Naval Ravikant argues humans thrive through diverse pursuits—like the Greeks and Romans—not rigid specialization, citing Elon Musk and U2’s reinvention. He dismisses UBI as a flawed fix for automation, warning it risks undermining capitalism by fostering dependency instead of education. Media’s shift from neutral reporting to ideological propaganda, pressured by governments, stifles free thought, while "conquest law" explains leftward cultural drift. True happiness comes from managing desires and inner peace, not wealth or external validation, achieved through meditation and reframing reality. Authenticity and equity in work matter more than societal approval; early success can trap people in stagnation. Ravikant merges play with vocation, prioritizing intrinsic joy over forced labor, urging listeners to explore his resources at nav.al for deeper insights. [Automatically generated summary]
You are one of the rare guys that is, you're a big investor, you're deep in the tech world, but yet you seem to have a very balanced perspective in terms of how to live life, as opposed to not just be entirely focused as opposed to not just be entirely focused on success and financial success and tech investing, but rather how to live your life in a happy way.
And I think it's because at some level, all humans are broad.
We're all multivariate, but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives.
And at some deep level, we know that's not true, right?
Every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought.
You're a UFC comedian, commentator, podcaster, but you're also more than that.
You're also a father.
So I like the model of life that the ancients had, the Greeks, the Romans, right, where you would start out and when you're young, you're just like going to school, then you're going to war, then you're running a business, then you're supposed to serve in the Senate or the government, then you become a philosopher, this sort of this arc to life, where you try your hand at everything.
And as one of my friends says, specialization is for insects.
So everyone should just be able to do everything.
And so I don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing.
And I think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is, and then they think that that is their niche, and they stick with it, and they never change, and they're almost out of fear.
Well, it's hard because there's an analogy around mountain climbing.
Like, if you find a mountain...
And you start climbing and you spend your whole life climbing it and you get, say, two thirds of the way.
And then you see the peak is like way up there, but you're two thirds of the way up, you're still really high up.
But now to go the rest of the way, you're going to have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path.
Nobody wants to do that.
People don't want to start over.
And it's the nature of later in life that you just don't have the time.
So it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path, but that may be the best thing to do.
And that's why when you look at the greatest artists and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does.
Like Elon will be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for.
Or when Madonna or Paul Simon or U2 come out with a new album, their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else.
And a lot of times they'll just miss completely.
So you have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over.
If you're not doing that, you're just getting older.
Yeah, I live for the aha moment, that moment when you connect two things together that you hadn't connected together before, and it fits nicely and solidly, and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind that you can then hang other ideas off of.
That's what I live for.
It's that curiosity fulfilled.
And it's what little children do, too.
My little son is always asking, why, why, why, why, why?
And I always try and answer him.
And half the times I realize, actually, I don't really understand why.
I just have a memorized answer for you, but that's not really understanding.
I think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of like have a one page, a one sheet, like a brief summary of the explanation for what this very complex subject might be.
Yeah, because your brain has finite information in a finite space.
You get enough advice, it all cancels to zero.
There's a lot of nonsense in books out there too.
So I don't read any more to complete books.
I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity.
And it can be anything.
It could be nonsense.
It could be history.
It could be fiction.
It could be science.
It could be sci-fi.
These days it's mostly sci-fi, philosophy, science, because that's just what I'm interested in.
But I will read for understanding.
So a really good book, I will flip through.
I won't actually read it consecutively in order.
And I won't even finish it.
I'm looking for ideas, things that I don't understand.
And when I find something really interesting, I'll reflect on it.
I'll research it.
And then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book.
Thanks to electronic books, I've got 50, 70 books open at any time in my Kindle or iBooks, and I'm just bouncing around between them.
It's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how, in modern society, we get too much information too quickly.
And so our attention spans are very low.
So you get Twitter, you get Instagram, you get Facebook, you're just used to being bombarded with information.
So you can view that as a negative and be like, I have no attention span.
Or you could view that as a positive.
I multitask really well and I can dig really fast.
If I find a thread that's interesting, I can follow through five social networks, through the web, through the libraries, through the books, and I can really get to the bottom of this thing very quickly.
It's like the Library of Alexandria that I can research at my disposal.
So I no longer track books read or even care about books read.
It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for.
And you really will not understand unless you experience it.
You know, I was having this conversation with my wife.
We were talking about people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing.
They don't care if I'm with my daughter, if I'm holding her, if I'm feeding her, if we're, you know, we're in the middle of an intense conversation.
She's crying.
She could be crying.
And some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture.
Doesn't care.
His needs supersede the daughter.
And my wife was saying that before she knew me, she used to think that that's just part of the price of being famous.
That people like you, that's just part of the price of being famous.
And now, when it interrupts her life.
And, you know, it interrupts the children and it interrupts friends.
And, you know, now she's like, this is annoying.
Like, this is not healthy.
This is not a smart way to interact with people.
And that people have this weird challenge, this weird thing that if you become famous, there's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you, especially today.
Because if they can get a photo of you, then that boosts their social media profile.
Yeah, so what it was, I did a tweetstorm called How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky, and it got pretty popular on Twitter.
It's really about wealth creation.
I just use the click-baity title.
It's trying to basically lay out timeless principles of wealth creation that if you absorb them, you become the kind of person who can create wealth, create business, make money.
My theory behind that is there are three things everybody wants.
There's actually more than three, but let's just start with the three basics.
everybody wants to be wealthy, everybody wants to be happy, and everybody wants to be fit.
And I know there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on, like, we don't want money, and, you know, I don't care about being happy, and happiness is for stupid people.
But let's face it, like, you want to be rich and happy and healthy.
That's the trifecta.
Now, of course, you also want an internally calm state of mind.
You want a loving household.
So there are other things that come into it, but those three, I think – They can actually be taught, right?
And fitness, I'm not going to teach.
There are a lot of people who you've had on here, including yourself, who know a heck of a lot more about fitness and health than I do.
But I was born poor and miserable.
And I'm now pretty well off and I'm very happy.
And I worked at those.
And so I've learned a few things.
There are some principles.
And so I try to lay them out, but in a timeless manner where you can kind of figure it out yourself.
Because at the end of the day, I can't really teach anything.
I can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you can remember things when they happen or put a name to them.
So this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet storm.
So there's a tweet storm with like 36, 38 tweets, got very famous, got translated into dozens of languages.
And these were principles that I came up with for myself when I was really young, around 13, 14. And I've been carrying them in my head for 30 years.
And I've been sort of living them.
And over time, I just realized, like, sadly, or fortunately, the thing that I got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that.
And do it in a very long-term kind of way, not the banker, crash the economy, get bailed out kind of way, but build businesses and help people and provide value kind of way, especially when applied to modern technology and leverage in this age of infinite leverage that we live in.
So the podcast is just explaining each tweet.
So these are little three, four, five minute snippets.
I don't like to say the same thing twice.
I don't like to explain in detail.
I feel like if you have something original and interesting to say, you should say it.
Otherwise, it's probably been said better.
So that podcast tries to be information dense.
It tries to be very concise.
It tries to be high impact.
It tries to be timeless.
And it has all the information.
I think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10 years, you get what you want.
So I've got the one on wealth creation.
I'm going to attempt to do one on wealth creation.
Happiness is a big word, but, you know, happiness and inner peace and calm and all that.
Because what you want is, you don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high-strung, high-stress and unhappy and leaving a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones.
Because you got to focus and it's very hard to be great at everything.
You want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know, quietly, without struggle.
You want to be the person who's the, when there's a crisis going on, you want to be the calmest, coolest cucumber in the room who still also figures out the correct answer.
