#AskNaval - Q&A with Naval Ravikant on 👋 Clubhouse Podcast | 31 Mar 2021

After the question that was suddenly plopped into the ether, I think she's asking for permission to translate something that I once did in the Chinese. By all means, translate into whatever languages you want. Go right ahead.

Yeah, so the broader question is just about how to be a good investor. And to the extent that you're asking for specific investment advice, nobody who's any good gives actionable investment advice online because they know that's not how investing works. If someone tells you what to buy, they're not going to tell you when to sell, and without any underlying explanation of why you should be buying or selling something, you're essentially just listening to an astrologer. And there's no reason for them to tell you what to do unless they're sort of pumping their own holdings. So you should always be very suspect when someone gives you a buy signal. Now there are buy signals that people can send that don't necessarily move the market, like I could say buy Bitcoin, but even then it's sort of irresponsible to put somebody into an asset where they don't understand the thing. So I think the problem here is that the questioners are pursuing wealth creation without understanding this is not possible. Wealth is a byproduct of understanding. It is not a substitute for understanding. It is not something you do instead of understanding. Yes, there's always the occasional person who gets lucky, and sure enough when they get lucky you hear about it. But for every one of them who gets lucky, there's many that don't, and you don't hear from those people. Winners are very loud and losers tend to be very quiet. So the same person can be telling you about the incredible trades they've made all year, and then when they go bankrupt all of a sudden because they were trading on margin or they didn't really know what they were doing, you're not going to hear about it or you're not going to hear from them. So I would give up on this whole idea of trying to find investment advice from other people. You just have to sort of figure it out yourself, and that's also where you get paid. You get paid not for being right when everybody else is right, because then it's already priced in, and you don't get paid for being wrong, because then you're just wrong, you lose money. So you only get paid for being right when others are wrong, and that's not going to happen because of online investment advice. That's going to happen because you genuinely understood the situation better than most people around you. And so the specific question that was posed in this context is about Tether, which is a stablecoin that is backed by a company, and people don't necessarily always trust this company. So they're saying, is this a systemic risk, a black swan risk to Bitcoin? If you're kind of asking that, that tells me you don't really understand Bitcoin. Bitcoin exists independent of Tether, whether Tether turns out to be a scam or a fraud or not, which I think is incredibly unlikely by the way. The fight about Tether has been going on for as long as I can remember being in crypto, and it's just turned out not to be true, at least so far. It's not to say it can't happen. We're not inductivists, you know, black swan events do happen. But if there were going to be no black swans between here and the end game for crypto, then Bitcoin would already be at a million dollars a coin or higher. So there are still large risks out there, but I don't think they're as easy to predict as reading someone's tweet storm. And that fight is as old as the hills. But anyway, you need to learn enough about Bitcoin that you can then decide for yourself whether that is going to be true or not. And there's no education I can give you here in like a minute. There are lots and lots of people who have written lots of good work on both sides of it. But if you don't understand it yourself, then you have no business investing in it.

Yeah, so I don't invest like Warren Buffett invests. Warren Buffett is a very different class of investor. I am more of a venture investor, he's a value investor. The thing that value investors and venture investors have in common is that they tend to both hold for the very long term, very patient, very long-term games. But then they diverge. A value investor is looking at the price and they're looking for a good price and they're looking at timing when to get in and when to get out based on the price. And hopefully you'll get into a business at a low price and it's a good business and compounds for decades and you don't have to get out. That's the ideal situation for a value investor. A venture investor is very different. We invest very early when it's just a hope and a prayer, when it's so cheap that the details of the price don't matter. It's still, if it works, can be orders of magnitude less than it will be worth, and if it doesn't work it's going to be worth zero. And we build a broad portfolio versus a value investor builds a narrow portfolio. So I can't interpret a Buffett quote for you in the context of crypto. I don't think it actually applies. I think basically if you believe in the Bitcoin and Ethereum and so on technologies and stories, and if you understand them really well, then you're likely to either not agree with them, in which case you wouldn't buy them, or you would agree with them, in which case you think they're ludicrously underpriced compared to where they will eventually end up once they pass all their black swan tests. So I don't think the Warren Buffett strategy applies. I don't think you want to time your entrance or exit into an asset class that is either going to go 10x or 20x from here or go to zero. That's not how you think about it. It's a binary bet. So you just have to decide whether you have the conviction and the fortitude or not. And if you do, then maybe you average in over a certain time period so as to not be exposed to sudden price swings and movements. And then you just kind of put it away and you hold for the long haul. You know, like HODL Bitcoin or ETH.

