Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, and More | The Tim Ferriss Show

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show where it is always my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different fields my guest today is a dear friend he does very few podcasts we're going to get into a disclaimer around that naval ravikont you can find him at naval n-a-v-a-l on twitter he is the co-founder and chairman of angel list he's an angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies including many mega successes such as twitter uber notion open door postmates and wish it is a long long list you can subscribe to naval his podcast on wealth and

happiness on apple podcast spotify or wherever you get your podcast you can also find his blog at nav.al for even more neval plus tim that's me check out my wildly popular interview with him from 2015 which was nominated for podcast of the year you can find that and resources and much more at tim dot blog slash naval neval welcome back to the show yeah thanks for having me if i recall correctly i was i was crushed in podcast of the year by jamie foxx so that's right i need weaker competition this time around if you

could just tone it down this year please i will do my best yeah jamie jamie basically i could have been a completely non-responsive critical care patient as long as the equipment functioned jamie foxx is the the consummate performer so he is he is formidable competition and podcast but you are a different breed and i understand that you get asked to do podcasts a lot so what type of disclaimer would you like to yeah i don't i don't go on other people's podcasts anymore i had to make an exception for you because you're the og you

put me on the map you're a good friend and frankly i wouldn't even be known if it weren't for you so i definitely have to thank you and honor your request to have me back i generally don't do uh podcasts anymore or at least other people's podcasts for a couple of reasons uh first is i just don't believe in sequels i think sequels suck right you look at sequels on uh in movies and and whatnot and they're usually pretty bad they cost three times as much you know they're long-winded the person now has an ego

and a reputation to defend they've already said what they were gonna say so they're just repeating themselves to some level and you know maybe the first run they took an idea they've had for a decade or three decades and they expounded on it and it sounded great and then in the sequel whether it's a book or a movie they have to come up with something equally good but they only have two years to do it and it's just really difficult to do so i think sequels just make everybody look bad and i'm not a fan

of sequels yet here we are the thing about sequels they make money people want them uh people crave them because there's a certain familiarity to it but hopefully we won't embarrass ourselves too much so yes i don't do sequels we'll make an exception here and kind of see how it goes just don't have jamie foxx back on at least not at least not this year well i am looking right now as a framework for starting this conversation at your twitter account and that might seem like an odd place for me to start people who listen

to this show a lot will know that i don't often do that but i want to know two things you follow zero people on twitter yet you have almost a million followers and also trending right now in the united states is jamie foxx hilarious he's right next to you he's reminding me this cannot keep this guy down so let's talk about your account i find your account fascinating i find your use of twitter fascinating and i'd like to begin with a photograph of a professor at a blackboard that you have as your profile suppose header

who is the person in the photograph i think i recognize this person but i want to hear you describe why you chose this photograph and who it is yeah there that's uh professor richard feynman um who was a a pioneer in the field of quantum electrodynamics he was part of the manhattan project he's known colloquially for his book surely you're joking mr feynman and a couple of related ones like so what do you care what other people think but he's also very well regarded in the field of physics obviously he passed away a while back

but he invented a lot of quantum electrodynamics uh feynman path integrals um he was part of the manhattan project uh brilliant brilliant guy and i loved him because feynman was one of the first characters that i encountered that did science and serious work and was accomplished in so-called real life but was also like a he was a character he was a happy person he was deeply philosophical he didn't take himself nor life too seriously he appreciated the mysteries of life he appreciated living life and he had a lot of fun along the way so it

was kind of a to me he was like a full stack intellectual hacker of life and was this very inspirational to me as a kid growing up you know even though i read a lot of philosophy and you know just kind of normal non-fiction my hero and even though i'm in the business world the tech world my heroes are scientists because i think applied science is the engine that pulls humanity forward it eventually becomes technology that technology allows us to engage in all kinds of pursuits around civilization rather than be scrapping for just basic substance

and survival and so i think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of human history and feynman was one of the greats and he was admirable in many regards as to how he lived his life although i think recently they tried to cancel him but you know they try to cancel everybody feynman is a character certainly he is a character was a character and a figure who has fascinated me for decades and actually i collect very few things but managed to buy some of his papers and drawings at auction a handful of years ago because

it was the first time that they had been made available so hey i can show you some of his equations from the manhattan project which is wild to think about and my fascination though is in many respects uninformed because i don't have the scientific literacy to fully appreciate the genius that he brought to bear on physics for instance but i could appreciate his cleverness and his questioning of assumptions and also his distaste for uniforms and other accolades uh most notably some of the prizes that he was awarded that he seemed to have particular a dislike

for on he famously said that science is the belief in the ignorance of experts and it's so funny because these days you know so many people are on twitter saying believe in science or according to science and you have to realize there's no such thing as science with a capital s science the foundation of science is doubt it is all about falsifiability david deutsch who's kind of one of my current modern living physicist heroes is a poparian like he he subscribes to karl popper's philosophy and he basically says that you know if it's not falsifiable

it's not scientific if you can't prove it false if there's if if you if it's true up or down or left or right it's not science it doesn't require belief you should be able to challenge it at all times it should make risky predictions that are not obvious and those predictions should then be tested and you shouldn't be able to after the fact change the goal move the goal post or change how the you know how the predictions were set up and so those are the hallmarks of good science falsifiability independent verifiability and making risky

and narrow predictions with details that are hard to vary both before and after the fact and that's how you end up with good science and good explanations not by people on twitter voting that's politics so like everything has become politics now science has become politics too people are politicized and there's big science but i think feynman would be very unhappy with that he was just a generally happy character and non-political intended not to get involved in these things but i think he would realize that that is not actually science but it's it's masquerade's a science

it's almost becoming social science and you know going to twitter like nassim taleb is one of my favorite twitter followers even though he's a he's a bit you know cantankerous yeah he's cantankerous yeah he's he's he annoys people for sure but you know you want to hear the truth you gotta you gotta be prepared to to be hurt a little bit but he had a great tweet recently that i retweeted which i'm sure made a lot of people mad where he said the opposite of education is not ignorance the opposite of education is an education

in social science and uh i thought that was hilarious uh but you know it it hurts because there's some truth to it if there was no truths to it it wouldn't hurt at all you know if i said tim ferriss is fat that would just bounce right off of you but if i said you know tim ferriss and of all or fake gurus that might hit us right because we suspect there's some deep level there's a part of that that's true so i think the same way like with you know social science does kind of

lead you down the road to ignorance because it's about social and anything social is about group think and group behavior and you know individuals can search for truth but groups search for consensus because if a group doesn't have consensus it can't get along if it can't get along it falls apart and there's conflict and so the last place you're going to find truth is in large groups and the moment you make science about large groups and about voting and about consensus you're not really practicing science anymore yeah and the science with the capital s is

dangerous very dangerous yeah it's propaganda it's and it then it becomes like macroeconomics again another nut until that line he says it's easier to macro than it's a micro and so big science is the equivalent of macroeconomics whereas the equivalent of microeconomics a little science which is you know me in a lab or me with my computer and trying out various things and so you can just like with macroeconomics you can pick and choose whatever data you want to prove whatever point you want with big science you can pick or choose whatever papers you want

so look at the fights right now on the internet about what covid means you can go down that hall of mirrors and find scientific quote-unquote substantiation for many points of view depending on which papers you choose to cherry pick and so then we reduce back to consensus but again science isn't done by consensus it should be done by experimentation verifiability falsifiability rigorous testing and you know in an ideal science world you don't go and survey 10 000 scientists you actually pick the one smartest scientist but that's very hard to do now no one can agree

on who the smartest scientist is so unfortunately i think that the nature of what science is is being corrupted and that started the day we let the so-called social sciences masquerade as sciences you know the day we said psychology is a science and politics can be a science and and so on and you can apply the scientific methods to those things then i think that's the day we start to corrupt science or at least the word science so real science you know these days is relegated to a very small corner you know physics maybe like

molecular biology and chemistry mathematics theory of computation but it's a fairly limited set yeah yeah very quantitatively uh literate friend of mine said at one point most of the disciplines that have science at the end of them are not actually science all right some exceptions right so yeah compute computer science computer science science if it's hard neuroscience it might be an exception but very often if there's science appended to it it is not in fact something that is falsifiable according to someone like karl popper right it cannot be it cannot be proven or disproven using

experiment at least that's right if there isn't some experiment could that could theoretically disprove it then it's not science um yeah it's like honest abe's law firm right he if he needs to put honest in the title then you have to wonder so the same way if they put science in the word other than as you said computer science and neuroscience you sort of have to wonder well let's look at a couple of quotes from feynman there are there are few that i think about a lot and these these are on goodreads but number one

and i think this is really applicable with respect to science in media particularly a term that bothers me a lot which is studies prove or studies show just like capital s science shows which isn't really a thing the facts can get contorted quite a lot the quote from feynman is i learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something right yeah this is a very deep point and i think that a lot of times that we just define something with another definition or we just throw out a piece of jargon

as if that means we know something and you know it's a difference between memorization and understanding understanding is the thing that you want you want to be able to describe it in 10 different ways in simple sentences from the ground up and rederive whatever you need if you just memorize you're lost so i think this is one of the things that i get stuck on a lot which is like just keep going back and reading the basics over and over trying to understand them so don't necessarily have that tall edifice of knowledge that is very

seductive in academia but as anyone who's operated much in the real world knows in the real world you get paid for making good judgments and decisions based on the basics for example if you know arithmetic statistics probability at a high level and you understand some basic math you have all the math that you need to succeed in life you don't need calculus or even trigonometry or number theory or set theory or any of these kinds of things unless you're going into a deeply technical field or mathematics yet we spend so much of our time in

school covering pre-calc and calculus when the kids who are taking those courses aren't even that good at basic math so the basics are really important that's the steel frame the foundation for understanding that you need to get through life and uh too much of it is reduced to memorization and understanding things as names and as definitions and i think the feynman example is you know his dad would take him for walks and they would see birds and you know if his dad would say this bird is uh such and such a warbler but that doesn't

tell you anything about the bird that tells you about humans and humans gave that bird that name really the bird you know it likes to stand on one leg at this point it likes to pick it uh lice and it's feathers doing this and it likes to eat these kinds of things and it flies you know this way for that reason and these are its predators and these are its prey so i mean those are the kinds of things that really give you understanding who cares what the bird is called the name of the bird