One of the things that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn, and then you can teach yourself to be happy, even just by adopting the mindset that you are a happy person, and proclaiming that to your friends.
And so you've sort of developed a social contract.
Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements.
So the way I started my first tech company was I was working inside a larger organization, and I told everybody that I was going to go start a company.
I was like, I hate this place.
I'm going to do my own thing.
I'm going to be a successful entrepreneur.
Six months pass, nine months pass, then people start going, you're still here?
I thought you were going to go start a company.
Were you lying?
That was the implication.
So we kind of know this.
Social contracts are very powerful.
If you want to give up drinking and you're not serious about it, you'll say, I'm going to cut back.
I'm going to have only one drink a night.
I'm going to only drink on weekends.
You tell yourself.
But if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook.
You'll tell all your friends.
You'll tell your wife.
You'll say, I'm done drinking.
I'm throwing everything out of the house.
You'll never see me drink again.
When you say that, you know you're serious.
So I think a lot of these are choices that we make.
And happiness is just one of those choices.
And this is unpopular to say because there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you.
And there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them.
It says, oh, now you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault.
I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice, health can be a choice, nutrition can be a choice, working hard and making money can be a choice, happiness is also a choice.
If you're so smart, how come you aren't happy?
How come you haven't figured that out?
That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable.
If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this?
Yeah, I'm going to define it a little bit more tightly, right?
So, let's go back to desire, right?
This is old, old Buddhist wisdom.
I'm not saying anything original.
But desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.
And I keep that in front of mind.
So when I'm unhappy about something, I look for what is the underlying desire that I have that's not being fulfilled.
It's okay to have desires.
You're a biological creature.
You're put on this earth.
You have to do something.
You have to have desires.
You have a mission.
But don't have too many.
Don't pick them up unconsciously.
Don't pick them up randomly.
Don't have thousands of them.
My coffee is too cold.
It doesn't taste quite right.
I'm not sitting perfectly.
Oh, I wish it were warmer.
Oh, my dog pooped in the lawn.
I didn't like that.
Whatever it is.
Pick your one overwhelming desire, and it's okay to suffer over that one.
But on all the others, you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed.
And then you'll perform a better job.
Most people, when you're unhappy, like a depressed person, it's not that they have a very clear, calm mind.
They're too busy in their mind.
Their sense of self is too strong.
They're sitting indoors all the time.
Their mind's working, working, working.
They're thinking too much.
Well, if you want to be a high-performance athlete, how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic seizures, if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your limbs are flailing out of control?
The same way, if you want to be effective in business, you need a clear, calm, cool, collected mind.
Warren Buffett plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun.
He doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with nonstop information and getting worked up about every little thing.
We live in an age of infinite leverage.
What I mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousandfold, either by broadcasting at a podcast or by investing capital or by having people work for you or by writing code.
So because of that, the impacts of good decision making are much higher than they used to be because now you can influence thousands or millions of people through your decisions or your code.
So a clear mind leads to better judgment, leads to better outcome.
So a happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions and have better outcomes.
So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind just like you have to learn how to tame your body.
And we like to think that, we like to view the world as linear, which is, I'm going to put in eight hours of work, I'm going to get back eight hours of output, right?
Doesn't work that way.
Guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you and me.
How much output is he getting?
What you do, who you do it with, how you do it, way more important than how hard you work, right?
Outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in.
The right way to work is like a lion.
You and I are not like cows.
We're not meant to graze all day, right?
We're meant to hunt like lions.
We're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores.
As a modern knowledge worker athlete, as an intellectual athlete, you want to function like an athlete, which means you train hard, then you sprint, then you rest, then you reassess, you get your feedback loop, then you train some more, then you sprint again, then you rest, then you reassess.
This idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time, that's machines, you know?
Machines should be working 9 to 5. Humans are not meant to work 9 to 5. No, I agree wholeheartedly, but for people that are working for someone, there's not really that option.
That's kind of where my tweet storm starts, which is, first of all, the first thing if you're going to make money is that you're not going to get rich renting out your time.
Even lawyers and doctors who are charging $300, $400, $500 an hour, they're not getting rich because their lifestyle is slowly ramping up along with their income.
And they're not saving enough.
They just don't have that ability to retire.
So the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business.
You need to have equity, either as an owner, an investor, shareholder, or a brand that you're building that accrues to you to gain your financial freedom.
Yeah, and I was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself, that you feel that in the future, whether it's 50 or 100 years from now, virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves.
And I believe the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age.
If you go back to hunter-gatherer times, how we evolved, we basically worked for ourselves.
We communicated and cooperated within tribes, but each hunter, each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit.
But there was no boss hierarchy, hierarchy, hierarchy, where you're like the third middle manager down.
In the farming age, we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms, but even those were still mostly family farms.
It's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up.
The reality is if you have to go, I don't care how rich you are, I don't care whether you're like a top Wall Street banker, If you have to go, if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave, you're not a free person.
You're not actually rich.
So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs.
And intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else.
But the information age is breaking that down.
So Ronald Coase is an economist who has this Coase theorem, very famous theorem, but it basically just talks about why is a company the size that it is?
Why is a company one person instead of 10 people, instead of 100, instead of 1,000?
And it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the external transaction costs.
Let's say I want to do something.
Let's say I'm building a house and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber.
I'm a developer, right?
Do I want that to be part of my company or do I want that to be an external provider?
A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally.
If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally, I'll bring that in-house.
If it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing, I'd rather keep it out of the house.
Well, information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally.
It's becoming much easier to communicate with people.
Gig economy.
I can send you small amounts of money.
I can hire you through an app.
I can rate you afterwards.
So we're seeing an atomization of the firm.
We're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking.
It's most obvious in Silicon Valley.
Tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets.
So what looked like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb.
But what I think we're going to see is whether it's 10, 20, 50, 100 years from now, high-quality work will be available.
We're not talking about driving an Uber.
We're talking about super high-quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning, your phone will buzz, and you'll have five different jobs from people who have worked with you in the past or have been referred to.
It's kind of like how Hollywood already works a little bit with how they organize for a project.
You decide whether to take the project or not.
The contract is right there on the spot.
You get paid a certain amount.
You get rated every day or every week.
You get the money delivered.
And then when you're done working, you turn it off and you go to Tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months.
And I think the smart people have already started figuring out that the internet enables this.
And they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own schedule, on their own time, on their own place, with their own friends, in their own way.
And that's actually how we are the most productive.
So the information revolution, by making it easier to communicate, connect, and cooperate, is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves.
And that is my ultimate dream.
Even when I run a company and I have employees, I always tell those people, hey, I'm going to help you start your company when you're ready, because I think that's the highest calling.
Maybe not everybody will get there, but it would be fine if we were...
Even working in a 10-person company or a 20-person company is way better than working in a 1,000-person company or a 10,000-person company.
So this idea that we're all factory-like cogs in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by rote memorization or instruction is going to go away, and we're going to go back to being small groups of creative bands of individuals setting out to do missions.
And when those missions are done, we collect our money, we get raided, and then we rest And reassess until we're ready for the next sprint.
The smaller the company, the happier you're going to be, the more human your relations are, the less you have rules to operate under, the more flexible, the more creative, the more you be treated like a human just because you're able to do multiple things.
This brings me to what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income with the oncoming apocalypse of automation.
This is how it's being portrayed by Andrew Yang, who's running for president.
I sat down and talked with him about it.
It's very compelling.
And he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself.
And when he starts talking about automation and how it's going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded, I know you're a guy who thinks about the future.
