and say, Okay, you know, 2007.

What was I doing? How was I feeling 2008?

What was I doing? How was I feeling?

2009? What was it doing?

How was that feeling?

And at least for me that's remarkable consistency emerged.

And that consistency was that everything that I was doing, I should have still done, but with less emotion, and especially less anger because I used to be very angry when I was younger.

But Life is going to play out the way it's going to play out, some good, some bad, but most of it is actually just up to your interpretation.

You're born, you have a set of sensory experiences when you die, and how you choose to interpret those sensory inputs is up to you and different people interpret them in different ways, but really I wish I had done all of the same things but with less emotion and less anger.

Like the most celebrated example would be when I was younger and started a company, and the company did well, but I didn't do well, so I sued some of the people involved It was a good outcome for me in the end and everything worked out okay But there was a lot of angst in a lot of anger and really today, you know What I would do is I wouldn't go down the angst in the anger I would have just walked up to the people and said look this is what happened This is what I'm gonna do.

This is I'm gonna do it.

This is what's fair This is what's not but I would have realized that the anger and the emotion themselves of this huge consequence is completely unnecessary so now I'm just trying to learn from that and to do the same things that I think are the right thing to do but to do them without anger and to do them with a very long -term point of view so I think if you take a very long term point of view and if you take the emotion out of it then I wouldn't consider those things mistakes anymore other than that I mean there's a the perspective elect to adopt is that everything that I did and everything

that was done to me, and there's some impossible separate combination, brought me to this exact moment here today talking to you and this is a good moment.

It's a gray moment.

Yeah, so whatever set of circumstances conspired to bring us here, we're good because here I am.

Was there a moment you would say when you realized that you could control how you interpreted.

I mean, I think one of the problems that a lot of people have is they don't recognize that they can control not what happens to them, per se, but how they respond and how they interpret a situation.

I think everyone knows it's possible.

And the reason to know it's possible is, because it's a great OSHO lecture that he calls the title, The Attraction of Drugs is Spiritual.

And he talks about why do people do drugs, everything from alcohol, psychedelics, to cannabis to you name it.

And they're doing it to control their mental state and they're doing it to control how they react.

And sometimes it's worse and sometimes it's better, but some people drink because then they don't care as much or they they're pot heads because they can zone out or they do psychedelics so that you feel very present or connected to nature or what have you.

But the attraction of drugs is spiritual.

So to some extent, we already know that we can control our internal state.

We just use external bioactive substances to do it.

And now there are a lot more techniques that are out there in the public domain.

And many of them dug up from older times, but these range from cognitive therapy and behavioral psychology to meditation, to taking long walks in nature.

You can control your mental state, it's just we're used to doing it by hacking our external circumstances to then come back around and control our mental state.

And for example, sitting on a, there's a famous line that says that all of man's problems arise because he can't sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes.

That's a lot of skill.

Absolutely, yeah. And that's a lot of skills, class to women too.

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, if a man or a woman can sit by themselves on a cushion for 30 minutes and that's hard, it's really hard to do.

That's meditation. You are essentially struggling with and controlling your internal state.

And the first thing, the first thing to realize is that you can actually observe your mental state.

So, just the advantage of meditation is not that you're suddenly gonna gain superpower power to control the internal state.

It's that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is.

It is like a monkey flinging feces that's running around the room, making trouble shouting breaking things.

It's completely uncontrollable, it's an out of control mad person.

And you have to see this mad creature in operation, before you feel a certain distaste towards it and you start separating yourself from it.

And in that separation is liberation.

When you realize that oh, I don't want to be that person.

Why am I so out of control?

Just that awareness alone calms you down.

There are many techniques one can use.

Another one, for example, that I think a lot of smart people say is if you're in about something or if you get an unhappy email and you want to respond, don't respond for 24 hours.

What does that do? It just, you calm down, you're the emotion subsided, the hormones go down and your mental state, a better mental state, 24 hours later.

So I think people already know this.

But we just don't act on it because socially, we're not conditioned to act on socially, we're told, go work out go look good.

Because that's a multi player competitive game.

Other people can see if I'm doing a good job or not, or we're told go make money.

Go buy a big house again external multiplayer competitive game.

But when it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to happy completely internal, no external progress, no external validation, 100 % you're competing against yourself single player game.

And we're such social creatures, we're more like bees or ants that were externally programmed and driven that we just don't know how to play and win at the single player games anymore.

We compete purely on multiplayer games.

But the reality is life is a single player game, you're born alone, you can die alone, all interpretations are alone.

All your memories are alone.

And you're gone three generations.

Nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared.

It's all single player.

I think Buffett has a great example of that when he gives the, do you want to be the world's best lover and known as the worst or the world's worst lover and known as the best in reference to an inner or external scorecard?

Exactly right. I mean, all the real scorecards are internal.

And the sad thing is we sit they're like jealousy.

Jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome.

When I was young, I had a lot of jealousy in me.

And by and by, I learned to get rid of it.

And it still crops up every now and then.

But it's such a poisonous emotion, because at the end of the day, you're no better off, you're unhappier, and the person you're jealous of is still successful or good looking or whatever they are.

But the real breakthrough for me was when I realized at a personal fundamental level, the problem with these kinds of podcasts I can give glib answers all day long.

But you have to discover your own personal answer because your personal answer is going to be different than mine.

It will speak to you.

But the one that I discovered that spoke to me was the day I realized that all these people that I was jealous of, I couldn't just cherry pick and choose little aspects of their life.

I couldn't say, I want his body, I want her money, I want his personality.

You have to be that person.

Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desire, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self -image?

And if you're not willing to do a wholesale, 24, 700 % swap with who that person is, then there's no point in being jealous.

Once I came to that realization, jealousy sort of faded away because I don't want to be anybody else.

I'm perfectly happy being me.

And by the way, even that is under my control to be happy being me.

It's just that there's no social rewards for it.

There's a lot of internal rewards.

Yeah, it's almost anti -social rewards because when you're working on your inner stuff, people don't love that.

They said they don't dislike it.

Your friends, of course, support you, but they're not getting anything out of it.

Even when I look at my own peer group and to the extent that they're working on themselves and everyone in their 40s, at some level, is, most of them are engaged in grouped activities.

Hey, let's do a group meditation.

Hey, let's do this group event.

Hey, let's do this group lecture.

And I keep coming back to this one line that I read, like everything I just read, but which was said, only the individual transcends.

Nobody reaches enlightenment, or internal happiness, or does serious internal work in group settings.

It is a very lonely kind of task.

So to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work aren't that serious about it.

And it's fine. I'm not judging.

But just, they're craving more social interaction than they're really craving internal work.

What big ideas have you changed your mind on in the last few years?

I mean, there's a lot on kind of a life level.

There's a couple, obviously, on the business level.

I think on a more practical basis, I've just stopped believing in macroeconomics.

I'm thinking macroeconomics.

I study economics in school and computer science.

and there was a time when I thought I was gonna go be a PhD in economics and all that.

But the further I get, the more I read that macroeconomics is a combination of voodoo complex systems of politics.

And you can find macroeconomists to take every side of every argument.

So I think that discipline, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, which is the hallmark of science, because it doesn't make falsifiable predictions, it's become corrupted.

Because you never have the counter example on the economy.

You can never take the U .S. economy and run two different experiments at the same time.

And because there's so much data, people kind of cherrypick for whatever political narrative they're trying to push.

So to the extent that people spend all their time watching the macro economy or, you know, the Fed forecasts or you know, which way the stocks are going to go next year.

It's going to be a good year or a bad year.

