Naval Ravikant - The 5 BIGGEST Truths That Society CAN'T Tell You [w/ Peter Thiel]

truth is very fought over when we say truth the biggest problem we're going to run into is that what Society wants for you is not what's always good for you Society is the largest group and groups search for consensus individuals search for truth it is not acceptable for society to tell you the truth on many things there are many things Society throws out all day long that if you are smart and critical thinking person that you disbelieve but you're forced to go along with it even though deep down you know it's not true money isn't

going to make you happy that's a society truth that's not an individual truth look at all the individuals trying to make money deep down they know that yes money will get rid of a lot of sources of unhappiness and at least put it to the point where happiness is then under my control it's my choice as opposed to being inflicted upon me externally that is just one of a billion lies Society tells you another lifestyle he tells you is that you send your kids to school for Education no they get an hour a day of

Education they get indoctrination they get taught at the speed of the slowest student they get taught mostly subjects that are irrelevant or obsolete education is a combination of a small bit of Education a large dose of socialization a large dose of compliance training a massive dose of babysitting which is helpful for parents who can't take care of the kids at home also it keeps young troublemakers off the streets especially at the teenage level who might be going out and committing crime and causing problems or getting in trouble so school does a lot of things but

education is just a very tiny piece of it as all the homeschooling stats clearly show and even the unschooling stats are starting to show Society does not just tell you things that are false it programs you to beat yourself up when you cross one of these boundaries when you transgress against society's truths the classic example of that is guilt guilt is society's voice speaking in your head guilt is society programming you so effectively that you are your own warden so truth seeking is a very hard business because you essentially have to with deep conviction understand

10 things that you are told or wrong all day long now let's hear Peter Thiel on the truth about competition we've been taught that um the losers are the people who are bad at competing so the losers the people who don't make the high school swim team or whose grades aren't quite good enough to get into the right grad school or or whatever the case may be and I would suggest that something very different is the case where very often um you know when you compete too intensely you've lost sight of the important things and

um and you end up working on the wrong kinds of things so that so that it is true that competition makes you better at that which you're competing on but it always comes at this terribly high price of focusing too much on the people who are immediately around you and um and not asking some questions about what's more valuable meaningful or important uh to try and do the sort of the autobiographical version of this was that you know I was sort of on this hypertracked uh competitive uh sort of things that you know teenager on

20 something um where you know it's 8th grade Junior High School yearbook one of my friends and I was like I know you're going to go to Stanford in four years four years later I got into Stanford I went to Stanford Stanford Law School uh ended up at a big law firm in in New York and it was one of these places where from the outside everybody was trying to get in on the inside everybody was trying to get out um when when when when when you left after uh seven months and three days um

when I left after seven months and three days one of the people down the hall for me said you know it's really reassuring to see you leave I had no idea you could Escape from Alcatraz which of course of course all you had to do was go out the front door and not come back but psychologically this was this was a very uh a very tricky thing for people to do because so much of their sense of self-worth their sense of identity was wrapped up in um in winning these uh these competitions and beating the

people around them you know the the word uh the word ready in the time of Shakespeare the word ape meant both primate and to imitate and uh there is something very deeply in The Human Condition it's how we learn things from other people how language gets transmitted it's how culture gets transmitted but it also can lead us very astray when we sort of blindly copy the people around us where uh that's what leads to herd-like behavior The Madness of crowds lemming like sheep like uh behavior that leads to all the sort of crazy bubbles people

participate in and I think uh you know I think there is sort of the somewhat strange phenomenon in Silicon Valley where so many of the successful companies seem to have been started by people who are suffering from a mild form of Asperger's and um and I think we always need to turn this around as a critique of our broader Society what is it about a society where anyone who does not have Asperger's is at a disadvantage because they are talked out of their original interesting ideas before they're even fully formed and they sort of sense

oh that's a little bit too weird people are looking at me funny I better do something a little bit more conventional I think I will just open that restaurant after all and uh and I think this is a this sort of is a is a dynamic that we always have to have to try to try to resist really hard now let's hear chamat palihapitia on the truth about mistakes in terms of your mistakes Society tells you don't make them because we will judge you and we will look down on you and I think the really

successful people realize that actually no it's the cycle time of mistakes that gets you to success because your error rate will diminish the more mistakes that you make You observe them you figure out where it's coming from is it a psychological thing is it a you know cognitive thing and then you fix it so the implied thing there is that there's a uh in in business and investing in poker and dating in life is that there's this platonic GTO Game Theory optimal thing out there and so when you say mistakes you're always comparing to that