And what it does is it frees people up for new creative work.
So the question is not, is automation going to eliminate jobs?
There is no finite number of jobs.
We're not like sitting around dividing up the same jobs that were around since the Stone Age.
So obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better jobs, more creative jobs.
So the question is, how quickly is this transition going to happen?
And what kinds of jobs will be eliminated and what kinds of jobs will be created?
Okay.
It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created.
If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job, or that playing video games is going to be a job, or commentating on video games is going to be a job, you would have laughed me out of the room.
Those are nonsense jobs, but yet here we are.
So society will always create new jobs.
Civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are.
So the question is, how quickly is that transition happening?
Well, the reality is, even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment.
The question is, how quickly can you retrain people?
So it's an education problem.
The problem with UBI, there's a couple of problems with UBI. One is, you're creating a straight...
You're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism, right?
The moment people can start voting themselves money combined with a democracy, it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves or everything in the top 49. And by the way, slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy.
I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through.
But the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically doing it with capitalism, which is the engine of economic growth.
You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here.
The estimate I saw for 15K a year basic income for everybody would be three quarters of current GDP.
And of course, GDP would shrink in response as all the entrepreneurs fled.
So you would essentially bankrupt the country.
Another issue with UBI is that people who are down in their luck, they're not looking for handouts.
It's not just about money.
It's also about status.
It's about meaning.
And the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the dole, I've lowered your status.
I've made you a second-class citizen.
So I have to give you meaning.
And meaning comes through education and capability.
You have to teach a man to fish, not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say, here, eat the scraps.
So it doesn't solve the meaning problem.
And lastly, it's nonsense to hand 15K out to everybody.
You want to means test people.
There's no reason to give it to you and me.
So you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't.
So I think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have, and we provide those in abundance to technology-based automation.
So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high-speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket.
Those are the kinds of things you want to give people.
And finally, in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly.
One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated.
We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college and you're done.
No more education.
Well, that's wrong.
You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up.
They're ones that will even pay you to go there now.
You can educate people en masse, and you can educate them into creative professions.
People who are talking about AI automating programming have never really written serious code.
Coding is thinking.
It's automatic structure thinking.
an AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world that's end game that's the end of the human species and I can give you arguments why I don't think that's coming either people who are thinking and I know I take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate but we're nowhere near close to general AI not in our lifetimes you don't have to worry about it even in our lifetimes Really?
It's so overblown.
It's a combination of Cassandra complex.
It's fun to talk about the end of the world combined with a God complex, like people who have lost religion, so they're looking for meaning and some kind of end of history.
Right, right. right.
First, we don't know how the brain works at all.
Number two, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain.
Number three, there's this assumption that all of the computation is going at the cellular level, at the neuron level, whereas nature is very parsimonious.
It uses everything at its disposal.
There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent, that isn't accounted for.
And the best estimates are it would take 50 years of Moore's Law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly and probably 100 years before we can build a brain that can simulate inside the cells.
So putting it at saying that I'm just going to model neuron as on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic.
Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence.
Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in.
So you have to evolve an environment around it.
So I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them.
I haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general AI. Instead, we're solving deterministic, closed-set, finite problems using large amounts of data.
It's also a part of the biological organism itself, and it has all these needs that, you know, the biological organism has to have food and rest, and there's a balance going on.
But when you eliminate all that, when there is none of that, and it's just calculations, And we get to a point where it's just this thing that we've created, whether you call it a computer, whether it doesn't have to be a moving thing even, but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world, Stores all the patterns of all the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived.
All the writers, all the people that have ever published anything, all the people that have ever spoken any words.
Stores all of their points, all of their counterpoints, all their contradictions.
Applies logic and reason and some sort of sense of the future.
And starts improving upon these patterns.
And then starts acting on its own.
Based on the information that it's been provided with.
So we've got this three-pound wetware object that can hold all this data.
Nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there.
I just don't think computers are anywhere close to that.
Like they can hold that amount of data with that complexity, with like the holographic structure of the brain where it can recall in many, many different ways.
And then, I don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the boundaries of feedback in a real medium.
Like, if you raised a human being in a concrete cell with no input from the outside, they wouldn't have any feedback from the real world.
They wouldn't evolve properly.
So I think just dumping information into a thing isn't enough.
It has to have an environment to operate in to get feedback from.
I mean, if you have just all the information that people have accumulated, and the lessons that people have learned, and you program that into the computer.
Like, if we can take a computer that can beat someone at chess, the real question was, well, can we make some sort of an artificial intelligence that can beat someone at Go, which is far more complex than chess?
I mean, heck, if I was not working and I was getting my 15 a year, I would happily vote for the guy who would give me 20 or 25. It's just common sense.
I think that crony capitalism is a problem with the government, you know, kind of gets in bed with them and sort of forces things.
I think the bankers have really, you know, raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it.
Yeah, they've essentially taken huge risks where they privatized the gains and they socialized the losses.
So when it fails, they basically get bailed out and bankrupt everybody else.
So capitalism has gotten a really bad name.
Let's talk about it as free exchange, free markets.
Free markets and free exchange are intrinsic to humans.
From when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said, hey, if I cook my deer on your fire, I'll share some of it with you, right?
So specialization of labor, we trade.
That's built into the human species.
Basic math comes from accounting, keeping track of debts and credits and so on.
We need to be able to engage in free trade.
The correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal opportunity.
And so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity.
But people confuse that with equal outcome.
When you have equal outcome, that can only be enforced through violence because different people, free people make different choices.
And when they make different choices, they have different outcomes.
And if you don't let them suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices, then you are forcibly redistributing through violence.
It's interesting that there are no socialist, working socialist examples that exist without violence.
You basically need someone to show up with a gun and say, okay, you're not allowed to do that.
You hand this over to that person.
So one of the reasons why I do this podcast is because I believe everybody can be wealthy.
Everybody.
It's not a zero-sum game.
It is a positive-sum game.
You create something brand new.
You exchange it with me for something brand new.
I've created this higher utility for both of us.
the sum of the value created is positive.
It's not like status where it's like, you're higher up, I'm lower down.
You're president, so I must be vice president.
You're a plus one, I'm a minus one, and has to cancel the zero.
We should be all for playing positive, some ethical games.
The problem is because of these looters who have ruined capitalism's name, that then you get socialists coming in and saying, burn the whole system down.
You burn the whole system down, we end up like Venezuela or the former Soviet Union.
You don't want to be a failed socialist state with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat.
That's literally what happens in some of these places.
So I think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that brought us here.
I think really socialism comes from the heart, right?
We all want to be socialist.
Capitalism comes from the head because there are always cheaters in any system.
And there's incentives in any system.
So when you're young, if you're not a socialist, you have no heart.
When you're older, if you're not a capitalist, you have no head, right?
You haven't thought it through.
So I understand where it comes from.
I always liked Nassim Taleb's framing on this, where he said, with my family, I'm a communist.
With my close friends, I'm a socialist.
At my state level politics, I'm a democrat.
At higher levels, I'm a republican.
And at the federal level, I'm a libertarian, right?
So basically, the larger the group of people you have massed together, who have different interests, the less trust there is, the more cheating there is, the better the incentives have to be aligned, the better the system has to work, the more you go towards capitalism.
The smaller the group you're in, you're in a kibbutz, you're in your commune, you're in your house, you're in your tribe, by all means be a socialist.
With my aunts, with my brother, with my cousins, with my uncles, with my mom, with my family.
I'm a socialist.
That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life.
But when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you want to be a real socialist?
And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices.
Now, again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem.