I think there's a tendency to create a high geography around people where you kind of think that they're somehow special or interesting or maybe their bio will rub off on you. I don't even know, I don't understand the instinct because I don't even read biographies. I think maybe the last and only biography I can remember reading was Steve Jobs' biography, and even that, to be honest, I did take away one or two interesting things, but I wouldn't put it even in my top hundred books of all time, maybe not even my top thousand. I just don't find biographies that interesting. I think they're just anecdotal stories. And sure, I mean, some people do take away from it, you can maybe get inspired from it, but my biography is not relevant or interesting. I think if I have ideas, they should stand on their own, and you should be able to evaluate the merit of each of those ideas regardless of the biography of the person who says it.

Most ideas are bad, whether made by smart people or dumb people. Most ideas are just bad. And it's the error correction, it's iteration, it's criticism, it's facing reality that tells us which of our ideas actually survive and do well. And you know, most of us, like, most of our thoughts, if you were to execute in every single one of your thoughts, you'd either be in jail or dead or just miserable. So I don't think that most ideas are good ideas. Most ideas are pretty bad, but we have to just try. We have to try and try and try again, see what works. And if there's a class of bad ideas that people fall into, that class of bad ideas is thinking that they only have good ideas or that they have better ideas than other people. And so then they want to constrain other people, saying, well, you know, these people don't know how to think, so let me think for them. Let me tell them how to behave. They're poor, so they're stupid, or they're, you know, I went to college, I'm educated, so I'm smarter than them, so I tell them how to run their life. Or they're saying stupid things, so I should control their speech or I should kick these people off this platform. So I think like the urge to censor people, the urge to like condescend towards people, the urge to tell other people that something is done or settled and they're not allowed to speak about or think about or challenge it, kind of this intellectual condescension that comes with frustration of like, you know, we are your betters. It's sort of like the modern equivalent of white man's burden, except I would say it's kind of like academic person's burden or journalist burden. You see a lot of this with the hoi polloi intelligence here from the coasts kind of trying to tell people how to live and run their lives, or even like being moralistic arbiters. I think that's probably the major problem going on right now. When you think that your ideas are really good ideas and should be set in stone and not be challenged in the future, that's the ultimate bad idea. It'll hurt society for sure, but eventually it also hurts you because you become rigid and you become incapable of finding good ideas because you think you already have them.