is irrelevant and you see a lot of professions in professional life this happens a lot which is jargon people try to protect their knowledge by basically saying well i understand this term and that term and what this term means but the reality is most people don't actually know what these things mean underneath i find this very common in accounting a lot of business people don't know accounting and even a lot of accountants will have fancy words for things but when you dig underneath they don't really understand the principle of what's going on below it and

if you just understand the principles and even if you don't understand the words you will have an advantage in for example negotiating deals because you'll understand underneath how the pieces are actually moving on the board as opposed to what they're called and i just want to point out developing that foundational knowledge is akin to learning the basics of shooting foul throws in basketball it is not becoming michael jordan right with a very limited set of colors with which to paint if you spend a few weeks maybe not even a few weeks a few days with

a decent youtube tutorial or book gathering the basics of accounting you will be able to make significantly better decisions right i mean it's it's i just want to underscore that this is not a master's degree or phd or any type of commitment like that that can separate you from the pack in terms of advantage well just just run a business run unlimited stand it'll teach you better accounting not a textbook now you may need to learn certain conventions because you need those to communicate with other humans so that there's efficient communication when you say one

thing they understand that thing and that's where jargon can be useful because it can be a compressed way of communicating knowledge rather than having to you know try and explain it from first principles every time but when it's not useful is when it becomes a substitute for understanding understanding is a thing you know that's what separates humans from the other animals that's what separates us from the robots that we actually understand what's going on underneath like for example in the artificial intelligence world there's a new algorithm gpt3 which is the rage which is text completion

so people are saying hey i can make up like really plausible sounding writing and so the ai is here is going to take all the jobs well no because the ai doesn't actually know what's going on underneath if i were to ask a question well why did you write that or what does that mean it would very quickly fall apart so you always want to strive for understanding not for memorization you should be able to rearticulate it five different ways in every language that you know otherwise you don't really understand it and the good news

is you don't have to understand that many things you know while we're on the topic of find a fineman one of the phrase the quotes from him is he says like you know nature uses only the longest threads to weave her tapestry and so what he means by that is that there's only a few basic principles that you have to understand to kind of understand the sum total of our knowledge in physics there's not a lot and as physics becomes more and more advanced we're actually unifying theories we're collapsing them into one thing like we

do with electricity and magnetism or statistical mechanics and heat and thermodynamics you know those turn out to be one thing so we're or we're trying to do currently with gravity and quantum mechanics we're trying to reconcile them in quantum loop gravity or in string theory or what have you so you just kind of have to understand a few of the basic things and then you'll see them recurring over and over and over again like for example i study and read physics in computer science just for entertainment i don't there's no practical application for me but

there's this really interesting theory i was reading about called solomonoff induction and it's basically formalized as occam's razor which is that the shortest answer is the correct one but it's it's more advanced than that but it basically says like if you want to figure out why something happened you take all the different reasons why it could have happened all the different theories why it could have happened and then you sort of weigh each of them based on how compressed they are how how short they are how likely they are and then that gives you the

probability that kind of gives you the the explanation for why that theory happened now feynman has a very similar and elegant thing in a completely different field where he basically says if you want to understand why this particle took that path why did this photon take that path what you do is you look at all the possible paths that photon could have taken and you sort of weigh them you you sum them probabilistically based on how likely that path was it's actually the same observation except one is about photons traveling through space-time and the other

is about the causality and why an event may have happened and what the theory is behind that and these are two completely different fields and two completely different characters thinking about two completely different things and these are very very fundamental theories in their fields but deep down they're actually the same which to me is fascinating it just shows how much of what we look at as complexity actually emerges from a set of very simple rules and it's just fascinating so understanding is a thing to strive for not the words so even though you use the

fancy words like solomon of induction and and finance path integral theory whatever the heck it's called i don't even know what the actual name is the name is irrelevant it's the concept that's that's fascinating you spoke to learning accounting through building a business let's segue to business your pin tweet is a tweet storm so it's a series of tweets the headline of which is how to get rich and then in parentheses without getting lucky it has as we record this 44.8 000 retweets 110 plus thousand favorites we're not going to go through this whole thing

it's quite long but i'm curious to know what parts of it you think people are paying too much attention to or overemphasize and what parts of it do you wish people would pay more attention to because there are many different pieces of advice in this thread that tweet storm is a series of principles that i kind of wrote for myself in my head when i was 13 and i was trying to figure out how to make money and i kind of came with a framework of how to be rich but not by accident to do

it in a way that i could repeat it over and over and i would leave very little up the chance because i think there's kind of this it's not completely mythology but there's this belief that you know to make money you either have to be born rich or you have to be privileged or you have to be in the right circles or to get lucky and i think that there are still ways to accomplish the original american dream which is you know make money but do it in a deliberate systematic way and when i say

money i mean wealth i don't mean like a law firm where you make you know a couple hundred bucks an hour but you're still tied to the clock i mean like when you wake up when you want you go to sleep when you want you know you live where you want and you have freedom so to me the purpose of money is freedom and for that you need to create wealth and can you do it ethically can you do it sustainably can you do it reliably can you do it with people that you like can

you do it doing things that you enjoy and i think it's absolutely possible and i i'd like to think that i'm at least one of many living proof points for that you know warren buffett and charlie munger are examples of others uh not that i'm in their status of their league but you know other people have done it so that was the whole point of that framework and the tweet storm i just wrote it down one day and it's funny because obviously i have some experience at twitter so i know how to craft things but

i think that was written back in the day when the tweet limit was 140 characters too so it's harder but i just woke up one night when i've been thinking about it and i wrote up the whole tweetstorm almost exactly like you see it and there are lots and lots of missing pieces like obviously that is just like a very high level very zen cone like or or haiku like or even hallmark card like framework it's missing a ton of details which i then tried to extrapolate on in my podcast series on the same topic

what do people over emphasize and what are people missing and actually involved let me pause to just read a few of them this is from may 31 2018 so a few examples and you don't have to comment on these specific examples but just for people who haven't seen this i want to give them an idea so the second of these various tweets in this sequence is understand that ethical wealth creation is possible if you secretly despise wealth it will elude you end of that particular tweet and then there's another one you're not going to get

rich renting out your time you must own equity a piece of a business to gain your financial freedom that one right there is the most important one which is you basically in modern life what happens is like the person who is the best at doing something in the world will get to do it for the entire world through a combination of leverage and distribution accountability and specific knowledge with all of which i talk about in the tweet storm if you're the best in the world doing something like if you're the best teacher in the world

at math you should be teaching the entire world math if you're the best podcast interviewer you should be doing all the top interviews and the returns will accrue to you especially in this highly digital world where we live in where the cost of distributing something is very close to zero and so what you kind of want to do is you want to productize yourself into a business and then you want to own that business that is the way to make wealth a clear example is that tim ferriss podcast the tim ferriss brand right you're it's

an eponymous brand your name is on it you're leveraged through this podcast and through the books that you write and through the army of followers that you have on the various media platforms and you're taking on big accountability and their specific knowledge only you know how to be tim ferriss the learning machine who can then connect to other learners and extract value out of them and share that with the audience so that's an example of you having productized yourself but ultimately you own the tim ferriss business now you can go lower levels down from that

you don't have to own the entire business you could be an investor in public equities or private stocks you could be a partner in a private business uh you could be an employee a startup where you have stock options but if you don't own a piece of a business you're gonna it's gonna be extremely hard to get wealthy it'll be nearly impossible almost not worth that route so i think that is the most important foundational tweet i think where people kind of all kind of miss the plot the most though is we have pain avoidance

in life we don't want to face things where it's clear we've made bad decisions because one good definition of suffering is that's the moment when you see things that they clearly are and you kind of don't like what you see like for example if you if you and your spouse have been fighting for a long time you know you've kind of been sweeping under the rug and you've sort of been suffering along but you're sweeping on the wrong and then you get divorced at that moment you can no longer unsee all the damage that was

in the relationship and what all the consequences are they're real the same way if you haven't been taking care of your health but then suddenly you find out that you've just fallen off a cliff and something irreversibly bad has happened the moment of suffering arrives and you're in pain because you can no longer unsee this thing you can no longer avoid it so i think the same way the unfortunate part is that a lot of these principles are written for young people because you can set yourself on a certain trajectory in life earlier and so

for example if you went you got a you know a phd in a social science and now i'm basically saying hey learn the code you're going to avoid that you're not going to want to see that because you have all this sunk cost in the degree so i think a lot of people don't want to pick up the new skills that are necessary or they don't want to for example physically move or they don't want to disappoint the people in the relationships that they already have to make room for new relationships so everybody wants to

start where they are nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top everybody wants to stay on the path they're on maybe make a few tweaks and get to the top or like charlie munger jokes you know people always ask me like how do i get to be rich like you except quicker i don't want to be the old rich guy i want to be the young rich guy so i think these are the hard parts the the the hard parts are not the learning is the unlearning it's

not the climbing up the mountain it's the going back down to the bottom of the mountain and starting over it's the beginner's mind that every great artist or every great business person has which is you have to be willing to start from scratch you have to be willing to hit reset and go back to zero because you have to realize that what you already know and what you're already doing is actually an impediment to your full potential and most people just don't want to acknowledge that and i'm guilty of that too that's just human nature

i'm not i'm not faulting anybody for it but it's just human nature just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by wealthfront did you know if you missed 10 of the best performing days after the 2008 crisis you would have missed out on fifty percent five zero percent of your returns don't miss out on the best days in the market stay invested in a long-term automated investment portfolio wealthfront pioneered the automated investing movement sometimes referred to as robo advising and they