So society should always try to give people equal opportunities.
So, for example, instead of basic income, what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric, which said that Every four years or every six years or whatever it is, maybe it's every ten, you can take one year out and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely.
And you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output, hopefully a creative long-term profession, and you can re-educate yourself.
That would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying, now you're going to be the dole for the rest of your life.
Well, it's a very weird progressive argument, and as it pertains to race is always a weird one, right?
Because white privilege, to me, although you could look at what they're saying on paper, like, yes, yeah, I'm sure there's more black people that are harassed by the police.
I'm sure there's more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like.
But the problem isn't the people who aren't treated poorly.
The problem is the people who treat the people poorly.
The problem is racism.
The problem is not people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed.
So this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is, that's not the problem.
You're just looking at someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting.
But you're not looking at the perpetrators of the problem.
You're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in their skin or having their ancestors come from a geographical location.
Well, it's also a side effect of the ability to broadcast, right?
Like everyone with a Twitter handle has the ability to broadcast.
Everyone with a Facebook page has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling messages.
These huge statements that people put out, when you read them, it's like, how much time did you put in this?
Do you put that much time in your kids?
Or your job, or your life, or your future, or planning for your, you know, how much do you work out a day?
I mean, are you just, these, I read some people's Facebook posts, I'm like, this is a preposterous amount of effort that you put into saying virtually nothing.
Because it's creative in that they're trying to elicit a response from people and they're trying to raise their social value or raise their position on the social totem pole.
It's signaling and it's easy signaling because it's the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody wants to be seen as a horrible person.
And it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against than it is to just kind of go along.
I wonder, because it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we have with whether you have a YouTube page or whether you have Twitter or whatever you're doing, this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little understanding I think it's actually a great thing overall.
Because now it means that any human can broadcast to any other human on the planet at any time.
So, for example, if, you know, a totalitarian dictator were to come to power and someone was beating up, you know, had fascists beating up on old women, like, that would get broadcast out instantly.
There would be an instant outrage hue and cry rallying.
So, in that sense, it Right now we're going through the phase where we have this newfound power to assemble mobs and people don't know how to deal with that.
So it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody, take all the context out.
Like even this conversation, I'm sure people will take out snippets, put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged.
And so you have to learn how, first of all, society just has to get over this idea of outrage.
Like to me, like, outrage people, people who get easily outraged are the stupidest people on social media.
Those are the people I block instantly.
It's just kind of very low-level thinking, right?
These are the foot soldiers in a mob.
Eventually, society just has to get over it.
They have to understand that these are all snippets being taken out of context.
These are doctored video clips.
These are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something.
Eventually, there will also be anti-mob tactics.
Like, for example, if I go to someone's Twitter feed and all it is is full of political ranting, raving, conspiracy theories, do I want to work with this person?
Do I want to associate with this person?
Do I want to be friends with this person?
Their mind is just cluttered with junk.
Now, I don't necessarily blame them.
I think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all the world's breaking news 24-7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news.
If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you're well-meaning, even if you're sound of mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane.
This goes back to Clockwork Orange, where he has his eyes opened up and he's forced to watch the news.
But I think that's what's happening right now because these are addictive, right?
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, these are weaponized.
You have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats, literally, Best minds of our generation are figuring out how to addict you to the news.
And if you fall for it, if you get addicted, your brain will get destroyed.
And I think this is the modern struggle.
The modern struggle.
So the ancient struggle used to be the tribal struggle.
You had your tribe of friends and family.
You had your religion.
You had your country.
You had your loyalty.
You had your nationality.
At least you had meaning and support, but now you would struggle against other tribes.
Modern life, we're so free, everything's become atomized.
We stand alone.
You live in your apartment alone.
You live in your house alone.
Your parents don't live nearby.
Your friends don't live nearby.
You don't have any tribal meaning.
You don't believe in religion anymore.
You don't believe in country anymore.
It's fine.
You got a lot of freedom.
It's fantastic.
But now, when they come to attack you, you're alone and you can't resist.
So how do they attack you?
It's all well-meaning.
I don't fault capitalism.
I love capitalism.
But look at how it happens.
Social media, they've massaged all the mechanisms to addict you, like a skinner pigeon or a rat who's just going to click, click, click, click, click, can't put the phone down.
Food, they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it.
They've put it into all these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating.
Drugs, right?
They've taken pharmaceuticals and plants and they've synthesized them.
They've grown them in such a way that you get addicted.
You can't put them down.
Porn, right?
If you're a young male and you wander around the internet, it'll like sap away your libido and you're not going out in real life society anymore because you've got this incredibly stimulating stuff coming at you.
Video games, another way to addict people.
So you have this...
You have entire...
Large factories of people that are working to addict you to these things and you stand alone.
So the modern struggle as an individual is learning how to resist these things in the first place, drawing your own boundaries, and there's no one there to help you.
I hope too because you're seeing some ridiculous behavior from people today that's so common.
I mean, I don't know if you've been paying attention to this, but there was a guy who – He made a video.
It turns out it wasn't even him that made the video, at least that's not what he said, but it was a video where he sort of doctored Nancy Pelosi talking and made it look like she was drunk.
And then a bunch of people retweeted it, like, oh my god, look, she's drunk.
And so one of the online publications, some website, tracked him down and doxxed him.
And it turned out he's just a day laborer who is an African American Trump fan.
And thought it would be funny to do that, and it turns out that he didn't even, at least according to him, he actually just put it up on his Facebook page.
What's even more disturbing is Facebook gave up his information to this website.
For what?
Because he made something funny that made people seem drunk?
That was a stunning one, though, that they would give up this guy who's a laborer because he made a parody video or he made someone look foolish with editing.
Yeah, I use media with air quotes in that regard because I don't think this is something that the New York Times would have done or anything responsible.
But the media is getting more and more desperate, right?
Because what happened was before the internet, you could have two local newspapers in every town and you could have two local news stations, you know, TV stations in every town.
And then CNN came along and started commoditizing the news 24-7 broadcasts.
And then the internet came along.
That was the final nail in the coffin.
Because what the internet did was it said, actually, if there's a fact that's news, you can distribute that immediately.
It can go on Twitter.
It can go on Facebook.
It gets reprinted on Google News a thousand times.
You know, you go on Google News, you're like, okay, what's the piece of news?
Which source?
And 3,000 other articles.
Too many, right?
So news has become commoditized.
So the entire news media has shifted into peddling opinions and entertainment.
And so now they've become...
A variation between cheerleaders, shock troops, enforcers, talking heads.
These are now propaganda machines signaling for their tribes.
There's a right-wing one, there's a left-wing one.
There's the alt-right, there's a control-left, and the two of them are just fighting it out using their various media organs and memes.
So, basically, when you see one of these news organizations doxing an individual, that's like a tank running over a soldier.
That's what's going on.
It's just war.
And so, there's no such thing anymore as a neutral media commentator.
The illusion of objectivity that journalism had is lost.
There's no longer one guy like a Walter Cronkite that everyone's going to listen to.
It's now all just shock troops fighting wars with each other.
So what the internet does, a lot of this is internet driven.
What the internet does is the internet creates one giant aggregator or two for everything.
One taxi dispatcher, one e-commerce store, one search engine.
One, you know, one social media site for friends and family, one for business, etc.
So the internet is this giant aggregator where it creates one big hegemon for everything.
And it creates an atomized long tail of millions and millions of individuals.
What it gets rid of is the medium-sized ones in the middle.
So, for example, you might have had like seven Hollywood studios.
Well, it's all going to be Netflix.
You had, you know, like 10 large e-commerce players from Walmart to Costco to, you know, Kmart and whatever.