That's all junk. It's no better than astrology.

In fact, it's probably even worse because less entertaining, it's just more stress inducing.

So I just think of macroeconomics, not in junk science, with all apologies to macroeconomists.

That said, microeconomics and game theory are fundamental.

I don't think you can be successful in business or even navigating through most of our modern capitalist society without an extremely good understanding of supply and demand and labor versus capital, and and game theory, and tit for tat, and those kinds of things.

So that macroeconomics is a religion that I gave up.

But there are many others.

I mean, I've changed my mind on death, on the nature of life, on the purpose of life, on marriage.

I was originally not someone who wanted to be married and have kids.

So there have been a lot of fundamental changes.

But the most practical one is I gave up macro, and I embraced micro.

And I would say I mean that's just not true in macroeconomics, that's true in everything.

I don't believe in macro environmentalism, I believe in micro environmentalism.

I don't believe in macro charity, I believe in micro charity.

I don't believe in macro improving the world, like there's a lot of people out there who get really fired up about going to change the world, I'm going to change this person.

I'm going to change the way people will think.

I think about micro, it's like change yourself, then maybe change your family and your neighbour before you get into abstract concepts about going to change the world.

What part of your base knowledge that you have today that you believe?

Do you consider the least solid or most likely to change over the coming years?

It's a good question.

I mean, I try not to have too much that I've pre -decided upon.

I think that creating identities and labels locks you in and keeps you from seeing the truth.

So I used to identify as libertarian but then I have to find myself defending positions that I hadn't really thought through just because they're a part of libertarian canon.

And the reality is that if all of your beliefs line up into neat little bundles, you should be highly suspicious, because they're pre packaged and put together.

So I don't like to self identify, and almost any level anymore.

And that keeps me from having too many of these so called stable beliefs.

So it's hard for me to point to something that I think is shaky because if I thought it was really shaky then I wouldn't stand on it.

I guess the areas where I'm becoming least certain is kind of all the, I call it the grand category of how should we organize society beliefs.

Everybody has them.

You know some people think we should be Communist, some people are Capitalists, some are Anarchists.

Some say we need a larger welfare state, we need universal healthcare and basic income and others say no, we need it all.

I think, the entire class of beliefs, they're unfalsifiable, they're based, they're almost religious, they're things that people got into when they were young, nobody actually knows which system is the better one, nobody actually knows which one maximizes happiness versus output versus whatever, I know there's a lot of smart economists and people studying it, there's a lot of good data and science, but at the end of the day, I just, and the more I look into it, the more I come away saying well maybe I don't know how best to organized society.

Maybe society should not have just one organization, but should have multiple organizations.

You can choose and you can go into whichever society where you were most bound to thrive, but I don't think there is a single right answer for human culture of society anymore except to the extent that given the increasingly destructive power of technology in a long enough timescale.

Along a timescale, you can 3D print a nuclear weapon, along a timescale, you can create a singularity in your backyard as part of your high school physics project.

So I think as a human race, we do have to sort of get past this idea of that we're separate organisms and kind of almost get into some kind of a multicellular organism situation, otherwise we'll just destroy ourselves, it will just be too easy to blow ourselves up.

And that that obviously runs very, very counter to my libertarian instincts of everyone should be free in whatever they want, et cetera, et cetera.

I just don't know how to organize society anymore.

I think any remnant beliefs that I have from being younger about the optimal way to organize society are probably wrong.

The future thriving society that we end up with maybe a thousand years from now will probably look like something that I would argue very strongly against today because they will have no room for the individual.

Maybe you can explain for listeners the singularity and what your thoughts are around that.

Yeah, singularity is this idea that technological change is accelerating and then at some point the acceleration gets so great that there's massive change in our lifetimes, we create things like general AI, we start living forever, and just the nature of who we are as humans changes the consequence of that.

It's most associated with the general AI.

If we produce a general purpose artificial intelligence, that artificial intelligence could then hack its own code, make itself smarter and outdevolve us to a point where we are either obsolete or immortal or something in between.

My thoughts on it, I think it's a fancy fault to say the least. Nick Bostrom wrote a very famous book called Super Intelligence, which lays out the past of it.

There are good rebuttals to Super Intelligence, so I wouldn't just read that book, you know, breathless and white -eyed and believe everything.

And there are people like the Singularity Institute who are looking forward to this coming that I think it is religion for nerds, you know—it's got all the same characteristics.

It's unfalsifiable until it happens.

It basically says, that chosen ones will be saved, the world is going to end, you know, we will be immortal.

It's very hard to tell apart from— I've heard this before.

Exactly. It's very hard to tell apart from a biblical kind of story.

And I find the people who are pushing it the most are what I would call sort of armchair technologists.

Like, they might understand a little bit of science, but these are not the Ph .D's and who are pushing this.

It's not like though fields, metal winning mathematicians pushing this.

I was trained in a little bit of science, and I consider myself an amateur scientist, and I know just enough to know how little we know.

Physics still can't solve the three body problem.

Collide three billion ball together, can't tell you what happens.

We cannot properly model complex systems. We can't tell the weather next week.

We still can't solve the vast majority chronic diseases.

We're just starting to connect the gut and the brain and bacteria in our system together.

There is so much complexity in nature and humans have just begun to scratch the surface that to believe that we are going to sort of go into this world of perfection through technology I think is far -fetched.

For example, AI. Everyone's talking about AI.

None of these people have written real code.

We are no closer to creating a general AI I think than we were 20 years ago.

Now there are actual huge advances that have been made in specific AI, but these are data processing problems. Basically, if I dump huge amounts of real world images into a neural network, then I can do better image recognition.

No question. That is real.

That is a data -driven solution.

The algorithms haven't gotten any better.

And the structure of how the human brain works and how the human body works is still so far advanced beyond our machine capabilities that certainly, if there's going to be singularity, it's not going to happen in my lifetime.

And I think in that sense, some things like the singularity are pernicious, they're pernicious for the same reason that the afterlife is pernicious, because it takes you out of the moment.

It gives you hope for the future, so you stop living for today and you start living for tomorrow.

And I know that doesn't sound like much, but it's actually a big deal.

Any given time when you're walking down the street, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present.

The rest is future planning or regretting the past. And that's keeping you from an incredible experience.

It's keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything and for being grateful for where you are.

And I think it can literally destroy your happiness that you spend all your time living in delusions of the future.

So I do think the singularity thing is good in the sense that it pushes forward, technological advancement, we put more resources on it, we spend more the time develop and some of the great things that the human race, some of the great technologies we're going to take advantage of.

So, that's an easy one.

It pushes science forward is a good thing, but I think it's delusional to think that you're somehow going to be saved before you die by some combination of AI and magic science.

You just have to live the life you have. You know, that's pretty profound.

Even when you're living backwards, you're not really living, right?

You kind of have to be in the moment.

There is actually nothing but this moment.

No one has ever gone back in time.

And, no one has ever been able to predict the future successfully in any way that matters.

And so literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at that exact time that you happen to be.

And it's, like all the great profound truths, it's all paradoxes.

So any two points are infinitely different.

Any moment is perfectly unique, but that moment itself slips by so quickly that you can't grab it.

What's your opinion on the current education that says, when I asked people on Twitter what they wanted to ask you.

This question came up a couple of times, which was… how would you fix it?

What's your opinion on the education system?

What are your thoughts around that?

I think there's no question.

It's completely obsolete.

The education system is a path dependent outcome from the need for daycare, from the need for prisons for college age males who would otherwise overrun society and cause a lot of havoc.