Yeah, yeah, I don't want to get autobiographical again. I don't think it's useful or relevant, plus it just makes me uncomfortable. But I would say in general, I have bad ideas all day, I make mistakes all day long. And you know, you just kind of notice them and you correct. Just don't get too attached to it. Actually, it helps if you tell other people about your mistakes. In fact, you know, I made a financial mistake about two years ago, and my wife hears about it to this day. You know, I probably think about it every single day or every other day, I kind of moan about it. It was a big one, and it was an obvious one in hindsight, where I even told myself I'm probably making a mistake, but I just didn't, you know, part of me didn't listen to another part of me. So at least if I'm public about it, then I can't hide from it. And Buffett does the same thing, right? He'll stick it in his annual newsletter when he makes a mistake. In fact, I believe Berkshire Hathaway is named after a textile business that he bought early on that he thought would be a value business, but that's where he learned that it's not about the cost, it's about the quality of the business. And he bought a poor quality business at a good price, but it turned out to be a bad price because it's just a poor quality business. And so he named his entire conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway to remind himself that, you know, that's the kind of investment that he should avoid. So I think that's actually pretty smart. So I think being public about your failures and being honest with yourself is kind of the best way to do it. And look, most actions and most ideas are failures. Just get over it. It's all error correction. That's how mother nature works with evolution. That's how invention works with trial and error. That's how science works with conjecture and criticism. And that's just how our lives work. We are creative idea generating machines that are always testing those ideas against reality. Society is the best set of such ideas that we have that has withstood the test of time, but that is not designed for the individual. That is balanced for the needs of society. And the individual has to rediscover for themselves what will work best for them and still allow them to function in society while being compatible with their DNA, their environment, their unique skill sets, their education, and their experience. And so you just kind of have to go through it. You just have lots and lots of ideas, and the only mistake is to think that you have the right idea forever. There's no such thing. You just keep correcting and correcting and correcting. I would say that one thing that helps a lot is as you go through this more and more, as you just get older in life, you realize that it's all about long-term. All the classical virtues are really just saying to you, whether it's in the Bible or whether it's the Romans or whether it's the ancient Greeks or whether it's the Stoics or whatever, they're all saying kind of just focus on the long term and don't focus on the short term. Most of the vices, most of the so-called acts of the devil, are basically temptations of cheap dopamine. And if you can avoid those and just focus on long-term rewards and payoffs, you will do better on average than someone who focuses on the short term. Now, gluttony is like, don't eat too much, because even though it tastes good now, you'll get sick later. Lust is, you know, don't covet your neighbor's wife or husband because you're going to then get in trouble and possibly get killed or ostracized or ruin your marriage, etc., etc. You can go through every single one of these. All of the classical virtues are basically saying optimize for the long term instead of the short term. And if you just want to do less 180s in your life, if you want to have better long-term thinking, optimize more for the long term the same way. I think if you broaden the scope of your thinking based on your needs, then you're going to have better outcomes in life. For example, if you can't even take care of yourself physically or financially, then obviously you focus on that. But once you can take care of yourself physically, financially, and mentally, then you have to start focusing on others. If you have too narrow of an operative aperture and you stay self-obsessed, you can be a miserable human being because your mind will just self-obsess and nothing will ever be good enough and you'll just keep feeding the ego until it literally implodes. But if you sort of start broadening your aperture the moment you have excess resources, then you can start taking care of your family and then maybe your tribe or your people and eventually everyone in the world. I mean, that's the ultimate goal, to do something like what Elon Musk is doing, which is taking all these excess resources and using it for things that are ostensibly good for humanity. And everyone may not agree with you on what's good for humanity, but you know, as long as you have your own vision, that will sort of help take you out of your own ego and your own mind and make you just a much happier person overall. It'll be sort of self-fulfilling and you'll have to do less error correction along the way because your aperture will be both wide in helping a lot of people and will also be long. It'll also be looking very, very far out. And the goal, I think, is to get to sort of a 360-degree infinite view where you're doing what's best for all of society from your own needs, from your own base of power and strength. So you are taken care of. That doesn't mean you run out and give away all your money or give away all your time to charity, because you still have to function, you still have to be happy. But you want to get to a position where you have everything that you want and then your cup automatically runs over and you can just kind of help the people around you again in the way that is best expressed through your unique DNA and experience. And then if you take the longest-term view on that, your entire life or many lives beyond, then you literally have nothing to worry about because there's no one to worry about. You yourself are taken care of. It's about all your goals and needs are going to the outside world. And then you can't lose. If the world doesn't give you what you want at that point, then it's just kind of cheating itself in a way. Elon had to become the richest man in the world because he was putting everything into giving the world what it needs, and so the world kind of has to take care of him because not letting Elon win means that the world loses. So I mean, this is getting a little metaphysical, but I just mean that people can sort of sense when you are working on long-term time frames and when you're working relatively unselfishly. Look, we all have to be selfish. If you're not selfish, you don't survive. Without the self, there is no survival, the physical self that is. And so you can't act selfless, and the actors are the worst. But if you can truly get to the point where your self needs are taken care of and then you can be selfless just by the virtue of excess resources, it makes you much better off. I don't know if I answered your question at all. I think I rambled for a bit.

Universities are complicated. I mean, right now you sort of probably want to go to them because they're these very strong curators and so they have a signal. They give you a badge that unfortunately is still very useful in large parts of society. But I joke that university degrees are the new taxi medallions in that they're artificially scarce and they're required for certain things, but they're going to be obsoleted relatively soon or already are in many disciplines. So you can already see some substitutes emerging for the university degree. For example, if you start a company that VCs fund or if you join Y Combinator, that can be a substitute for a university degree. If you win some incredible medal or award or you launch a company or build a website or do something interesting when you're very young, that can be used as a credential. Or you write some great book or what have you, that can be used as a substitute. But it's a rare person right now who can really skip the university. They would have to be very didactic, especially in the technical domains. So I don't think it's kind of doable for everyone. It is a unique small set, like the so-called Thiel Fellows, for example, or people who are chosen for that, and there just can't be that many of them yet. That said, I think it'll get easier because the credentialing will become less important out of university. The other thing is I think there's a whole class of university degrees that are pretty worthless. If you're not getting a STEM degree or a degree that can help you build or fix things, and you don't need a degree for it, you can just read books on it. I mean, you can teach yourself. So really the classical university degree where you're investing four years of your life, and boy, isn't it a coincidence it takes four years to learn anything regardless of whether it's English lit or physics, you know, I would argue that if you can learn it on your own, then you don't need a university degree for it. To the extent you need it for signaling, there's a fun little hack, which is, at least in Silicon Valley or the greater tech ecosystem, it's almost better to get accepted to Stanford and then drop out than to actually finish the degree. First, you're in a very illustrious cohort of people who then went on to be very successful, or at least that's the perception, which is good enough for signaling purposes. And secondly, you just save yourself a lot of time. You've shown you've passed the filter, but then you recover the next three years. Now, I think a lot of the Stanford students who are ambitious also get around this by starting companies while they're at Stanford. But they use something like Stanford, you could say, one-third curation signaling, which is done the moment you get in, and then one-third sort of alumni network and networking with other smart people that you may want to start a company or do something with, and then maybe the third of it that's actually the education. If you're the kind of person that needs to question whether or not you should go to university, at least today in 2021, yes, then go to the university. On the other hand, there are a small set of people who can't stand the idea of wasting three or four years of their life in a university when they could be doing something, and those people should not go to universities. But you will know. It is one of those things where if you are going to err, err on the side of going to a university. Now, I would say go to the best university you possibly can, because the signal/curation function is the most important. And then secondly, once you're in, study something worthwhile that you absolutely cannot learn on your own, whether it's biology or law or medicine or my favorites are, you know, physics, math, computer science, those hard skills. Because once you're good at mathematics and you don't fear any book, then you can learn anything on your own later. But I would say the soft, squishy skills, those are the ones where I think you'll be suspect. Like if you're going to go to a middling school and graduate with like a social sciences degree, I don't know if you're going to pay back your student loans.