Now it's just going to be Amazon and a ton of small individual brands.
So that's the world that we're headed towards.
One hegemon and millions of individuals.
So where it ends up long term is media will be a few gigantic outlets.
You know, it could be the New York Times, it could be Facebook, a few like that.
And there's going to be just a really long tail of millions of independent people.
So this idea of who's a journalist and who's not, you know, is Assange a journalist or not?
Everyone's a journalist.
That's the world that we're headed towards.
I do think that extreme power, the most powerful people in the world today, and this is not well known, but the most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram.
Because they're controlling the spread of information.
They're literally rewriting people's brains.
They're programming the culture.
And they're doing it very subtly.
Like Google, I believe that, you know, one of their execs got up in front of Congress and The Congressman asked him, you know, do you manipulate search results?
And he said, no, we do not manipulate search results.
Really?
That's your job.
That is literally all Google does.
Google has one job, which is to manipulate search results, to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly.
And the precise algorithms of how they do that is very hidden, very complex, but influences the hearts and minds of everybody, including all the voters.
Now, if Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides.
They would have said, we're publishers, whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes.
If it's illegal, we'll take it down, give us a court order, otherwise we don't touch it.
It's like the phone company.
If I call you up and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble.
But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier.
And now all of a sudden, they've taken on liability.
So they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies.
Traditionally, the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't.
So my guess is, as soon as Congress, and this day is coming, if not already here, it might have even been here today, actually, because I saw something related in the news.
The day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman.
They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government.
Yeah, there's a little saying on the internet, I think it's called conquest law, that any organization that's not explicitly right-wing eventually becomes left-wing.
And I don't know why that's true, but it does seem to me to be true.
What will eventually happen is that whenever you suppress speech, The organism metastasizes.
Then it has to start turning towards other means.
If you're unlucky, it goes towards violence.
If you're lucky, they find other outlets.
I think what will happen is we will start creating decentralized media that's not owned by any single entity that can't be suppressed or shut down that will then start spreading these various things.
Well, you know, Twitter took 10 years to get to the point where it's at this mess right now.
But it was so interesting to have Jack Dorsey and to talk to him about where it's going, where he thinks it's going, and his own principles, which he believes that it's a fundamental right, and he believes that freedom of speech is something that we all should have, and that these...
Platforms should essentially be like utilities, like the electric company.
I mean, I think there's certainly lines around violence and illegality that you don't want to cross, but Gab is closer to a free speech platform, but it's still not decentralized.
Well, this is unfortunate for conservatives, but technology is a force that also pushes left.
So if you look all throughout human history, like the left essentially grows and grows and grows, right?
Why is that?
Why is it inexorably that...
As some commentators have said, Leviathan slouches left.
Leviathan is the government.
Why does this slouch left?
And I think a lot of that has been because of technology.
Technology has made it so that it makes more like industrial revolution technology.
We all band together.
We're wards of the state, right?
Contraception is a technology that kind of helps lean leftward.
It takes away from the family unit.
Abortion is a technology.
It wasn't possible thousands of years ago.
So technology actually empowers the individual.
The individual means that you have the breakdown of family structure and religion and all that, and I'm not necessarily opposed to that, but it does mean that there's a leftward shift to it.
Now we're getting a small set of technologies that actually can take you more rightward.
Encryption is an example, because encryption makes it easier to have privacy.
It makes it easier to have money that is outside of the state.
Guns, 3D printing of guns is an example of a technology that is more of a rightward shift.
What happened with universities is very interesting.
Universities first became the arbiters of data and intellectualism and what's right and wrong.
So there's a time period when it was like, should we be doing that or not?
Well, let's look at the university.
What do they have to say?
What are the smartest people, the professors, the think tanks have to say?
And the universities got this credibility from the hard sciences.
So they got this from...
You know, physics and math and computer science and chemistry because these deliver real things.
The Manhattan Project, the microprocessor, the space vehicles and so on, the electric car.
So they gain this mantle of authority and legitimacy from the hard sciences.
So then come the social sciences kind of sneak in.
Then you get economics.
And microeconomics is a real discipline, real science, real math behind it, logic, reason.
And then you get macroeconomics, which can be politicized a little bit more voodoo.
And then you get social studies, and then you get gender studies, and then you get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so what happened is that because we took scientists to be the high priests of our new world, science itself has gotten corrupted.
And the social sciences, and you can tell they're fake sciences because they have the word science tacked on at the end, have come in and hijacked the universities and become the new think tanks.
And so essentially what you see going on today in the universities is a war between the social sciences and the physical sciences.
And the crossover point is biology.
Where you can see the whole gender is a social construct movement is attacking biology and evolutionary biology.
Just like in the social sphere, they're coming after the comedians.
But you can see the struggle going on in the universities.
And I would say the physical sciences are essentially losing that war.
Yeah, but at the end of the day, your aircraft still has to fly.
You know, your microprocessor still has to compute.
So there's only so far they can take it.
But I do see, for example, in biology, a lot of biologists are facing this difficult thing where they have to say things that they know are not true to keep their job.
Whereas on the right, sometimes you've got racist hiding in there, so it doesn't help their cause.
They're talking about two different things.
If they were talking about the same thing, which is how many immigrants should we let into the country and what are the criteria for that, that would be a very different conversation than no immigrants or everybody comes in.
And then also on the left, you have this benefit that everybody who's currently coming in illegally is going to vote for the left because of where they're coming from and their socioeconomic circumstances.
To me, the test of any good system is you build a system, hand it over to your enemies to run for the next decade.
So for example, if you want a censorship on Twitter or Facebook, you should build that system and then hand it over to the other side to run.
So if you're a left-winger who's promoting censorship, let somebody else run it.
Same with immigration.
If you want an immigration system, build the system, then hand it over to the other side to run it.
There's no room for nuance when you're dealing with these political battlegrounds, when you're dealing with right versus left and one side has a clearly established stance that you're supposed to take.
Gun control is a great example of that, right?
There's no room for what about mental health?
What about the fact that so many of these people are on psych medications?
Oh, I do it, and I do it whenever I get, like, spare time.
I was at the doctor's office this morning, and I knew it was going to be 20 minutes, so I just sat there with my eyes closed for 20 minutes, and I meditated.
You know, when I was growing up, there was this statement, I think it was Pascal, he said, you know, all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone.
And it's very true.
I always needed to be stimulated.
And when the iPhone came along, boredom was dead.
I would never be bored again.
Even if I'm standing in line, I'm on my iPhone.
And I thought it was great.
And when I was a kid, I used to try and overclock my brain.
Like, how many thoughts can I think at once?
The answer is only one.
But I would try to think multiple thoughts at once.
And I was proud of that.
I was proud that my brain was always running.
This engine was always moving.
And it's a disease.
It's actually the road to misery.
And now that I'm older, I realize you actually want to, again, rest your mind.
You want to learn how to settle into your mind.
Now, I look forward to solitary confinement.
You leave me alone for a day, it'll be like the happiest day I've had in a while.
And that is a superpower that I think everybody can attain.
Well, I think it's critical, and I do think that these times where you just think about things, just be alone and think about things, are so rare these days.
And I think during those rare times is when you really get to understand what you actually believe or don't believe.
When I first started meditating, it was really hard, right?
I think a lot of people who listen to this broadcast have heard of meditation.
It has a good rep, so everybody tries it.
They struggle.
They kind of give it up.
It's one of those things that everybody says they do, but nobody actually does, right?
It's like not eating sugar, right?