The original medieval universities cities, and guard towers that face inwards, for example.

You have to put a curfew, and then you need to lock up the young 18 -year -old males before they go out with swords and daggers and create trouble.

So a college and schools, and the way we think about them, they come from a time period when books were rare, knowledge was rare, baby sitting was rare, crime was common, violence was prevalent.

There was no such self -guided learning.

So I think schools are just byproducts of these kinds of institutions and now we have the internet which is the greatest web of knowledge ever created completely interconnected.

So it's very, very easy to learn.

If you actually have the desire to learn, everything is on the internet.

You can go on Khan Academy, you can get MIT and Yale lectures online, you can get all the coursework and get interactivity, you can read blogs by brilliant people, you can read all these great books.

The ability to learn, the means of learning, the tools of learning are abundant and infinite.

It's a desire to learn that's incredibly scarce.

I just don't think that schools matter for self -motivated students.

What the schools matter for is wanting to keep the kids out of their parents' hair while the parents go to work.

It creates socialization because kids want to be around their peers, and they want to learn how to operate society of their peers.

But I think if it's purely learning you're after, that learning can be done much more either on your own or through the internet or by uniting through the internet with like -minded groups.

So, I think that's one problem with the current educational system.

The second problem is what do you choose to learn?

And the current educational system has to have a one -size -fits -all model, it has to say, well, you have to learn X now, and then you have to learn Y.

And, you know, to give you examples of where this is obsolete, memorization, right?

In the day and age of Google and smartphones, memorization is obsolete.

Why should you be memorizing the battle of Trafalgar?

Why you should be memorizing what the capital of this or that state is?

But we still put undue weight on that just because that's the way it's always been done.

And we've been in a pre -Google world.

Another example is how, when we're moving along at a certain pace, I'm sure, not everyone, but I'm sure 90 % of your listeners have had this happen to them, which is they were learning mathematics and at some point they were they were keeping up they were doing arithmetic then they were doing geometry, they did namatry, they pre -calc and somewhere in there they got lost. Somewhere in there while building the massive edifice, the logical structure that mathematics is they missed one lesson they missed one concept, they missed five classes or they just didn't they just their brain couldn't think

a certain way that something was being explained to them and it should have been explained visually but it was being explained numerically, or it should have been explained symbolically, and it was being explained in cartography, but what have you, but they were not able to keep up.

And the moment you lose that rung in mathematics moment, you miss that rung in the ladder, you can't go to the next one.

Because now the next one, the teacher's like, okay, we're done with pre calculus, now we're moving on to calculus, you're saying, wait, I didn't understand pre calculus, and I understand how pre calculus leads from trigonometry to calculus and miss that whole part.

So now you get the calculus you don't understand understand the fundamentals, and now you reduced the memorization.

So you're like, OK, DX, DY, when I see that symbol, I do this.

But now you've lost the actual learning, you've lost the connection to the underlying principles.

So I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields.

And learning them really well over and over.

Because life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in the things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out.

But that's not how our system is built.

we teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all, when really they would have been better off serve just doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time.

So I think there's a pace of learning issue and then there's finally what to learn and there's a whole set of things we don't even bother trying to teach, we don't teach nutrition, we don't teach cooking, we don't teach how to be in happy positive relationships.

We don't teach how to keep your body healthy and fit, you know, we just say sports.

We don't teach happiness.

We don't teach meditation.

Maybe we shouldn't teach some of these things because different kids will have different aptitudes, but maybe we should.

Maybe we should teach practical construction of technology, and maybe everyone in their science project.

Instead of building a little chemistry volcano, know, maybe you should be building a smartphone.

So we just haven't kept up.

And I have to believe that we can change the system but we're not but you never you never change the system by taking the existing thing and reworking it.

I don't believe I been in Silicon Valley and tech business long enough to know that you're better off changing it just by creating something brand new.

So one fantasy idea I've had is, you know, after I'm done with Angel list, if I have more time in my hands, I would like to create a successor to the one laptop project.

In MIT, Niklas Nagarpanti had the one laptop per child project.

But then I saw this fascinating write up, this is really long time ago, maybe five years ago, maybe it was an economist or somewhere.

It was a story about how they left a box full of unopened Android tablets in a little village in Pakistan.

And when they came back, months later, the kids have opened up the box, they've all figured out how to boot up the tablets, they've hacked They've gotten pass through the user administration login.

They've installed a whole bunch of apps.

They've got a little economy set up.

The older kids are teaching the younger kids.

They're teaching their grandmothers how to run businesses.

They're surfing the web.

They've taught themselves English.

Kids are learning Sheens.

They just need the tools.

So to that end, what I would love to do is create a very low cost, very rugged, easily powered, cheap Android tablet that's hard to destroy.

and basically distribute them around the world with pre -built learning applications so that you can literally fire one up and it works with you interactively in 30 seconds that figures out what language do you speak if any speak symbolic and what level of aptitude are you at are your second grader third grade fifth grader and of course it varies by different discipline and they'll let you dive into and let you learn anything you want that will make your life better just to going back to my original.

Exactly it always keeps you on the edge it It always keeps pushing you.

And then you can network in all the teachers of the world.

So anyone who wants to be a teacher can contribute, not just Salman Khan doing Khan Academy, but essentially you could network, connect all the teachers of the world and all the students of the world using tablets and do it at a pace and level where it's essentially customized for each child.

And they're learning the things that have a practical outcome in their life.

They know there's an advantage to liberal arts education, pushing things that people don't necessarily wanna learn on their own, but they have to have some desire for it.

It's better to wait until they think they're ready and then give it all to them, because I think that's the way that learning sticks.

So, that's the kind of project I like to work on, but I don't think it's solvable with the current school system.

I hope you get a chance to work on that.

I think that'd be a phenomenal impact to the world.

Yeah, I think it would be fun, and I'm thinking about this now more because I have a young, intense son, and honestly, I don't want to send him to school.

How do you, as an adult, I mean, you mentioned a couple of physics books in the start of the interview here, how do you as an adult go about learning new subjects you specifically in?

Yeah, mostly I just stay on the basics.

So even when I'm learning physics or science, I'm sticking to the basics.

So I'll read concepts for fun, but I'm more likely to do something that is arithmetic in it than calculus.

I'm not gonna be great financials at this point, maybe in the next lifetime or my kid will do it.

But it's too late for me.

So, I have to stick to what I enjoy and what I love about science is mathematics is the language of nature, science is to me the study of truth.

It is the only true discipline because it makes falsifiable predictions, actually changes the world.

And applied science becomes technology and technology is what separates us from the animals and allows us to have things like cell phones and houses and cars and eat and electricity.

So, science to me is the study truth and mathematics is the language of science and nature.

So in that sense I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.

And to me that is the most devotional thing that I could do to study the laws of the universe.

And so the same kick that some guy might get out of being in Mecco or Medina and bowing to the prophet, I get that same feeling of awe and that same small sense of self when I study science.

So, for me, it's unparalleled and I'd rather stay at the basics and start at, and this is the beauty of reading.

It's one thing I don't like to do, by the way, when I review my books on the Kindle, I skip two -thirds of them.

And the reason I skip two -thirds of them is because they're kind of embarrassing.

They won't sound like good books to read.

They'll sound like trivial or silly or whatever, but who cares?

I don't have to tell everybody.

Everything I read, I read all kinds of stuff that other people consider junk or even reprehensible.

I read all kinds of stuff that I disagree with because of mind bender.

I found myself in some random dark hole in Twitter the other day, where I was reading this guy's tweets and like, Wow, he's really smart.