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autopilot and it can monitor any checking account for excess cash to move into savings or an investment account they've really thought of a ton they've checked a lot of boxes smart investing should not feel like a roller coaster ride let the professionals do the work for you go to wealthfront.com tim and open a wealthfront investment account today and you'll get your first five thousand dollars managed for free for life that's wealthfront.comtim wealthfront will automate your investments for the long term and you can get started today at wealthfront.com tim and if we look at your specific

case as it relates to equity you mentioned owning part of a business you also mentioned in this conversation productizing yourself so would you view your success in following that principle predominantly in for instance the equity that you own in a company like angellist or is it the identity and the brand meaning associations that you've built as naval the human or is it slash investor therefore being sought after as an investor or is it something else how would you think of that principle as applying yeah most in your own life because you've created wealth not just

through say your equity and angel list but also through many successful investments and then i'm sure there are other ways that we could identify wealth as is coming from your path that you know what i what i like about my path is that i've made money doing a lot of different little things so i've made you know money consistently in sort of small to medium-sized chunks i haven't had like one gigantic payday that set me up forever although it depends on your standards right i'm talking about by silicon valley standards obviously for most parts of

the world i've had many of those gigantic paydays but they've been consistent and they've been varied varied in the sense of that there are completely different kinds of investments and endeavors but consistent in that i get one every couple of years which would i just want to interject for a second which would seem to suggest that there is a there are principles guiding your approaches or absolutely right therefore yeah you're not relying on winning the powerball lottery or that equivalent no not at all no there's no lottery here to win the lottery is for losers

lotteries are just attacks on people who can't do math uh yet rich get rich quick schemes are just other people getting rich off of you there are no shortcuts so what i'm doing is i'm taking my specific knowledge which is my ability to understand deeply technical concepts and communicate them to the rest of the world to be an interface between great programmers and developers and designers and the capital markets and consumers and using that to put myself in a position where then i can identify great trends as they're emerging invest in those companies or help

start those companies own equity in those things help bring them to market help do the strategy on how to navigate the worlds of fundraising and exiting and recruiting and company building and cultures and technology development and all that and have a brand around it and i use that to kind of make money and that is just one of several ways you know i've also done it by investing early on in public markets and cryptocurrencies and starting funds and all kinds of things but i i don't it's funny i don't really follow my own principles anymore

like for example the whole podcast thing and the whole twitter thing even though i've got reasonably good brands and followers and those i'm not monetizing them at all i'm not charging anybody for anything because i'm not trying to make money anymore to me like making money is like you become the kind of person that makes money and you put yourself in long-term situations where you're always going to make money so i have the brand and i have deep relationships with a dozen people who i know and i trust that i can do business with for

the rest of my life and they're very high integrity people they're very capable people and just makes it easy to do things so i've set up that infrastructure now the money just kind of makes itself as i go about my life i don't want to have to work hard i don't have to roll out of bed at a certain time i don't have to answer to somebody so i optimize for independence and freedom i could have made a lot more money by raising a huge fund or joining a big vc firm early on or being

exec at one of the massive companies in silicon valley early on but i always optimize for independence i'm lazy you know i wake up at 7 8 9 10 a.m i go to sleep at 2 30 a.m you know i don't work a lot of days uh some days i work morning tonight but it's just based on whatever i'm curious about i never want to have to answer to a boss no one's ever going to tell me what to do i don't want to order people around i don't want to have someone reporting to me

and kind of asking me all the time what to do i want peer relationships i want to flow i want to be able to do business while walking you know in a forest talking on a cell phone or sitting in a meeting or in front of a computer or i want to be on a beach if i don't feel like it the ideal would be to make money with your mind not with your time so if i can just make one good decision a year and that makes me all the money that i need for

that year then that's perfect and that's the way it should be because we're living in an age of infinite leverage and your judgment just gets multiplied through this massive force multiplier through code capital community labor what have you so if you're smart and you kind of know what you're doing you don't need to work hard working hard is the last least important thing you have to pay your dues you have to put in all the iterations ten thousand iterations not ten thousand hours to figure out what to do and how to do it well but

once you know you don't have to put in the time anymore it's your judgment and the judgment comes from clear thinking the clear thinking comes from having time to reflect and to pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity and you'll see that a lot of the great investors for example just sit around reading most of the time or warren buffett famously plays a lot of bridge obviously not everyone can be just an investor although that is becoming more and more democratized and i've picked something that suits my temperament and particular capabilities but there's lots and lots of

ways to make money if you apply your mind to it so i don't work to make money i mean if i make so much money that i'm donating hospital wings and universities and all that stuff i overshot you know i'm not trying to have some influence on the world through money and ironically i have more influence on the world through podcasts like this and so you know making more money doesn't change my life it doesn't change the world as much as i could by doing other things so there's not much incentive for me to make

money anymore other than just practicing my craft well let's let's talk about a few of your your missives missives is probably not the right word yeah i'm not telling you anything i'm not trying to persuade anyone of anything so if people don't like it you know some people get triggered on twitter and they start arguing it's like just leave just don't listen to it the one i'm going to read would be a great one for people to get really upset about or i would find it comical to to look at the comments people are upset

but the the line is this imagine how effective you would be if you weren't anxious all the time why did you put this out and have you seen highly anxious people become people who experience very little anxiety is that something you've seen but first why did you put this up what was behind it and then have you seen anxious people become largely i guess unanxious or non-anxious people yeah most of my tweets are not very deliberate or thought through what's happening is i've been thinking about some concept for you know months years whatever it's been

percolating and then all of a sudden it'll come to me it's sort of in like one spiffy sentence where i'm like oh this is how i will remember this thing this is how i can distill this down into a pointer for myself so that when i need to make decisions i can retrieve that whole line of reasoning and so where this comes from is basically like everybody after a certain age i am taking responsibility for my own happiness and peace and quality of life and one of the things you learn after you make money is

that money doesn't make you happier it takes care of your money problems but it's not necessarily going to put you in a place where you're in some kind of bliss all the time in fact there's nothing out there that will make you happy forever so you sort of have to take responsibility for guiding yourself in such a way that your mental state ends up where you want it and so i've been working on my mental state and i have you know working is a big word i don't i don't want to say i've been working

on it but i would say my mental state has gotten to a place which is much better than it used to be and people will often say well i don't want to do that because it will take away my ambition i want to succeed right now and so i've thought about that a fair bit and is that true or not well certainly for me in the last few years since i've become calmer my effectiveness has gone through the roof and i've been more successful but it's hard to disambiguate that from well also maybe you're just

later in your career you're in a better position for it and that's a valid criticism so one of the things i've been trying to figure out is like would i have been as successful and it's hard to do the counterfactual obviously if i wasn't as anxious because anxiety is you know comes from fear it's also a motivator it makes you get off your butt and one of the ways to make the anxiety go away at least until the next piece of anxiety comes along is to go do something about it so what is the role

of anxiety well firstly i noted that pretty much everybody's anxious all the time it's a rare human being who isn't anxious and it makes sense we're alpha predators you know we took over this earth and domesticated or killed all the other animals and we did that by being the most paranoid the most fearful the most angry predators this world has ever seen so anxiety is built into the core of who we are in fact you could argue that all the mind does all day long is fear-based scenario planning for survival and then maybe a little

bit of greed for replication so anxiety is at the core level of who we are but certainly some people are more anxious than others there's no question and some people seem to be much calmer about it so which is more useful for effectiveness so assuming that your goal is your motivation is intrinsic you're doing the thing because you love it or because you really want it and you can separate that motivation from anxiety then i think you can take on certain superpowers and we kind of all intrinsically know this like if you look at you

know samurai warriors right like uh miyamoto musashi is in a duel with somebody else you know that the person who is calmer is going to win in all those movies it's the one who can like who's like incredibly still then swipes with a sword incredibly quickly and then still again that's the winner the one who has a zen state of mind similarly in the terminator movies part of the reason you fear the terminator is because he's a robot he's unstoppable he's implacable you can't argue with him you can't communicate with him you can't make him

slow down and he has no remorse he just keeps coming or in that old clinton movie unforgiven you know the guy who wins the gunfight is the one who doesn't flinch he's just keeping his cool while he's loading his gun and shooting he's not like all over the place running around so i just think we waste so much energy through anxiety that if you can be calm and still go about your business it's a superpower and i i realized this myself recently where i was in a conflict situation in business it was a high conflict

situation it was unfortunate we i think we've solved it but as i went through this high conflict situation i'd been through one like it years before where i was much more anxious and i remember that time period i remember how much i was sweating it and how nervous i was and how i went through bouts of fear and anger and and how kind of worked up i was the entire time intense and didn't get much sleep but this time i was incredibly calm and i was almost enjoying it because it was like practicing my craft

now of course it's easier to do now because i have more money but at the same time it just didn't bother me it was just very mechanical and because of that i could be very effective about it and i could be effective about it while doing lots and lots of other things my mind wasn't constantly spinning in a whirlpool taking on 10 different problems and just fear based on aeroplaning all the time most of these things were never going to happen so i do believe that being calm and still going about your business is the

superpower now yes if anxiety is your only motivator then you have a problem but i would argue the pure motivations don't come out of anxiety so let's talk about attribution here to what would you attribute the and i know this that it's difficult to isolate variables etc but if let's just say like you have a family so let's just say one of your kids comes to you it's like dad i'm suffering from a lot of anxiety what should i do or you observe it and you want to help your kid out what types of recommendations

would you make or might you make another question if you prefer it is what has helped you to go from the whirlpool experience of anxiety in high conflict experience round one versus calm naval and high conflict experience round two yeah it's really hard to separate all the pieces out i mean it comes from a combination of philosophy yoga meditation getting older having kids you know like you i've i've had some psychedelic experiences but those are very far back in the past um just a distant memory at this point but i would say the number one

thing that has been very very important for me is meditation and it's a stupid thing to say because it's so trite everybody just says it now but when i say meditation i don't mean sitting there and watching your breath or chanting a mantra i mean self-examination and meditation is a great way to do that self-therapy it's sitting there with your thoughts so anxiety the anxiety anxiety this this pervasive non-specific anxiety we're just constantly on edge about everything that comes from an unexamined life you know i think what's the socrates said like an unexamined life is

not worth living i forget who said that quote something like that yeah but it's it's arithmetic one of those one of those smart philosopher types but it's correct it's your unexamined life that is causing the problems and you can examine it in multiple ways you can examine it through you can have some crazy mushroom trip where it all comes out one night you could do a lot of meditation sitting there with yourself and letting your mind run crazy and then seeing what's actually in your mind that your mind wants to tell you and have you

listened to and have you resolved that is unresolved it could be through therapy it could be through reading lots of philosophy and reflection and long walks so there's many many ways to tackle it but it's that spending that time with yourself to examine why are you having these thoughts think about it this way we spend so much time in our relationships our relationship with our wives our relationship with our colleagues our relations to our business partners our relations with our friends the most important relationship you have is with yourself it's with this voice in your

head that is constantly rattling every waking hour it's this crazy roommate living inside your mind who's always chattering always chattering never shuts up and you can't control these thoughts they just come up out of you don't even know where that quality of those quality of your thoughts that convers those conversations you're having in your head all the time that is your world that is the world you live in those that's the world view you have that's the lenses you see through and that's going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else and