Everyone talks about how, yeah, I don't eat sugar, but like, yeah, then the dessert tray rolls around and everyone's going for the cookies, right?
So it's become one of those things.
And in fact, it's now even become a signaling thing where it's like, oh, how much did you meditate?
I meditated this much.
Or, you know, there are people now wearing headbands saying with tweety birds that chirp and then when they're in deep meditation, I don't know.
I don't know how they make it work, but they'll be like, I got a lot of chirps today.
How many chirps did you get?
Oh, your meditation technique is wrong.
Mine is right.
But really, all it is is the art of doing nothing.
And it's important because I think when we grow up, it's all this stuff happening to you in your life.
And some of it you're processing, some of it you're absorbing, and some of it You should probably think a little bit more about and work through, but you don't.
You don't have time.
So it gets buried in you.
And it's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues.
And it's like your email inbox.
It's just piling up, email after email after email that's not answered, going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years.
And then when you sit down to meditate, those emails start coming back at you.
Hey, what about this issue?
What about that issue?
Have you solved this?
Did you think about that?
You have regrets there?
You have issues there?
And that gets scary.
People don't want to do that.
It's not working.
I can't clear my mind.
I better get up and not do this.
But really what's happening is it's self-therapy.
It's just that instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you're listening to yourself.
And you just have to sit there as those emails go through one by one.
You work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero.
And there comes a day when you sit down, you realize the only things you're thinking about are things that happened yesterday.
Because you've processed everything else.
Not necessarily even resolved it, but at least listened to yourself.
And that's when meditation starts.
And I think it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience.
And that's when you arrive upon the art of doing nothing.
Or when the chatter comes, it's in the background, it's dimmer, it's smaller, you've heard it before, you see the patterns, it's more recent, it's something you need to resolve anyway, and you will get moments of actual silence.
It's kind of indescribable because when you're really meditating, you're not there.
When there's no thoughts, there's no experience or there's nothing.
There's just nothing.
So it's hard to describe, but I would say that every psychedelic state that people encounter using so-called plant medicines can be arrived at just through pure meditation.
And in fact, I would say that's also like an experience that you can start craving, which will then actually take you out of meditation.
Where you really, and I'm not enlightened or anything close to it, so not even the ballpark, but my own experience, and this is just personal experience, is the place where I end up the most that is really the one that I want to be at is peace.
All these people who are shouting on social media, the best way is just to actually live the life that you want other people to live.
I went out in New Zealand, and there's this guy that I met with.
You know, everyone's on social media shouting about environmentalism and conserve and sustain.
And I go to this guy's house and he was doing a, very quietly, very gently, he was doing a two-week long zero-waste experiment where he was throwing out nothing.
So every package that he opened, he would keep.
And he would like clean it up.
So he would keep his Amazon boxes.
He would keep the little containers.
Even a tea bag.
If he opened a tea bag, he has to figure out how to compost the tea inside, how to make the tea itself useful, how to make the tea bag like a little storage item.
So there was no trash.
He was literally living with zero trash waste.
And he was doing it.
And it was really inspirational.
Meeting people like him made me far more environmentally conscious than, you know, any amount of people yelling at me on social media ever will.
You know, the struggle with the modern environmental movement is that they identify the correct problem, which is finite earth, spaceship earth, this is all we've got, don't ruin it.
But they don't have the solution.
So what they say is no growth, no growth, no growth.
Well, the problem is you got 3 billion Indian and Chinese who aren't going to stay in poverty.
They're going to grow whether you like it or not.
So you can yell at them, you can scream at them, you can yell at us and scream at us, but that's not going to happen.
So the only way out, unfortunately, is again through technology, which is you have to build green technology.
And I give Musk a lot of credit for being one of the few people who's out there trying to do that.
So you build things that are biodegradable and good for you and healthier and healthier.
Everybody wants to be healthier.
Chinese want to be healthier.
Indians want to be healthier.
They want to be cleaner.
If you say, I can clean up your rivers, I can clean up your forests, I can have your children not get sick with cholera and diphtheria and typhoid.
I can cure your diseases.
I can help make your immune system stronger.
I can give you clean drinking water.
That is what causes people to become environmentalists, not shouting and screaming at them that they shouldn't grow and they should stop pumping things into the sky.
They have no concept of that.
They're just trying to get out of poverty.
So I think the modern environmental movement identifies the correct problem, but then doesn't come up with the right set of solutions that are appealing to people.
Yeah, there's a new technology that was just – Rhonda Patrick had it on her Twitter today about they're able to convert plastic waste into fuel and that there's companies that are actively trying to do that now.
So then in that way, plastic waste will become valuable.
So there you kind of have to step in with other means.
So for example, look at the Amazon, right?
Everyone's complaining about the Amazon being deforested.
Well, you're not the poor Brazilian farmer, right?
So you're sitting here in your comfortable chair like social media hammering away at the evil Brazilians for deforesting the Amazon.
The Amazon has incredible resources.
If we really care about it, we should turn it into an incredible tourist park and put your money where your mouth is, start doing ecotourism in the Amazon, start paying for it, and then maybe take the future rights for all the pharmaceuticals that are going to come out of all the incredible plants there and start selling those off.
So that people, so that maybe give the pharmaceutical companies an incentive to preserve the biodiversity of the Amazon.
Say, hey, if you buy this patch of the Amazon, you conserve it, and you conserve it, whatever plant medicines that come out of there that you can then license, you get the patent for 20 years or 30 years or whatever.
So I think there are solutions where we, as the first worlders who have money, can put our money where our mouth is and go and rescue these kinds of properties.
That's a very interesting solution, but I could see immediate pushback from people that don't think the pharmaceutical companies should have the rights to this natural plant.
Obviously, I skew more towards a private property capitalist type solution because even though they're not perfect, they have been proven to actually work.
Once something is your property, you take care of it.
You're not going to crap all over your own house.
But it should probably be temporary property, not permanent property.
You see a lot of countries around the world now doing this no foreign ownership of land thing, for example.
Or Mexico has no private ownership of beaches, right?
I'm not trying to illuminate so much as, you know, talking to you I learn as much as I do.
And I learned it for myself because I'm being forced to articulate it.
I can sit around and think my thoughts all day long, but a lot of it's going to be nonsense.
Because there are gaps in thinking where you make leaps because you're kind to yourself that you don't realize you're making.
But when you're forced to write it down, and this is why I tweet, or when you have to talk to somebody, you have to complete those gaps and make it a proper logical chain.
And the mistake that I made when I was young was, you know, I always wanted to seem like the smartest kid in the room.
You know, like just like you probably want to seem like the funniest kid in the room or the toughest kid in the room, right?
We're all losers starting out.
We want to be winners.
So we pick the thing we're good at and we double down on it.
So I always wanted to be the smartest kid in the room.
So what did I do?
I read a lot of books.
I memorized a lot of things.
And then whatever I hadn't memorized is pre-Google.
I made it up.
So it sounded good.
Okay.
Pre-Google.
After Google, fact-checking started and I had to get better, right?
So now what I realize is that the biggest mistake was memorization, right?
Because when you're actually trying to live your life in congruence with reality, you want to have a deep understanding of what you do and why you do it.
And so it's much more important to know the basics really well than is to know the advanced.
But knowing arithmetic really well will help you really.
Whether it's at the corner grocery store counting change to figuring out the value of your podcast business to figuring out how to do the probability math on some action that you want to take.
So, understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts.
And the problem is, and this is true of I think all reasoning, it's much better to know the basics from the ground up, solid foundation of understanding, a steel frame of understanding than it is to just have a scaffolding where you're just memorizing advanced concepts.