Yeah, English is the lingua franca of the internet, ironically enough. And so the internet took English from being a plurality of speakers to, I think, it's going to take it to a majority of online speakers. And because a lot of technical stuff is written in English, you know, the various websites work best in English, apps work best in English. If you want to be a first-class citizen on the internet, it really helps to be fluent with English. You know, the reason I'm up here and not in the audience like the rest of you is because I happen to be more articulate than the average person with English, because I read a lot of books when I was a kid. And so I just happened to be good at expressing myself in the English language, and that's a big deal. You know, that eloquence turns someone into a speaker as opposed to a listener. So there's huge value in being a good native English speaker. So I think places like India are advantaged by the trend towards remote work and Zoom and Clubhouse and so on, because it gives more of them an opportunity to compete on a relatively level playing field. One of the things that people are going to learn with remote work is, remote work is not really about letting the Facebook engineer work from Ohio instead of from Silicon Valley. I mean, that may be true in the short term, but in the long term it's really about Ahmed from India being able to work for Facebook in Silicon Valley while he's in some rural town in India. So that's going to disrupt and change lives and global supply chains. Some people will be better off, some will be worse off, but that's true globalization happening. So yeah, English is a superpower. You know, if I had to pick subjects for my kids to learn, I'd really, really drill down on logic, math, computer science, and English. And then I think everything else they can follow their natural intellectual curiosities. If they want to learn music, they can learn music, but you don't force them to go learn the violin just because you have some idea that every kid should be a musician. The rest of it they can follow the natural aptitude, but English is foundational. It's the classic reading, writing, arithmetic, right? The classic stuff. Instead, I would add code and science, which are like slight variations on those. You know, science being the language of applied mathematics into nature, and computers being applied mathematics into machines. But I think those are very foundational skills. Everything else you can kind of learn on your own.

Yeah, I reject this whole social development thing. I know it's gotten very popular, but I think humans are social machines and these days we're over-socialized, not under-socialized. We have Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Clubhouse, Twitter, Facebook, we have unlimited ways to socialize virtually. Lots of kids I see are socializing in real life, you know, if they're not socializing virtually. I would argue that socialization creates far more problems than it solves and that the modern individual is over-socialized. Exceptional people are built in solitude. That's not popular here, but it's true. It's the alone time that you spent when you were a kid that made you good at whatever you are. It wasn't the group time. The group time was spent having too much fun, most likely. There are a few exceptions, but not many. So I would say in general, socialization is actually the problem that you're trying to avoid as opposed to the asset that you're trying to bring into it. And I think it's kind of pathetic how quickly we fall into saying, well, school's for socialization. What about socialization? We've abdicated this idea that it's the best way to educate your child because clearly it's not true. It's a combination of one-size-fits-all education, compliance training, daycare, and socialization. And I would argue socialization in the worst kinds of socialization. Socialization in false little Lord of the Flies type worlds where people are very hierarchical. Who's the prom queen? Who's the football player? Who's the jock? Who's popular? Who's cool? Who's doing drugs? Who's not? All that stuff is nonsense. I mean, the further you get in life, the more of an adult you become, the more you get away from that. And we all remember that shock when we shifted from school to the real world, what a tremendous difference it was, and we'd just been in a little bubble in our lives up until that point. So I would argue, and I don't care about, you know, sure, people may ask me for citations, but there is plenty of evidence that homeschool kids do a lot better than even private school kids or public school kids. There's even evidence that unschooled kids, kids who are basically...