He's really interesting.

I was very clever. Like, wait a minute, this guy's a full blown white supremacist. I mean, he's not even like mildly white supremacist. He just thinks like everyone in the white race should be gone.

And people like me shouldn't be allowed on the streets.

But it was still fascinating.

And he's still really smart, and I kept reading it.

And I read it and read it and read it.

And after a while, I built up my own sense of his coherent view of the world and where he was coming from.

But to do that, I couldn't have judged too much. And I'm certainly not going to go around bragging to my friend, hey, I learned this from a white supremacist the other day, right?

So, to some level, you almost have to read the stuff you're reading because you're into it.

And that's it. You don't need any other reason.

There's no, there's no mission here to accomplish.

Just read because you enjoy it.

If you read what everybody else is reading, I mean, there's wisdom that you're going to think what everybody else is thinking, so you need the diversity and almost like an index fund approach, right?

Where you're going to catch the winners, but you can't really identify a lot of them beforehand that they're going to change you as a person because so much of that is contextual.

Yeah, I think almost everything that people read these days is designed for social approval.

you know. All the best sellers are about social improvement, social conditioning.

If you really wanted to be successful, happy, blah blah blah, all those external metrics, you're looking for a non -average outcome.

And so you can't be reading the average thing to your point.

And all these things are actually as old as the hills.

You can go read Adam Smith from the Wealth of Nations.

You can go read Benjamin Franklin and his aphorisms and understand how to live your life.

You could read Charlie Munger you could read you could read Charles Darwin understand evolution in the source You could read Watson and crick understand the structure of double helots and DNA but instead what we choose to read are just You know Whatever is number one at the airport bestseller or whatever our friends are reading or we read I know people who have read a hundred Regurgitated books of evolution and they've never read Darwin or they've read they've got or think of a number of macro economists And they're out there.

I think most of them, who have read tons of treatises and economics but haven't read any Adam Smith.

Yeah, right. So at some level, you're doing it for social approval, you're doing to fit in with the other monkeys, you're fitting to get along with a herd, but that's not where the returns are in life.

The returns in life are being out of the herd. Social approval inside the herd. So if you want social approval, definitely go read what the herd is reading.

But it takes a level of contrarianism and say nope, I'm just going to do my own thing regardless of the social outcome.

To learn anything I think that's interesting.

Do you think there's some sort of loss aversion there because once you diverge, you're pushing out say there's a Gaussian distribution, you're pushing out to one of the tails.

And if you feel that you're going to lose out on that, you would rather just stay in the middle.

If there's a chance that you're not going to be in the fat tail for a positive.

No. Absolutely. I think that's why, it's the smartest and most successful people I know started out as losers.

If you view yourself as a loser, as someone who has been cast up by society and has no role in normal society, then you will do your own thing and you're much more likely to find a winning path.

So it helps to just start off by saying, oh, I'm never going to be popular.

I'm never going to be accepted.

I'm already a loser.

I'm not going to get what all the other kids have. I've just got to be happy to be me.

Yeah. I think that's true.

When you're reading, do you just read and it sticks in your head or is it more like you take notes, do you have a system for how you keep track of that or review them?

I'm both lazy, and I'm really focused on being present.

So I think taking notes is the same as taking photos when you're on a trip, all it's doing is taking you out of the moment, and then who really sits there years later and goes back and looks at all their trip photos, gets in a salad, you just go take your next trip.

So I just don't believe in anything from the past anything no memory no regrets no people no trips nothing because a lot of our unhappiness also comes from comparing things from the past to the present first time you saw a sunset it was amazing was jaw -dropping you forgot yourself the second time you saw it was cool you know the hundred time you say it's nothing a thousand times you're saying and someone shows you a sunset you're like well actually I saw this one sunset in Mexico this time that was really cool you're not even there so I just don't believe in clinging too much memories and that includes

in reading. So I do highlight, I catch myself doing that, but I do it more because it's just kind of a way of rereading and rereading that particular paragraph at that moment in time.

And then once in a blue moon for my especially favorite books, I want to reread the book, but I'll be short of time so I'll just reread the highlighted passages until something catches my eye and then I get sucked back into the book.

But the reality is I could stop highlighting tomorrow and it would make no difference.

and note -taking is even, I think, harder than that.

So, I do not take notes.

But everyone's brain works differently, you know?

Some people love to take notes.

Actually, my note -taking is Twitter.

So, what I do is I read and read and read, and if I have some fundamental, aha, insight, or concept, then what I like about Twitter is it forces me to distill that into 140 characters, and then I try and put it out there as an aphorism, and then I get attacked by all kinds of random people and I pointed at all kinds of obvious exceptions and jumped down my throat.

Why did I do this again?

And then I go into hiding for awhile.

You have one of the most thoughtful Twitter feeds that I know of so I hope nobody jumps down your throat too bad there.

Thank you. When you first pick up a book, are you skimming for something interesting?

How do you go about reading it?

Or do you just flip to a random page and start reading?

What's your process for that?

I'll start at the beginning but I'll move fast. So if it's not interesting, I'll just start flipping ahead or I'll start skimming or speed reading If it doesn't grab my attention within the first chapter in a meaningfully positive way I'll drop the book or skip ahead a few chapters I don't believe in delay gratification when there's an infinite number of books out there.

They're reading There's so many great books and there's so many of them that are so well written that you know I just can't spend my time on these one thing I will do though is if I find that early on in the book the author starts making statements that I think think are just factually untrue.

And one should always be open to new ideas, but if they're starting to make contradictions where the epistemological load of acknowledging that contradict, sorry, use that 50 cent word, but I would have to revisit my entire lifetime of learning and undo it and start over.

Or, I had a conversation recently with a guy who sounded really, really smart and was throwing all kinds of science at me, and my head was spinning.

And then he basically said and as we know, you know, thermodynamics isn't really true.

I was the point of which was like, okay, I gotta discard everything you just said, because thermodynamics was fundamental.

It's what the undo button is for.

Yeah, that thermodynamics is not even a theory.

It's a law and comes from the mathematics.

So if you wanna that out, then we just have to we have no base conversation.

So if I find something like that in a book where someone says, oh, yes, I cleared my mind and I watch my thought process, then I was able to levitate, then I have to put the book down because now I don't know what in here is true and what in here is false.

Basically what I'm looking for it is the author knowingly lying or completely diluted, and if they are then I can't fill my brain with a junk because I can't separate truth from fiction.

So generally I'll skim, I'll fast forward, I'll try and find a part that catches me, usually though what happens in most books though is most books have one point to make and obviously this is nonfiction I'm not talking about fiction but they have one point to make they make it and then they give you example after example after example after example and they apply it to explain everything in the world and you once I feel like I've gotten the gist of it I feel very comfortable putting the book down so there's a lot of these what I would call it pseudo science bestsellers that are all over you know

that everyone's always reading and people like oh did you read this And I would say yes, but the reality is I read maybe two chapters of it, but I got the gist. I want to switch gears and talk a little bit about decision -making.

Which is kind of what you get paid to do, both as an investor and the CEO of AngelList. You're kind of paid to be right when other people are wrong.

Do you have a process around how you make decisions?

Yeah, so decision -making is everything.

And in fact, someone who makes decisions right 80 % of the time, so 70 % of the time, will be valued and compensated in the market hundreds of times more.

And I think people have a hard time understanding that, but that's a fundamental fact of leverage.

If I'm managing a billion dollars and I'm right, you know, 10 % more of the time than somebody else.

And that's $100 million worth of value on a judgment call.

And with modern technology and large workforces and capital, our decisions are getting leveraged more and more.