This is why there are a lot of people I'm sure that you listen to who are really smart.
They use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning.
You don't know how they're putting things together and you have this deep down suspicion they don't even really understand.
So if you look at the most powerful thinkers, especially the ones where money or life is on the line, They have to understand the basics really, really well.
Richard Feynman, the famous physicist, was able to – he had this piece in one of his lectures where he takes you from counting numbers on your hand all the way to calculus in four pages of text, orally, but written down as four pages of text.
And it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, analytic geometry, graphs, everything, all the way to calculus.
He understood numbers at a core level.
He didn't have to memorize anything.
When you're memorizing, it's an indication that you don't understand.
You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot.
But if you can't, and this is where Twitter is great for me, is I try to understand something, and then I try to write it down in such a way that I can remember it.
Just the basic hook that'll point towards the deeper understanding, and I'm forced to explain it to people.
And that's how I know I understand something.
So this is what I meant originally when we talked about reading.
A good book, I'll read one page in a night, and then I spend the rest of the night thinking about it, or I'm chasing down references on Wikipedia or weird blog posts trying to understand it.
You know, so for example, there was a, I was dealing with, this is a few months back, I was dealing with a question of, stupid topic, but the meaning of life.
And you have this feeling that it could be meaningless.
It is...
I mean, if you...
When you start pondering the...
The multiverse, the universe, the galaxies, the solar system, the planet, the organism, the cells inside the organism, the bacteria, the parasites, the symbiotic relationship we have to our environment.
And you start going, Jesus Christ, am I just a little piece of this thing?
Well, the answers to all the great questions are paradoxes.
So, for example, you're asking, do I matter?
That's really the question you asked, right?
How do I matter in this infinite universe?
On the one hand, you're separate.
No two points are the same.
Every two points are infinitely different.
You're completely separated.
No one will have your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your experience.
So your life is a single-player game.
You're trapped inside your head, and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on, and that's it.
On the other hand...
I cannot say the word Joe Rogan without invoking the entire universe.
Alien comes along and says, what's that?
Joe Rogan.
What's Joe Rogan?
It's a human.
What's a human?
Bipedal ape.
What's an ape on the earth?
What's the earth planet?
What's a planet?
Solar system.
Where was the carbon made?
Inside stars, right?
I have to create the entire universe to just say the words Joe Rogan.
So in that sense, you're connected to everything.
It's inseparable.
So the answer to that question of do I matter is I am nothing and I am everything.
And you'll find this with all the great questions.
The answers are all paradoxes, which is why at some level it's sort of pointless to pursue them, to find a trite answer like I'm giving.
But the act of pursuing them is actually really useful because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace.
So everything that I've ever created on this topic of how to make money, I will never charge a dollar for.
Because that would ruin it.
That would show that I'm just another huckster who's trying to get rich off of you.
There are no get-rich-quick schemes.
That's just somebody else trying to get rich off of you, right?
So to me, it's more of a philosophical contribution where for it to have meaning and to be legit, I can't charge you anything for it.
But yes, everybody can be rich.
And let me give you a thought exercise, okay?
Imagine if tomorrow we could wave a wand, And everybody was trained as a scientist or an engineer.
Everybody.
Even if you weren't very good.
You had enough understanding of computers.
You could write some code.
You could build some hardware.
And don't tell me people can't do it.
Because they can.
That's just a tyranny of soft expectations.
That's just you looking down on somebody else.
They can't do it.
They just have to be educated.
Now, if they're educated all as hardware, software, engineers, scientists, biologists, technicians, hard sciences, not the social sciences, We would all be done within five years.
Robots would be doing everything from cleaning toilets to cooking food to flying airplanes to driving Ubers.
And what would we be doing?
We would be doing all creative jobs to entertain each other and researching science and technology.
We would have wonderful lives.
So it is really just a question of education, nothing else.
The problem with nuclear fission is that nature creates energy through nuclear energy.
The sun creates energy, nuclear energy.
Now, for transmission, we use photons because photons don't interact.
And so photons are great for information transmission, but they're actually not great for energy transmission.
For energy creation...
You want nuclear to work.
And the problem is because nuclear energy, you know, we built it with a bomb, we have dirty nukes, all those kinds of problems.
We have Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl.
We don't innovate anymore on nukes.
Imagine if when the first steam engine blew up, we said, oh, no more steam engines for a while, or very carefully regulated billion dollars of regulation.
You can't innovate that way.
When the first airplane crashed, we said, no more innovation in airplanes, right?
So we need a way to iterate on nuclear fission and eventually fusion and get them working safely, cleanly, passive failure, etc., if we're going to find our way out of the energy trap.
And the best place to do that is someplace like on the Moon or Mars.
They do now have Gen 4 nuclear reactors that are passive fail-safe.
So, in other words, when they fail, they fail into a… When you pull the plug on them, they fail into a state where there's no leakage, there's no problem.
Right.
Is a positive outcome as opposed to the current ones, the old ones, where if you unplug them...
I mean, in an ideal world, the problem is if you have nuclear energy on the moon, how do you get it home?
Right.
So what you actually got to do is you got to rev it on the moon and you're using it there maybe to launch more satellites, more rockets further out into the solar system.
And that's the initial use case.
But then eventually the technology gets so good you can bring it home.
Now, I want to go back to this idea of getting people rich, that somehow or another that's going to make people happy.
How do you stop the natural progression that people have of, you know, oh, you know, I've got a nice Chevrolet, but I really want a BMW. I've got a nice BMW, but now I want a Mercedes.
It comes from if you're smart, it's usually because you thought things through and you have a very busy mind.
And so busy mind can often rob you of peace of mind.
Because the peace that we seek is not peace of mind, it's peace from mind.
So if you look at all the crazy activities you do to be happy, whether it's like trying to get laid and have an orgasm, or extreme sports, or looking at something beautiful, or taking a psychedelic, you're trying to get out of your own mind.
You're trying to get your monkey mind to stop chattering at you for a moment.
You're trying to get peace from the mind.
And there are other better ways to do that.
Most of the ways we try to get peace from mind are indirect.
Whereas if you understand things, if you see things properly, you will naturally slowly develop peace from mind.
It's a good tangent because I think that oftentimes the pursuit is what's thrilling to people and the possibility that one day they'll be able to rest and that they'll reach this goal.
But when people look at, particularly social media, let's bring it back to that, when you see someone who, you know, you see them posed in front of their mansion with their beautiful car and they're leaning against it with their designer clothes on, their expensive watch, you go, ah, I want that.
So people, once someone can solve their money problems, either by lowering their lifestyle or by making enough money, and, you know, essentially what you want to get everybody to is retirement.
But not retirement in the, I'm 65 years old, sitting in a nursing home, collecting a check, retirement.
Different definition.
Retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow.
When today is complete in and of itself, you're retired.
And so how do you get there?
Well, one is you can have so much money saved up that just your passive income off of that without you having to lift a finger covers your burn rate.
Keep your burn rate low, right?
A second is you just drive your burn rate down to zero.
You become a monk.
A third is you're doing something you love.
You enjoy it so much.
It's not about the money.
So there are multiple ways to that path.
But the most common is people just say, I need to make more money.
And the kind of wealth creation that I talk about is about creating timeless principles and adapting yourself so that making money won't be an issue.
And you can do it by doing what you love.
We get into this model of, I must work for other people, work my way up the ladder.
I must do what that person is doing to make money.
But really, today in society, you get rewarded for creative work, for creating something brand new that society didn't even know yet that it wanted, that it doesn't know how to get other than through you.
So the most powerful moneymakers are actually individual brands, people like yourself, or Elon, or Kanye, or Oprah, or Trump, right?