optimal path you could have taken I think uh slightly different I would say mistake is maybe a bad proxy but it's the best proxy I have for learning but I'm using the language of what Society tells you sure got it Society tells you that when you try something and it doesn't work it's a mistake so I just use that word because it's the word that resonates most with most people got it the real thing that it is is learning yeah it's like in neural networks it's lost the neural network it's lost exactly uh yeah right

so you're using the mistake that is most uh the the word that is the most understandable especially by the way people experience it I guess most of life is a sequence of mistakes the problem is when you use the word mistake and you think about mistakes it actually has the counterproductive effect of you becoming conservative in is just being risk averse so that if you folk if you re if you flip it and say try to maximize the number of successes somehow that leads you to take more risk um mistake scares people I think mistakes

scare people because Society likes these very simplified boundaries of who is winning and who is losing and they want to reward people who make traditional choices and succeed but the thing is what's so corrosive about that is that they're actually not even being put in a position to actually make a quote-unquote mistake and fail so I'll give you if you look at like getting into an elite school right Society rewards you for being in the Ivy Leagues in a way that you know in my opinion incorrectly doesn't reward you for being in a non-ivy league

School there's a certain level of status and presumption of intellect and capability that comes with being there um but that system doesn't really have a counterfactual because it's not as if you both go to MIT and Ohio State and then we can see two versions of Lex Friedman so that we can figure out that The Jig Is up and there was no difference right and so instead it reinforces this idea that there is no uh truth-seeking function there is no way to actually make this thing whole and so it tells you you have to get

in here and if you don't your life is over you've made a huge mistake now let's hear monish babri on the truth about copying from the work of other people so what I found is I found that cloning is incredibly powerful because so few people are willing to do it right they're just not willing to go there and so there's a number of facets to cloning okay so what I try to do is anytime I saw people in the industry or outside the industry do anything that impressed me or made me look up and say

oh that's something good and all that I remember like for example one time I got a letter from my law firm in this big brown manila envelope and the label they had used was a very nice elegant label large label firm named written nicely and it was larger than most labels I had seen and I cloned that I said you know what we'll do whenever we send out stuff we're going to use this large table and I've used it all the companies from Dental now okay so that's an example of I've continued to look for

small things big things that I can clone so cloning is a very powerful idea if you Embrace cloning you will get a massive Edge on your fellow peers and humans and people will look down on it and that's okay we have no shame we are Shameless and I think it would be quite foolhardy to not ride on the shoulders of giants I think a lot of smart people many of them dead have done a lot of heavy lifting and to try to sit down and create everything by yourself nobody is that smart reflections passage from

Gustav levonne the masses have never thirsted after truth they turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste preferring to defy error if error seduced them whoever can supply them with Illusions is easily their Master whoever attempts to destroy their Illusions is always their victim quote from George Orwell there was truth and there was untruth and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world you were not mad quote from Leonardo da Vinci the truth of things is the chief nutrient of superior intellects the truth from Peter thielen competition might seem like

it conflicts with the truth from Manish babri on copying good practices from other people but I think they don't conflict because what Peter Silo poses is pursuing a competitive goal whereas munish babri is only in favor of copying other people's best practices when it makes sense for you to do it so Peter is talking about copying and competing over goals which is the end whereas monish is talking about copying practices and methodologies which are just means of an end also the kind of copying that Peter talks about is driven by the ship-like behavior that is

common in humans as explained by social epistemology whereas the kind of copying that monish talks about is driven by independent thinking from the individual on what makes sense to him to incorporate into his work and personal goals on mistakes I think that a big part of that avoidance of mistakes and risk aversion comes from the school system nasimta lab argues on his book anti-fragile that being right or wrong is fundamentally different when we're talking about papers or schools compared to the real world what happens in Academia or the school system is that you normally need

to be right at least slightly more than wrong whereas in the real world which runs under a power law distribution of events we have asymmetries going on let's take the example of Entrepreneurship in entrepreneurship you can be wrong most of the time as long as each individual mistake is inconsequential and when you are right the win is massively consequential so in the real world is not about the relative proportion of mistakes and wins it's about the consequential magnitude of those mistakes and wins so that's all for today's nuggets and if you also want to get

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