Kids just left alone with no education tend to be at worst one grade behind school kids, and then when they get to college they actually catch up completely because they're interested. Think about that. All the time you spent in school K through 12 really amounted to being one year ahead of a kid who didn't go to school at all, and then in college that kid caught up right away because now they were generally interested. So I think the way we do schooling is much more about daycare, and it's also preparing kids for the wrong things. I mean, eight hours a day, nine hours a day, you know, in a little group prison camp where you have to raise your hand to go to the bathroom and they tell you how to think and how to behave. I mean, that is terrible. But I think most parents don't have a choice, right? Most parents are busy working. We don't live in tribal societies anymore where grandma and the aunts and uncles can all raise the kids together. So raising kids is really hard, so we abdicate that to the state. The state turns to lowest common denominator situation, and the kid ends up bored and compliant, or having most of their curiosity stamped out of them and just wasting an enormous amount of time. Most of the time spent in school is just completely wasted, and then they use it to build a social life because there's nothing else to do. So I just cannot imagine sending my kids to a regular school. Maybe I'll abdicate, maybe I'll be forced to, so I reserve the right to change my mind. But at least right now I don't think it's the best way to educate them. Obviously I have the means and have the time to do otherwise. If you don't have the means and the time, then you know, send your kids to the best school possible or try to form a local homeschooling group where you can share the burden, or try to live close to your tribe so you can do what you can there. That said, look, I am a product of mostly public schools, including thank God magnet schools, which I know are out of fashion now. But so I don't necessarily say that that won't work, but I do get the sense that at least in my time public schools used to care a lot more about proper education and merit and much less about being politically correct. So I'm not sure which schools are today, but I hope not to find out.

Yeah, that's just experience. You just spend time on it. You do it enough times and it becomes second nature. The first time it's weird, you know, the first 50 times is hard. Then the next 100 or 200 times it's work but doable, and eventually you just develop a gut feeling. Just listen to your gut, feel it. It's like building expertise in anything else, you just do it often enough. And then as you get better and better at it, the goal is just to have a strong enough filter that you can recover your time. So I reject most meetings, I reject most opportunities. I still occasionally get sucked into them, usually have some regrets afterwards because everyone's human. But just value your time, value your free time. You don't have to follow anybody else's model of taking every meeting or trying for every opportunity. You only have to be right a couple of times in your world to do well. So it's much more about keeping your mental and physical bandwidth open for the right opportunity, especially if you have some form of leverage through code or capital, and then striking when the right opportunity presents itself. So if you're an investor, you definitely don't want your day cluttered with meetings. You want to be able to think. Even if you're let's say an engineer or a writer, you don't want to be constantly writing junk or coding up junk. You want to be thinking hard about what you're going to do and then trying to do the right thing. Now of course you have to try enough things that eventually you have a sense yourself of what is good and what is doable and what's possible. But this is a very hard question to answer because it's so abstract. I mean, look, I would just say the honest answer is experience. You just do it often enough.

Yeah, leverage is what separates us from the animals, right? It's like a human wielding fire is way more fearsome than almost any animal, and they're leveraged to this tool of the flaming piece of wood that they're holding. And so leverage is basically just tools, it's force multipliers. And you can leverage yourself in many ways. You can leverage yourself by convincing people to do something with you or for you, that's labor leverage. You can apply stored up wealth or capital or machinery, that's capital leverage. You can use a tool that doesn't require anyone else's permission to create copies of your work, to create products, and that could be everything from a 3D printer to a computer for coding to even a bicycle which is a mechanical leverage for motion, to writing a book, to a podcast, and so on and so forth. There's many, many, many forms of leverage in society. It's just that this last set of publishing, coding, etc., or podcasting or Clubhousing for example, I'm leveraged here. I'm sitting in my room and talking to hundreds of thousands of people, something that just wouldn't have been possible even a few years ago, and I'm doing it on my terms and my time at my leisure. And the message getting out is leverage. That's all leverage is. Leverage is the force multiplier for your actions. And the best forms of leverage employ permissionless tools, tools that don't require anybody else's permission. They sort of productize what you naturally are and do. So you know, you can kind of summarize all that by just saying productize yourself. If you can productize your own work, then you've leveraged just being you, and you've essentially created copies of you through space and time. My podcasts are deliberately designed to not refer to contemporary things and to be timeless content. Look, part of the reason why I've gotten such a huge Twitter following is I've actually stopped tweeting. I don't know if you go back and look at my tweets, I don't think I've done original tweets in a long time. I just lost interest in tweeting. But at the same time, my mentions and spread and everything just seems to be going up and up and up. Why? Because eighty percent of my tweets and almost all of my podcast content is timeless. So to someone who discovers it just now, it's as good as new. It doesn't get old. So that stuff just keeps compounding. It's a form of leverage, it's productizing myself. So the timelessness actually allows it to compound across time and it just runs and builds up more compound interest than content that someone else is writing that may no longer be relevant a year or a few months later. The same way when I read things, I like to read timeless books. I'll read philosophy and science because I think they're relatively timeless compared to say if I'm reading the news. The news is all timely. If you read last week's news, it's nonsense, it doesn't make sense anymore. So try to stay away from both producing and consuming timely content and focus on timeless content. You get free leverage. These are just examples of how to think about and how to use leverage. But leverage is literally it. I mean, look at Mark Zuckerberg for example. He's leveraged with a close to trillion dollar company and with tens of thousands of brilliant people writing code, plus lots of capital. So he's got labor, he's got capital, and he's got code, and he's got media. He's got it all in one, which makes him one of the most leveraged human beings on the planet. So you want to get leverage. Once you get leverage, then it just becomes so easy to either make a living or spread your message or do whatever it is that you want to do.