if you want to see what the quality of your life actually is put down the drink put down the computer put down the smartphone put down the book put down the headphones just sit by yourself doing nothing and then you will know what the quality of your life actually is because that's what you're always running away from that's why people when they try to meditate to sit down like i hate it i can't sit still why because your mind is eating you live your life is unexamined your mind is running in loops over things that

it has not resolved and because they're not resolved when you run around in your normal life it's not those problems have gone away it's that they're just there they're there but they're provoking anxiety and what you think of as the anxiety that's that's kind of consuming you and you can't identify the source that's just the tip of an iceberg poking out from underneath the water and underneath this giant pile of garbage of decisions that were made without too much thought of situations that you're in that you haven't resolved that you need to resolve of problems

that you have or desires that you have that have gone unmet or unmanifested or contradictions that you're living in or ways that you which you feel trapped so proper meditation proper examination should ruin the life that you're currently living it should cause you to leave relationships it should cause you to re-establish boundaries with family members with colleagues it should cause you to quit your job it should cause you to change your eating patterns it should cause you to spend more time with yourself it should cause you to change what books you read it should cause

you to change who your friends are if it doesn't do that it's not real examination if it doesn't come attached with destruction of your current life then you can't create the new life in which you will not have the anxiety or at least parts of it not necessarily whole cloth so let's ask let's let's dive into meditation because as you mentioned it's a term that is used a lot and in the minds of most it is represented by things that you just said you do not do like the mantra based meditation or following the breath

and you and i have meditated before i don't know if your approach is still similar but it is quite a i'd hate to talk about trite paradigm shift in a sense at least in the way that i experienced it alongside you at one point which was literally doing nothing for extended periods of time i don't know if that's still the case but could you describe the practice a bit because it's it was such a burden lifted in a sense when the pass fail is removed and the experience that i had after say a week of

doing this twice a day which is not necessarily what people do in normal life but it was pretty profound so could you describe the current practice which may be different from what i experienced yeah i actually have two different things that i do and i almost hate calling it meditation because everyone has in their mind a preconceived notion of what meditation is let's not even call it that i would say that there are two self-examination practices that i do and i don't even call them practices anymore because sometimes i do them because i feel like

them and i enjoy them or because it feels right and sometimes i don't because anything done routinely sort of becomes its own trap and is not going to get you anywhere it just becomes like another spiritual high another checkbox right now is it fair though to say that you're able to opt in and out now because you had a certain front loading period doing it consistently actually i'll say there are three different things that i do and i'll go through them the first is i just read a lot of philosophy especially at night time before

i go to bed which ones schopenhauer maxims who are we talking about yeah schopenhauer western philosophy is my current favorite uh although i've definitely moved around on that one eastern philosophy i'll read everything from osho i know he's discredited and been canceled but fantastic that makes me like him even more um krishnamurti i don't know kapil gupta uh rupert spira i mean it's all over the place uh anthony demelo he's fantastic actually i'm gonna start with one book start with anthony demelo's way to love um or his book awareness they're both really good um but

there's a ton of them i basically read a lot of philosophers siddhartha vasis says yoga bhagavad gita the daodecheng you know i'm always going through one of these books at any given time and usually rereading for inspiration and i'll read these at night usually there'll be one or two things i'll catch on to it'll i'll reflect on it before i go to sleep so that is a form of self-examination and it's it's not done because it's a formula it's done because i'm genuinely interested in these things so it's not work to me it's fun the

second thing that i do is which i've been doing for a long time now is just trying to be aware of my thoughts and not in a you know sit there and be like oh i'm gonna be aware of my thoughts kind of way but just realizing that a lot of these thoughts that come up aren't unbidden i don't control them it's not like i decided to have this thought i don't even know what i'm saying to you right now it's coming out of my mouth at the same time as i'm thinking it so where

is this coming from who is this person what is this person saying is this true is it correct has it been correct in the past is he just being paranoid now is he being crazy what are his underlying motivations and i'm not even questioning so much but more just kind of seeing it and after a while when you see it you start seeing through your own bs you start seeing how you're mainly just justifying whatever the heck you want to believe because it's good for your survival it's good for your replication or it's good for

your money or it's going to get you late or any of these various things and when you're doing that reflection is it sitting at a table pen and paper is it half lotus with your eyes closed what is it no it's literally just walking around it's just walking around it's nice it's just life just just if you say something to me i'm always going to listen to it with a slightly critical filter because you're external to me applying that same filter to my own thoughts gives me a level of peace and distance from them and

the ability to see through my own bs which i think makes my life better so i've just found that to be a useful thing way of life but there are lots of times where i forget to do it i get caught up in some emotions some runaway train of thought but usually these days i can catch myself and be like oh okay i'm in that mindset again i'm having that mode of reactions again and when the mind sort of sees me chattering it quiets down a bit right and like i said it's that back to

that crazy roommate analogy which i originally picked up from michael singer by the way he has a good book called the untethered soul but you know the room the crazy roommate analogy like you would eventually tell your roommate to shut up or you would tell them to start justifying their claims or you would at least at some level you start dismissing them for just kind of rambling all the time in this fear paranoia mode so i think just kind of viewing your thoughts as sort of these unbidden things that arise from within you but aren't

really necessarily the whole story and should be viewed with the same level of skepticism that you would apply to an outside observer i think that frame work is helpful and if you find it to be true then you'll find yourself doing it more often if you find it not to be true if you're like no actually i choose these thoughts and i want to have them and that's who i am and this all makes sense to me then you can stop viewing it with a critical eye that's up to you but the last one is

the one that i think people think of as more traditionally meditation which is sitting down and meditating and on that one i learned from an indian gentleman same same character you learned from who i had a very simple system and i just found it the most compelling form of meditation i've ever tried which is you sit there for 60 minutes so unfortunately not less than an hour at a time because it takes 30 to 40 minutes to sink in past the initial chattering so you get to the good part or the so-called runner's high equivalent

and you sit for 60 minutes every day and you do it for at least 60 days and you do it first thing in the morning it's been your mind is clear and you're alert and you've had a good night's sleep and you sit up with your back straight and you can use cushions or you can use a chair or whatever there's no magic position and just whatever happens happens whatever your mind wants to do you just let it do if it wants to talk you let it talk if you wants to fight you let it

fight wants to be quiet you let it be quiet if it wants to chant a mantra or pay attention to breathing you can do that but you don't force anything you just kind of let it happen and so you don't fight it you don't resist it you don't argue with it you don't double down on it we just kind of let things happen and when you do that for at least 60 days my experience has been that you kind of clear out your mental inbox and all the craziness that was going on all the chattering

will come out some problems will get resolved you will have some epiphanies you will make changes to your life some will be self-examination some of you just get tired of some of it just needs to be heard once and then it goes away and eventually you'll get to a mental state of inbox zero where now you're just thinking about what happened yesterday you're kind of caught up and your mind is relatively clear and just your anxiety level goes down you're living more peacefully and i've been doing this for about two and a half years now

and i probably missed about a dozen days total and but there are some days where i've done two hours a day or more and i will tell you that is the single most important thing that i do it is a sheer joy much of it is highly entertaining pleasurable sometimes it's just flat it's nothingness i can't even tell you why i do it i can't even tell you what's going on in that state but i will tell you that that time spent by myself is the most important time that i have and thanks to that

i am now much more self-contained i don't feel like i need other people i don't need external sources of pleasure or happiness all the time i drink less i'm not attracted to trying any drugs whatsoever it's just life is easier it's more pleasant i don't take things as seriously i'm not afraid of my mortality as much anymore i don't fear aging i don't i don't lust after things i don't have this constant pervasive need to find something outside of me to make my life better when the best hour of my day is spent by myself

then the world has very little to offer me and i can still participate in it but it doesn't have that grip on me that it used to i don't fear solitary confinement and i think that is a superpower and i think everyone should have it everyone does have it it's easy it requires doing nothing it's your birthright you can't fail at it there's no there's no way to fail at it literally all you have to do is just sit down and close your eyes and just just be by give yourself a break for an hour

every day just take the time off from the world a few follow-ups krishna murday do you have any any favorites of his or anything that you would suggest someone start with if they have no familiarity with krishnamurti and i'll second anthony demelo also yeah i actually remember starting with krishna he's a tough one but if you're going to start somewhere i started with this book called think on these things there's also the book of life um he's very cerebral very intellectual and a little confusing but he definitely speaks truth and he walks the walk anthony

de mello the way to love uh osho's book the great challenge uh and i know people think osho is a fake guru and all that but he had some real stuff too he's very articulate he uh he understood a lot there's a great clip from him on soundcloud that says it's called life has no goals no purpose uh i listen to that that one a lot there's a lot of them out there once you start going down this rabbit hole you'll find them the classics the bhagavad-gita get a good translation stephen miller i think has

a good translation uh he also has a good translation of the daodaiching those are both really interesting again only if it appeals to you i mean there's ancient wisdom in schopenhauer read councils and maxims you know these are smart people self-reflecting but overall the point is not to read the point is to inspire so that you yourself can reflect and kappa gupta is an account in twitter he has a couple of great books direct truth is a fantastic book um you know written very recently and pulls no punches um but you know all of these

are basically there to inspire you to self-reflect and if you're not interested in self-reflection if you're not at that stage in life then don't do it it's a waste of time in fact i would say the reason to do these things is just because they make your life better because they make you more effective because they have some utility to you if they do not have utility to you if they don't make your life better then drop it it's useless i will also second the reading of philosophy and this is not for kind of idle

or abstract like semantic tail chasing right it's it's for whatever reason on a very pragmatic level deeply soothing to read the insights and observations of those who are considering things that are not of today they're not of this week they're not of this month they are for much broader periods of time or timeless in some capacity right it alleviates some of the manufactured emergency and urgency of the that is it upon us by every possible input oh yeah the news and twitter are so toxic the human brain is not designed to manage every emergency in

the world in real time we're not designed to process all the breaking news on the planet in our heads and this is one of my recent tweets but the goal of the media these days is to make every problem your problem that's how they get attention it's how they get clicks you know you have tribal wars going on zombies battling each other and they want to pull you in where even non-participation is not allowed anymore neutral bystanders are not allowed so it's a crazy world out there there's a circus going on with the monkeys flinging

