Naval Ravikant

2017–2025 · changed view

“Wealth is the thing that you really want. Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep. Wealth is the factory that with the robots as cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program that's running at night that's serving other customers. Wealth is even money in the bank that is being reinvested into other assets and into other businesses. Even a house can be a form of wealth, because you can rent it out — although that's probably a lower use of productivity — but land and actually doing some commercial enterprise. So my definition of wealth is much more businesses and assets that can earn while you sleep.”

2015–2025 · changed view

“The ultimate foundation are mathematics and logic. If you understand logic and mathematics, then you have the basis for understanding scientific method. Once you understand the scientific method, then you can understand how to separate truth from falsehood in other fields and other things that you're reading. So be very careful about reading other people's opinions, and even be careful about reading facts, because so-called facts are often just opinions, but, you know, with a veneer around them.”

2015–2025 · changed view

“Happiness is that state when nothing is missing. And when nothing is missing, your mind shuts down, and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past, they 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.”

2015–2025 · changed view

“There's a thing called Agrippa's trilemma, and Agrippa's trilemma says that any questioning like this, why, will always end in one of three places, okay? First is infinite regress, right? Why? Because of this. Why? That. What? And just keep going forever. The second is circular reasoning. Well, A, why A? Because of B. Or why B? Because of A, right? You get trapped in that. Or the third is an axiom, and the most popular axiom is God. But it could be anything. Because of math, because of science, because the Big Bang, because the simulation, right? These are all axioms. These are all just stopping points. Saying simulation, we're in a simulation, or saying it's the Big Bang, is just another way of saying God. It's just God's a dirty word, so we don't use it as much anymore, but same thing. So you end up in one of these three dead ends, essentially, right? So there is no answer. The real answer is because, right? What is the meaning of life? Yeah, you get to make up your own answers. The beauty— if there was a single answer, we would not be free. We would be trapped, because then we would all have to live to that answer. Then we'd be bored, like robots, each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the others. Back to signaling, like, I'm better at it than you are. But luckily there is no answer, so you just do whatever you want.”

2015–2025 · changed view

“And so busy mind can often rob you of peace of mind, because what— the peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it's peace from mind, right? So if you look at all the crazy activities you do to be happy, right, whether it's like trying to get laid and have an orgasm, or, you know, extreme sports, or looking at something beautiful, or taking a psychedelic, you're trying to get out of your own mind. You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment. You're trying to get peace from the mind. And there are other better ways to do that. Most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect, whereas if you understand things, if you see things properly, you will naturally slowly develop peace from mind.”

2015–2025 · changed view

“I think reading is so powerful. If you take away one thing from this podcast, just figure out how to read. And I say that because there are many skills and gifts that people have in life, and the great thing about reading is you can use that to pick up any new skill. So if you learn how to learn, it's the ultimate meta skill, and I believe that you can learn how to be healthy, you can learn how to be fit, you can learn how to be happy, you can learn how to have good relationships, you can learn how to be successful. These are all things that can be learned. So if you can learn, that is a trump card, it's an ace, it's a joker, it's a wild card. You can trade it for any other skill.”

2019–2025 · changed view

“If you want to make money, you have to get paid at scale. And why you? That's accountability. At scale? That's leverage. And just you getting paid, as opposed to somebody else getting paid — that's specific knowledge.”

2017–2025 · changed view

“We have this idea that everything can be taught — everything can be taught in school — and it's not true that everything can be taught. In fact, the most interesting things cannot be taught, but everything can be learned. And very often that learning either comes from some innate characteristics in your DNA, or it could be through your childhood where you learn soft skills which are very, very hard to teach later on in life, or it's something that is brand-new, so nobody else knows how to do it either.”

2019–2025

“So, you're basically saying this, unless the laws of physics explicitly forbid it, we can figure it out. And if we can figure it out, we can build it. It may take more time, it may take more resources, but humans are sort of universal explainers, we're universal computers, and to date we have found no law of physics that is a barrier and says that things are not understandable. So, we should be optimistic.”

2019–2026 · changed view

“People who are talking about AI automating programming have never really written serious code. Coding is thinking. It's automatic structure thinking. An AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world. That's end game. That's the end of the human species. And I can give you arguments why I don't think that's coming either. People who are thinking— and I know I take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate, but we're nowhere near close to general AI. Not in our lifetimes. You don't have to worry about it, even in our lifetimes, really. It's so overblown. It's another— it's a combination of Cassandra complex, you know, it's fun to talk about the end of the world, combined with a god complex, like people who have lost religion, so they're looking for meaning in some kind of end of history.”

2019–2025

“There's a view, a pervasive view, maybe even dominant view globally, that you raise the children for society, not for the parents. So it's fundamentally a freedom, pro-American thing to raise the kids for themselves, is the next step. So enlightened society would go from 'we're raising the kids for the state' to 'we're raising the kids for the parents' to finally 'we're raising the kids for themselves.' Or we're just not even raising the kids; we're there to help them raise themselves.”