Yeah, let me make a point on coding. So one of the reasons why I don't really tweet much anymore is because Twitter is just an outreach machine where people excerpt things you said and then they attack you. And so what I'm about to say is the kind of thing that would get me shredded on Twitter. I'll say it here anyway, even though I'm sure somebody's gonna put out a clip and I'm gonna get shredded on Twitter for it anyway. But you know, that's why I'm not much on Twitter anymore. Basically, yes, you should learn to code. Everyone should learn to code a little bit. And not so much that you're going to become a professional coder. I'm not saying you're rich and go be a coder. But just enough that you can understand what it is and how it works and your brain can work logically the same way, and that you aren't intimidated by computers. And you know what they're capable of, what they're not capable of, and what this device that you spend all day long on, how it actually functions underneath, what some of its limitations and capabilities are, and then you don't get scared with horror stories and fairy tales about AGI or jobs being replaced or computers doing everything. And you understand what they're good at, what they're not. The computer is the most powerful tool ever invented by humanity. In your pocket, you're carrying the single most powerful thing that all of humanity has ever invented. And it has been made very egalitarian. It's the ultimate Swiss army knife stuck in your pocket. And every little bit you can do to figure out how to use that better than you did before is going to give you enormous leverage. So I tell people to learn to code the same reason why I'm sure in the 1600s or 1700s it was good advice to tell people to learn to read and to write. Yes, not everyone is going to be a great author. Yes, not everyone is going to be an avid reader. But they should all know how to read and write. And I think coding is just the new literacy. For the same reason you learn mathematics so you're not innumerate, and for the same reason you learn to read and write so you're not illiterate, it's important to learn to code so that you are not computer illiterate. Computer literacy is a basic fundamental skill that will be a requirement of society going forward. In fact, most good schools now teach computer programming to all children. That's just a requirement. So we missed it because we grew up a little too early. It doesn't mean we can't take out the time to do it. You know, like I think a boot camp for six, eight, twelve weeks, you'll find time. If not, just do whatever you can. But it just gives you such a leg up against the people who are not ready. One guy famously said, like, in the future, either you're telling a computer what to do or a computer is telling you what to do. And you don't want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. If you're an Uber driver, the computer is telling you what to do. You're following orders. Your days are numbered in that job because you're not in a creative job. On the other hand, if you're the programmer for Uber, then you are the one who is instructing all these drivers around. And yeah, you could argue it's not fair, but you can close that gap. And you can close that gap for you and your kids by learning to code. So even though this will get me shredded on Twitter, I think it is still the best advice I can give to someone who is relatively young and up and coming. Even if you don't plan on coding for a living, learn to code. And if you're saying, oh, I'm not going to learn to code because in 10 years coding will be automated, that is exactly why you should learn to code, because no serious coder thinks that's true.

Yeah, that's just completely wrong. So if you look at science and technology, obviously that stuff has not been done yet. So there's always a new frontier, there's infinite new knowledge to be discovered and gained. I direct you to my favorite recent book, David Deutsch's The Beginning of Infinity, for a very good explanation of this. But essentially, knowledge creation is infinite, and humans will always be creating and discovering new knowledge and correcting old errors that we had. So that's number one. Second, you write for yourself. You write so that you learn it, so you know it cold. The teacher actually learns more than the student by explaining it. That's why I'm up here, because I get to learn things at the same time by being forced to articulate them. It forces me to check my thinking. And then it's the nature of wisdom, and wisdom is what kind of directs you in your everyday life and leads to a good quality of life, that it cannot be transmitted, it can't be conveyed easily. It has to be rediscovered one individual at a time. So you can write and articulate new ways to inspire people. Finally, you can write just for art. You can write fiction, you can write poetry, you can write to be creative. So this idea that there's nothing new to write is the same as saying there's nothing new to do, there's nothing new to discover. This is completely false. That person just sounds depressed to me. I hope that's not a real person.