So if you can be more right, more rational, and that's one of the reasons why I love your blog, because it really focuses on helping you be more right, better decision -making, make them more rational, then you're going to just get nonlinear returns in your life.

So decision making is everything.

And decision making, what what what's going on?

We're basically when the brain is a memory prediction machine.

It has a memory of things that work in the past and what it's read, and it's trying to predict the future.

And a lousy way to do memory prediction is X happened in the past, therefore X will happen in the future.

It's two based on specific circumstances.

So what you want is you on mental models.

So the best mental model that I have found have come through evolution, game theory, and Charlie Munger, who I'm sure you quote a lot on your blog.

But Charlie Munger was Warren Buffett's partner, very good investor, but he's tons and tons of great mental models.

Nassim Taleb has great mental models.

The Benjamin Franklin had great mental models.

So I basically load my head full of mental models.

But then different ones apply to every situation.

So I don't really run a checklist. But for example, I studied a lot of complexity theory when I was younger, it's a field that I got into, I've gotten occasionally just getting these things I just learned a lot about that field.

And my most recent one is cryptography.

But I was really into, into complexity theory back in the mid 90s.

And the more I got into it, the more I understand the limits of our knowledge and the limits of our prediction capability.

And that's been super helpful to me.

So that has helped me come to the system that operates in the face of ignorance.

And I believe that fundamentally we are ignorant and very, very bad at predicting the future.

So I don't look for and I don't believe that I have the ability to say what is going to work.

So rather what I try to do is I try to eliminate what's not going to work.

So I think being successful is just about not making mistakes.

It's not about having correct judgments.

it's about avoiding the incorrect judgments.

So I have mental models around how do I determine if I can trust somebody around, you know, what are the actual odds that this is going to work?

How much margin of safety do I have?

If it works out, you know, the angel bets and venture bets are great because they've not linear outcome in the positive, but the downside you can only lose one x, but in the upside you can make 10 ,000 x.

So I tried to rig the game.

So I don't believe set up systems not goals.

So use your judgment to figure out what kinds of environments you can thrive in and then build a system to create that environment around you so that you're statistically likely to succeed.

I don't I'm not going to be the most successful person on the planet nor do I want to be.

I just want to be the most successful version of me while working the least hard possible.

I want to be like in a thousand universes.

is, Nival has successful $999.

He's not a billionaire.

But you know, he's done pretty well in all of this, right?

So whatever the metric is, or he's happily married in most of them.

He may not have, you know, nailed it in every regard, but he's set up systems such that he's failed in very few places.

So, so basically, I just try and set up good systems. And then the individual decisions aren't that don't matter that much. Because I think our ability to make individual decisions is actually not great.

So for example, the investor, I would rather invest, my system is, I want to see 10 ,000 companies, and I want to pick 500 that have a shot of being huge.

And then I want the option to double down on the five winners.

I don't want to just look at 100 companies and pick 10 that I think are winners, and go all in on those.

Because I don't think I had that capability.

And and origin stories that people make up about why they were successful.

But the real separation here is, you look at which people are consistently successful.

Especially in Silicon Valley, there are lots of one -hit wonders.

But how many people consistently seem to do something interesting, build something interesting, make money and do something new?

I'm not in this to make money.

Money is just a piece of paper, and every time I see one of these billionaire founders, you know, giving away to a hospital or whatever, you know they overshot.

they didn't need that much money, so there's huge diminishing returns to money after a certain point um especially now that i'm more into freedom from rather than freedom too there's the thing i want to do that i can't do so literally uh money in that sense is a boat anchor around my neck because all it is something that i'm then fearful of losing something i'm getting jealousy debates about so many people want from me so i'm not even anymore for the money it's like can i do something interesting and new.

Can I create something brand new the world has never seen that it gets value out of that it uses that is congruent with my morals.

So I never have problem sleeping at night.

And I never have to worry about selling something that I wouldn't buy.

So much more into that.

But I don't, I don't have a checklist system for decision making.

I know that's like a big thing recently.

Atul Godwand. They wrote the checklist manifesto.

And that's good for pilots and surgeons.

And by the way, that's another one of those books where you just read the first chapter and you're done.

It would have been a great blog post. But yeah, so I also don't think you need to be that hard on yourself.

A lot of a lot of what goes on today, a lot of your listeners are right now, like beating themselves up and scribbling notes and saying I need to do this and I need to do that.

And I need to do no, you don't need to do anything.

All you should do is what you want to do.

And if you stop trying to figure out how to do things the way other people want you to do them.

Then you get to listen to that little voice inside of your head that wants to do things a certain way.

And then you get to be you.

And no one in the world is going to beat you at being you.

You're never going to be as good at being me as I am.

And I'm never going to be as good at you being you as you are.

So certainly listen, absorb, but don't try and emulate the fool's errand.

Instead, each person is uniquely qualified at something they have some specific knowledge, capability and desire that nobody else in the world that that's just purely from the combinatorics of human DNA and development.

And so because so your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most to find out the business that needs you the most find the project in the art that needs you the most, because there's something out there just for you.

But what you don't want to do is be building checklist and decision frameworks built on what other people are doing because you're never going to be that.

You'll never be good at being somebody else.

Yeah, and you're inevitably going to miss stuff too in checklist. You mentioned kind of like how you determine if you can trust somebody.

And I know you've said in the past, he's kind of used Buffett's criteria for evaluating people, which is the combination of intelligence, energy, and integrity.

What predictive signals do you pay attention to for each?

How do you determine if you can trust someone?

Yeah, integrity is the hardest one.

And integrity usually comes out in two ways.

one is long term, which is just you've known somebody for a while and you kind of know, you know, how they think about things.

But the most, the more interesting one.

There's a short term one, which is you just kind of see how they treat other people.

So there are lots and lots of people who will, you know, not screw over, screw over is a strong word, but they will do something that is self feeling, or slightly unethical relative to another business partner.

When the whole time they'll, they'll say to you nudge nudge wink, wink, you know, I'm taking advantage of that person because they deserve it, but you're my friend.

I would never do that to you And the thing is yeah, exactly it's very easy to change your definition of who friends are I find that the people who really do it things out of integrity.

They have an internal moral compass so they don't They don't do unfair or unethical or bad deals With other people because it would soil their own view of themselves and they wouldn't be able to sleep with themselves at night So some of the highest integrity people I know, the worst thing you can do is you can say to them, well, I think you're self dealing on that one.

And they will get so unhappy because they'll be like, no, no, no, no, that's not who I am.

I can't be that person and they'll bend over backwards.

Usually I find that people that negotiate with who are high integrity, they're very easy to negotiate with.

They'll give you things that they don't need to give you because they think it's fair and vice versa.

So negotiations with high integrity people are usually very easy.

You're giving each other things to make sure the other person's happy enough that the deal survives because unhappy deals get unwound and they become short -term relationships which don't have any compounding benefits And then finally if someone is going around and talking about how honest they are they're probably dishonest It's like a little telltale indicator of learn when someone spends too much time talking about their own values or talking themselves up They're covering for something So there's actually a good book, it's kind of out of print I think it's hard to track down maybe you can find

it online somewhere.

And it's not the obvious one, the name of the book is called the Art of Manipulation.

And I found it because of a tweet that I followed from Illocertus and it was really good it was because this guy basically goes under cover and lives with con men.

And he spends time with them running cons and learning all about cons and it's very without judgment, he just lays down how con men work.

And he put down their how to spot them when they're being dishonest. And some of the telltale signs are they will, they will push the deal a little bit too hard. They'll sell just a little bit too hard, they'll talk about how honest they are.