These are individual brands, eponymous name brands, who themselves are leveraged, like you're leveraged.
You have podcast media going out to everybody that's leveraged.
The podcasts work for you when you sleep.
They have knowledge that nobody else has, which is your knowledge is the knowledge of being Joe Rogan.
I mean, who else is a UFC fighter and a commentator and a podcaster and a comedian and, you know, interested in all these things and knows all these people?
So because of this unique, what I call specific knowledge, because of the accountability that you have with your name, because of the leverage that you have through your media, you're a money-making machine.
I'm sure at this point I could make you start over tomorrow, wipe out your bank account, you'd be rich again in no time.
Because you have all the skill sets.
So once people have those skill sets, and the beauty is, the way you've done it, is you don't have any competition.
There's no substitution.
If Joe Rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow, it's not like random podcaster number 12 would step in and fill that thing.
No, it's just gone.
So the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic.
The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody.
And you know how to do that better than anybody because you love to do it.
No one can compete with you if you love to do it.
Be authentic.
And then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants.
Apply some leverage.
Put your name on it so you take the risks but you gain the rewards.
Have ownership and equity in what you do and then just crank it out.
I think people have to be very careful to not get trapped along the way with things that you can afford with your current lifestyle, like the way you're living and the way you're earning, but they're also imprisoning you in the fact that you are now going to have to work this 40-hour-a-week job in order to get this thing that you can afford, but now you're saddled down to this job.
You're not saving.
You're not putting things in a good place, and you're working for these things.
Working for things as rewards is a real trap that a lot of people fall into.
Nassim Taleb also says that there are two great addictions, heroin and a monthly salary.
And that's why you can't get rich renting out your time.
because even when you start charging more and more for your time, it's a slow upgrade loop and then you upgrade your house at the same time, you upgrade your car at the same time, you move in the neighborhood.
You really also have to get used to ignoring your peers or upgrading or changing the definition of your peers.
There are a lot of people here who are poor here but they would be rich if they were living living in Thailand and Bali and if they have the luxury of a remotely doable job, they may want to be living there and saving up money.
And then there's a other thing that people have to avoid even allowing their mind to When they're hearing what you're saying and all this logical, fantastic advice, there's these six dirty words, that's easy for you to say.
Yeah, your real resume is just a cataloging of all your suffering.
If I were to ask you to describe your real life to yourself, when you look back on your deathbed, you're going to go back and say, what are the interesting things I've done?
And it's all going to be around the sacrifices that you made and the hard things that you did.
Anything you're given doesn't matter.
You have your four limbs, you have your brain, you have your head, you have your skin.
That's all for granted.
So you have to do hard things anyway to create your own meaning in life.
Making money is a fine one.
Yeah, struggle.
It is hard.
I'm not going to say it's easy.
It's really hard, but the tools are all available.
I started doing things like I would start looking at the, you know, in every moment and everything that happens, you can look on the bright side of something, right?
And so I used to do that forcibly, and then I trained it until it became second nature.
So for example, like a friend of my wife's was over when we were dating, and she took all these photos.
She took like hundreds of photos.
And then she sends them all to us.
And my immediate reaction was like, why are you dumping hundreds of photos on my phone?
I don't need hundreds of photos.
Have some judgment.
That was my immediate reaction.
And then I could say, actually, how nice of her.
She sent me hundreds of photos.
I could pick the one that I like, right?
There are two ways of seeing almost everything.
There are a few things that are like high suffering, so you can't do that other than just saying, well, this is a teacher, right?
But I slowly worked through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive.
And now it's second nature to me.
I also realized that what you want is you want a clear mind.
You want to let go of thoughts.
Happy thoughts disappear out of your head automatically.
Very easy to let go of them.
Negative thoughts linger.
So if you interpret the positive in everything very quickly, you let it go.
You let it go much faster.
Simple hacks get more sunlight.
Learn to smile more.
Learn to hug more.
These things actually release serotonin in reverse.
They aren't just outward signals of being happy.
They're actually feedback loops to being happy.
Spend more time in nature.
You know, these are obvious.
Watch your mind.
Watch your mind all day long.
Watch what it does.
Not judge it.
Not try to control it.
But you can meditate 24-7.
Meditation is not a sit-down, close-your-eyes activity.
Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world.
And say, why am I having that thought?
Does that serve me anymore?
Is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old?
Like, for example, getting ready for this podcast.
Well, all of us start out, you know, everything you're the winner now in your life, it's because you were a loser at some point.
If you had gotten all the girls, if you had all the money, if you had everything you wanted, you were good looking and In junior high or high school, you wouldn't have done anything with your life.
And you would have peaked early.
It's like the Bruce Springsteen Glory Days song, right?
You would have married your high school sweetheart.
You'd be living in your hometown.
You'd be a manager at the local McDonald's, whatever the first dream job you had.
Thank God we didn't all get what we wanted when we were young.
Or we would be trapped in that.
So you have to be able to break out of where you came from.
Or maybe those people that peak too early can do the Elon Musk thing and just abandon it and start something new and then learn the joys of sucking at something.
Yeah, and we talked about this, that I love your approach to meetings.
I hate meetings.
Life or death.
I'm the same way.
I avoided a good one recently, and this was someone that was just tracking me down as a high-profile person at a big organization, and I'm like, can we just talk on the phone?
But really, where it comes from is when I was young, one of my principles was I knew I had to make money.
It was my overwhelming desire.
And one of the things I did was I said, okay, I'm never going to be worth more than what I think I'm worth.
Okay, no one's going to pay me more than what I think I'm worth.
So what am I worth?
So I picked an hourly rate for myself that I was worth.
And I said, I'm never going to squander my time for less than this.
So if originally it was $500 an hour, then I would upgrade to $5,000 an hour.
It's ludicrous.
But pick an aspirational hourly rate.
Aspirational.
It has to be a little ludicrous.
And then what I would do is if I have to return something, I'm standing in line to return something, and it's below my hourly rate, I'll throw it away.
Or give it away.
If I have to do some task and I can hire somebody to do it for less than my hourly rate, I would hire them.
And so I just became extremely jealous of my time, which doesn't mean you can't have fun.
Rest, leisure, spending time with your friends and family, that's all great.
Don't count that.
But if you're doing anything you don't want to do, which is the definition of work, it's a set of things that you have to do that you don't want to do, if you're working, it better be for your hourly rate.
Otherwise, don't do the work.
And so once it came out of that, then I just realized the cost of meetings.
The cost of meetings is so high, especially given all the people who are in there, right?
One person's talking, seven people listening, you're literally just dying an hour at a time.
So you have to just drop non-urgent meetings or figure out how to be more efficient with them if you're going to do anything great.
The extreme example is business travel.
Getting on a plane to fly half around the world for one meeting, which never amounts to anything, and then wasting your whole little life there and then flying back.
So about five years ago, I resolved, I am never going to travel for business.
I only travel if the travel experience will be so entertaining and joyous because I have friends or it's a place I want to see or whatever that it will be complete in and of itself because I know that whatever the business meeting I came from is never worth it.
And actually that principle applies larger than just travel.
It applies to life in general.
One of the secrets to happiness is to really embrace what you're doing in that moment.
That's trite, but where that comes from is saying, I only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves.
If I'm looking for some ulterior motive down the line, It's not going to materialize.
And if you think it is, maybe even if it does, it'll be very short-lived.
Anything you wanted in your life, whether it was a car or whether it was a girl or whether it was money, when you got it a year later, you were back to zero.
Your brain had hedonically adapted to it and you were looking for the next thing.