feces at each other and they want to drag you into the fight really what you want to focus on is what's timeless timeless is great you know the old questions all have old answers and they're best consumed from the old practitioners because they were very clear-minded about it they weren't busy trying to fit into the politics of this time they were fitting to the politics of that time but that's lost to us now so actually another great source is i have your dao seneca series in audible uh and i listen to it on repeat when

i'm working out a lot so that's so very kidding yeah those letters to lucilius uh amazing yeah amazing stuff and every time i go through it i learned something new yeah the town of seneca the the moral letters to lucilius if people want to look on public domain from on public domain sources you can find these letters the moral letters to leukillus also spelled as you might read lucillus by seneca and so that's an audiobook series that that i produced and you can find the pdfs for free online as well let's talk about some brass

tack stuff since i think people will be very interested you mentioned monkeys throwing feces tribalism in times like this this is being recorded in 2020 and first day of october a lot of folks are interested in stores of value they are fearful of what could happen and considering investments like gold or cryptocurrency and i wanted you to explain one of your recent tweets this is just from the last few days and it is crypto stable coins dash choose between blow up risk censorship risk and fraud risk what are crypto stable coins and what does this

tweet mean yeah just backing up for a second like i i think cryptocurrencies are probably one of the greatest inventions in human history and the reason why they're interesting is because if you look at the technology industry technology plays in unregulated spaces it's very hard for technology to change regulated spaces as uber and postmates and companies like that find out but generally the reason technology works is because it creates its own frontier it is a digital frontier that has been created not the physical frontiers are all closed and the new world has been colonized and

the wild west has been tamed where do you go to create new things free of interference and regulation and kind of exercise maximum creativity and so that's been done mostly in the technology space and one of the areas that has been protected by technological innovation from technological innovation is wall street because they're it's you know they have regulatory capture very bureaucratic you know the the money industrial complex that runs a lot of our economy and runs a lot of washington dc where 20 of our gdp goes into financial engineering and into the wall street casino

and so cryptocurrencies are kind of how we get around that and so they're sovereign resistant they're designed to be completely decentralized you don't need the violent power of the state to enforce the value of a cryptocurrency and it allows for truly trustless transactions between humans without some king or authority or government or corporation having to be in the middle and so it's very liberating to disconnect wealth creation wealth storage and wealth protection from the state and that's what cryptocurrencies really enable one second let me just pause to say that at at one point you and

i did a very thorough cryptocurrency 101 conversation with a domain super expert named nick zabo s-z-a-b-o which people can also find for more on kind of the the history and basics of some of the crypto yeah nick is a bonafide genius and a pioneer in the space he also has a great blog called unenumerated that i highly recommend but anyway so the best known cryptocurrency is bitcoin and bitcoin is trying to be the new gold or the new swiss bank account kind of all rolled into one and has some advantages you know as a store

of value it can be stored digitally so it's hard to seize it's very easy to verify technologically speaking unlike gold it's easy to send across national boundaries and and electronically over the internet it's easily divisible and verifiable down to its authenticity is very verifiable where gold is hard to do it can be divided down to millions and trillions of a bitcoin very very easily it is somewhat programmable so you can put it inside smart contracts and you can do some intelligent things with it so it has a lot going for this store of value what's

difficult about it is it's not really private it doesn't although there are parts of it that are private it's not completely private and it's untrusted it's brand new as far as stores of value go it's only from 2009 and so people don't know if it'll be around forever and how dependent is on the internet and people aren't really certain about it's not like the proof-of-work mining algorithm that makes it possible and can it be hijacked can it be centralized can it have a bug can it break and every year that bitcoin survives and goes through

one of the various challenges facing it it gets more valuable as people entrust it a little bit more and more but it is extremely volatile you buy bitcoin you're buying a very speculative asset at the moment and you're speculating that it will become digital gold or possibly even you know all store value and so be incredibly valuable but along the way there's lots of hiccups at any point it could break it could go to zero and so a lot of people who are now participating in the crypto world they're building a decentralized wall street they

call it d5 d-e-f-i for decentralized finance but i actually think it's more like defies and just defy the government defy and so i think we're seeing yeah governments love that yeah exactly we're seeing a whole new casino that's better than wall street spring spring up and decentralized finance unlike wall street this one is 24 7 open it's 365 days a year it's available around the world to everybody it's trustless in that it's you know there's math and algorithms and code underneath that not goldman sachs front running your trades or whatever not that i'm saying they

do but you know there's flash boys and kind of all that kind of craziness that goes on and you can program it to do things and to make bets or hedges or calls that you just can't even do on wall street so i think we're building a better wall street using cryptocurrencies but everyone who participates in that doesn't necessarily want to take on the volatility of these cryptocurrencies so we've created these things called stable coins which track the value of the us dollar so that when you're trading for example you can still do it in

dollar denominated terms and this is a tricky thing because the moment you're now trying to track some asset in the real world like dollars then you have to basically peg the value somehow to something that exists in the real world and cryptocurrencies do best when everything is on the blockchain when everything is electronic and digital and controlled by computers in the cloud so these stable coins have come along that mimic the value of the us dollar and the best known ones are tether usdc which is coinbase's coin and uh uh and uh uh make or

die which is an algorithmically stable coin but there's no lunch in life for one second well is this should people think of what would be a comparable that people might be more familiar with it's not an index it's like an etf or how would you think about is there another digital dollars these are designed so that you can live in crypto land this is living on a blockchain it's math-based code but really your value is pegged to dollars so it's not going up or down with bitcoin it's just it's just worth a dollar all the

time so if you want to hold a dollar in crypto land the way you do it is by buying one of these so-called stable coins but all my tweet was observing is that there's no free lunch the what you're actually doing underneath is you have crypto and crypto is incredibly volatile and you're trying to convert a volatile asset into a stable asset so there has to be a cost for that what is that called like the subprime mortgage crisis that's right exactly there's no free lunch so what does that cost and all i was saying

is that the three main categories of stable coins today they each impose one or more of these costs and so one cause is fraud risk where people suspect this of tether where like actually this thing says it's backed by dollars but it's not actually backed by dollars i don't know if this company is dollars underneath so you have to kind of take their word for it so now you're trust underneath meaning they would have actual physical dollars like you would have physical gold correct yeah so for every tether they issue you they claim to have

a dollar somewhere but what if they don't and you just don't know so you're trusting them and there could be fraud underneath i'm not saying there is i have no evidence but that you're basically now back to the trusted third-party model that exists in just putting your money in the bank the second kind is where you're dealing with someone like coinbase or some company that is well known and trusted and is regulated but then it's no different than holding normal dollars there's censorship risk where if the government says hey we don't like this character seize

their bank account coinbase can turn off your usdc account and your stablecoin has basically been seized you're no longer decentralized and sovereign like you are with bitcoin and the last kind of risk is a blow-up risk so something like a maker you know it's collateralized but it's collateralized with bitcoin and ethereum and so what they're hoping is that the price of bitcoin ethereum won't move so drastically the peg breaks and you lose money on your so-called stablecoin it's just it's just an observation there's no free lunch and so if you're trying to create this this

mythical stable currency out of thin air in what is inherently very volatile space you have to pay for it and people think today they're not paying for it they're just getting these uh free crypto stable dollars or they're getting the stability aspect for free but they're not they're either taking on fraud risk or censorship risk or blow up risk or some combination of them so if you're advising and this is not financial advice this is just two friends talking obviously for informational purposes only but if if you're talking to a friend who has a fair

amount of savings or investable capital and they say neval i want to do something with crypto how can i get started or how should i get started what do you say to them because there there's such a broad spectrum of options it's still even though it's been simplified a lot crypto is still quite confusing it's very complicated absolutely for people who are who are who are very smart i would consider it's still quite confusing incredibly confusing yeah it's a domain of mathematicians hackers you know tech entrepreneurs and and um a few people who really dig

in but it's still too hard to handle man it's just dangerous like i can't hold my own crypto i have to stick it inside funds and custodians because i'm a known public figure and it's a bearer asset so ironically i can't actually say it's dangerous you don't hold it because you would be i'd be yeah exactly it's a better asset so you know you don't want to bear a bearer asset you have to put it inside vaults you know the equivalent of the goldman sachs in the space so like they're custodians like anchorage is you

know an amazing one there's bitco there's coinbase so there are these large custodians or coin list which is a company i helped start um who can hold on to your crypto assets for you but that's not really the point of crypto the point of crypto is to be your own bank so if the government is coming to seize money or if they're printing lots of it you can always withdraw your crypto assets from these organizations and you can carry it yourself you can put on your laptop which is kind of crazy and risky and hard

you can do it through a hardware wallet like a ledger or a trezor which are pretty well-known hardware wallets where you have a small specific device that's designed just for carrying crypto but you have to understand you're replacing the banking system you're literally replacing the government all the guns and the police that back up the banking system you're replacing all that and all the control that comes with it so of course it's going to require some level of sophistication you're literally building your own swiss bank so it is it is quite complicated where to start

well i don't i don't like giving people buy signals because if you're going to be a good investor you also have to have your own conviction because then you'll know when to sell if you call me and ask me when to buy are you going to call me every day and say should i sell should i sell no you don't know that they're really really important right you have to fundamentally understand it yourself so i would say the first thing is go down the crypto rabbit hole listen to the interview we do with nick sabo

go online and start reading up on bitcoin read up on ethereum read up on the privacy coins like zcash and monero learn about the different high level stuff in the crypto space decide how much exposure that you want um go buy it at a coin list or a coin base or or what have you figure out which custodian you want to use you know put it somewhere safe probably in the cloud unless you really know what you're doing and if you if you really know what you're doing then you can use one of the hardware

wallets or one of the offline schemes make sure that it is protected in case that you're attacked or kidnapped or someone comes to your house or steals your computer you know you have to cover all those base cases so it's not easy but you're literally creating extra sovereign money you're creating money where you know if you ever have to flee the country you know like the jews had to leave vienna back in the 1930s you're not like scrambling for gold you're you're using crypto you're not if you're living in some country where they tend to

seize all the money in your bank account then you have unseasonable money if you're worried about hyperinflation as we print too many dollars then you have a hedge against the mmt and all the various excuses that they're going to use to print money i mean what probably the scariest thing that happened in 2020 from a financial perspective is both the republican and the democratic party figured out that oh actually we can just print lots and lots of money and the u.s has this reserve dollar that's reserve currency status with a dollar where most of our