But I have great people in my life who are extremely successful, very desirable, like everybody wants to be their friend, very smart.

And yet, I've seen them do one or two things that are slightly not great to other people and the first time I'll tell them I'll go up and say hey look I don't I don't think you should do that to that other person not because You won't get away with it.

You will get away with it But because it'll hurt you in the end not in some cosmic karma kind of way But just I believe that deep down we all know who we are Mm -hmm you cannot hide anything from yourself and And so your own failures are written within your psyche and they're obvious to you.

And so if you have too many of these moral shortcomings, you will not respect yourself.

And the worst, the worst outcome in this world is not having self esteem.

If you don't love yourself, who will?

So I think that you just have to be very careful about doing things that you were fundamentally not going to be proud of because they will damage you.

So the first time around, I warned them, by the way, nobody changes.

Right. And then I just kind of distance myself from them.

that sort of, you know, cut them out of my life, like I just have this saying inside my head, the closer you want to get to me, the better your values have to be.

Yeah, when I met my wife, it was a great test because I really wanted to be with her.

And she wasn't so sure at the beginning.

And so in the end, we ended up together because she saw my values.

And I'm lucky I developed them by that point.

Because if I hadn't, I wouldn't have gotten her...

Not that I own her or anything, there's no attachment like that, but but I wouldn't have deserved her.

It's like as Charlie Munger says, to find a worthy mate, be worthy of a worthy mate.

So I think it you know working on your values is long term selfish, although short term, it's absolutely involves sacrifices.

If being ethical or profitable, everybody would do it.

It would have to have a separate concept.

We wouldn't talk about it.

There would be no books on it, there would be no, no one would ever talk about values could it be profitable.

But it's not it's obviously unprofitable involves sacrifices.

But like everything in life, if you're willing to make the short term sacrifice, you'll have the long term benefit.

My physical trainer, Jersey Gregory, really wise, brilliant guy, he always says, easy choices, hard life, hard choices, easy life.

So basically, if you're making the hard choices right now and what to eat, you're not eating all the junk food you want, making the hard choice to work out, then your life long term will be easy, you won't be sick, you won't be unhealthy.

Same is Same as true of saving up or any day.

Same as true of how you approach your relationships.

But if you make the easy choices right now, your overall life will be a lot harder.

I like that. I want to dive into intelligence a little bit there, too.

How do you separate the people who know what they're talking about from these people who pretend they know what they're doing?

We're full of a world where it's so easy to pretend you have knowledge that you don't actually have. Real knowledge is intrinsic and it's built from the ground up.

So going back to my math example earlier, you can understand trigonometry without saying arithmetic or geometry so Basically, someone is using a lot of fancy words And a lot of big concepts.

They probably don't know what they're talking about I think the smartest people can explain things to a child and if you can't explain to a child then you don't know it and I think that's very true and of the common saying but Richard Feynman, you know, very famously, if you go into his lecture, six easy pieces, where his early physics lectures, he has one where he basically explains mathematics and three pages, he starts from number line counting.

And then he goes all the way up to pre calculus, and it just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic.

He doesn't rely on any definitions.

You know, for example, if somebody says like, Oh, that bird is called this, or you know, the rule for this thing is that they're not really telling you the fundamentals they're telling you about humans, they're telling you about naming systems. True understanding is about algorithms, about understanding how things connect to each other.

So I think it's the mark of a charlatan to try and explain simple things in complicated ways and it's the mark of a genius to explain complicated things in simple ways.

So really they should be able to do it very, very, very, very simply.

And I have to catch myself on this because I have a big vocabulary because they read a lot, so I can sound smarter than I am just by using big words.

But in the process, I'm being dishonest with myself.

It's okay to use more precise words.

English is a big language with a lot of words, and so that allows for a lot of precision.

But if you're deliberately using words that your audience doesn't know, or if you even think you're using a word that your audience doesn't know, and you don't catch yourself and correct that, then you're essentially being dishonest. You're just trying to show off.

You're trying to pull one over their eyes.

There's a great book by Randall Munro, who is the creator of XKCD, that very science -oriented comic, and it's called Upgoer 5.

It's a reference to Saturn V rocket that took the Apollo missions into space.

What he's doing in that book is he explains all these very complicated concepts all the way from climate change to physical systems, to submarines, and so on, but he does it using only the thousand most common words in the English language.

Yeah So that's why he called the Saturn fire rocket up go over 5 because see it's color rocket You can't define a rocket as a spaceship or a rocket.

It's just a preferential He says up go or his thing that goes up kids get that right away.

That's a thing you find there, right?

The book I think oh, yeah.

I'm sorry. You're right that the name of the book is thing explainer Yeah, and up core 5 is one of the pages There's another great book that I have called thinking physics I opened this one all the time and I loved on the back cover.

It has this great little pitch should say the only book that's used in both grade school and graduate school.

That's true. It's all simple physics puzzles that can be explained to a 12 year old child they can puzzle over.

And it can be explained to a 25 year old grad student in physics.

And they all kind of have fundamental insights and physics.

They're all kind of tricky.

But anyone can get to the answer to purely logical reasoning.

I love reading the history of how scientists came up with their various breakthroughs.

And if you have ever gone, like for example, relativity, relativity is a fascinating thing.

It's a very advanced concept.

But in a way, it's very simple, because Einstein came up with what are called Gedanken, fancy word for thought experiments, which mean thought experiment in German.

So he was able to basically just do logical thought experiments in his mind until he came up with relativity.

And then he formalized, with mathematics and with predictions that he made that were later, unfulcified that were basically shown to be true.

So really brilliant physicists like that they get there by pure reasoning and pure logical reasoning.

It's not like he had to go draw lots of complicated diagrams and so on.

He just understood things at a very basic fundamental level.

So again, this goes back to I think the really smart thinkers are clear thinkers, and they understand things at the understand the basics at a very, very fundamental level.

And I would rather understand the basics really well, then have I've memorized all kinds of complicated concepts, but then I can't stitch together and I can't re -derive them from the basics.

If you can't re -derive it from the basics as you need it, you're lost. It seems like a large part of making effective decisions kind of boils down to dealing with reality.

How do you make sure you're dealing with reality when you're making decisions?

By not having a strong sense of self or judgments or mind presence.

The monkey mind will always respond with this regurgitated emotional response to what it think the world should be and that will cloud your reality.

This happens a lot of times when people are mixing politics and business.

Like for example, in January, this year I wrote a little piece on the election that kind of predicted that Trump or Bernie is going to win one of those two characters going to win.

That's not what I wanted to have happen necessarily.

I'm an elite. My life is pretty good, right?

I'm not looking for rabble -ro specially to change everything, but I wanted to see reality the way it was as opposed to the way I wanted it to be.

So I think the number one thing that clouds us from being able to see reality is just that we just have preconceived notions of the way it should be.

There's one definition of a moment of suffering is that it's that moment when you see things exactly the way they are.

This whole time you've been convinced your business is doing great and really ignored the science that's not doing that well, then your business fails and you suffer.

Well, it's just because you've been putting off reality, even hiding it from yourself.

So the good news is that when you're suffering, when you're in pain, that's the moment of truth.

There is a moment where you're forced to embrace reality, actually the way it is.

And then you can make meaningful change and progress.

Because you're gonna only make something, you can only do that when you're starting with the truth.

So I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth and to see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn't want to face the truth.

So the smaller you can make your ego, the less conditioned you can make your reactions, the less desires you can have about the outcome you want the easier it is to see the reality.