It's a very tricky question. It's super abstract, so it's really hard to answer without degenerating to platitudes or inapplicable situations. But I would just say in general that grit and perseverance tend to be determinate factors. Most startups succeed because the founder doesn't give up and goes through ups and downs. That said, there's definitely founders who stick it out too long in a failed situation. I would basically say don't stick it out or persevere out of some false sense of perseverance or thinking that well, grit will make me successful. No. If you are reluctantly persevering for 10 years, that's not going to lead to success. That's going to lead to a prolonged failure. But if you are persevering with conviction because you truly understand and believe that you understand better than others that this thing is important and is going to work, then that is a legitimate form of perseverance. So I would say that yes, the successful entrepreneurs persevere, but that doesn't mean that the entrepreneurs who persevere are all successful. The causality is not necessarily true here. So maybe the best advice I have on this is pick the kind of project where you're going to persevere because you want to see the thing exist, you enjoy it for its own sake, or you have some determinant for doing it that is outside of just pure monetary success.

The time is not an issue. The format is a little awkward just because I sort of feel, you know, by the way, it's not no one's fault. I just like to experiment with new things. And even now I kind of remember why I stopped doing AMAs on Twitter because it just feels too strange. It feels too autobiographical. I just prefer having conversations with people. Right, I come on Clubhouse so I can have conversations with smart people and then other people can eavesdrop and you know, you get a little bit of fame, you get a little bit of your back scratched, you get to talk to some smart people, everybody seems happy, it's kind of a win-win. These sorts of chats that we're answering kind of abstract questions, I'm not sure what it's doing for anyone. But yeah, if people get value out of it, great. And you know, I had time. I'm probably gonna drop off. But I may just kind of hop around Clubhouse and see what else is going on on somebody else's channel. Now, if specific people have questions in the audience, maybe we could pull up one or two people. I don't know, I mean, that's always risky, but it can be fun too.

Yeah, most knowledge is very temporary and you probably shouldn't try and keep up with it. And when you say worrying, you're sort of implying that it's the news that's kind of concerning you. Well, look, the human brain is not designed to process all of the world's breaking emergencies in real time. When you were evolving, you know, with your ancestors who are your great-grandparents and so on, they lived in small villages and they never heard of the news outside of their village unless it was like a war was going on and there was an enemy force approaching their doorstep. They tended not to hear about it. You're just not meant to process the grievances and the unfortunate atrocities, especially these days when they're filtered through news media that's designed to scare you because that's their business model. Reading the news will drive you insane. The problem is not that you can't keep up. The problem is that you're trying to feel and exert control over the things that are not in your immediate vicinity. And so now people will say like, oh, does this mean you're just saying we should check out of life and have no responsibility? Actually, yes, I am saying that, and I have to say it that way because I think otherwise you will get sucked back into the news. The only news that should really matter to you is the local news and news that is relevant to exact decisions that you're going to make which is going to significantly alter the quality of your life. And a rational person can, I think, achieve peace or get closer to peace by cultivating an indifference to things that are out of their control. And there are people out there who are news junkies and they tend to be on Twitter a lot, for example, and they're going to force you into the news and they're going to make you feel guilty and bad about not listening to the news. These people are crack addicts. Even worse, they're often mentally deranged just because they're addicted to the news and they're going to shame you and assault you if you don't listen to the news. Doesn't mean you should listen to the news. And look, sometimes I fall down the news rabbit hole too, but I view it the same way as falling down a drug addiction or doing things that I know are supposed to be bad but yet I'm indulging in a guilty pleasure that I have to pay for later. The anxiety from external sources just means that your aperture is spread far wider than you have the ability to control. So you need to narrow your aperture and focus it on the actual problems that are right in front of you as opposed to the abstract problems that people are yelling in your ears using bullhorns from far away trying to get you excited about all the things they're excited about. Those people are the problem. It's actually the people who are spreading and writing the news who are the problem, and you have to learn to cut them out of your life.

Yeah, audio, I prefer to read. And so for the same reason, I think out of politeness it's kind of better to write. That said, it's definitely easier to create audio content, at least for me, and so I'm creating a lot more of it through Clubhouse and podcasts sort of by accident. That said, when you're first starting out, I think it's better to write. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is it can spread through more channels, it'll get consumed by more people, it'll probably be more timeless because it's easier to excerpt and snip it and pass around, it's easier for people to quote it. It'll hone your thinking better, your arguments have to be much tighter when they're written down. And so you will build sort of better building blocks for your future thought processes and conversations. So I do think that there is something magic about writing that one cannot substitute purely by speaking.