dollars i think something like 70 are held by foreigners because the trusted reserve currency of the world they use it for trading oil they use it for settling international transfers they use it just to kind of hide money they used to protect money from their local inflationary authorities so because of that when we print a dollar 70 of that inflation rate effect is cost is borne by the rest of the world not borne by us and so the the us governments kind of figured this out and we printed six trillion dollars to fight the coronavirus

and so now both parties can agree that they can just print money to get out of any problem that they're in a great tweet that i saw was somebody wrote that now we know what would happen if aliens were to invade the earth the fed would just lower interest rates the fed would cut interest rates right and so unfortunately that's just the situation we're in so they're going to keep doing that until at some point the you know the rest of the world throws in the towel and says you know this dollar thing is not

working for us and what we rely upon is that the european euro or the chinese renimbi and these other currencies are in worse situations but that's not necessarily always true i think there are well-managed currencies like the swiss franc and the singaporean dollar there's also uh hard assets like gold and crypto and real estate and even the run up in tech stocks at some levels because equities are a tax efficient inflation hedge or relatively tax efficient inflation hedge because someone like google can just raise prices and they don't have to hire more people because they're

a monopoly you know they can lay off half their engineers and the company will work just fine so people are realizing this and there's a flight into hard assets to get away from inflation and crypto is one of the few places where you can really put your money in and defend against something like the dollar reserving its reserve currency status and these are black swans it's very hard to talk about black swans because obviously since the dollar became the u.s reserve currency it hasn't lost the status even when we went off the gold standard but

at the same time the pound sterling used to be the reserve currency of the world and it lost its status at one point money used to be gold back and that went away so it's not inconceivable that'll happen and if it were to happen then you would basically have the true reckoning then our ability to print our way out of recessions would go away uh you would probably have an inflationary collapse in the u.s and you would just see kind of our our global economic system start breaking down in those scenarios crypto does really well

assuming the internet stays up right there's scenarios where the internet goes down too and then all hell breaks loose and you better have golden guns but we're not talking about that um cigarettes and tampons that's great for your water yeah that's right well bullets are the ultimate one right as we as we also see in 2020 but we have 5 million new gun owners in the u.s but it just depends how much of a prepper you are how paranoid you want to be and how many standard deviations out you want you want to handle risk

but i think this is the year where a lot of people feel like risks that were inconceivable have suddenly gotten pulled in let me ask a dumb newbie question as a hypothetical so speaking as someone who i'm a great example of someone who can use words associated with crypto who really has no fundamental understanding i'm the i'm the guy pointing at the bird who thinks he's got it all figured out because he's able to name the yellow threaded warbler i don't think i have it all figured out but let's just say i managed somehow like

a you know a thousand monkeys typing out shakespeare on a million laptops given infinite time i somehow manage to get a bunch of cryptocurrency onto a hardware ledger right or a hardware wallet rather so i have this thing us is going to hell in a handbasket i somehow manage to get that to fill in the blank i'll just arbitrarily choose spain like i land in spain i'm like oh my god that was so close thank god i got out in time i managed to make it over how the hell do you buy an apartment or

pay your rent or anything like that with crypto when it still feels like the crypto landscape and the tools are kind of computers pre graphic user interface do you know what i mean like even smart people can't quite figure it out but what would you how would you if that were two years in the future i mean i think that's unlikely but let's just say uh yeah for most of my friends the scenario i recommend is like you go buy it on something like you know coinbase coin list whatever you move it into a dedicated

custodian like an anchorage uh or a bitco um then you kind of hold it there now if the is hitting the fan and you decide you want to get out of town then you contact your rep there you move it into a hardware wallet and then you flee the country right or go wherever you're going and when you land on the other side now you have this crypto in your hardware wallet in theory you can log into a local crypto exchange you know go through their verification processes and upload it now you've got bitcoin that

can be traded for cash um or you can go find any of the local bitcoin meetup people and groups the enthusiasts the so-called maximalist the die-hard believers and the holders and you can trade any of them bitcoin for cash now in the distant future it's possible that people will just take bitcoin directly because it is a you know fungible high quality hard asset that can be transported and held like cash but if you can't do that you can always find either a local believer or you can find a crypto exchange where you can convert it

the thing that makes bitcoin so interesting is not that it's necessarily the best technology it is definitely robust and it's the og what makes it really interesting is it has the most die-hard believers and because it has the most die-hard believers as long as there's five thousand or fifty thousand wealthy brilliant people who just that the wealthy part is really important yeah that wealthy party they will always trade it for you for trade it with you for hard assets uh you know i think recently microstrategy started it's a company it started moving half of its

treasury into bitcoin and the ceo michael saylor was quoted as saying something along the lines of i can't believe people willing to sell me bitcoin right he figured out what it was and then he was just like i want to get as much as possible so you know here take pieces of my company but give me bitcoin and there are there are lots of people like him there are lots and lots of people like him and they exist in every major country in the world and as long as there are believers because it's as much

a movement or religion as it is a currency and because what what is a currency at the end of the day money is just the bubble that never pops right it's just if we all agree tomorrow that if we all manage to come upon the story tomorrow that it's not the us dollar it's actually the euro that is really money then the world will switch to the euro heck if we agreed that clamshells were money the you the world would switch to clam shells now obviously their underlying characteristics that make euros and dollars better than

clamshells and so therefore we converge upon those but if the world were to decide that bitcoin is better money than us dollars the world would switch to bitcoin it's a story it's a consensus belief and the beauty of bitcoin is that there are these die-hard maximalists and i fight with them on the internet all the time they don't like me by the way so i've had twitter battles with them running but i still really appreciate that they exist because they are actually the core of what makes bitcoin always tradeable always valuable there's always some guy

in some location somewhere in the world who will give you his house for bitcoin and as long as that is true and i don't see why it will stop being true because if anything more and more people are being added to that list every day it has real value and has redeemable value what do you think the conceivable near term looks like with the possible entrance of more institutional investors in other words if we see let me ask a better question it was very noteworthy and newsworthy when paul trudeau jones wrote his memo detailing why

he was investing i think it was something like 100 million into bitcoin or bitcoin like equivalence some type of crypto equivalent uh if not crypto itself do you anticipate that more institutionals are going to come in sovereign wealth funds things like that and how do you think the the story and the landscape could change over the next handful of years i think it's inevitable look bitcoin and crypto still have risks right a lot of these algorithms and schemes are new even bitcoin through this proof-of-work mechanism you could argue that it tends towards centralization because it

gets managed by these anonymous miners and data centers and data centers of economies of scale and so it will end up being more centralized than people would like um there are up-and-coming competitors like ethereum there's privacy issues you know on the bitcoin blockchain you can be tracked forever so it's not perfect you know people talk about quantum computing breaking it i don't think that's true i think you can upgrade the encryption algorithm you know just as well or better but there are always potential problems right which are not completely resolved but every time we face

one of these reckonings and that problem gets resolved the value goes up the story becomes stronger and so the same way when paul tudor jones or microstrategy by bitcoin the story is becoming stronger the set of believers is increasing the validation is increasing and now more people can come in and hang their hat on this and say okay if paul tudor jones agrees and michael saylor agrees then i agree to be in that set of people who believe that this is going to be the new way to store value and wealth and so now i'm

joining their wealth storage scheme and the early people then get rewarded for it so one way to think about a bitcoin in particular is or even actually any of the cryptocurrencies is it's a swiss bank account but it's a swiss bank account with finite space and if you want shelf space in that swiss bank account with finite space you have to buy out one of the existing holders in that space so imagine a swiss bank count that's impregnable it's a new one no government can break into it it's secured by consensus across millions of people

using massive computation power on the globe and if you want one of those safety deposit box you got to buy it from someone who's already there so as long as the demand for new people trying to get in the swiss bank account is greater than the supply of people who are trying to get out of that swiss bank account then you're going to pay more for that box and that's where the speculative power of it comes from and i think it's going to take a good crisis to really see what crypto is worth and actually

so far it's been weird because yeah the people's people have said that crypto failed the crisis test with covet right i mean it didn't didn't what it didn't do was it didn't skyrocket right it didn't like go you know bitcoin didn't go to 100k as everybody fled the us dollar but that kind of shows you how resilient the dollar is and how far we are from losing global reserve currency status but at the same time it didn't collapse either you know it didn't go down it went down briefly as people needed cash to meet various

margin calls and loans but overall stayed very stable and i would say the number of people who have gotten involved in crypto recently as a true wealth protection mechanism is the largest i've ever seen so i do think that the holder base has gone up i don't know if we're going to see like real you know 3 000 bitcoin ever again in my lifetime we might see zero if something breaks completely but i don't think we're going to see like a you know a bunch of people leaving and losing faith in it and that's why

it goes to 3k bitcoin tends to hit these highs then crash back down to a plateau hang out in a plateau for a while and then go back to a new high and i kind of feel like we're you know around the 10k level who knows i don't want to make price predictions but you know i feel like there's a stronger base of holders now than there's ever been so each one of these people comes and validates it you know paul tudor jones validates it for other hedge fund managers hedge fund managers validated for sovereign

wealth funds sovereign wealth funds uh you know validated for central banks uh eventually some country out there is going to say actually we inflated our currency too much our currency collapsed nobody trusts us anymore we have to adopt a new national currency instead of pegging to the dollar let's peg the bitcoin or let's use bitcoin or let's use some other cryptocurrency or let's be clever and buy up a bunch of bitcoin and then announce we're going to use bitcoin and then bitcoin will skyrocket and we're all rich right so i think there are other scenarios

where it ends up being a lot more valuable but it's going to be stumbling steps forward and backward it's not going to be like necessarily you know in one fell swoop until it is right that's the nature of black swans you can't predict them when it happens it happens suddenly like i had a friend who used to tell me he's now a hardcore bitcoin it's funny he actually helped write a book on bitcoin now but when i first talked about bitcoin years and years ago he said what's the big deal he's like if i ever

have to flee the country you know i'll just buy bitcoin then and i said yeah when you have to flee the country your entire fortune's going to buy you one bitcoin right that's the problem it's supply and demand so you can't so it's like anything else a store of value it's a hedge you can't wait till the last second and i do think more and more smart people are coming into it every single day and i think the psychological dynamics of crypto volatility are a lot like casino slot machine right this this variable reward with

high variability where you just see things spiking and dropping and then they stay flat and then they spike and they drop in a way that is unlike most equities that you or i would buy on the public even wall street at some level is a big casino with a potential positive expected value and creating some value for society in terms of hedging and liquidity for companies raising money and so on uh and crypto's doing the same thing it's it's a global 24 7 365 casino where anybody in the world can play but through decentralized finance