The clear example of this is when we're going through difficult things like a breakup or a job loss or business failure or health problem and our friends are advising us right?

Well when we're advising them the answer is so obvious it comes to us in a minute and we tell them exactly oh that girl get over her she wasn't good for you anyway you'll be happier trusting you will find someone you know what the correct answer is but that person can't see it because they're in that moment of suffering and pain, and they're still wishing that reality was different.

So the problem is in reality, the problem is their desire colliding with reality, it's preventing them from seeing the truth, no matter how much you say, it's the same thing happens when I'm making decisions.

The more of a desire that I have that work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth.

So especially in business, if something isn't going well, I tried to acknowledge that publicly.

And I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co founders and friends and co workers, because that And that way I'm not hiding it from anybody else.

If I'm not hiding it from anybody else, then I'm not going to basically dilute myself in what's actually going on.

You won't set anything you can think of as been thought of and tried.

The only way you're going to find something is if you stick to it at an irrational level and try a whole bunch of things.

This kind of makes an idea, a commodity, but the judgment and execution incredibly rare.

How do you evaluate if someone is picking the right idea and if they have the capacity to execute on that idea?

The best founders I found are the ones who are very long term thinkers.

So even decisions that maybe they shouldn't care that much about early on, they fix it on because they are not building a house.

They're putting bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper, at least in their lines.

And so what you're looking for is looking for someone who knows the space well, who understands how difficult it's going to be, but doesn't care because they're, they just love whatever they're doing, they're into it and they commit to it for the long haul.

So, passion and vision alone are not enough.

I think Steve Case said that vision without execution is a hallucination.

Execution alone isn't enough.

And then unfortunately, at least in technology business, there's a lot of luck required.

Right place, right time, market forces, timing, regulatory action against our pro.

So, there's a lot of things that you control where the platforms are shifting, what open source efforts show up.

So, you can never predict the outside successes, but what you can predict are the failures.

You can say, oh, this person doesn't know this field at all, they're way out of their depth.

Or this person, they're a short -term thinker, they're not going to last the game, they're not going to have to go as far as needed.

Because as I was saying, there are no new ideas.

All the ideas have been thought of.

But it's about the combination of the idea plus the execution plus the passion.

Like Steve Jobs was a visionary and a great designer, not because he came with the idea to build a smartphone.

Many people had tried to build a smartphone, but it's because he had a very high bar for the design, he understood the manufacturing tolerance and what technology was capable and what it was and he could rally the people and the resources to get it done.

He actually didn't care about the financial outcome, he took a dollar a salary from Apple.

He just wanted to see it done and he was willing to do it for as long as it takes until it worked.

So it was kind of this magic comp, some factors.

And then the timing in the world happened to be right, the technology was around and Johnny I was there and who knows how many other factors intersect make it happen but just many factors intersected on his side there are ones that intersected against him.

Um you know for example he had tickled our apple which was a horribly failing company at the time.

Uh poor guy died of pancreatic cancer, right, he got taken out early think about what more he could have created what more he could have done for the world.

Um he probably wasn't happy in the whole process you know he drove himself to ruin uh so I I think you do have to be irrationally optimistic to succeed and passion it but you also have to really know your stuff and I meet a lot of entrepreneurs which are short term thinkers in which case that's okay just means this is not the thing for you right go find the thing you can commit to for ten years because that's how long it's going to take minimum to get a good outcome and you have to enjoy the journey because there's no guarantee on the outcome and you have to be really really good at it which means

that you probably love it so much that you willing to put in the time before there's even any return on it.

So I think the best founders, they have a deep understanding of the space they're going into, enough to be contrarian.

And they have a deep passion for it so that they'll just keep working on it.

And they have execution skills, they just get things done.

They solve problems they're capable.

I love that. Yeah, I don't get too embarrassed with angel founders.

so I don't… we all deal with people with similar… you know, in business or life if we're establishing a partnership, whether it's with a customer, a supplier, you know, a relationship we have similar concerns about their short -term thinking and we'll take advantage of us and how should we go about entering that relationship, and is this relationship fragile?

I think that's a good way to think of it.

One thing I figured out kind of late is that generally, at least in the tech business in in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes.

They just have to be patient.

Every person that I met at the beginning of my career 20 years ago, where I looked at it and said, wow, that guy or that gal is super capable.

They're so smart and dedicated and blah, blah, blah, now we'll just be friends or hang out or whatever.

You kind of forgot about them.

All of them, almost without exception, became extremely successful.

You just had to give them a long enough time scale.

It never happens in a time scale you want or they want, but it does happen.

I want to circle back and ask you a few more questions about life before we wrap up.

You've kind of called your philosophy rational Buddhism.

How does that differ from traditional Buddhism, and what type of exploration did you go through to arrive at that?

Yeah, the rational part means that I have to reconcile with science and evolution, and I have to reject all the pieces that I can't verify for myself.

So, for example, is meditation good for you?

Yes. Is clearing your mind a good thing?

Yes. Is there a base layer of kind of below your monkey mind.

Yes, all these things I've verified for myself.

And some of the beliefs that come out of Buddhism I believe and follow because again I've verified or reasoned with thought experiments there myself.

But what I will not accept, is things that are written down as just so, like oh there's a past life that you're paying off the car before.

Well, I haven't seen it, I don't remember any past lives, I don't have any memory, so I just have to not believe that or when people say you know your third chakra is opening and your second Chakra… I don't know, this is fancy nomenclature, right?

I have not been able to verify or confirm any of that on my own.

So, if I can't verify it on my own, or if I cannot get there through science, then it may be true, it may be false, but it's not falsifiable.

So, I cannot view it as a fundamental truth.

On the other side, I do know that evolution is true.

I do know that we are, you know, evolved survival and replication machines.

I do know that we have an ego so that we get up off the ground and worms don't eat us, we actually take action.

So what rational Buddhism to me means understanding the the internal work that Buddhism espouses to make yourself happier and better off and more present more in control of your emotions and being a better human being.

But I don't subscribe to anything fanciful just because it was written down in a book.

I don't think I can levitate, I don't think that meditation is going to give me superpowers and those kinds of things.

So it's you know it's basically try everything test it for yourself be skeptical, keep what's useful and discard what's not.

So I would say my philosophy falls down to and one pole is evolution, as a binding principle, because it explains so much about humans.

And the other side is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time tested spiritual philosophy on the internal state of being inside each of us and I think those are absolutely reconcilable I actually want to write a blog post at some point about how you can map the tenets of Buddhism especially the nonfensible ones directly into a virtual reality simulation what I mean by that is if you believe we're living in a VR sim which I know some people are espousing or if you believe the Buddhist view of the world with Samsara and Nirvana and all that you would actually come to the same conclusions on how

to live your life. What are the areas of your life right now that you'd like to change the most and why?

I would like to be less I'd like to be less time bound.

I like to be less greedy about signing up for things.

I don't know how to describe this.

You know what, it really is.

I had a tweet recently, where I was going back and forth with somebody and then came up with this concept of there should be a two factor authentication on your calendar.

Exactly. There's two factor authentication, when you're logging into a website so that if your password gets stolen, the attacker doesn't, the thief or hacker doesn't have your phone, so they can't log in because the phone has to generate a unique code.

Well, I wish that the two -factor code against my calendar, because current me, present me, is always making promises for future me.

Current me is tired, exhausted, hungry, wants to go home, wants to go to sleep, wants to read a book, wants to hang out with the wife and baby.

But FutureMe is this dynamic, high -energy individual who will always show up to every meeting, and will have a lot of energy and will want to get a lot of things done.