99% of people are gonna still listen to media and no one's gonna listen to me saying ignore the media. I don't even listen to myself when I say ignore the media. So most people most of the time are going to remain hooked on the media. So there's no danger of it going away, or I should say there's no beneficial chance of it going away. And obviously we need journalism and reporting, although I'm not sure that's what we get anymore. That may have just gone extinct unfortunately. Although there do seem to be some really good new journalists and writers emerging on platforms like Substack. And you can tell that's where they are because the classic media is attacking them and hating on them. So literally every time they carry a hit job on some new Substack author, I'm like, oh, let me go subscribe to that person and support them. Just like all these industries are all unbundling. And as they unbundle, the best journalists are going independent, just like the best investors are going independent. They're not necessarily staying at the brand of a firm anymore, they're starting their own funds. The best writers are running their own Substacks or their own newsletters or their own Twitter accounts. The best musicians are starting to go more direct to the audience, you know, artists with NFTs. So this is kind of the age of the individual over sort of the mid-size institution, although there are a few mega platforms that do tend to dominate everything, which is unfortunate. But I don't think that the existing media is going to suddenly reform and somehow get better. And it's a heterogeneous ecosystem, so to the extent that it's doing something that I think is not necessarily great, it's because the structural incentives are that way. It's not because of some conspiracy, it's just because it's easier for them to converge on that point, that Schelling point. That's just how they're designed. So I think they're going to be replaced by individual citizen media, you know, citizen journalism, Substack, Twitter, whatever the next Clubhouse, whatever the next few things are. I'm not holding my breath waiting for them to reform.

Sure, let's do one or two more.

Nah, all my friends in the audience right now are boring. I'm kidding. I'm trolling them.

Yeah, I mean, obviously there's a lot more compute power out there in nature than exists within humans. We barely comprehend the reality that exists. I agree. I mean, I think that's why science is so interesting, because the process of the discovery and the unfolding of the deepest laws of nature, you know, David Deutsch talks about the four fundamental theories that have very deep explanations that allow us to know all the things that could be understood today that aren't just memorizing facts. And that is the theory of evolution, epistemology, quantum mechanics, and the theory of computation. And we're going to add more and more to that, but those are four very fundamental theories that as he says help us define the fabric of reality. And I think we'll just keep uncovering more and more of it. And we're always going to have mistakes, but we always keep making progress as long as we keep an open mind about knowing that we can make mistakes and we do make mistakes. The only real mistake is to think that we figured it all out and it's time to stop looking and stop thinking of new things and stop correcting the errors we've already made.

Yeah, I lost you for a bit. I lost you for the first half of the question. I think you're asking about practical tips to maintain a long-term outlook, but is it specific to some domain like investing, or is it for everything?

Yeah, basically my rule on this, which I don't even always follow myself, but what I try to remind myself is that I buy something when I have conviction and I sell it when I lose conviction. And that's kind of it. I try not to pay attention to all the variations in between. As long as you have conviction, something you sleep well at night, you don't need to worry about it. The mistake or the problem happens when you buy something where you don't have conviction and now you're constantly just revisiting it. And first of all, that's mentally exhausting. Second, you're probably not going to get it right because you didn't spend the time to figure it out to the extent that it could be figured out. And thirdly, you're not going to put enough capital into it because again, you don't have conviction. So conviction is the foundation of investing, and if you don't have the conviction, you should sell and not look back. But do whatever it takes to either develop the conviction or to not have the conviction. And like Warren Buffett, does many of the things that he faces go in the pile of too hard, like I don't understand, so it's a pass. Venture is a little different because especially early stage venture investing, you're basically buying cheap out of the money lottery tickets, out of the money call options. And so sometimes you will invest in things where you don't really have the full conviction, and you kind of wait to see how it plays out. And it's sort of a feature of venture capital or private investing is that you're illiquid for a long time, so you can't even panic sell when you want to. And that illiquidity forces you to hold on for a long time, which sort of feeds back also into having conviction, because if you are going to hold an investment for 10 years and be interacting with a founder, it would be really good if you picked well in the beginning so you're not dealing with someone or a situation that you don't actually like. So anyway, I think that's it for me for tonight. So just thanks for setting this up.

You did a great job. It's the nature of the medium, you know, it's always a little strange getting up in front of an audience and not knowing what the heck you're really doing. That said, as long as I don't get cancelled for telling everyone to learn to code tomorrow, you know, this has been fun. One of the things I do like about Clubhouse is that because in context you can just be more honest than you can on Twitter where every word has to be carefully crafted because the lowest IQ person in the room is going to attack you. So but the unfortunate part with Clubhouse is you can't communicate with the audience easily. There's no tight feedback loop, nor is it easy to have a lot of people up here having a conversation. So thanks for bearing through this and I'll see you all around Clubhouse or maybe even Twitter. Have a good night.