underneath you're actually making loans you're protecting wealth you're storing it you're letting people you know buy derivatives you're letting people hedge um so all of these things are coming up like we now have insurance in the crypto markets we now have lending in the crypto markets we have shorting in the crypto markets uh you know we have computation going on that requires crypto underneath look if two computers are talking to each other if two mini ais are talking to each other and high speed uh exchanging resources to run a company how are they gonna exchange

money you think they're gonna send us dollars through paypal or through fedwire hell no they're going to use crypto crypto is going to is the native currency of the internet of course the internet is going to have its own currency you know otherwise like saying like the internet's going to use email through the usps you know u.s postal service techno it's going to have its own native on-chain on-wire protocol for communicating data and so what cryptocurrencies really are bitcoin isn't a thing bitcoin is not like there's a coin sitting somewhere bitcoin is an entry you

know like what yeah it's an entry in a virtual ledger and that virtual ledger is maintained by tons of machines running across the world and what you're doing is you're communicating value securely across the internet with no third parties in the middle validating that that is the correct communication it's done by the entire network at once and you're communicating and transmitting scarcity and value to the internet and that's a new thing what the internet gave us before was digital abundance i can make copies of everything and that was a very big idea i can make

one podcast and ship it to everybody i can make one web page and ship it to everybody that was a very big idea and created huge fortunes and huge revolutions the same way digital scarcity is an equally interesting idea which is i can only have one of this thing if naval has a bitcoin then tim ferriss doesn't have that bitcoin or vice versa that ability to create scarcity and transmit scarcity and value through the internet is just as important as the ability to create abundance and transmit that through the internet and so the native language

of the internet in communications and protocols around valuable things and on finance is going to be in cryptocurrencies it's not going to be any other any other way so i want to bring up two more tweets and then we can bring this this to uh to a close and put a bow on it first i just want to mention again and i very rarely do this but i am very happy with how this discussion turned out if people want more of the history and the design of cryptocurrency which is endlessly fascinating just google nick zabo

s s-z-a-b-o and then if you're interested in diving into audio naval and i spoke with them two tweets these are both from september one i'm gonna read just because i agree with it super strongly and i also have observed you following this advice very well which is all self help boils down to choose long term over short term i would modify the tweet to say though all truly effective self help boils down to choose long term over short term uh and i mean that is the entire challenge uh which is long-term thinking gets you long-term

results uh and i've said this a thousand different ways in business you want to play long-term games with long-term people in your modern life and addictions and kind of just dealing with the avalanche of all the the abundance of things that are thrown at you that really traps like video games or a trap there there's a shadow career that substitutes for your real career or you know smoking weed or drinking alcohol substitutes for like pleasure through uh more simple things like sunlight and walks and porn substitutes for sex and this just goes on and on

i thought you were saying walking sunlight and porn i was like we're talking yeah that sounds about the trifecta but look at the so the related tweet i had is the modern devil is cheap dopamine and some interesting people on twitter point out to me actually the ancient devil is cheap dopamine as well and but in modern times we've just hyper hyper uh accelerated it you know the modern mind is over stimulated the modern body is under stimulated we've just taken all the creature comforts we've maximized them to a thousand times and so literally all

success in life boils down to a variation in the marshmallow test where you know can the kid like hold off and eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes exchange they get two marshmallows and the claim is that turned out to be a big predictor for future success although like many psych experiments i don't think it replicates well um but anyway so it just boils down to long-term versus short-term and if you can just adopt long-term thinking in your mindset you're just going to have a much easier life or as our favorite trainer jersey gregorick says hard

choices easy life easy choices hard life that's it right so just can you take a long-term view on anything compound interest applies everywhere it applies in relationships it applies in money it applies in health and fitness can you change your habits to read the kinds of books that you think will serve you best in the long term the foundational books can you change your eating habits so that you're eating healthy food as opposed to unhealthy food can you create an exercise routine that you can do every day or every other day so that it's a

consistent part of your life and so i think a lot of it boils down to just choosing the long term or the short term and all the hacks the good hacks basically help make the long-term choice palatable or they help inspire you to kind of keep your eyes focused on the long term so an example is if you're doing something that you love if you're running a business that you enjoy it it's probably going to be more fun than playing a video game if you if you come home at night from work and your first

instinct is to play a video game you're suffering at work you're working just as hard in the video game but the rewards are all fake because they're going to change the rules on you or some 13 year old kid on the internet will destroy you because they play that video game all day long and i used to be a hardcore video gamer i had a lot of fun doing it and i did learn playing games for sure but you know at this point this age i pick up a video game i'm doing it to get

away from suffering and i'm not really getting anything out of it i could play the video game of investing or i could play the video game of starting companies or i could play the video game of you know go and play tennis and that would be good for my health so it's good to find so so i think a lot of it is about finding the thing that you can do that is fun for you that looks like play that feels like play to you but looks like work to others that you can do that

sustains you for the long term so for example in foods what you want to find is you want to find what is the health food out there that other people consider healthy and as nutritionally healthy profile but that i find tasty because if i can create those foods if i can become a good cook and create great foods that i enjoy eating and i'll like them and i can eat them regularly but they're actually super healthy that's amazing that's a hack now now i'm eating for the long term but i'm not giving up too much

of the short-term pleasure the same way being in a good relationship is you know is going to be watching porn and having a good career or working enjoyable job or hacking on some code that i enjoy is going to be far more productive than playing a video game i don't want to sound preachy but i will just say that as i my love for reading came from another one of my tweets is read what you love until you love to read so just fall in love with the idea of reading itself so it's okay to

read the junk food stuff just fall in love with reading and eventually get bored of the simple stuff and you'll go to the more interesting stuff and i love to read enough that i don't like watching tv i don't watch movies you know people start talking about shows that they're watching on netflix or what have you and i give them this empty look i don't watch shows on netflix they're not interesting it's far more interesting to me to go for a walk and be meditative and i'll be in a very happy place or to read

a book which will be intellectually stimulating and sure once in a while watch a movie with friends or with my wife but it's a social thing you know i'm doing it as a way of kind of sort of being on the same common ground as them i'm not i would never watch a movie on my own unless maybe i was trapped in like a 15-hour airplane flight i was really bored and i run out of everything else to do and i just want to zone out even then i don't think i watch a movie anymore

so i just feel like a lot of it is like finding the hacks finding the things that make the long term feel effortless to you and then you win okay last last question first a recommendation if you ever do decide to watch something sorry before we finish that topic very important on people find the people that doesn't take work to be around the best relationships don't feel like work you make the other person happy being yourself they make you happy by being themselves everyone's honest no one's putting on an act they can't carry on for

the next decade same thing with friendships you know the best friendships or friendships that were formed or nothing it's not because you went to school it's not because you studied on the same things not because you're working together it's not because you enjoy rugby or or whatever it's because your chemistry matches your temperament is similar and so you can be friends with this person for 30 years 50 years so the compound interest and relationships part ironically means that the best relationships whether friendships or family or love are the ones where you don't have to work

too hard at them so you don't have to sustain that workload for the rest of your life and you can do it effortlessly yeah totally well one of the one of your quotes that i think of often and i might be paraphrasing this is if you want to avoid conflict rule number one is avoid people who are constantly involved with conflict right i mean something along those lines i mean for example when you're in a relationship just watch how the other person treats their worst enemy because eventually they'll just redefine you as enemy and you'll

get to feel that behavior so i think the number one criteria i look for in a in a relationship is that a person has to be kind they just have to be a nice person and because eventually they'll in a certain context you can always be reclassified from friend to enemy so you just want to see the boundaries of someone's ethics if you see someone being bad to a server or someone engaging in unethical behavior or suing other people or fighting other people all the time it's only a matter of time before they fight you

so just stay away from these high conflict people everyone has conflict no one is clean but that said like there are definitely people who engage in conflict and do it regularly and they make it a part of their lifestyle just walk away it's not worth it there's plenty of people who are low conflict and easy to get along with yeah low conflict low maintenance who can also be brutally candid when necessary right which doesn't equal eye conflict well the one thing i've noticed and i haven't written the tweet on this because i've had a hard

time figuring how to say it but the people that i want to spend time around these days when i look at what the common characteristic is they're highly self-aware they're very very aware of themselves they're not running on autopilot they don't get angry easily they don't get unhappy easily they don't take themselves too seriously they have a certain separation from their own thoughts and personality that prevents circumstances and their personality from overwhelming them they don't have a victim mentality they're not caught up in some story of what happened to them when they were younger they've

had those issues for sure but they've just gotten past them and been like i don't want to be that person i don't be trapped in that mindset they're not trying to signal all the time how important they are or who they know or what they've done or how virtuous how virtuous they are they're not virtue signaling or bigoteering they have low egos generally i can literally plot on a line the more self-aware somebody is i guarantee you the more attractive that they are to a large number of people and to into the degree that i've

achieved any modicum of fame and fame is a trap and i'm going to pay for this i know i will pay for this but any modicum of fame that i've achieved i think is because i am one of the few people who has been successful in business that thinks out loud in public and because i'm willing to think out loud in public that's a risk that i take on it improves my thinking but other people say oh yeah he's somewhat self-aware he's thinking about himself and i think that helps inspire other people to also say

okay it's okay for me to think about myself and i just i just find hanging around self-aware people is a lot easier than people who are running on autopilot almost like npcs npcs what does that mean non-player characters it's a reference to certain kinds of video games where it's like a computer control character right they're predicted all right so speaking of games this is this is the the final tweet the final podcast here it is the reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it and my questions about this are

wait one more time the reason to win the game is so that you can be free of it i would be curious to know what game you are free of or what game you are playing so that you can be free of it i like to think i'm free of almost all the games at this point what are the games all of life is games right you start out with the family game you do the school game the grades game the getting girlfriends and boyfriends game the getting married game the having kids game the the

making money game they're having the career game the getting famous game the dressing well game you know it's so much of a social games there are a few that are not games like meditation you're not doing if you're scoring points in meditation you're doing it wrong yoga these are single-player games right so it's really the multiplayer games are the ones that suck you into society and into anxiety now you kind of have to play them you have two choices towards peace in your life one is you can play these games and you can win them

and when you win them this is the hard part realizing you've won and stopped playing new ones or setting new goals for yourself that are even higher and higher it's like my friends who have made so much money and they continue all they try to do is make money and they just don't seem very happy about it it's fine if they're happy if they're like elon musk seems like he's having a grand old time that's fine but if it's making you miserable and you continue doing it and you only have one life and you kind

of can't see past that then i would argue you're playing the game too far so there's kind of two ways out of the trap one is not wanting something is as good as having it right i think it was lyad shabo said this on twitter i thought it was really good or there's a recent socrates quote that i retweeted where he was taken to uh the story is he was taken to a a market back in ancient greece and it was full of luxurious and fine items and he said there are so many things that

i do not want right and it was he looked at all these finders and said so many things here that i do not want and i thought that is freedom that is power that is self-contained uh that is a person who has found himself and needs nothing outside of himself that is so inspirational so the same way i look upon the world and i say well i could just say that right you can't just say that if i just said there's so many things that i don't want it's not true i want the money i

want the girl you know i want i wanted the fame or i wouldn't have gone on podcast and i wouldn't be on twitter at some level that is true so obviously there's certain things that i want i'm not a monk i'm not a i'm not living in an ashram but what i can do is i've gotten the things that i want and i'm careful not to want more i don't want more fame i don't want more money or if i get it it's fine it's part of the crafts by the bonus you know so i

have to be careful about what i about not unconsciously taking on new desires if i'm taking a new desire i better go fulfill that so these are all just games that i'm playing and you know you got to play some game you're on this planet you're alive you might as well play something now the question is what game do you play and how do you get out of the game so you're not just trapped playing that game forever and one way is you choose your games very carefully if you're a monk you only choose very

very few games to play or you play no games and you live content blissful harmonious peaceful or the other is you play the game and you win it and then you say i am now free of this so what that tweet is that tweet is the reason to play the game so the reason to win the game is to be free of it it's a reminder to myself that for the games that i've won it's time to let go of them and to be free of them and not to unconsciously double down by comparing myself

to the joneses and continuing to level up and level up and level up and level up and then one day you die and then you're like okay that was pointless like you know i i did all that work for what like for nothing so if you're not enjoying it anymore if you've already won the game by the definition you had when you started playing the game and one hack is to set the definition early on so that when you go past it you know you won to not get trapped into playing this game forever and

just living in some anxious future as opposed to actually enjoying yourself in the present you have to know when to stop playing the game and so to me the reason to play these games is to win them and then you can be free of them and to see what else then that you want to do or not do not to keep playing the same game forever because these games are the adult games are very cleverly designed you can keep playing them infinitely and they're all ups and downs and ups and downs and i guarantee you

every time you get money you'll be afraid you're going to lose it or you're going to compare it to the next person who has it or every time you get famous now that's uh let's say that's the image that you have to live up to and now insults can hurt you and now you don't have your privacy anymore as you've written about so all of these games have downsides or if you're uh you know very you're good at dating you have a lot of men or women in your life then you're also going to have

a lot of relationship trauma and you've got a lot of tumultuousness you know a lot of hurt people you got a lot of emotional drama in your life so you just have to kind of realize when you won the game and say i'm done with this so i would i would aspire to be like socrates and say there are so many things in this world that i do not want and i like to think that i'm kind of there for the most part either i don't want it or i have it now of course there's

a fear of losing it which is always there but i don't want to pick up new desires unconsciously and i don't want to keep upgrading my lifestyle and my expectations to match my circumstances otherwise i'll be on this treadmill forever we are all playing games and the key is knowing which game you are playing so you can at least attempt to consciously choose the game finite and infinite games by james carso's an interesting read and i just want to close with and then you're certainly more than welcome to add any closing comments but a quote

that really makes me think of you it's one of my favorite quotes from fineman so richard p fineman once again here's the quote the first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool i love that quote i love that quote i i read it when i was 9 or 10 years old and i've never forgotten it it is so important and none of us are perfect we all have flaws we all have weaknesses we all have vices or i'll speak for myself certainly that's true of me but

unival as much as anyone else perhaps more than anyone else i know have gone to great lengths to become self-aware furthermore and this is i think that one of the distinguishing characteristics for me that you represent becoming self-aware and spending time on the timeless while also reserving the right with competency to be a very high level operator in the real world right because you can be not of this world by opting out completely and go into a world of introspection but in truth lack the resilience and emotional awareness to interact with any type of real

stressor which doesn't appeal to me certainly and you can be so engulfed by being in the world that you lose self-awareness you stop realizing that you are playing certain games you become addicted and self-identified with things that come from sort of consensus reality that's also not appealing but you have managed in a way that i find fascinating to combine the cultivation of self-awareness with operating in the world at a high level i wouldn't say i'm necessarily there yet but it gets a little easier every year like yeah the finding quote is is a brilliant one

he's right you we fool ourselves all the time and i still fool myself all the time because i still have strong beliefs and opinions for example even though i don't tweet a lot about politics i do have strong political opinions um and that is a form of fooling myself because you know politics is a man-made game it doesn't really exist in the real world there's no no tree is aware of politics and i do even though i don't like to even some of my beliefs are filtered and lined up in bundles based on my chosen

media sources and whatnot so i fool myself all the time but just if you can fool yourself a little bit less then you can navigate reality much better it doesn't take a lot most people are just living very unconsciously you know under unexamined life so it just gives you kind of a leg up and i agree with you in that you can always like check out of the game and it's easier that way but then you're fragile right you kind of build resilience by working out hard and it's hard to be calm until you've lost

a lot and won a lot like you have to see the ups and the downs and the ups and the downs before you get tired of the dopamine chase and you sort of realize like okay this is down but eventually there'll be an up or there's an op that'll be a down i know how this game works so one of the things i've been tracking recently is i've been trying to kind of make a a list of what are the activities that are sort of non-dual in nature they don't create their own opposite down the

road so chasing money does create anxiety and suffering down the road as you compare and you win and lose and so on uh you know chasing fame also has downsides where you can you're not open to insult and attacks and being cancelled and what not so what activities are intrinsically true in and of themselves and are kind of are a free lunch and so those include things like meditation yoga creating art playing reading for fun not necessarily for knowledge or education writing journaling you can even be building a business as long as you're doing it

for the craft of it for the flow of it not necessarily for a given outcome although it's hard to do that at least externally it seems like elon musk is doing that he's you know building rockets to get to mars not to make money um or to be famous although he's doing the he's getting those the byproducts so i i think that kind of this whole not fooling yourself uh paying attention to yourself not taking yourself too seriously uh examining your own thoughts from first principles um and kind of uh doing activities that are drawn

intrinsically for you as opposed to for the external world they just make your life better i'm not doing these things to be a stoic sage right honestly one of the downsides of the stoics is they don't look like they're having a lot of fun i still like that right now obviously loss has been a lot in translation i know they had their vomitoriums and they had their orgies and whatnots uh but you know the stoics just at least the way it's a modern projected and this is one of the reasons why i do like osho

you know people give osho a lot of flack and they should he he was a little crazy in some ways but he was having fun he had a good time and you know you're alive you got you have one very short life when it when your life ends it goes to zero it's to you it's indistinguishable from your perspective your death is indistinguishable from the end of the world as far as you're concerned the world has disappeared because when you came into existence the world appeared when you go out of existence the world disappears and

that is so consequential that it makes the rest of your life inconsequential and that is a form of freedom and so you should enjoy yourself you should not suffer in this life if you are just constantly suffering then figure out how to get out of that suffering if you can't get out of that suffering then figure out how to redefine your internal worldview so that you don't necessarily view it as suffering any more than the extent that you need to to get out of it these days we borrow a lot of suffering on behalf of

other people a lot of people want to be a little christ carrying crosses for others it's a miserable existence you're actually not doing them any favors either you carrying their cross isn't making their life any better the better way is for you to be happy and successful and healthy and then go save them like literally save them physically not necessarily just you know sit around suffering for them or at least that's the life that i choose to live i'm gonna i'm gonna end with one story um there was a guy that i met in thailand

uh craig i forget his last name but he used to work for tony robbins and i met this guy and we were on vacation in thailand and he was just the happiest person he was just happy all the time and he just seemed to be able to laugh it off and as far as he had a good life he had stuff going for him but it wasn't like you know he had this incredibly enviable life where you would drop everything and move to thailand and adopt his lifestyle he had an okay life but he was

just happy and not in a forced way but he was genuinely happy and so i asked him i said like you know what's your secret why not and he said that you know he used to work for tony robbins and used to fly around setting up events for tony and you know he was always sitting in the front row and taking notes and setting things up and learning and listening and he just kind of started seeing through his own internal bs he got to this point where like you said like he was he was fooling

himself into unhappiness and he just decided one day he said you know what i have no responsibility to anybody in this world other than me and like or if i do have a responsibility this kind of weight of responsibility that goes on where we're like oh i need to live up to some imagined self what he realized was he said somebody in this world somebody has to be happy all the time that is somebody's job to be that role model for people in the world that might as well be me i'll be that guy i'll

take on that burden and he decided to be the happy one and i just thought that was simple and brilliant and he did it he lived there so you know i want to be that guy who is successful peaceful happy enjoying life blissful meditative spiritual successful and you know as healthy as i can be and famous and rich and not give a damn about any of it so if i lose it all tomorrow i still want to be happy that's it that's where i want to be and i'll just make that decision because somebody has

to be that person it might as well be me i love it man uh naval ravikant otherwise known aka novel ravakant but naval ravicon naval on twitter n-a-v-a-l and he has the podcast of course naval n-a-v-a-l you can find that anywhere you find your podcast the blog nav.al previous conversations we've had and we've had quite a few you can just search naval on the website tim dot blog forward slash naval anything else you would like to add any other resources places people can say hello on the internet recommendations asks of the audience them all uh

i'm mostly on twitter uh eric jorgensen recently put out a book which had a bunch of my sayings called the almanac of naval ravicon it was very nice of him i don't make any money off of it it's free on the internet you can just download it i think it never almanac clever little turn of phrase yeah i think i think that's it we'll see you on the interwebs you know i i wish everybody has a wealthy healthy and happy life like go get it thanks so much neval for taking the time this is awesome

and uh to everybody listening thank you for tuning in and until next time don't fool yourself sit down spend some time with your mind and uh don't be too hard on that roommate in your head hey guys this is tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet friday do you want to get a short email from me would you enjoy getting a short email from me every friday that provides a little more soul of fun before the weekend and five bullet friday is a very short email

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