So I commit myself to all these commitments in the future that when FutureMe arrives, actually, it's present to me, in respect to being lazy and hungry, and tired.

So I want to two -factor against myself, and the way I would like to do that is, I think every time I make a commitment to anything, I should instead just write it down, and then And then check back in 48 hours later and then clear mind say, Do I commit to doing this?

Or even better would be saying, if I commit doing something, then I committed to doing it right now.

Yeah, I think if I'm not willing to do it right now, then don't do it.

Don't commit to it.

Yeah, that's the Derek Sivers approach, right?

Like if you're not saying hell, yes, right now, then you should just be saying no, I think.

Yeah, so I think this is this is something of every busy person that just want to be much better at managing my own time.

Because you go through life through an exploration phase, and then you switch to the exploitation the exploitation phase and I'm very much in the exploitation phase.

I'm not looking for more exploration.

But all that said, I have a hard time saying no. I mean, if I had one wish, the most important thing to me would be I would constantly be running my mind in debug mode.

I would literally be watching every single thought I have and letting no reaction pass without it being stopped, inspected, stripped, searched, examined, understood, and then like go.

But the reality that took a lot of time, and we're just highly conditioned creatures.

So I do view a lot of my goals over the next few years of unconditioning previous learned responses, or habituated responses, so that I can make decisions more cleanly in the moment without relying upon memory or prepackaged heuristics and judgments.

What's the most common mistake you see people make over and over?

I think the most common I mean, this is a very tough question case of contextual, right?

It really depends on the context.

I think the most common mistake if I'll look at out there in on planet Earth, like for humanity, is the idea or the belief that you're going to be made happy because of some external circumstance.

And that and I know that's not original, that's not, you know, that's fundamental Buddhist wisdom, I'm not taking credit for it.

But I think I really just recognize it now the fundamental level including in myself.

Like we just bought a new car, we have a baby so we need a safer car.

We were driving a little mini Cooper before, not enough room in there.

So we bought a new car and now waiting for the new car to arrive and of course every night I'm on the forums reading about the car.

Why am I doing that?

It is silly object, silly car.

It's not gonna change my life that much or at all.

And I know that the instant the car arrives I won't care about it anymore.

Yeah. But what it is I'm addicted to the desiring, I'm addicted to the idea that this external thing is going to bring me some kind of happiness and joy, and that's just completely delusional.

So I think just looking outside for anything, I think is the fundamental delusion.

Which is not to say, you shouldn't do things in the outside.

You absolutely should, you're a living creature.

There are things that you do.

You locally reverse entropy.

That's why you're here.

You're meant to do something.

You're not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long.

So, you should self actualize and you should do what you are meant to do.

But the idea that you're going to change something in the outside world that is going to bring you the peace and everlasting joy and the happiness that you deserve, that is a fundamental delusion that we all suffer from including me.

And so the mistake over and over and over is to say, oh, I'll be happy when I get that thing, whatever that is, that's the fundamental mistake that we all make, including me 24 seven, all day long.

I definitely see myself from that answer.

Because you're human.

You're human, all of us do it.

I want to end with a really unbounded big question, which is, what is the meaning and purpose of life?

Yeah, that's a big question.

I'll give you three answers, because that's a big question, I'll give you three answers.

One is, it's personal.

You have to find your own meaning.

Any piece of wisdom that anybody else gives you, whether it's Buddha or you or me, it's going to sound like nonsense.

So I think fundamentally, you just have to find for yourself.

So the important part is not the answer, it's the question.

You just have to sit there and dig with the question, and it might take you years or decades, but when you find an answer you're happy with, that will be fundamental to your life.

The second answer I would give is there is no new to life.

There's no purpose to life.

Osho says, it's like writing on water, or building houses and sand.

The reality is you've been dead for the history of the universe, 10 billion years or more, you will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so until they eat deathly universe and anything you do will fade.

It will disappear just like the human race will disappear, the planet will disappear, get to Mars, even that group will disappear.

So no one's going to remember you pass a certain number of generations whether you're an artist or a poet or a conqueror or a poplar or nothing, so there's no meaning.

So you have to create your own meaning, which is what it boils down to.

You have to decide Is this a play that I'm going through that I'm just watching?

Is there a self -actualization dance that I'm doing?

Is there a specific thing that I just desired just for the heck of it?

But these are all meanings you are making up.

There's no fundamental intrinsic purposeful meaning to the universe, because if there was, then you would just ask the next question.

You say, well, why is that the meaning?

It would just be as Richard Feintrins said, it'd be turtles all the way down.

The whys would just keep accumulating.

There is no answer you can give that question that wouldn't have another why.

And I don't buy the everlasting afterlife answers because it's insane to me with absolutely no evidence to believe that because of how you Live 70 years here on this planet that you're gonna spend an eternity Which is a very long time in some afterlife What kind of silly god judges you for eternity based on some small period of time here?

So I think that after this life it's very much like before you were born remember that it's going to be just like that and and Before you were born you didn't care about anything or anyone including your loved ones including yourself, including humans, including whether we go to Mars or whether we stay on planet Earth, and whether there's an AI or not, you just don't care.

So like I met this entrepreneur who was obsessed with Steve Jobs, and he was making all these sacrifices trying to be like the next Steve Jobs, and I said Tim, do you want to be exactly like Steve Jobs right now?

He said yes, and I said, well, Steve Jobs is dead, he doesn't care about anything, he's gone, like zero, he's not registering at all.

So if you want to be like Steve Jobs, you don't want to be like Steve Jobs, just be you right now.

He would trade places with you right now in an instant, if you could.

So I don't think there's any real meaning or purpose to life.

And the last answer I'll give you is a little more complicated than that.

From what I've been reading in science, friends of mine have written books on this, a kind of stitched together theories.

And maybe there is a meaning to life but it's not a very satisfying purpose.

Basically, in physics, you know, the arrow of time comes from entropy.

Second law of thermodynamics says that entropy only goes up, which means the disorder in the universe only goes up, which means concentrated free energy only goes down.

And if you look at what living things are, living systems, humans, plants, civilizations, what have you, these are systems that are locally reversing, humans locally reverse entropy because we have action.

But in the process, we globally accelerate entropy until the heat death of the universe.

So you could come up with some fanciful theory, which I had, which I like, that we're headed towards a heat death of the universe where there's no concentrated energy, where everything is sort of at the same energy level.

And therefore, we're all one thing, we're essentially indistinguishable.

And what we are doing as living systems is we're accelerating getting to that state.

So the more complex of a system you create, whether it's through computers and civilization or through art and mathematics, or just through creating a family, you're actually accelerating the heat death of the universe, so you're pushing us to this point where we end up as one thing.

But I think that's a kind of If you're looking for personal meaning today in your life That was phenomenal listen to about thank you so much. This was just absolutely mind -blowing.

I really appreciate it.

Where can people find you?

Twitter at in the ball or on my blog at start up boy calm.

Thank you so much Thank you.

It's been great. Thanks for listening and learning with us.

For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more.

Go to Fs .blog slash podcast, or just Google the Knowledge Project.

Until next time. you

[Naval Ravikant: Mastering the Self, Habits, and the Art of Rational Living]-[#171 Naval Ravikant: The Angel Philosopher (2017)]

📋 Summary

The Philosophy of the Modern Sage: Insights from Naval Ravikant

The Monkey Mind and the Quest for Presence

Habits as Tools for Liberation

The Art of Reading and Thinking

Redefining Happiness and Success

Conclusion: The Path to Authenticity

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript