#97: The Evolutionary Angel, Naval Ravikant

Naval Ravikant (@naval https://twitter.com/naval) is the CEO and a co-founder of AngelList https://angel.co/. He previously co-founded Epinions http://www.epinions.com/, which went public as part of Shopping.com http://www.shopping.com/, and Vast.com http://www.vast.com/. He is an active angel investor and has invested in more than 100 companies, including more than a few "unicorn" mega-successes. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack, and OpenDNS https://www.opendns.com/, which Cisco just bought for $635 million in cash. You can find many more examples here http://angel.co/naval, but suffice to say — he's really, REALLY good at start-up investing. In this episodes you'll discover: How AngelList and Venture Hacks came to be What Naval looks for when deciding to invest in a founder Common "wives tales" in venture capital How to replace bad habits with good habits How to set stakes and awards And much, much more... Links, resources, and show notes from this episode can be found at http://fourhourworkweek.com/podcast This episode is sponsored by 99Designs http://99designs.com/tim, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. Did you know I used 99Designs to rapid prototype the cover http://99designs.com/tim for The 4-Hour Body? Here are some of the impressive results http://99designs.com/tim. Click this link http://www.99designs.com/tim and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run... This podcast is also brought to you by Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so. Get 50% off your order at Athletic Greens.com/Tim https://www.athleticgreens.com/tim Enjoy!

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 02

  No, what is the appropriate time?

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:23Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design related. I have used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mockups that led to The Four Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mockups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are

• 1:05Tim Ferriss?

  listening have already used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim.

• 1:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The Four Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my gosh, 50% off, yes, 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will

• 2:06Tim Ferriss?

  help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning. So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out. Athleticgreens.com/tim.

• 2:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hello my frisky little kittens. This is Tim Ferriss and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, to tease out the routines, the habits, the influences such as favorite books and so on, that have made them good at what they do. And the intention of course is to unearth the things that you can borrow, that you can replicate in your own life ASAP. And the guests range from chess prodigies to hedge fund managers to celebs to fill in the blank. And this time we have fill in the blank, which is a world-class entrepreneur, builder and investor. His name is Naval Ravikant. Naval is the CEO and co-founder of AngelList. He is a close friend, has become

• 3:02Tim Ferriss?

  an even closer friend because I am now an advisor to AngelList. He previously co-founded ePinions, which went public as part of shopping.com and VAS.com also. He is a very active angel investor, not surprisingly, and has invested more than 100 companies, including more than a handful of unicorn, so-called unicorn mega, mega, mega, I think I'll just say that again, mega successes. His deals include Twitter, Uber, Yammer, Postmates, Wish, Thumbtack and Open DNS, which Cisco just bought for 635 million in cash. There are many more and you can find many examples on his AngelList page, which is just angel.co/naval. If you want to see mine,

• 3:43Tim Ferriss?

  it is angel.co/tim. And AngelList is one of the most incredible tools for investing, matching opportunities and investors that I've ever seen. And it's very, very disruptive to the venture capital space. There were, I think, around 10 people who were introduced to Uber way back in the day as investors and given the opportunity on AngelList. This was around 2010. I have led a couple of deals, including Shyp, S-H-Y-P. You can check them out, shyp.com, which is, I think, around 40x up in its valuation from the first time that I put it on AngelList and made it available to people like yourselves, who are accredited investors. So you can check

• 4:27Tim Ferriss?

  out all of my startup deals at angel.co ...co/tim, but let's talk about Naval and why he's on the podcast. Naval's on the podcast because he is a very deep thinker who is very good at asking questions and testing, in other words, questioning the obvious. And that practice and the practice of being hyper rational when other people are emotional has allowed him to be very successful in the world of investing. But it translates to many other sectors of life and business. And that is why, even if you have no interest in early-stage investing, I highly, highly encourage you to listen to this. Much like the Krasaka episode, Naval has had a huge impact on my own thinking about

• 5:12Tim Ferriss?

  the world and startups and investing, but not only money, my time, my energy. And he's been very much a mentor in that capacity and many others. So I hope that my enthusiasm and enjoyment in this interview translates to the same for you. He is a treasure trove of many recommendations and you will probably take down a lot of notes, but you can find the links to the books and so on in the show notes. And the show notes are at fourhourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. And without further ado, please enjoy Naval Ravikant.

• 5:53Tim Ferriss?

  Naval, welcome to the show.

• 5:55Naval Ravikant?

  Thanks for having me, Tim.

• 5:57Tim Ferriss?

  I have really been looking forward to this because I always enjoy sitting down in this somewhat artificial, formal setting to talk with close friends because it gives me the opportunity to do something that would never work in, say, a dinner or sitting down, which is basically have a unidirectional Charlie Rose experience of lobbing questions at you. So I'm actually pretty stoked to jump into it. The first thing that I wanted to ask is, I suppose, a pretty basic one, but when people ask you, "What do you do?", how do you answer that?

• 6:35Naval Ravikant?

  Oh, very poorly. Fundamentally, at heart, I'm an entrepreneur. And any day in which I solve the same problem twice in a row, I'm pretty unhappy. So by definition, you know, I like to do something different every day. And I think all humans are sort of meant to do that kind of thing. The idea that we repeat ourselves and we specialize and we pigeonhole ourselves is a modern invention created through specialization of labor in the industrial revolution. And hopefully, as more and more people move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we're going to be able to define ourselves much more loosely. So that's a good way of dodging your question. Now let me actually answer it.

• 7:19Naval Ravikant?

  My day job is I am co-founder and CEO of Angel List, which is kind of the world's largest platform for online fundraising and recruiting for startups. We're bringing venture capital online. We have lots of great lead investors, essentially mini micro venture capitalists, who can do deals on the platform and allows anyone who is sufficiently wealthy and sophisticated to invest behind them. And we also run a large marketplace for introducing talent to startups, where we have over 10,000 companies recruiting now. We have hundreds of thousands of candidates who are looking to join great startups. And we're making over 10,000 introductions, mutual introductions, every single week,

• 8:03Naval Ravikant?

  doing candidates at startups. So that's kind of my day job. But the reality of what I do on a day-to-day basis is just completely different.

• 8:11Tim Ferriss?

  Now, so no, I wanted to talk about two seemingly opposed, maybe they're complementary characteristics of yours that I've observed. The first I thought I'd introduce just via a story. So we have a mutual friend who's a salty old Polish trainer, who I won't mention by name. And you actually introduced me to him. He does a lot of incredible Olympic lifting. And he is one of the most aggressive, intense human beings I've ever met in my life. And of all of the people that he and I know mutually, he's like, Naval, that guy is intense, that guy is intense. So why does, why does he have that opinion of you? And do you agree with it? What is that?

• 8:56Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, yeah, it's actually interesting. I think at my core level, I am an extremely intense intense person, very competitive. Um, I have this huge drive to win. Uh, I always wanna be right. I usually research the hell out of any topic I get into and learn eighty percent of it very quickly. And I take nothing at face value. So I'm always kind of questioning and, and deciding. And when I first met this gentleman who, just like you, he's transformed my life, actually. He's made me healthier and fitter than I've ever been. Um, and he, and I consider him incredibly intense. Uh, I pushed back on him. I mean, there were things that he said that I thought were smart, that I could corroborate, um, that I took, uh, as he had handed them. And there were things that he had said that contradicted

• 9:40Naval Ravikant?

  my own experience and reading, and so I dismissed them. So I think he was little, he might refer to me as being intense because I have my own point of view on everything, uh, or everything that matters. That said, uh, I've probably spent the last half decade of my life, like all of us who are getting a little older, being, uh, much more introspective, uh, much more aware of my own foibles, and trying to be a much calmer person, uh, and trying to be less stressed and more happy and more in the moment. And part of that means learning how to control the intensity, dial it up and dial it down. And that's, that's a contradiction that we all deal with, that we all want to be successful people, but we also want to be happy people. And the two of those run in almost diametric opposites

• 10:24Naval Ravikant?

  to each other. And if you look at all the new wisdom, uh, the new wisdom is if you walk into an airport bookstore, you open up Time Magazine, it's all about, you must be like Elon Musk or Larry Page. It's all about success, success, success. And because we live in this mythology of anyone can achieve the American dream, if you're not successful, if you're not Tim Ferriss, then you're a loser. Uh, and that's a terrible-

• 10:45Tim Ferriss?

  Or if you're Tim Ferriss and you're not Elon Musk, you're also a loser, right?

• 10:47Naval Ravikant?

  You're also a loser. That's right. There's always, there's always someone higher up the stack. Uh, so the success-driven mentality drives you to unhappiness. And if you, if you wanna be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are. But if you wanna be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful than you are. So, so this is the, the contradiction that we deal with all day long, because we're also told that the American dream will bring you happiness, and it will not. I think a lot of us learn as we get older, that happiness is internal. Happiness is a choice that you make and that a skill that you develop. And so how do you do that? And that's the fundamental contradiction. And that's why- Our mutual friend can consider me incredibly intense. And by the way, I hope you'll have him on the show someday because I think he has incredible wisdom to pass along.

• 11:31Naval Ravikant?

  So that's where the intensity comes in, the desire to be successful. And at the same time, the non-intensity comes in, which is the desire to be happy.

• 11:40Tim Ferriss?

  So, so let's call him, let's call him Victor. We'll just call him Victor. So Victor, my, what I expect would likely happen if I had Victor on this podcast is he would just spend 60 minutes berating me and telling everyone how fat I was and uncoordinated. I think it would be very hard to steer him away from the, the beat Tim with a, you know, leather whip routine. But yeah, he's a fascinating guy. So I'll have him on at some point. The intensity. I'd love to ask just of some follow ups about that because your brother Kamal is a great friend as well of mine and seems very different, right? He seems almost the, the sort of yin to your yang, wrote a great book called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It.

• 12:24Tim Ferriss?

  Where did your intensity come from? I mean, have you always been that way? Why do you think you have that intensity? Which, not to say Kamal lacks, but to a much lesser degree, of course.

• 12:36Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, it's a good question. I don't know. I mean, the genetics and evolution are a powerful thing. And you could just say at some base variation level, both of us were hit with similar adversities in life and our genes chose to respond very differently. To see who would adapt their way out of the situation. So at the core level, we are very different. You know, we, we had a tough childhood growing up, make no secret of that. And we just responded in different ways. For me, it was all about winning and having a strong desire to win. I started out as a bookworm and then I had to transition into sort of being a a combatant in the field of business, if you will. And now I'm sort of making my transition back into being a bookworm.

• 13:20Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, I, I think everyone gets shaped very, very early on in life. Um, you're probably baked in terms of your core personality by the time you're twelve or thirteen. Uh, you hit puberty, it's a jarring thing, you sort of emerge into the world, you become an adult, you construct your ego. You go out there to, to, to fight your fights, to do your things, to become who you wanna be. And then at some point, you get to where you are, where you wanted to be or close enough, and you start realizing, wait, it's not about external world, it's not about external accomplishment, I have to work on myself. Uh, and I think my brother Kamal has gotten to that point as well. Uh, and then you, you sort of start working on the, the inner being, so. I'm not sure I answered your question about where it comes from, but, uh, you know, I, I think, uh, we all get shaped by adversity.

• 14:05Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, every great thing that is, that I've ever done or accomplished, you know, according to external metrics. Um, or even when I look internally, all the great things that have happened to be in my life that I consider highly positive. They all started with something highly negative.

• 14:21Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, what made your childhood difficult? Or what were aspects of it that made it challenging?

• 14:27Naval Ravikant?

  We were immigrants, so we came to this country when I was nine, my brother was eleven. Uh, we had very little, uh, my mother raised us as a single mom in a studio apartment.

• 14:36Tim Ferriss?

  Where did you come from?

• 14:37Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, from India. And, uh, yeah, she, you know, she went to, she worked a menial job by day and then she went to school at night. Uh, so we were latchkey kids and sort of left to, uh, develop and learn on our own. And a lot of growing up was watching the ideal American lifestyle, but sort of from the other side of the windowpane with my nose pressed against the glass. And saying, yeah, I want that too, and I want that for, for myself and my kids. So I, I grew up with a very dark view of the world and the other side of the tracks, and then kind of had to cross over and uh, start trying to fit into, you know, this Amer- amazing life that is available to most, but not all Amer- all Americans.

• 15:16Tim Ferriss?

  And where did you, which part of India did your mother come from or bring you from, and then where did you grow up in the US at that point?

• 15:23Naval Ravikant?

  So we came, yeah, we came from Delhi, which is the capital of India, and, uh, here we landed in, uh, Queens, New York. And we grew up in Queens Village in Jamaica, Kew Gardens. We moved around a lot. We probably lived in nine or 10 different places in the course of nine years.

• 15:41Tim Ferriss?

  Wow. And you mentioned combatant. I think that you are, you're a very, very good strategist and combatant when need be. And coming back to the intensity, I thought it was, I'd never thought of it this way, but you, you never hesitate to say what's on your mind. And so I could see how that would be interpreted by a lot of people who are used to sort of polite, aha, nod, nod conversation. I remember when you and I were both invited to a dinner and there were a bunch of, a lot of people, neither of us had really met before, around. And we were standing in a group of a couple of people and I, or I walked up and I had a pretty unusual getup on. I had this like turquoise long sleeve shirt, which I'd never

• 16:26Tim Ferriss?

  worn. I don't know if you remember this.

• 16:28Naval Ravikant?

  I did not.

• 16:29Tim Ferriss?

  Jeans on. And then these like brown, unusual looking dress shoes, kind of looked like bowler shoes. And you were like, wow, you look like a gay banker.

• 16:40Tim Ferriss?

  And then this woman that neither of us had ever met started defending me. And I was like, oh God, here we go.

• 16:46Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah. The honesty thing is, is a core foundational value, right?

• 16:51Tim Ferriss?

  Now, in fairness, in fairness, I totally did.

• 16:54Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah. Well, and I think, so I have a couple of core foundational values and they're not things that I explicitly developed. They're just sort of, you can look back after the fact and say, oh yeah, I won't compromise on those things. But now I realize how important honesty is. And I, and I was, and I learned that from a couple of different places. One is when I grew up, I wanted to be a physicist and I idolized Richard Feynman. I read everything by him, technical and non-technical that I'd get my hands on. And he said, you must never ever fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool. So that was, that was, uh, the, the physics grounding is very important because physics, you have to speak truth. Uh, you don't compromise, you don't, uh, negotiate with people, you don't try and make them feel better.

• 17:37Naval Ravikant?

  Because if your equation is wrong, it just won't work, whatever you're doing. So I think the science background is important in that. Um, a second is growing up in New York, I grew up around some really rough and tumble kids, some of who were actually in the Russian mob. Uh, and I once had an encounter where I watched one of them threaten to kill the other. Uh, and the, the one who would, the would be victim, uh, you know, went and hid. And then finally he let the aggressor into his house after the aggressor promised him, no, I'm not gonna kill you. Their, their honesty was such a strong virtue between them that even when they were ready to kill each other. They would take each other's word for things. Uh, it, it, it sort of, um, uh, went above, above everything.

• 18:18Naval Ravikant?

  And even though it was honesty in a mob context, I realized like how important that is in relationships. And then as I get older in life, I realized that a lot of happiness is just being present. And whether you get this out of Buddhism or cognitive therapy or, or drugs or wherever, you realize that to live in the present moment is the highest calling. It's, it's the source of all happiness. And when you're not honest with somebody else, uh, or when you even withhold something in your mind. What you've done is you've created a second thought process, you've created a second thread in your head. That then has to stay active, keeping track of what you've said versus what you're really thinking. And that takes you out of the moment and it brings you unhappiness over time. You will not realize it at that moment itself, but it will create stress and distraction.

• 19:02Naval Ravikant?

  So if you really want to be happy, you have to be present. And one of the core tenets of being present is to be completely honest at all times.

• 19:10Tim Ferriss?

  There is a great short book.

• 19:14Tim Ferriss?

  That had a huge impact on me on this topic called Lying by Sam Harris, which was just phenomenal because it explored the impact not just of lying in the way that most people think of it, but generalized deceit or even white lies that are intended to protect people. And just to come back to Feynman also, Feynman is a character and a thinker who I've long idolized in many ways. Surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman's one of my favorite books. And even for non-technical people, I think he's someone worth exploring. And if you're not the reading type, you could just search for a video. I think it was done on Nova ages ago called The Joy of Finding Things Out, which is, it gives you such a taste of Feynman and the way that he not only,

• 19:59Tim Ferriss?

  I think, questioned the so-called obvious or best practices, but also explored being a polymath, right? I mean, even though he was a world-class physicist, he was also an amateur safe cracker and pick-up artist and musician, you know, in other ways. Really fascinating guy. The, it seems like you have scratched your own itch in a lot of respects, right? With whether it was Venture Hacks, like you had a pain point and you wanted to help other people understand what can be a very opaque black box, which is venture capital and so on. And so you provided these how-to articles and so on that you would have liked to have had, right? And it seems like Angel List, does Angel List serve a similar function? I mean, how did Angel List come about?

• 20:45Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, so it's exactly that, which is basically self-actualizing, creating the product that you want. So the initial problem was entrepreneurs go out and raise money. It's a complete black box. Nobody knows what to do. They do the most important negotiation of their life, which is the initial term sheet or initial deal with a venture capitalist, and they have no information. So they need that information. Boy, I wish I'd had that information. And that's where Venture Hacks came from. And then Angel List was, well, okay, that's how you negotiate a term sheet. How do I get a term sheet? How do I find investors in the first place? For that, we built a product. And then a few years into Angelus development, it became very clear the biggest problem in this environment is not how do I raise capital, it's how do I get help building my business?

• 21:30Naval Ravikant?

  How do I find great individuals to help me and how do I recruit great talent? So we created both our syndicates product where you of course are one of our top leaders who invest in companies, as well as we created our jobs product which helps companies find great engineers. At the end of the day, we stand for founders, we stand for underdogs. And you know, it's funny, you asked me at the beginning, how do I describe what I do? I said, I'm an entrepreneur. And in the back of my mind, what Angelus does is it helps founders fund other founders. And on the recruiting side, it helps founders recruit and find other founders. And in fact, when I look inside Angels itself, the company's only thirty people.

• 22:10Naval Ravikant?

  Almost everyone in the company is a former founder or wants to be a future founder and is getting their training wheels on at Angelus and then is going to go start a great company. And we've had former engineers from us go and start companies like Instacart and Cover, and many more will come out of it. So at the end of the day, to me, it's all about founders, it's all about individuals, it's all about the underdog. And I think long term, on a long enough time scale, maybe it's fifty years from now, maybe it's five hundred years from now, but almost everybody on this planet will work for themselves. The information revolution is reversing the industrial revolution. What the industrial age did was it allowed human beings to team up in mechanistic, organized, hierarchical ways to create factories and production.

• 22:55Naval Ravikant?

  And I think the information revolution is breaking down the communication barriers. It's saying the optimal size of the firm is shrinking from thousands to hundreds to dozens, maybe even to one at some point. And eventually, every morning, someone will wake up, or every week you will wake up and on your phone or whatever the devices of the future, you will get an alert with a various bunch of jobs and contracts that you can choose from. You'll look at them, you'll pick out which ones you like based on your social connections and how much they're offering you and how much it can build your profile and your future work. And you'll do that work and then you'll be ranked on it, you'll be rated on it. And then you, if you want to take the next week off, you'll take the next week off. If you want to do two jobs at a time, you'll do two jobs at a time.

• 23:38Naval Ravikant?

  But if the future is all headed towards individual brands, you can see how reporters on the New York Times now, they, they, they build individual brands on Twitter that far exceed the brand they would will, that they would build just under the New York Times. You yourself, I mean, you're an individual brand. There's, there is no, there is nothing else other than Tim Ferriss. Tim Ferriss doesn't work for CNN, Tim Ferriss doesn't work for Apple, doesn't work for New York Times. You're an independent brand and you're an independent actor. And I think the entire world is headed that way. And so to me, I was lucky enough to be a founder early, but I figured out how hard it is, what are the parts of it that work, the parts of it that don't. And so now, what makes me happy is to work on a platform that creates more founders and helps those founders.

• 24:24Naval Ravikant?

  Because I think at the end of the day, we're all founders. We're all meant to work for ourselves. We're meant to be individuals. We're not meant to follow. We're not meant to be in hierarchies. We're not meant to go to nine to five jobs where we're told what to do over and over. And the sooner we get off the grid and self-actualize and become free, the better off all of humanity is.

• 24:41Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I mean, I think people could also look at being a founder as just being a creator, right? And I think there's the, in my mind at least, the misconception that you, you find yourself. Whereas I think that a more constructive way or actionable way of looking at it is creating yourself, right? Day by day, habit by habit, decision by decision. It's not some needle in a haystack that you have to, you know, go into the jungle and take drugs to find, although that's a separate conversation.

• 25:10Tim Ferriss?

  The, let's talk about founders for a second, but in the, the startup context. The, one of the more common questions that people ask successful VCs or investors is what do you look for in a founder? So I'm just going to ask you that, like what, what are the things that you look for in founders? Or the red flags that disqualify?

• 25:35Tim Ferriss?

  An investment or a founder?

• 25:37Naval Ravikant?

  Yep. So, number one, intelligence. You've got to be smart, which means you have to know what you're doing to some level. And that's a fuzzy thing, but you talk to people and you kind of get a sense of, do they know what they're doing or not? Do they have insight? Do they have specific knowledge? Have they thought about this problem deeply? It's not about the age, it's not how many years they've spent, but just how deep is their understanding of what they're about to do? So, intelligence is key. Energy, because being a founder is brutally difficult. It takes a long time. And in the long run, the people who succeed are just the ones who persevere. So, if someone runs out of energy, or if they're doing this in some hesitating preliminary way, where they're looking for constant positive feedback, or if they're easily thrown off course,

• 26:22Naval Ravikant?

  then they're not going to make it to the end, especially in the highly competitive startup context. And then finally is integrity, because if you have someone who's high intelligence and high energy, but they're low integrity, what you've got is a hard-working, smart crook.

• 26:37Naval Ravikant?

  And especially in the startup world, things are very dynamic, they're very fast-moving, people are very independent. So, if somebody wants to screw you over, they will find a way to do it. And fundamentally, ethics and integrity are what you do despite the money. If being ethical was profitable, everybody would do it. So, what you're looking for is a core sense of values that rises above and beyond the pure financial incentives. So, for example, if I'm talking to a founder and they offer to do something that is slightly unfair to another shareholder, or employee, or founder, in exchange for making me happy, that's a red flag. Because if they can do it to them, they can do it to me.

• 27:15Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 27:15Naval Ravikant?

  And integrity is the hardest one to figure out, because it requires longitudinal relationships.

• 27:20Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning long-term.

• 27:22Naval Ravikant?

  Exactly. So, I've just become more hyper-aware of that piece as time goes on. But those are kind of the three things that I look for. And then, I would just say, or thought, you know, a thing that isn't really about success, but is more just about personal time is, when you invest in somebody, or you work with somebody, you start a company with somebody, you're signing up to spend the next decade of your life having them in your life.

• 27:43Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 27:44Naval Ravikant?

  And so, you just have to make sure you actually genuinely like these people. You don't consider work to have to answer a phone call, or take a meeting, or spend time with them. If it's exhausting, if they're downers, if they're negative, if they're difficult, no amount of money is worth it. You know, you and I will both die with money in the bank. And so... It's not about money at this point. It's about, uh, do I want to spend my scarce time, resources, mental energy, spirit, uh, interacting with these people. Uh, my favorite founders are actually the ones who I learned from. So every time they call me up because they need help with something, I jump on it because I know that walking around the block with them for an hour, I'm going to walk out much smarter.

• 28:26Tim Ferriss?

  Who are some that come to mind just offhand, recognizing that there are many others you could name?

• 28:31Naval Ravikant?

  Oh, there are, there are tons, but just to give you a very recent example, there are these, uh, two, basically kids, uh, Corey and Michael, who started this company called ONE, which now runs a product called After School. Uh, and they're young. I think Corey was 19 when they started the company. He might've been 17.

• 28:47Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell ONE?

• 28:49Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, it's just O-N-E. That was the name of the, that was the name of the company, but they have different products. And, uh, Michael Callahan is his co-founder, uh, and these guys are just brilliant. They're, they're young, they're kids, but the level at which they think about, the depth that they put into social products is absolutely mind-blowing. Uh, another one is Ryan Breslow. I recently invested in his company, started a company called Bolt, uh, which does stuff in the financial payment space. Uh, you know, this founder has assembled a crack team of engineers out of Square and Twitter and Stripe, and he's, he's done very little so far. He's a very young guy. Um, and then when I asked to invest in his company or I was getting to know him, he reference checked the heck out of me, you know, at every, every step of the way. Very professional, very quick,

• 29:32Naval Ravikant?

  very thorough. Uh, but he did more diligence on me than I did on him.

• 29:35Tim Ferriss?

  How did he, how did he do that without being a pain in the ass to people you know? Because I know people, for instance, there are entrepreneurs I shall not name, who try to pitch me and they have like 30 people, they just bombard 30 of my friends to try to get to me and it's a complete turn off if they're just using kind of brute force. How did he do it the right way?

• 29:54Naval Ravikant?

  It wasn't brute force. He asked me for references. He also did his own back channel. He was very quick. He was very transparent. And then he actually compiled the feedback he had gotten on me and gave it to me.

• 30:06Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow.

• 30:06Naval Ravikant?

  As if he, as if he had done a peer review of me and he thought I should have the data. And I was so blown away by his professionalism, especially for such a young person. He's just probably one or two years out of school, maybe a little bit more. So it's just certain people, certain entrepreneurs, you get the feeling they really care about what they're putting together. Every early move that they make, they consider it as they're putting bricks in the foundation of a skyscraper that they're gonna build. And you can see that right away. A founder who comes barreling in, decides very quickly, you know, treats it like a flip, says, "Well, you know, if I get a good offer, I'll sell this thing," or "I'll do whatever's pragmatic to make money." Those founders are not in it for the long haul.

• 30:48Naval Ravikant?

  And you learn very quickly that all the returns in this business are made with a huge, huge outcomes, at least for an investor. And so you start becoming hypersensitive to these founders who actually apply care and are very meticulous about how they go about things.

• 31:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I haven't had, and granted, you've been in, I mean, how many, how many individual and fund-based investments have you made to date? Would you say, if you had to guess?

• 31:13Naval Ravikant?

  I lost track. It's probably north of 150.

• 31:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and you have a lot more experience than I do, of course, but I haven't had, I don't think, a single good outcome from any company led by a founder who is like, "Well, if the wind blows this way, then this. If the wind blows that way, then that." They've always had a very clear vision of some type, or some type of true north.

• 31:35Naval Ravikant?

  That's right. Yeah, in this industry, you get paid for being right when everybody else is wrong. So unfortunately, that means a lot of them run full speed and crash into a wall, which is painful, but they'll get up and they'll run again at somebody, at something else. But you get paid for being right when everybody else is wrong. So if you're looking for how to operate based on what everybody else around you thinks, then, you know, you're, you're, you probably don't have what it takes. That said, these people are also very hard to separate from delusional crazy people.

• 32:06Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, those people were completely mad. They're not paying any attention to the feedback from the environment. They're not dealing with reality. They're living inside their own fantasy. So it's very hard to tell a madman apart from a genius in this environment.

• 32:20Tim Ferriss?

  Give me an idea for a reality show. You could go out and like gather people from asylums or homeless people in SF who are very vocal and give them like a 10 minute training session and then unleash them on like VCs to see what the actual success rate would be. I mean, I bet the confidence would take them a long way. It's, there are a lot of venture capitalists and angel investors flooding the current environment. What are some of the old wives tales or things that are repeated so often that a lot of people believe they're true that are completely false in your mind or dangerous?

• 32:58Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, so I think the hardest thing in this business is that the great new companies always look really strange. They don't look very much like the previous companies. So you can get very easily trapped into believing that there is a certain way of doing things and then you'll find huge exceptions down the road, which will cost you dearly. So for example, before Netscape came along back in the mid 90s, it was believed that there wasn't much money to be made in internet or internet type products. Before Microsoft came along, it was believed that the money was in hardware, not in software. Before Apple and a few other computer companies came along, it was believed the money was in mainframes and enterprise and not in consumer.

• 33:43Naval Ravikant?

  Before Uber came along, it was believed that the money was in all virtual and software and not in handling real world things like taxi dispatchers and dealing with unions and those kinds of things. So the conventional wisdom is always wrong. And so as an investor, if you have a failed investment in one space, the worst thing you can do is write off that space and not make an investment again. For example, Sequoia Capital, who's one of the best investors on the planet, they were investors in Webvan, which was the failed grocery delivery service in the late 90s that blew up.

• 34:14Tim Ferriss?

  So they skipped Instacart or what did they?

• 34:16Naval Ravikant?

  They did Instacart.

• 34:17Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they did Instacart?

• 34:18Naval Ravikant?

  That is what makes Sequoia so great, that they saw their own blow up, they lost a lot of money, they had egg on their face, they didn't care. They actually reevaluate every opportunity on its own merits and they know that a lot of these things are about timing. It might have been the right idea at the wrong time. And they also know that each great business looks weird and there's no such thing as a perfect deal. So there are lots and lots of venture capitalists who miss out on the great companies because they're looking for the perfect deal and there is no such thing. So I think that anything that becomes conventional wisdom in this business gets blown up. For example, one of the pieces of conventional wisdom is, you know, don't invest in married couples because if they get divorced, the company blows up.

• 35:00Naval Ravikant?

  That said, if you follow that advice, you would have missed Cisco and you would have missed a bunch of other amazing companies that were founded by couples.

• 35:07Tim Ferriss?

  Eventbrite too, right?

• 35:08Naval Ravikant?

  Eventbrite as well, yeah, there's a long list. The classic mythology is you should have a two-founder company. But there have been plenty of great one-founder companies, there are plenty of great three-founder companies.

• 35:19Tim Ferriss?

  Wasn't Drew of Dropbox, wasn't he a single founder?

• 35:22Naval Ravikant?

  No.

• 35:23Tim Ferriss?

  You know, he didn't.

• 35:24Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, he recruited a co-founder and very quickly. But especially in the enterprise space, Oracle and Salesforce have been single founder companies. And even the dual founder companies, you find that over time, one of the founders leaves and the other one dominates. So in the Jobs and Wozniak case, in Apple, Jobs dominated. Same thing in Microsoft where Gates took over and Allen sort of went by the wayside. So it's not enough to say that, you know, it has to be two founders. So any formula you lay out is a set of guidelines that is probably going to be wrong. And so you have to actually... This is very difficult, but you, when you meet with a new company, you have to forget everything you know.

• 36:02Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Naval Ravikant?

  And you have to shut up and listen.

• 36:04Tim Ferriss?

  The Instacart example with Sequoia is really impressive to me. Now, I don't know if it were, if it was handled by the same partners. So who knows? I have no idea. But the, the nature of cognitive biases and for instance, anchoring is something I've been thinking a lot about where I'm not kind of by disposition or expertise, a very good public markets guy, like trading stocks. I, it's, I make bad decisions. I get emotional or I peg, for instance, a recent high per share price to a stock. And then, and then I, I've made this mistake where I'm like, well, when it gets up to X, then I'll sell. But generally speaking, not a smart idea, right?

• 36:46Tim Ferriss?

  Because you've, you've sort of pegged and anchored this point that just has no basis. The stock doesn't, you can't train the stock like I'm trying to train my puppy who's sitting next to me chewing on a marrow bone. Like it doesn't work that way. What, what books or people outside of the startup world have most improved your ability to invest? And maybe, maybe broadly speaking, just resource allocate.

• 37:17Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah. So this is a really good question. And so this is a very deep question. It's going to have lots of answers, but at the end of the day, I think you have to work on your internal state until you are free of as many biases and conditioned responses as you can be. And it will improve every aspect of your life, including investing.

• 37:38Naval Ravikant?

  And I am a bookworm, so I read an enormous amount. I mean, I was raised essentially in a library of the daycare center. And so I've just read so much that I don't even know where to start. But if you work on your internal state, one of the things you start realizing is as an investor. Emotions dominate. Investors are very emotional, even though we act, we pretend to be very rational. For example, you'll decide in the first five minutes of a meeting, usually whether you want to invest in the company or not. And if a company doesn't take your money in the first round, you get annoyed with them, or you feel like they crossed you. Then you have to undo that emotional state. So when the second round comes along, you can still be a positive force and continue to help the company and maybe have a bite at the apple a second time. And these kinds of skills are extremely hard to build. They're not things you're going to build

• 38:22Naval Ravikant?

  by, by reading one book and then you're like, aha. So I don't believe in the epiphany theory of self-development. Where you read some book, you have an incredible epiphany, you read one phrase, you're like, okay, that's great. This changes my life. And then you scroll it down a piece of paper and you keep looking at it, or you put it as a backdrop to your computer screen. Life doesn't work that way. What you kind of have to do is you have to build skills. And I think happiness is a skill, nutrition is a skill, diet is a skill, investing is a skill, self-awareness is a skill. And skills get built up over decades with feedback loops and you just have to constantly keep working at it on it. So the books that have helped me a lot, I, I think there's a class of books that I would kind of put in the Stoicism category.

• 39:07Naval Ravikant?

  And I know you've been a big advocate of these in the past and I sort of discovered them independently, but they were very influential. So, you know, Seneca and Marcus Aurelius both stand out. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius was absolutely life-changing for me because it's, it's the personal diary of the Emperor of Rome. And here's a guy who was probably the most powerful human being on earth at the time where, that he lived and he was writing his own diary to himself, not expecting it to be published. And when you open this book, you realize he had all the same issues and all the same mental struggles and he was trying to be a better person. And so right there, you figure out, okay, success and power don't improve your internal state. You still have to work on that. Uh, and so that, that, that class of books is very influential.

• 39:52Naval Ravikant?

  Um, I, I, I, I like to pay attention to what I consider the rational Buddhists. Uh, because a lot of Buddhism is drowned in mysticism and Hinduism and sort of, uh, worship this guru or do this ritual. So I don't pay any attention to that. Uh, but I pay a lot of attention to what I consider rational Buddhists, where they can make the case very intelligently with reasoning along the way as to how you should train your mind to work or how you should observe your mind. Sam Harris, who you mentioned earlier is great. Uh, Jiru Krishnamurti, who's a lesser well-known guy, but, uh, an Indian philosopher who lived during the last century, uh, is extremely influential to me. He's an uncompromising, uh, very direct, uh, person who basically tells you to look at your own mind at all

• 40:36Naval Ravikant?

  times. Uh, and so I've been hugely influenced by him. Probably the best book of his, uh, that I like is one called The Book of Life, which is sort of excerpts from his various speeches and books, uh, that are stitched together. Um, oddly enough, Bruce Lee wrote some great philosophy.

• 40:51Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely.

• 40:52Naval Ravikant?

  And, uh, Striking Thoughts is a book that is a good summary of some of his philosophy. Um, but I could go on and on and on. I mean, there are, you have to read hundreds of these things, literally. Blogs, the blogs are, I feel, an underappreciated resource. Uh, we're now in a day and age of Twitter and Facebook, where we're getting sort of bite-sized, pithy wisdom that's really hard to absorb. Uh, and books are very difficult to read as a, as a modern person because we've been trained, uh, we've got two contradictory pieces of training. One is our attention span has gone through the floor because we're hit with so much information all the time that we want to skip, summarize, skip. We want to get to the TLDR, cut to the chase, too long, didn't read. Uh, you know, what's the 140-character version? What's the Instagram version?

• 41:36Naval Ravikant?

  On the other hand, we're also taught from a young age that books are something you finish. Books are something that are sacred, that you treat books as a, you know, when you go to school and you're assigned to read a book, you have to finish the book. So over time, we learn, uh, we forget how to read books, or we get in this contradiction where everyone I know is stuck on some book. Everyone is stuck on some books. I'm, I'm sure you're stuck on some book right now. It's like page 332, you can't go on any further, but you know you should finish the book. So what do you do? You give up reading books for a while. Your Kindle or your iPad or whatever you use, or even your paper book is in a stuck state. And, uh, that for me was a tragedy because I... I grew up on books and then I switched to blogs and then I switched to Twitter and Facebook. And then I realized I wasn't actually learning anything.

• 42:19Naval Ravikant?

  I was just taking a little dopamine snacks all day long.

• 42:24Naval Ravikant?

  I was getting my little 140 character burst of dopamine and then I'd retweet and then I'd see who retweeted my tweet. Then I'd get into an argument on Twitter and you know, it's a fun, wonderful thing, but it's a game that I was playing. I wasn't actually learning anything.

• 42:36Tim Ferriss?

  Usually with Startup L. Jackson is uh.

• 42:38Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, Startup L. Jackson, great character on Twitter. So I realized like I have to go back to reading books because when you're talking about solving old problems, the older the problem, the older the solution. So if you're trying to learn how to drive a car or fly a plane, absolutely you should read something written in the modern age. Because this problem was created in the modern age, the solution is created in the modern age. But if you're talking about an old problem, like how to, you know, generally keep your body healthy, how to stay calm and peaceful of mind, what kinds of value systems are good, how should you raise a family, these kinds of things, the older solutions are probably better. And they withstood the test of time. Any book that survived for 2,000 years has been filtered through a lot of people.

• 43:23Naval Ravikant?

  Now, it may have some stuff in it that we now know to be true, but the general principles are more likely to be correct. So if I want to learn the theory of evolution, which I kind of use as my binding principle, whenever I'm trying to explain any human action. People read all kinds of blog posts and tweets and evolution. Everyone has a loose understanding of how evolution works. But how many have actually read The Origin of Species? I mean, you can get it for five bucks on Kindle and it's a very easy read. It's not a difficult read and you can read the actual source and you can see the source of the brilliance. And you can see how Darwin came up with stuff back then that we're still trying to figure out, or statements he made that we're still trying to prove out. But there's very little that's incorrect in that book and it is a source book. So I wanted to get back into reading these source books.

• 44:08Naval Ravikant?

  Um, and I knew it was a very hard problem because my brain had now been trained to spend time on Facebook and Twitter and these other bite-sized pieces. So what I did was I came up with this hack where I started treating books as throwaway blog posts or as bite-sized tweets or Facebook posts. And I felt no obligation to finish any book. So now anytime someone mentions a book to me, I buy it. At any given time, I'm reading somewhere within ten and twenty books. I'm flipping through them. So I'll, I'll skip. If the book is getting a little boring, I'll skip ahead. Sometimes I'll start reading a book in the middle because some paragraph caught my eye and I'll just continue from there. And I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book. If at some point I decide the book is boring or if it's got, uh, pieces of it that are incorrect

• 44:51Naval Ravikant?

  and I can't trust the rest of the information in there, I just delete it. And I don't remember them at all. So I treat books now as other people might treat throwaway light pieces of information on the web. And all of a sudden, books are back into my reading library.

• 45:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 45:05Naval Ravikant?

  And that's great because there's a lot of ancient wisdom in there.

• 45:08Tim Ferriss?

  And you, you mentioned blogs being potentially a source of good information. If, are there two or three blogs that you have particularly liked or do particularly like that you could recommend to people?

• 45:20Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, so blogs are great because now all of a sudden you have some incredibly smart people who before may have had niche audiences or may not have, you know, their full-time job is not to be a writer. Um, so they, they can, they have a voice now. And the reality is books are long because that's the size you need to justify printing up, uh, you know, cutting up a tree and printing a physical object and sending it to a bookshelf. When in reality, a lot, a lot of the wisdom in these books is, can be encapsulated in a few pages. Uh, but you can't charge somebody twenty dollars retail for a couple of pages of info. So I, I feel like blogs are actually a very efficient source of information. Uh, and there's some absolutely brilliant people out there that, that you should take advantage of. Now, the problem is if you read enough information on the internet

• 46:05Naval Ravikant?

  or in books, it all cancels to zero. And you're probably, you have a lot more facts, but you don't have much more wisdom. So you do have to be careful what sources you you get information from. So one of the criteria I use, if if somebody is a deep expert and they're talking about things, but then they start making errors in rationality or judgment or clear biases start showing through, then I basically put that blog or I put that book down because now I can't trust what they're saying.

• 46:30Tim Ferriss?

  You put it on probationary period?

• 46:33Naval Ravikant?

  Essentially, because you have to, you have to filter the information that comes at you. For example, you could read news articles all day long. And all that would end up happening is you would end up a hyper-stressed, anxious individual, and you wouldn't even know why. At some core level, your brain would have been rewired to assume that every bad thing that's happening is happening next door instead of tens of thousands of miles away. So I filter my blogs very carefully. I have a long reading list that I use of a couple of hundred blogs. But like a recent standout is a blog called Melting Asphalt. It's written by a guy named Kevin Simler out of New York. I've never met him, but I read his blog and it was mind-blowing. He just really digs deep into all these topics that we take for granted. He he figures out an orthogonal viewpoint on it.

• 47:18Naval Ravikant?

  He makes some nice observations, but very often he'll end with questions or no conclusions. He'll just sort of meander off.

• 47:25Tim Ferriss?

  What types of topics does he explore?

• 47:27Naval Ravikant?

  He'll talk about like how the brain works, how human cognition works. He'll go into topics like why do we dance? You know, basic economics theory leading to bad outcomes. I just highly recommend reading it for anyone who is intellectually and scientifically curious. And what I like about it is that a lot of times he doesn't feel the need to wrap up with a conclusion. It's very clear that he's exploring the space and learning. Like, for example, you know, your your blog is great for what I consider sort of these quick one-off hacks, or you're you're great to surprise, the twist, right? Tim's gonna tell you how to, you know, how to peel a hard-boiled egg instantly. By the way, I blew up one on my kitchen counter, I had yolk everywhere.

• 48:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, sometimes if it's soft-boiled, not a good idea.

• 48:14Naval Ravikant?

  Yes, that was my learning there. So, you know, everyone has their style, but your style is very much, you have to have a conclusion. I have not seen a Tim Ferriss blog post that does not lead to an actionable conclusion because you've built your brand around being a fast learner lifestyle hacker. I feel like if I go into Tim's blog, the promise that I get is I can get 98% of the benefit by doing 2% of the work, which is very seductive. Whereas on melting asphalt, what I know is going to happen, I'm going to have this massive exploration of a deeply interesting, complicated, complex topic with a couple of different hypotheses and no real conclusions.

• 48:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, which I think is important for people to balance out with the prescriptive sort of Scooby snacks of how to solutions. I think it's important for people to be able to sit with uncertainty. I mean, I think that's why Richard Feynman is so interesting also to, I mean, training yourself to be a good scientist does not require college degree or a PhD. It requires, like you said, not fooling yourself and having good questions. And sometimes you just have to sit with those questions and evaluate whether they're the right questions or the wrong questions, or if there's a better tweak to that question. So it sounds like the melting asphalt author is kind of along the same lines of a Freakonomics, but without necessarily the conclusions.

• 49:34Naval Ravikant?

  Yes, and in that sense, I actually even like it better than Freakonomics. The original Freakonomics is fantastic, don't get me wrong, but now they just have to fill a lot more volume, so of course the quality goes down. But it's still, Freakonomics is still great. Another one is, you introduced me to this guy, he's a childhood hero of mine growing up, Scott Adams. He's the creator of Dilbert, and he's completely self-made. And he put together Dilbert through a combination of business judgment and hypnotic techniques that he learned, and writing techniques and public speaking techniques. And he's very transparent about it. And so he has a blog, the Dilbert blog, or the Scott Adams blog, I forget the exact name, but it has some absolutely brilliant posts. And of course, like with anyone who is trying to figure the world out from scratch and is

• 50:18Naval Ravikant?

  an orthogonal thinker, he's going to have some things that are completely wrong or very controversial, so he gets some flack over that. But there's some complete genius in there. He has a particular article, a particular blog post called "The Day You Became a Better Writer." And even though I am a very good writer, and I've been writing a lot since I was young, I still open up that blog post and I put it in the background anytime I'm writing anything that's important. It's that good.

• 50:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Naval Ravikant?

  I use it, I use it as my basic template for how to write well. And even think about the title, "The Day You Became a Better Writer." It's such a powerful title, absolutely. And so he teaches you in one small blog post, the importance of surprise, the importance of headlines, the importance of being brief and direct and not using adjectives and adverbs and using the active voice, not the passive voice, et cetera, et cetera. And if you consider yourself to not be a great writer, if you're not a 10 out of 10 writer already, or a 9 out of 10 already, that, that one blog post right there will change your writing style forever if you put your ego down and absorb it properly.

• 51:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Scott is, Scott is great. He's also a great teacher. So I actually had my first real tennis lesson ever with Scott at his house. And he got me up to, you know, playing a volley game with him in about 20 minutes. I mean, it was really outstanding. I'm gonna have him on the, on the podcast very shortly, which I'm excited about. Let me switch gears just a little bit and ask you a couple of rapid fire questions. Doesn't mean your answers have to be rapid fire, but I'll just throw out a couple to add some color and sort of connective tissue to what we're talking about. What are some of your biggest successes in the investing world? Just the sort of greatest hits of, of Naval?

• 51:58Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, so I've thrown a lot of darts. And, you know, half of it is just showing up, frankly. If you're in the tech business, the best thing you can do for yourself is move to Silicon Valley, just like if you're in acting, you probably have to go to Hollywood. And if you're in finance, you used to have to go to New York, although now there are more options. So I don't necessarily take credit for it in the same way that some people might say where they were very thoughtful and did a lot of diligence. You know, some of it was luck, a lot of it was luck. But I was in the first round investor in Twitter when it was first getting started. I was a first round investor in Uber when it was getting started, Thumbtack, OneNilo, Flipagram, there's a couple of others.

• 52:42Naval Ravikant?

  I was early in Postmates, I was actually probably the first real investor in there after they got out of an incubator. There's a bunch of them that goes on and on. It's hard for me to draw the full, the full list, but the fund that I ran is on track to return 10 or 20 times the capital that I had raised. And my individual portfolio is up by dozens of times.

• 53:05Tim Ferriss?

  Congratulations, once again.

• 53:08Naval Ravikant?

  Dumb luck, dumb luck.

• 53:09Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's talk about dumb luck on the flip side. So what are some of the biggest misses, like deals you've passed on? Your anti-portfolio, I think it's, is it Sequoia that has that or Excel?

• 53:20Naval Ravikant?

  I think Bessemer pioneered it, but it's a nice thing to do, which is to keep yourself intellectually honest. Warren Buffett also pioneered it in a sense in that he goes on record at the annual meetings and talks about their biggest mistakes from the previous year. And then he'll literally look at the previous annual meeting, what he talked about, and he'll go through it and talk about what he said that was wrong. So to some extent, he does these annual meetings just to keep himself intellectually honest. And in terms of biggest mistakes, I passed on Twilio very early on and Jeff Lawson, the founder is a great founder and he gave me every chance to invest. I passed on Pinterest. Ben Silberman gave me every chance to invest. I was sitting in bed next to my, at the time, fiance.

• 54:01Tim Ferriss?

  I thought you were gonna say next to bed. I was like, wow.

• 54:04Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, exactly. We were that close. Sorry, Ben. No insinuation implied, nothing implied. I was sitting in bed next to my fiance and Ben had just, we'd helped him a little bit with Angelus, although not a lot. We were just getting started and he was raising money from Pinterest and I saw the numbers go up month to month to month. And I had a chance to invest the first time, the second time, the third time. And he kept offering it to me and I was sitting in bed next to my fiance and she was obsessively using Pinterest. And she said, I think you should do this. And I was like, I don't get it. You know, it's images, it's like flickery. Who's gonna use this? How is this gonna make money? And so I passed on that. But you know, I've got lots of stupid ones like that. I could have been advisor to YouTube at the early days. I helped them out, but I didn't take any stock, even though they were kind enough to offer it.

• 54:50Naval Ravikant?

  You know, there's lots and lots of misses. Square, I could have done the first round. I just thought it was too expensive. Even Twitter where I did my piece, I did a much smaller piece than I was allocated just because I thought it was too expensive.

• 55:01Tim Ferriss?

  I did the same thing in like 2009. I was like, this is never gonna work out, but whatever, put some money in.

• 55:08Tim Ferriss?

  The rule, you mentioned Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett often talks about the two rules of investing. Rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, pay attention to rule number one, or something along those lines. When you've made investments that in retrospect, you look back on, you're like, I knew it, I shouldn't have done that deal. What are the things that lead to you making those bad investments or overriding your rules or intuition?

• 55:34Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, I don't actually dwell on the bad investments much because in the startup businesses, the exact opposite of Warren Buffett's value investing business. He's investing at a much later stage where you have a lot more data and you're putting much bigger amounts in there and you're betting that you're going to make a compounded return of 17, 20, 30% a year. In the startup world, you're betting that 90% of these companies will go to zero or just return your money. And the remaining 10% are going to post huge multiples and markups. So the Twitter investment is probably now up 400x. Uber is probably up around 4,000x. So the returns, the winners can be staggering and can overwhelm the losses

• 56:19Naval Ravikant?

  in the portfolio. So you're always focused on the upside. You don't really pay attention that much to the downside. And I would say most of my downside mistakes that I think about are mistakes of omission, not mistakes of commission.

• 56:30Tim Ferriss?

  Commission, right.

• 56:31Naval Ravikant?

  That said, mistakes of commission, usually it's because you didn't have time to get comfortable with the deal. You got caught up in the heat of it where someone was pushing you to make a decision very quickly. You didn't have the data, you didn't have the gut feel for it, but you just went ahead and did it because of fear of missing out. So I think that's actually the worst reason to invest because of fear of missing out. But that said, a great company will raise money very, very quickly. So very often you just don't have that much time. The mistake of commission that really... Gets me, uh, sorry, the mistake of, uh, yeah, of commission that really gets me is when I waste my time. So I haven't really regretted making bad investments. That's part of the game.

• 57:15Naval Ravikant?

  And sometimes you make an investment, the company doesn't go that far, the founder offers, offers to return the money. And I learned this from Ron Conway, usually a great response to say, you know what, keep it, land on your feet, get your next job, start your next gig, I'll invest in that too. Um, so it's not really about, uh, did you waste money? Because like I said, your reputation matters and if it works out, then you're, you're gonna make more than enough. Uh, the, the thing that I regret is signing up for advisory roles. Because they take up a lot of time and then you're working for the founder and they're calling you for help all the time. And then you realize, well, you know, they'd offered me what looked like free stock, but nothing in life is free. And I don't really wanna spend that much time with this person or even worse, they don't call you and they just feel guilty.

• 57:58Naval Ravikant?

  You know, I'm getting all these advisory shares and I haven't done anything for the company. Um, so if I had to watch out for a mistake as an early stage investors, guard your time carefully.

• 58:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 58:09Naval Ravikant?

  Guard your time more carefully than you guard your money.

• 58:11Tim Ferriss?

  Right, the non-renewable resource, uh, versus the renewable.

• 58:16Naval Ravikant?

  Exactly.

• 58:17Tim Ferriss?

  When you, so, when you think of the word, say, successful, who's the first person or people who come to mind for you?

• 58:26Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, it's, it's an odd answer because, uh, you know, most people think of someone as successful when they win the game. And, uh, it's whatever game they're playing, right? So if you're an athlete, uh, you're gonna think of successful, uh, someone who is a top athlete and wins that game. Or if you're in business, then you're gonna think Elon Musk or, uh, you know, someone of that sort. Or in, in my mind, I would have answered that question a little differently a few years ago. I would have said Steve Jobs, um, because he created something or he was a driving force, uh, part of the driving force and the spearhead for creating something that has changed the lives for all of humanity, uh, and that's the iPhone. Uh, you know, I think of Marc Andreessen as super successful, not because of his recent incarnation as a venture capitalist, which is an interesting one.

• 59:11Naval Ravikant?

  But because of the incredible work that he did with Netscape, you know, he he commercialized the web browser. Satoshi Nakamoto is successful in the sense that he created Bitcoin, which is this incredible technological creation that will have repercussions for decades to come. So in the classic sense, I consider those creators and commercializers successful. And of course Elon Musk, just because he changed everyone's viewpoint on what is possible with modern technology entrepreneurship. But that said, to me, the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don't even play the game, who rise above it. And those are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness that they need nothing from anybody else.

• 59:54Naval Ravikant?

  So there are a couple of these characters that I know in my life, some older gentlemen that I like to kind of learn from, and we mentioned our Polish friend earlier, I would consider him successful because he doesn't need anything from anybody.

• 1:00:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yes.

• 1:00:07Naval Ravikant?

  He is at peace, he is at health, and whether he makes more money or less money or whether the next person over from him does better or worse than him has no effect on his mental state and bearing. And historically, I would say that the legendary Buddha or Krishnamurti, whose stuff that I like reading, they are successful, quote unquote, in the sense that they step out of the game entirely. Winning or losing does not matter to them. There's some line that I read somewhere that all of man's troubles arise because he cannot sit in a room quietly by himself for half an hour. Right? And if if you could literally just sit, if you could just sit for thirty minutes and be happy, you are successful.

• 1:00:52Naval Ravikant?

  And I think that that is a that is a very powerful place to be, but very few of us get there.

• 1:00:57Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a current meditative practice?

• 1:01:00Naval Ravikant?

  I have a couple. Like most people, I talk about doing it but don't really do it all that well. I think meditation is like, you know, like a dieting or where everyone is supposed to be following a regimen. Everyone says they do it, but nobody actually does it. The real set of people who meditate on a regular basis, I've found are pretty rare. And I've identified and tried at least four different forms of meditation. The one that I've found that works the best for me is something called choiceless awareness or non-judgmental awareness. Where you essentially don't sit in a corner and don't stay quiet, you walk around. You're going about your daily business.

• 1:01:43Naval Ravikant?

  But hopefully there's some nature around, you're not talking to somebody else. And what you practice is you just learn to accept that moment that you're in without making judgments. You don't say, oh, there's a homeless guy over there about across the street. You don't say, you don't look at two people running by and say, oh, he's, he's out of shape or I'm in better shape than him. Or that person's better than me or this one's better or I should get a coffee or whatever. You just don't make any decisions. You don't judge anything, you just accept everything. And if you do that, I find if I can do that even for 10 or 15 minutes walking around, I end up in a very peaceful, grateful state. And so that one works well for me.

• 1:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  And when, when those thoughts come up, right? When you see the guy with the bad hairdo and you're like, that guy has no, no business having that unmanageable hairdo. Or whatever ridiculous thought comes to mind, what is the internal response to that?

• 1:02:32Naval Ravikant?

  What I do is, for those of you who have programmed, I'm basically trying to run my brain in debugger mode. I'm trying to be very, very alert and watch my thoughts. You're not trying to judge anything, including your own thoughts. And, you know, there's a great definition that I read that says enlightenment is a space between your thoughts. Which means that enlightenment isn't this thing you achieve after 30 years, sitting in a corner on a mountaintop. It's something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be certain percentage enlightened every single day. So you want to create as much space between your thoughts as possible. And the way you do that is by being aware of what your thoughts are and why you're having them. So if I saw the guy with the bad hairdo and a toupee. Um, I would look at that and I would, at first I'd be like, haha, he has a bad hairdo. And then I'd say, well, why am I laughing at him? Oh, to make me feel better about myself.

• 1:03:17Naval Ravikant?

  And why am I trying to make me feel better about my own hairdo? Oh, because I'm losing my hair and I'm afraid it's going to go away. And what I find is that 90% of thoughts that I have are fear. 90% are fear based. The other 10% are probably desire based and as any.

• 1:03:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's a very tactful way to put it.

• 1:03:33Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, and as any, as any Buddhist will tell you that desire is just fear by another name. It's the other coin. It's just the coin of fear.

• 1:03:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I thought you were talking about something else entirely.

• 1:03:41Naval Ravikant?

  Oh, lust, lust, yeah.

• 1:03:43Tim Ferriss?

  There's this, there's this cartoon, I don't know if you know who Harry Crumb is. He has all of these very sort of profane comic strips and was very famous. And there's a great documentary about him as well. I, wait, Harry Crumb, I think that's actually a comedy. Uh, but, uh, R. Crumb, maybe I'm, I'm mixing it up. In any case, somebody can correct me in the comments, but there's this one cartoon of his. I think it's a single cell, kind of like the far side in its format. And it's, uh, it's basically a drawing of people on the street in Manhattan. And every man has a thought bubble above his head with a vagina in it. And every woman has a thought bubble above her head with a penis in it. And there's everybody walking.

• 1:04:19Naval Ravikant?

  Well, it is, that, that's why the Adam and Eve story is there, right? Original sin is lust. Uh, it's a thing that makes you fall out of heaven. Uh, the same way, uh, maybe some of your readers have this, read this book called Siddhartha. But it's a beautiful parallel story to the making of the Buddha by Herman Hesch. It's a great book. I highly recommend it. But even in that book, our, our protagonist is out there seeking enlightenment and gets really close. And the thing that drops him out of it is lust. He, he meets a woman that he falls, uh, he feels lustful towards. And that sort of slowly becomes his undoing into everything. Um, but anyway, so to, to answer your original question, when I'm, when I'm doing the choiceless awareness form of meditation, which by the way, isn't, as far as I can tell, is not taught in any school. Um, it's something that I discovered mostly by reading enough of Krishnamurti's book

• 1:05:02Naval Ravikant?

  and piecing together what he meant, because he's a very, uh, he's not a, he's not a very clear speaker at times. Or he is clear, but in a very different kind of way. And then I realized that, okay, so the point of meditation is to clear your mind. And the way to clear your mind is, yes, you can sit in the corner and struggle with it, which doesn't really get you the outcome. Or you can do transcendental meditation, which is where you're using this chanting to create a white noise in your head to bury your thoughts. Or you can just very keenly and very alertly be aware of your thoughts as they happen. And as you watch them, you realize how many of them are just fear-based. And the moment you recognize it is fear, without even trying, it sort of goes away. And then after a while, your mind quietens.

• 1:05:44Naval Ravikant?

  And when your mind quietens, you stop taking everything around you for granted. You start noticing the details of, oh, my God, I live in such a beautiful place. It's so great that I clothe on me. Yeah, I can go into a Starbucks and get a coffee anytime I want. How rich am I? Look at these people. They're, you know, each one has a perfectly valid and complete life of their own in their own heads that's going on. So it sort of drops us, it pops us out of the story, the dream that we're always in, the story that we're constantly telling ourselves. And if you stop talking to yourself for even 10 minutes, or if you stop obsessing over your own story for even 10 minutes, you'll realize that we are really far up Maslow's hierarchy of needs and that life is pretty good.

• 1:06:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, totally agree. And for people who are looking for a little teaser on this, I think a very good one is a lecture by Sam Harris called Waking Up, and it covers, he's a PhD in neuroscience. He's also been on the podcast. If you just go to, if you just go to fourhourworkweekallspelledout.com/vimeo, that'll take you straight to a page that has a sample kind of trailer that people can check out. Robert Crumb was the name of the cartoonist, just as a side note for people who are interested. He was very fond of women with thick legs and also fond of drawing weird, like, electrical instruments. In any case, somebody to check out. What is a bad habit that you're working to overcome right now?

• 1:07:10Naval Ravikant?

  Very good question. So this is something that I learned through our Polish trainer friend Victor, currently Victor. Habits are everything, everything. I think that we are, we are trained in habits from when we were children, including potty training and when to cry and when not to and how to smile and when not to and all of these things become habits. These are all behaviors that we learn and that we then integrate into ourselves. And then what ends up happening when we're older is that we're a collection of thousands, maybe tens of thousands of habit groups that are constantly running subconsciously and they're internalized and then we have a little bit of extra brain power in our neocortex for solving new problems.

• 1:07:52Naval Ravikant?

  And so you become your habits and what really brought this to light for me is our friend, our trainer, gave me a routine to do every single day. And before that, I had never worked out every single day. And it's a light workout. It's not tough on your body, but I did this workout every single day and I realized the incredible astonishing transformation that it had upon me, both physically and mentally, because I think to have peace of mind, you have to have peace of body first. So that taught me the power of habits and after that I started realizing that it's all about habits. So at any given time now, within a six month period, I'm either trying to pick up a good habit

• 1:08:33Naval Ravikant?

  or I'm discarding a previously bad habit. And it takes time. So for example, if someone says, "I want to be fit, I want to be healthy, but right now I'm out of shape and I'm fat." Well, nothing is going to work for you in three months. It's going to be sustainable. It's going to be a 10 year journey, at least. And in the 10 year journey, what you're going to do is every six months or every three months, depending on how, how fast you can do it, you're going to break bad habits and you're going to replace them or you're going to pick up good habits. So I think it is all about habits. There is nothing else.

• 1:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  I was just gonna add some color to what you said. For those people who are curious, the morning routine is, it's basically a mobility movement practice. It's not intended to give you a big burn or anything like that. And you're basically taking your joints to the end range of movement. And I think what's very unique about it also, and this is, ties into the Laird Hamilton pool training and so on, that was in a previous episode, is that you are, you're controlling your breathing in a very particular way, and holding your breath at certain moments. And I think that has a lot to do with the kind of present state value of that routine. But, you know, I could be, that's just one man's opinion. Furthermore, I'd like to

• 1:09:43Tim Ferriss?

  just add, and since you're always so forthcoming in a valuable way with pushing back, I'm gonna push back a little bit, or maybe just revise, from my mind, what you said about the three months versus 10 years. So if you're fat, you can make a tremendous, I think that people underestimate what can be done in a short period of time, and they, but they underestimate how quickly they can fall back into bad habits.

• 1:10:09Naval Ravikant?

  Yes, yes. So it's absolutely right.

• 1:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. So it's a long-term project, because it's not a diet. It's a way of eating, for instance, that's required to keep you from not being fat in the future, right? But you can lose, say, 20 pounds in a month and do it surprisingly easily. But like you said, you have to sort of keep track of those habits. And I think measurement is a really great way to concretize, that's probably not a word, make concrete, that was the little donking, these types of changes. The Power of Habit by Doohic is actually a very good book on this type of thing as well.

• 1:10:44Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, so basically, like, examples of habits I've picked up in the last 12 months, or I'm still working on. And I don't, I'm kind of, I'm one of these people who wants everything, right? So I don't want to give up anything. So for example, if I want to stop eating bad foods, if I want to lose weight by fixing my diet, I don't go around, I don't say, "These foods are bad, I'm not gonna eat them," and then suffer, and then feel like I'm not eating tasty food. Instead, what I do is, I do some combination of changing my taste buds. To actually like the foods that are healthier for me and substituting unhealthy tasty foods with healthy tasty foods uh so that I can sustain it forever. I'm not interested in anything that is unsustainable or even hard to sustain.

• 1:11:29Naval Ravikant?

  I want my life to be effortless. So, once I've created a good habit, it has to be the kind of habit that I can sustain with no effort. The classic example for most people who have successfully lost weight in the last decade is most of them, not all, but most of them have been on some variation of a low sugar diet uh or a paleo diet or something where they're just or a slow carb diet where they're just watching the simple carbs. And if you stay in one of those diets for a little while, what you realize is you lose your sweet tooth. And when you when you drink like a sugary drink, it's an overwhelming amount of sugar. It just doesn't taste good. Um, so I think there are there are ways to fix your habits and do it in a very sustainable, gentle way. Um, so most recently, I've started, I've I've developed a lot more Japanese tastes in eating

• 1:12:13Naval Ravikant?

  uh which has helped me a lot because now the food that I find tasty and flavorful is actually not sauce, not curried, not cream, not carb. Uh, and I find that kind of food sloppy. I find it hard to even look at.

• 1:12:25Tim Ferriss?

  So, so this ties into, not to interrupt, but I was going to ask you, and I suspect this is related, what the what one hundred dollar or less purchase has most positively impacted your life in the last six months? And I think this might tie in.

• 1:12:38Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, it's a teppanyaki grill. It's like a little tabletop grill. And what I learned was that for food, the freshness and quality of the food going straight from the grill to your mouth is way more important than what you do with it. For example, in most recipes and most restaurants, we sauce the heck out of everything and we cream it and we over prepare it, we over process it because it's sitting under a heat lamp for ten minutes. And by the time it gets from the cook to your plate to your mouth, fifteen minutes have passed. And that's an eternity when it comes to food. Whereas the Japanese teppanyaki style of cooking is you have a tabletop grill and you have high quality meats and vegetables and you slice them thin and you put them on top and they're cooked a minute later and then it goes straight from the grill to your

• 1:13:21Naval Ravikant?

  mouth within five or 10 seconds and literally all it needs is salt and maybe not even that. And you can cook the vegetables in the oils from the meat and it's the best tasting meal that I can imagine. When I eat out now, I feel like I'm making a sacrifice on taste. So my meals at home taste better and they're very simple to prepare and really the hack is straight from the grill to your mouth because we're evolved as humans to eat cooking around the fire. We're not evolved, this is back to my evolution as a binding theory, we're not used to somebody going off and cooking the food and then coming to us 10 or 15 minutes later with the meat that's got cold on a plate, but now to make it taste good, they put in all kinds of sauces on top. So that is an example of a hack and

• 1:14:04Naval Ravikant?

  that $50 grill that I bought is the best investment for my health that I've ever made.

• 1:14:08Tim Ferriss?

  Do you know the brand offhand?

• 1:14:11Naval Ravikant?

  I think it's a Presto tabletop grill and you know, it's not, it's not perfect because it's got the non-stick surface on it and I would rather not deal with whatever chemicals are coming out of there, but it's a start. Same way, you do this workout that we were talking about earlier, it's done with a light 20-pound pair of dumbbells, you know, which I bought a sports basement for 20 bucks. And the beauty is I can do that anywhere I am. I can do that in my hotel room, I can do that in my bedroom, I can do that first thing when I roll out of bed. So there's no overhead of going to the gym. So this new daily workout for me, because it's only 20, 30 minutes, right in my living room, takes me less time than the old model of getting into a car and going to the gym and working with a trainer because of all the overhead that was involved in that model.

• 1:14:55Naval Ravikant?

  So I think what you want to find is you want to hack in habits that are actually more pleasurable, that are easier, and they replace your bad habits or you're not as good habits. So the most recent one is I dropped caffeine, for example, which was great. It was fantastic. And I'm dropping hard alcohol altogether and even wine, I don't really drink much anymore. So those seem to me almost unconquerable. For anyone who's gotten used to drinking a lot, it seems like a really difficult habit to break, but it is breakable.

• 1:15:23Tim Ferriss?

  So how did you crack caffeine and why did you feel the need to crack caffeine?

• 1:15:28Naval Ravikant?

  Well, I had a, I had a health issue a few months back, which is a great wake up call. I think at the, at the beginning of this session, I talked about how everything great comes from something bad. And so one of the definitions, Krishnamurti has a definition of suffering that I really liked where he says, suffering is that moment when you see reality exactly as it is. When you can no longer run away from it, when you can no longer deny it. For example, you have a bad relationship with your wife. You're in denial about the whole thing. You're always covering it up. You're always sort of escaping around it or, or putting a finger in the dike and making it work. And then one morning you wake up and she leaves you and you're in suf-, and you're in suffering. You're in pain and the suffering is there because now you can no longer deny that things were going poorly.

• 1:16:12Naval Ravikant?

  There's no more denial. You're forced to face reality. And when you for-, when you face reality, that is when you will change. So I always look upon suffering as a teacher and it's hard to do when you're actually going through it. But when you're not, you know, that's how you should like prepare yourself for it. So in this case, I actually had a bacterial infection is what it turned out to be. Uh, but it could have been a lot worse. So my internal state was bad. I was unhealthy and not feeling well. So literally in one week, I dropped alcohol, caffeine, dairy, red meat. Uh, you know, went completely zero carb. Basically I just switched entirely to meat salad water. And all my bad habits disappeared overnight because my body was giving me a very tight feedback loop. Oh, eat the wrong thing, you feel terrible.

• 1:16:55Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, and so that was a gift because when I'm 41, my body turns around and tells me, this is how you need to eat to be healthy. And if I ate perfectly, then the symptoms were a lot less worse. And I was a bacterial issue, antibiotics killed it. But it was, it was actually amazing because outside of the issues that I was having from the health condition, I felt great. I felt high energy. I felt clear headed. I felt light of feet and light of mind. Uh, and I became, and I wasn't, I was never before aware of what caffeine does to you. I think we, those of us who drink a lot of coffee slide into it without really realizing what's going on. And once you stop caffeine for two weeks, I was really tired and sleepy.

• 1:17:38Naval Ravikant?

  But then I became aware caffeine is a, is a real stimulant. It would, what it would do is in the morning when I had my, before I had my coffee, I would wake up like a zombie. I would be groggy and not quite functional. And then I have my coffee. And I would be functional, but what happened is my heart rate would be slightly elevated. And I would be slightly stimulated. It's absolutely a stimulant. And then that would run for about six or seven hours until my next coffee. And then it would slow down, then I would crash, and then I'd be low energy for the night. And when I was forced to drop caffeine, I realized how I was very consistent energy. I didn't get that stimulation boost at the beginning, but I also didn't get that crash at the end. And as we all know, the candle that burns twice as bright burns half as long.

• 1:18:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:20Naval Ravikant?

  So I decided that I no longer wanted to do that to myself. I did not want to overclock my body every single day of its life. Because I'm sure that leads to negative repercussions near the end of your life.

• 1:18:33Tim Ferriss?

  Let me add a couple of thoughts to a number of things you've said. So the first is with sugar cravings, just for people who want to cut back on sugar or simple sugars. Two things that are surprisingly effective for combating sugar cravings, particularly if you've just gone on to a lower carb diet or a slow carb diet, for instance, paleo keto, whatever, is number one, make sure you're getting enough sodium. Make sure you're getting enough salt. So a lot of people who go on to a lower carb diet, because each gram of carbohydrate can hold about four grams of water, they start shedding water. It's a diuretic. And they start craving salt, but they don't realize that, so they start eating carbs again. And so what I'll do is I'll just sprinkle some like sea salt or whatever

• 1:19:17Tim Ferriss?

  into a couple of glasses of water throughout the day. And obviously, I'm not a doctor, don't play one on the internet, but that's one. The second is branched-chain amino acids. So you can take a few grams of branched-chain amino acids, and your liver will convert a small amount of that to glucose. And you can get that hit without having to ingest carbs, which is kind of a neat trick also. It's a great way to maintain muscle mass and even gain muscle while on a low carb diet also, if you take it before you work out. And then the last point I'll make before asking the next question is, and I think this was actually also from Krishnamurti, in fact, is that sometimes it's easiest, paradoxically, to, or ironically maybe, counterintuitively probably a better word, to change a bunch of behaviors at once.

• 1:20:00Tim Ferriss?

  And so when you're adding behaviors, I think that it's often best to do one at a time. And I think there's a lot of science to support this. When you're subtracting, Behaviors or inputs like caffeine, sugar, alcohol. It's sometimes easiest to subtract them all because they're interdependent. Right? A lot of people are like, "Well, I smoke and then I drink and then I eat a pizza." Right? They're all interwoven cues. So I think that a great way to say, "Remove caffeine," is to remove a bunch of those negative inputs at once. And I did that by going to a three-day meditation retreat for transcendental meditation. And that provided, you know, the Friday, Saturday, Sunday, necessary to sort of get over that initial hump,

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  which was at the Center for Noetic Sciences, I think, up in Northern California. But we mentioned Krishnamurti. I'm sorry, go ahead.

• 1:20:52Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, I think you're spot on correct. Krishnamurti is a very uncompromising character. And for a lot of people, he can be tough to read because he starts from such an extreme point of view that he doesn't even make sense to them. But one of the things that he talks about is that an internal state of revolution. And so you should always be internally ready for a complete change. Whenever we say, "I'm going to try to do something," or "I'm going to form a habit," or "I'm going to become something," we're sort of wimping out. We're just saying to ourselves, "I'm gonna buy myself some more time so I can just limp along." When the reality is, most of us, when our emotions want us to do something, we just do it. If you want to go approach that pretty girl, or if you want to have that drink,

• 1:21:36Naval Ravikant?

  or if you really desire something, you just go do it. And so when you go about saying, "Well, I'm going to do this," or "I'm going to be that," you're really putting it off. You're giving yourself an out. So at least if you're self-aware, what you can say is, "Okay, I say I want to do this, but I don't really..." Because if I really wanted to do it, I would just do it. Or I would commit externally to enough people, all my friends and family, and they would say, "Hey, I thought you were gonna do this new thing. You were gonna stop smoking, you were gonna stop drinking. What happened? Why are you drinking in front of me?" For example, if you want to quit smoking, all you have to do is literally go to everybody you know and say, "I have quit smoking. I did it. I give you my word. I am done smoking." That's it. That's all you need to do. Go ahead. Go ahead.

• 1:22:18Naval Ravikant?

  Right, but most of us say that, but we're not quite ready for it. So we know we don't want to commit ourselves that extremely. Um, so because of that, I think it's important to be honest with yourself and say, okay, you know what, I'm not ready to give up smoking. I do like it too much. It's gonna be too hard for me to give up. I'm not gonna be able to replace it. So let me set a more reasonable goal for myself, which is I'm gonna cut down to the following amount per week, and I'm gonna commit to that externally, and I'm gonna work on that for three or six months. And when I get there, then I'll take the next step as opposed to beating myself up over it. So I think you're right in that when you really want to change, you just change. But most of us don't really want to change. We don't want to go through the pain just yet. So at least recognize it, be aware of it, and then give

• 1:23:02Naval Ravikant?

  yourself a smaller change that you can actually carry out.

• 1:23:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and the other thing is, if you, if you want to change something, and the, the public pronouncement is a good example of this, you need incentives, whether it's the carrot or the stick, because self-control is really overrated. Uh, and if you've had trouble making the change, clearly, the incentives haven't worked before, or they've been non-existent, right? So I'm reading a book right now for helping me train my puppy, which is called Don't Shoot the Dog, and it's by Karen Pryor. Might be out of print, but you can get it used. And Karen Pryor, the, the title's very misleading, because it's actually about behavioral modification. And Karen Pryor used to be a dolphin trainer, or a marine mammal trainer, also worked with orcas. And so she would use a clicker, this sound, and then translated

• 1:23:49Tim Ferriss?

  that over to dogs. And she talked about superstitious behavior from dogs, who say, like, every time you bend at the waist and say, sit, you think they're looking at your hand or listening to you, but they're actually watching you bend at the waist. And so, and so they, they start sitting at weird times, and you're like, what the hell is going on? And it's this superstitious behavior, and how she's helped her friends, who are humans, do the same thing with, say, superstition about fencing competitions. This one friend always needed his favorite, uh, not sure what the, uh, not rapier, but they, whatever the hell the sword is, the poker, whatever that thing is called. And he, when he forgot it at his apartment, he got to the competition, had to use another one and was in this really superstitious, negative state of mind and lost, right?

• 1:24:33Tim Ferriss?

  So he went through and identified with her help, sort of the 15 superstitious behaviors he had associated with it and trained those things out of himself, which led to a lot of performance enhancement, right? And also, it's a great book, people should check it out. But where I was going with that is, set punishments or rewards. And a very easy way to do that is with betting pools. You can also use a tool like Stick, S-T-I-C-K-K.com, or Diet Bet.com. But for those people who want more, check out the, just search Stakes, S-T-A-K-E-S, and The 4-Hour Chef, and there's a bunch of stuff online about how to set up those consequences, right?

• 1:25:12Naval Ravikant?

  It absolutely works. So I started my first company that way. I was working at this tech company called At Home Network, and I told everybody around me, my boss, my coworkers, my friends, I said, "Well, you know, Silicon Valley, all these other people are starting companies, looks like they can do it. I'm gonna go start a company. I'm just here temporarily. I'm an entrepreneur, I wanna start a company." I told everybody. And I wasn't meaning to actually trick myself into it. It wasn't a deliberate, calculated thing. I was just venting, talking out loud, being overly honest. But I actually didn't, because it was, this is 1996. It was a much scarier, more difficult proposition to start a company then. And sure enough, everyone started coming up to me and says, "What are you still doing here? I thought you were leaving to start a company. Wow, you're still here. That was a while ago, you said that."

• 1:25:56Naval Ravikant?

  And then I was literally embarrassed into starting my first company.

• 1:26:00Tim Ferriss?

  So if you hadn't harnessed the power of shame, you might still be clocking in as some type of corporate drone, for all we know.

• 1:26:07Naval Ravikant?

  Probably, probably, yeah. Scott Adams had a version of this, where he would fold a consistency bias to himself. So, you know, their biases can work for you. If you know the set of biases that are out there, you can use them against yourself. And so Scott Adams had this thing when I think he was working for Pac Bell. And he wanted to be a great cartoonist. He would show up to work really early in the morning, like four or five AM. And he would go to the bathroom and he would stand in front of the mirror. And he would repeat to himself for thirty minutes like a crazy person. He'd say, I'm going to be a great cartoonist. I am going to be a great cartoonist. I am going to be a great cartoonist. And then he had programmed himself and he had to be consistent with his own pronouncements to himself

• 1:26:52Naval Ravikant?

  or would destroy his ego. So then he had to go and just do, he did a lot of drawings, he did a lot of cartooning. So there are lots of ways to hack yourself. Every time you find a weakness about yourself, you can actually turn it to the positive. You can use that to hack your own brain, hack your own mind to get to where you need.

• 1:27:10Tim Ferriss?

  That's super hardcore with the mirror. I'm gonna have to talk to him about that. What is the book that you have gifted most to other people or books?

• 1:27:19Naval Ravikant?

  In the last year, it's probably Sapiens by Yuall Noah Hariri. I hope I'm saying his name correctly.

• 1:27:26Tim Ferriss?

  Sapiens, like Homo sapiens.

• 1:27:28Naval Ravikant?

  Exactly. It's a history of the human species written by a professor of history in Israel. It's absolutely mind blowing. It's a very orthogonal view on humans clinically as we are. And he starts out from the point of view that-

• 1:27:44Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry to interrupt. Can you explain orthogonal? It's very common in Silicon Valley, but just for people who may not know what that means.

• 1:27:49Naval Ravikant?

  Orthogonal means he kind of comes out of left field. It doesn't, it doesn't line up with your normal way of thinking. I don't know if it's a technical, it's actually a geometric term where something can be running on a different axis. So he basically comes at it from left field and he says, let's take a look at human beings, the species. Let's look at them like an anthropologist or a zoologist will look at this animal and what's different about this animal. And so he comes to some very, very startling conclusions. Uh, he talks about how humans are the first animals that were able to tell each other's stories. And those stories that talked about things that weren't actually going on around them allowed humans to self-organize.

• 1:28:28Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, in, for example, the Neanderthals were probably stronger than us physically, but uh, you could only organize Neanderthals by blood. So you could have a hundred of them who are related who could gang up maybe to fight a war. But you could unite five thousand or fifty thousand humans under the banner of being Christian, because we all believe this story. Uh, he talks a lot of corporations are a story, religion is a story, even the, you know, the, the fact that we're talking and I, I'm someone that you want to interview. That's just a story in our heads. Uh, reality is actually quite different. So he starts with that thesis that humans are these storytelling monkeys who then get out of control. And he basically documents the genocide of every other species in this earth, or genocide or domestication by humans.

• 1:29:10Naval Ravikant?

  And then basically shows, he doesn't use the word AI, but we're sort of the first artificial intelligence as far as every other creature is concerned that overran the earth and took it over as a resource. Uh, and he comes to all these really interesting startling conclusions, like he talks about how empires have never been overthrown from within. Uh, instead, the children of the losers get kind of brainwashed into thinking they're part of the victors. Um, he, he talks about how every generation is a form of racism. Where they basically uh, treat other people, some class of people as dirty and polluted and, and not to intermingle with our kind. And he talks, and he shows how in our modern society, that's rich versus poor. So we think poor people should live in different neighborhoods. We don't think they should go to the same schools. We don't, we don't want

• 1:29:53Naval Ravikant?

  uh, our college educated children marrying a non-college educated, blue collar worker. Uh, but then the biggest predictor of uh, uh, poverty or wealth is being born poor or being uh, born wealthy. Uh, so it's kind of the racism of our times. Uh, but I don't want to do the book Injustice. I, I just gave away a lot of copies and I feel like people should read it. Before that, I was The Rational Optimist by Matt Ridley, or in fact, anything by Matt Ridley, I thought was really provocative and eye-opening. Poor Charlie's Almanack, which is the

• 1:30:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, great one.

• 1:30:23Naval Ravikant?

  Charlie Munger's book, probably the best book on business quote-unquote that I've ever read. I try not to read business books for the most part, because they're very simple ideas wrapped up in a lot of pages. But yeah, and definitely Krishnamurti's The Book of Life, Siddhartha by Herman Hesch, Meditations, Marcus Aurelius, these are all fantastic books.

• 1:30:43Tim Ferriss?

  Super solid. The, just a quick note, since I'm in dog mode, on the Homo sapiens versus Neanderthals, and you mentioned domestication. One, one theory that has some legitimate scientists subscribe to it is, and I believe this is, I originally read this in Scientific American, I want to say, but people could find this if they Google for it, is that part of the reason Homo sapiens were able to dominate and drive out Neanderthals is that they were able to domesticate wolves, whereas Neanderthals were not, which is kind of a really fascinating idea. And you can see that type of domestication taking place right now, and people could just

• 1:31:26Tim Ferriss?

  do a Google search, where baboons have this truce with Ethiopian wolves in Africa. And it's so fascinating, because when the baboons are foraging for whatever the hell baboons eat, they drive up field mice out of the ground, and it makes it easier for the wolves to hunt. So they've established this truce, but it's, it doesn't exist with other canines, like feral dogs, for instance. It's super fascinating.

• 1:31:51Naval Ravikant?

  Actually, related to that, another great book that I would recommend is The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin. I think almost everything about humans and human civilization is explained better by evolution than anything else. If you look at what religions are, is religions are trying to basically explain how humans work on a large scale. They're a cooperating system for humans, and they're an ancient one, and they kind of establish what are the set of rules and boundaries, then what kind of behavior you can expect. And I think the modern religion, if you're a scientist, you know, the closest thing to it is evolution, where you can look at it and say, okay, this is probably why most creatures behave the way they behave. And so if you're going to read the Bible of evolution, you got to read The Origin of Species. And what you'll find is that creatures, like

• 1:32:35Naval Ravikant?

  you're talking about, are incredibly dynamic. They exhibit Uh incredible behavior, social, cultural, cooperative, the way they talk, the way they sing. You know, for example, species of whales are are born that communicate through song. But the but every song is unique to each pack and they're not born with that song. They learn it from their parents. They learn different songs for different communication. And you realize how much complexity there is in the natural world and you realize how little you matter.

• 1:33:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:03Naval Ravikant?

  And and that's and knowing how little you matter is actually, I would argue, very important for your own mental health and your own happiness. Usually, when you see someone who's depressed, uh they're trapped in their own mind and they're taking themselves far too seriously.

• 1:33:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, Marcus Aurelius' meditations, not to beat a dead horse on that one, is great for that. And some of the um some of the reminders that Marcus would read for himself in the mornings before going about the day, like today I'm going to encounter ungrateful, rude people and this, this and this, and then at the end of it all, I will be dust and I will be put in the ground, you know, for animals to consume or whatever. Uh which sounds depressing until you realize how much perspective it gives you before you set out uh in the day. Do you have a, related to the books, favorite documentary or movie?

• 1:33:55Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, you know, I generally don't watch movies. I consider that, I mean, they're great and they're great for other people, but for me, they're just very low bandwidth.

• 1:34:04Tim Ferriss?

  So pure, pure cartoons, is that your more of a cartoon guy?

• 1:34:07Naval Ravikant?

  Well, I like cartoons. I like Rick and Morty. It's a great cartoon.

• 1:34:10Tim Ferriss?

  Rick and Morty is amazing.

• 1:34:11Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, it's really fun. Uh, good for smart people too, but I I like to read because I can read a lot faster than I can listen. Uh, and also when, you know, listening or watching or someone's talking to you, like the the egos enter into it. Uh, whereas the great thing about reading is you can read a hundred books, then you can absorb them all, forget the source material and sound really smart.

• 1:34:32Tim Ferriss?

  The, what words, okay, so sounding smart.

• 1:34:37Naval Ravikant?

  And actually, just before we get off this topic, like related to that, I recently read a book, which I think a lot of people have read as a child, but it's called Illusions by Richard Bach. And it's a beautiful book, and I would call it the, you know, Siddhartha is about a character becoming Buddha-ish and his journey to do that. And Illusions is about a character becoming Jesus and his journey to do that. And it's a very messianic, it's kind of got a Midwestern twist to it, but it has a lot of really great little mental hacks for living your life. And one of them, speaking of movies, was to treat your life as a movie. So if you pick up a film reel, that's a finished movie, that's kind of your life, it's a finished life, because so much of it is out of your control that for all practical purposes is finished.

• 1:35:20Naval Ravikant?

  And then you sort of have to watch it one frame at a time to experience it. So the purpose of your life is to live it. But now if you start living your life as if it's a movie, and you're the star of your own movie, because everyone's trapped in their own heads, right? The things you care about are so different than the things I care about, that for all practical purposes, we're living in two different worlds that intersect only briefly. So we're each living the movie of our lives. Now, if you start treating real life as that, you're walking around, you're like, well, this is the movie of my life, you take a very positive view towards everything, because you're like, well, I'm sitting here on a train and I'm acting all bored, when really in the movie of my life, something interesting would be going on. In the movie of my life, I'd be talking to the person next to me. So why don't I just talk to the person next to me?

• 1:35:58Tim Ferriss?

  I like that.

• 1:35:59Naval Ravikant?

  And so, yeah, so it sort of helps you just keep your life moving along in a positive way, because it's your movie, you want it to turn out well. These are all, and even when you get pissed off at people, you say, oh yeah, that's the villain, awesome, the villain has entered the scene, this is the foil, who now I'm gonna like counterbalance against, and I'm gonna learn something in the process. And, you know, let's see if this is the chapter where I win or I lose, and then maybe I win later on down the road. Another way to think about it is that it also gets you to be more moral or more ethical, because if it's a movie, that means there are hundreds of thousands or millions of people watching your movie. So what would the hero of a movie do? Would the hero behave badly, or would the hero behave well? Well, hopefully the hero would behave well. There's no such thing as a part of the movie where the hero does something terrible and the audience kind of overlooks it.

• 1:36:42Naval Ravikant?

  So if you, if you treat the world as a movie of your life, and you treat yourself as the hero of that movie, it makes the world a much more pleasant place to deal with.

• 1:36:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and it also engages you in a way that's very present state, right? So one thing that I do, I don't think I've really talked about, that sounds kind of weird, but I will often

• 1:37:01Tim Ferriss?

  Basically behave like someone who has a what would Jesus do bracelet on, but I'll do it for people, friends of mine typically, who have characteristics that I want to adopt. So Matt Mullenweg, for instance, is so calm under fire, I mean, it's very hard to frazzle Matt. And so sometimes when I find myself getting anxious or wound up about something, and I'll just ask myself, like, okay, if this were, like you said, a movie, and Matt were playing Tim Ferriss, like, but not, but not trying to be the spastic Tim Ferriss, like, what would he do? And it's really weird to, when you become the observer in that way, which is a part of a lot of meditative practice, it allows you to be more effective. And what,

• 1:37:43Tim Ferriss?

  another thing that I do, which is kind of Hulk-like, is I'll just, I'll talk about myself when I'm having some poor response, or about to have a poor response, and I'll be like, oh, look at that, Tim is angry. Like, why is Tim so angry? And when I take that, that step back, and I was talking to, I think, Phil Libin about this, kind of like third player game versus a first, first-person shooter, for instance, when you take that step away from yourself to observe in a detached way, it allows you to pattern interrupt, right? So you're not reflexive.

• 1:38:16Naval Ravikant?

  We spend most of our waking lives dreaming. We think we're awake, but we're walking around talking to ourselves. If we verbalize those thoughts, we'd be locked up, right? It's not cool to walk around talking to yourself in public, but we talk to ourselves in our heads constantly. And I consider that a state of dreaming. And, you know, 90% of the time, we're dreaming to ourselves. And all I'm hoping is five, or 10, or 15% of the time, I'll catch myself dreaming, I'll realize that it's just some form of fear, and then I'll say to myself, I'm awake, wake up. And then I wake up, and I observe the present surroundings, and everything is fine. By the way, that's what I think Buddha means. Buddha means the awakened one, or that is one interpretation of it. So maybe that was a fellow who was awakened most or all the time. But that doesn't mean you have

• 1:39:00Naval Ravikant?

  to be asleep all the time, you just have to be awake a little bit more than, than you normally are.

• 1:39:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:06Tim Ferriss?

  A very fun way to explore this for people who are allergic to the concept of meditation is lucid dreaming, where you do reality checks and literally learn to distinguish between a dream state and a normal waking state, but it requires doing these constant check-ins. Because things, for instance, in a dream state will shift orientation, like bricks that are laid down on a floor, if you look away and look back at them, they'll almost always shift orientation. So, people are interested in looking at that. It's really fascinating and can be proven in a lab. Can just look for lucid dreaming 101 and my name. Talking to yourself, or talking to other people, what words or phrases do you overuse, or most overuse?

• 1:39:48Naval Ravikant?

  Orthogonal. Most of my vocabulary is built from reading, not from talking or listening. And so, it makes it easy for me to sound smart. Because when people are writing, they will use a larger range of words than, rather than when they're speaking. So, I, so one of the hacks that I use is I try to use, or I don't even try, sort of do it effortlessly at this point, is I use a written vocabulary while speaking. And so, that makes me sound smart, even if I don't know what the heck I'm talking about. So, that's a, that's a good little hack. What phrases do I overuse? I don't know, I mean, we're all just habit loops,

• 1:40:29Naval Ravikant?

  so I've got the habits of a bunch of phrases. I definitely kind of overdo this, looking at everything in evolutionary context. If I can't find evolutionary reason, either biometric or genetic, for why someone is behaving the way they are, or why they're doing certain things, then I kind of don't have a framework for it, and I discard that hypothesis. Similarly, game theory, I think, is ultra-important. If, if you understand game theory well, just the, just the rudiments of it, you don't have to go into any of the advanced, you know, Nash equilibrium-type stuff, but if you just understand prisoner's dilemma and iterated prisoner's dilemma, and there's a great book called The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley that goes through a lot of this, then you have a very deep understanding

• 1:41:13Naval Ravikant?

  of how humans negotiate and behave and transact. Uh, and that helps out. We didn't talk about this, but I'm positive you read this book, Robert Kaldy, his influence.

• 1:41:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:41:22Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, classic, classic book. Everybody should read it, memorize it, understand that the way that people influence other people is consistency, liking, authority, social proof, scarcity and reciprocity. And once you know that, that anytime you're trying to persuade anybody of anything, you can use those to, to, to your benefit. But you have to be very careful because there is a tendency when we're trying to persuade other people to be dishonest. And when you're dishonest with somebody else, you're gonna be dishonest with yourself. And when you're dishonest with yourself, you're disconnected from reality. You're gonna make poor decisions. You're gonna drop out of the moment and you're gonna be less happy and you're gonna be wrong. So you have to maintain your honesty while doing it.

• 1:41:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, the, they're tools, right? And they're also just principles of psychology that can be wielded for good, or they can be wielded for horrible, uh, genocides and so on, right? I mean, so you, if you, if you look at like master propagandists, you could look at some of the nonprofits out there, right? Which use these principles, but for a greater good, like charity water, like donors choose. I mean, they, they take advantage of these and leverage them. But you could also look at Goebbels, right? In World War Two. And so it's not inherently good or bad. It's like a scalpel. It could be used to kill someone or it could be used to, to perform surgery, right?

• 1:42:35Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, I feel like there's 10 or 15 great skills that we should have all been taught in school. But instead, we spend too much time memorizing the capital of Rwanda uh, or, or Alabama, when we should be learning, uh, okay, what do we know about what works about dieting and nutrition? What do we know that works about happiness and peace? What do we know that works about persuasion? You know, how do you, uh, you know, have a healthy relationship with someone? What, what's, what is the meaning of values, right? What are your options and values? Those kinds of things. Now, they're very fuzzy topics. They're very hard to learn. They're very hard to teach. But at the same time, it's, it's shocking how we essentially just ignore them in our educational process.

• 1:43:16Tim Ferriss?

  What, did you go to college?

• 1:43:19Naval Ravikant?

  I did. I went to Dartmouth.

• 1:43:21Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's right. I just talked about the alumni magazine. What did you study there?

• 1:43:24Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, computer science and econ. And I did, uh, little bits of English, physics, history. Um, I was actually originally going to do English and history and then I realized I didn't want to drive a taxi. I was very ambitious, uh, so I switched to computer science and economics. Uh, and, uh, but my real education, frankly, even before Dartmouth, came from a magnet, uh, high school in New York called Stuyvesant, uh, which is a magnet math and science school that was absolutely brutal and eye-opening and educational. Uh, but even before that, I would say the real education begins in the library, begins with books. Uh, if you can learn to like to read, you never need to go to school and, uh, learning to like to read, I think is, I think everyone can get there. It's just a, you just have to think about two things. One is,

• 1:44:09Naval Ravikant?

  don't feel the need to read anything you don't want to read. Okay. Only read the stuff that's fun to you. Because it's more important to form the habit and the practice and the enjoyment of reading and to associate Pavlovian style with something positive rather than negative. So even if you're reading junk, just read. Um, and then secondly, don't feel the obligation to finish any book. Don't, do not treat it like a linear, uh, tome or treatise that has to be read in order and the way the author intended beginning to end. Feel free to skip around. It's your book. Uh, you know, you can start at the back. Uh, there are books that have literally started in the middle. Uh, I read, you know, near to the end and then I put it down. And it was a decent book and I learned something, but I just didn't feel like having to start it or finish it. Uh, and that liberation, that freedom just allows me to read.

• 1:44:53Tim Ferriss?

  If you wanted to get someone hooked on the joy of reading, what would the book or books be, like one or two that you would recommend just to suck people into the, for the pure enjoyment of it?

• 1:45:04Naval Ravikant?

  Uh, it, it's highly genre dependent, so it depends what you like.

• 1:45:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, just for you personally, yeah.

• 1:45:10Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah. So if for me personally, like if I was going to read science fiction, uh, or if I like technology, I would read Snow Crash.

• 1:45:17Tim Ferriss?

  So good, so good.

• 1:45:18Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, it's old, but it's brilliant. Uh, Neal Stephenson predicts everything from Bitcoin to the internet to virtual reality to see, to nation states to, uh, you name it, encryption. I mean, it's a, it's a powerful.

• 1:45:32Naval Ravikant?

  Powerful book. It's sad that it's still never yet been made into a movie. It would make a brilliant movie. So on the sci-fi level, I recommend that. I think graphic novels are underrated because there's some great writing in modern graphic novels. V for Vendetta, The Watchmen, Sandman, these are up there. These are works of art and they're very approachable because there's also beautiful illustrations and expansive storylines that go with it. If you like history and science, actually Sapiens is great because it's a very easy read. There's nothing difficult about it. You can just fly through it. In the same way, if you're looking for spirituality and internal awareness, Meditations and Siddhartha are the two places I would start because they're both very light, easy, beautiful reads.

• 1:46:15Naval Ravikant?

  Siddhartha, even though it's been translated from the German, is almost lyrical. It reads almost like poetry.

• 1:46:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:46:22Naval Ravikant?

  It's a beautiful book.

• 1:46:23Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll add a couple of options for people, just for the joy of reading. If you're like, God, you know, I'm one of those people who doesn't read books or I don't have the time for books or whatever. It doesn't have to take a lot. And from from my perspective also, one of the best ways to solve insomnia or get to sleep is to turn off your problem solving brain by reading fiction before bed. And so I'll give a couple of recommendations. If you like fantasy, The Name of the Wind, I've mentioned this before, so good. You could try another one, if that one doesn't grab you, called The Lies of Locke Lamora, L O C K E Lamora, which is part of the Gentleman Bastards series. And it's basically written as if the author had a little black book that he carried around and wrote down the most hilarious insults he heard people saying

• 1:47:06Tim Ferriss?

  in like every bar for a year and then wove them into dialogue. It's fucking hysterical. And then if you want something that is also very deeply philosophical, but but just roariously funny, Zorba the Greek, which is a classic, is is just outstanding.

• 1:47:21Naval Ravikant?

  I'll throw two others in there. This one's a harder read, but really fun. Most egotistical author of all time is The Secret Life of Salvador Dali by Salvador Dali.

• 1:47:34Naval Ravikant?

  The title alone should grab you and give you a sense. And then I'm blanking for a second, but we'd mentioned earlier, oh yeah. You know, I keep coming back to Meditations. It's such an easy book. I almost recommend everybody start there because it will, it will change your worldview on what you think success means.

• 1:47:52Tim Ferriss?

  I think, I think that so, so Meditations is an interesting one. It didn't grab me the first time that I read it. And I feel like that type of material, the philosophical deep stuff is like, it's more like music than a generalizable textbook, in so much as different types of music calm down different people. Some people like reggae, some people like classical, some people can listen to, you know, Green Day or Nirvana because they associate it with a positive time. And for me, you know, Seneca was the fix that I needed at first. And then I came back to Meditations, right? So I think it's in part finding the type of teacher that works best for you.

• 1:48:34Naval Ravikant?

  I completely agree, which is why I think the most important way to read is pick up a lot of books, start reading them all, put down any book instantly that doesn't grab you and you don't have fun reading and just keep going till you find something that does speak to you.

• 1:48:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:45Naval Ravikant?

  There's so, so many choices out there.

• 1:48:46Tim Ferriss?

  Which is, which is one of the huge benefits of using, say, a Kindle, right? And I, I do love paper books, but because I like to be able to export my notes and highlights, I, that was really what sold me on the Kindle is I use it almost exclusively. And what I recommend people do is just, you know, buy a few of these books and read the first 10 or 15 pages. And if it, if you're not super stoked to continue and you're like, oh my God, like I want to eat dinner later because this is so awesome. Then move on to the next one and try it until, until you hit the jackpot. Like, don't settle for pretty good.

• 1:49:20Naval Ravikant?

  A lot of the great books actually start out strong. It's a misconception that you have to suffer through it until it gets good. Yes, that may be true for some, especially the ones you were assigned to read in school. But Snow Crash, for example, starts out very strong.

• 1:49:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:49:33Naval Ravikant?

  Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman. It's all bite-sized little stories. You can skip around and read these great stories about the adventure of this curious character. And you can learn about the inner mindset and external state of someone who was absolutely brilliant, world-shaking, earth-shattering brilliant, but also unconventional, lived their life the way they want. There's also a, it's not quite a sequel, but there's a follow-up book to Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, which is also good if you liked the first one. And I love the title alone. It's called So what do you care what other people think?

• 1:50:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's a great title. And yeah, everybody at the very least should try to find some footage of Feynman being interviewed, like the joy of finding things out. And that will, that'll be the gateway drug to get you to read. Surely, you must be joking, Mr. Feynman.

• 1:50:20Naval Ravikant?

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

• 1:50:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 1:50:56Naval Ravikant?

  So, so, and that all begins with reading.

• 1:50:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hundred percent agreed. So the, we've been giving a lot of advice. Obviously, trying to take our own advice is, is hard oftentimes, but you're, look at, if you look back to your undergrad self. So you got the, you switched to computer science and econ and so on. You're about to graduate. If you had to go back and give that and of all advice, you're already hooked on reading, so that seems to be covered. What, what advice would you give yourself?

• 1:51:27Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, it's funny. I actually did this exercise recently where I sat down and I didn't write it because it was in my head, but I did spend some time thinking about what is the advice I would give my 30 year old self? And the advice was along the lines of chill out, don't stress so much, not so much anxiety.

• 1:51:45Naval Ravikant?

  Everything will be fine. And be more yourself. Don't, don't try and do what you think society wants or needs. Don't try and live up to other people's expectations. Self actualize, say no to more things. Protect your time because it's very precious, you know, on your dying day, you will give everything, everything you have for another day. So the discount rate, the marginal value of that extra day just goes up as you get older. Um. So the advice was all along those lines. It was basically be yourself. Don't listen to other people. Don't worry about what other people need or want or think or expect from you. And then I said, well, what would my 30 year old self have said to my 20 year old self? And it turned out to be pretty much the exact same thing. And what would

• 1:52:27Naval Ravikant?

  my 20 year old self have said to my 10 year old self? Pretty much the exact same thing. So I think my 50 year old self is going to say chill out, relax, don't stress so much, live in the moment, it'll all be all right. Less fear, more love. And, you know, I'd love people more. You know, love is one of those weird things, like everyone wants to be loved. Everyone deeply needs to be loved. It's not something you can buy. No amount of money or power will bring you true unconditional love. But it turns out you can give love. It's free to give. So you can't necessarily get it, but if you can get in the mindset of, well, I'm just going to give it, eventually, in a long enough time scale, you get what you deserve. The universe kind of sends it back your way.

• 1:53:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Well, not only that, it's like if you don't know how to make yourself happy, try to make someone else happy. And that is sort of a, as you said, kind of a recursive function. And now I'm getting, I'm using vocab I shouldn't, but it's a virtuous cycle.

• 1:53:20Naval Ravikant?

  Well, Charlie Munger, who's Warren Buffett's partner at Berkshire Hathaway, and just a brilliant older gentleman, he was, he's, his speeches are collected in poor Charlie's almanac, and they're worth reading. But he was asked at one of the Berkshire Hathaway annual meetings, someone basically asked him on the lines of like, you know, how do I find a worthy mate? And he said, be worthy of a worthy mate. And I think that's absolutely right. You just work on yourself until you no longer need them, and then they appear. I think that's what the Zen saying that says, when the student is ready, the master appears. What that basically means is you have to work on yourself and be ready. And then, you know, good things will happen to you.

• 1:53:59Tim Ferriss?

  Well, not only that, but when you prepare your mind, right, by, let's just say hypothetically reading, surely you must be joking, Mr. Feynman. It's almost like when, when the When the student's eyes are prepared, the teacher becomes visible, if that makes sense.

• 1:54:14Naval Ravikant?

  Yes.

• 1:54:15Tim Ferriss?

  You suddenly, it's like buying a new car and then you see that new car everywhere. Well, it's not that everybody went out and bought the same car. You just have a new selective attention and you can hone that to be a useful selective attention.

• 1:54:28Tim Ferriss?

  Just a couple more questions. This is fun. We could go on for hours and hours like we usually do, but just a couple more. What does the first 60 minutes of your day look like? If you have, if you can completely have control of it, what does the first 60 minutes of one of your weekdays look like?

• 1:54:45Naval Ravikant?

  If I have control of it first, I try not to wake up to an alarm clock. I think that's highly damaging. It's not something you're meant to do. It destroys the last bit of your sleep and peace. So it's better to wake up naturally. So it's ideally you get to bed in such a time that your eyes will roughly awaken at the right time. And the simplest hack for that is sleep near a window or skylight or something that will let natural light in. And natural light is the ultimate gentle alarm clock. Then again, going back to evolution as a binding principle, you're evolved to wake up to the sunrise. So I think that is a nice way to wake up, although in reality I don't wake up that early. So easier said than done. Then I do this.

• 1:55:26Tim Ferriss?

  When you usually wake up? What would be, without, if not the crack of dawn, when, what time are you usually waking up on a good day?

• 1:55:34Naval Ravikant?

  This is embarrassing, but I'm a night owl, so I get up around 7:30. So it's not that early.

• 1:55:39Tim Ferriss?

  I love how you, that's your night owl. I wake up late. I was talking to my, my, one of the, one of the people helping with dog training and she's like, so what time do you wake up? And I was really proud because I've been working on this and I was like, I wake up at like 8:30. And she's like, whoa. And I was like, yeah. And I took, I took that as like a pat on the back. I was like, I know I've been working on it. She's like, no, you wake up really late. Anyway, okay. So you wake up at 7:30.

• 1:56:00Naval Ravikant?

  I sleep underneath a skylight, which is deliberate. I, I put, I always try and get an apartment or a house that has a skylight and I always try and put my bed underneath it.

• 1:56:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:10Naval Ravikant?

  Because if I didn't do that, my teenage self used to wake up at 11 a.m. So that's a quick way to get rid of that habit. Then I always like to do that light workout that I'd mentioned during the day. It combines yoga, stretching, breathing, dumbbells. I should be doing 30 to 40 minutes. I actually do 20 minutes. I shouldn't be distracted, but in the middle, sometimes I'll take a break and go and check email. I try to put my meditation actually in the workout. If I do the workout properly. Uh, no music, no distractions, and I'm just being aware of my thoughts and watching my mind as well. And because my body is busy, it also gives me something to do, then I can actually be very meditative. So in an ideal world, I would do that and then I exit that state very peacefully.

• 1:56:52Naval Ravikant?

  Um, then I'm usually on the computer, on Slack, on email, talking to my team, working with them. Hopefully not a phone call. I did, I really dislike phone calls. Uh, and then I'll kind of leisurely, you know, either I'll have a decaf coffee or a tea. Uh, and then I'll head off to work, but uh, that, that combined workout meditation is really important. And waking up naturally is very important. Actually, the number one thing my wife and I fought about for a long time after we got married. Uh, was that she would wake up to alarm clocks and she would set five, six, seven of them. Uh, uh, as, as little snoozes. So every 10 minutes, and she's a deep sleeper and I'm a very light sleeper. So every 10 minutes she has some alarm going off that she's sleeping through and I'm going absolutely berserk.

• 1:57:34Naval Ravikant?

  Cause I've been woken up in the middle of my sleep and I feel like, like my heart is racing and then sort of all stressed out. Um, so finally she got a Fitbit, uh, which she wears on her wrist and that sort of buzzes her awake. Uh, and sometimes it'll wake me up, sometimes not, but it's not a jarring wake up.

• 1:57:49Tim Ferriss?

  All right. It's not the auditory punch in the face.

• 1:57:52Naval Ravikant?

  Exactly. Alarm clocks are terrible for you. Anyone who's waking up to alarm clocks on a, on a regular basis. Like it will bring more peace in your life to break that habit than any more difficult habit that you might have to change.

• 1:58:03Tim Ferriss?

  And an intermediate step, I haven't talked about this, but it's had, it sounds so funny, but it's had a huge impact on the quality of my mornings. Is I had the default kind of phone ringtone, which was just a horrible like na, na, na, na, na, na, na. One of those horrible like fire alarm type sounds. And I just switched it to chimes. It's such a simple thing. Go into your ringtones and just change the alarm ringtone to something that sounds like wind chimes. It's a good intermediate step.

• 1:58:34Naval Ravikant?

  Well, so someone out there who's pretty smart is going to at some point create and a thing you can put in your bedroom. That will essentially create natural sunlight type light slowly and maybe add in some. Birds that are chirping and so on to wake you very gently, like a natural sunrise.

• 1:58:52Tim Ferriss?

  So there are lights that do that. There are alarms that will brighten up the room with lights. I always sleep with an eye mask. That's a whole separate conversation, but we'll save that for another time.

• 1:59:04Naval Ravikant?

  There's actually, there's actually some studies that show that if you are sleeping and you hear the crackling of a fireplace or the breathing of a dog, the snoring of a dog, that you will sleep better than if there was no noise whatsoever. At the same time, the barking of a dog, if there's a dog barking in the distance remotely, it will raise your anxiety level higher than the same amount of noise, say, made by a car or a siren. And the reason is, again, evolution. We're evolved to fall asleep by fireplaces with our domesticated animals around. We're not evolved to sleep in a dark, quiet room with absolutely no noise. That's actually not natural.

• 1:59:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:59:46Naval Ravikant?

  You're not, you're not, you're not meant to sleep alone.

• 1:59:50Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, everybody, don't sleep alone.

• 1:59:54Naval Ravikant?

  I think most people are already working on that.

• 1:59:56Tim Ferriss?

  When I was in Japan, I remember there was this story about a sumo wrestler, and a lot of these guys can be prima donnas, but he had told his manager, he was one of the stars of the stable, and he's like, "I just can't sleep and I get bloody noses if I don't have a different woman next to me every night." And so this guy's like, "Damn it, my like prize racehorse," became a big issue.

• 2:00:17Naval Ravikant?

  Well, I mean, related to that, when I grew up in India, you know, India, there's this concept of the extended family where you basically live with your tribe at all times. So we used, when we were young, we were at our grandmother's place, my aunts and my uncles and my cousins and my grandparents, and everybody was there. And it was a warm night, we'd go out in the backyard, we'd put all these comforters and these little cots out, and everybody would sleep in one giant pile of 15 people, any of the stars.

• 2:00:42Tim Ferriss?

  That's awesome.

• 2:00:43Naval Ravikant?

  It was amazing. And, and two things were, were very great about it. One is, the noise level didn't bother you. Someone's foot was in your face, it didn't bother you. When it's family and you're young, like, it all just works and you feel very safe and happy. And the other thing is, I think it really reinforced in me how important the tribe is. And modern society gives us incredible flexibility in that we can get away from our crazy family members and we're not destined to die where we were born or do what our parents did. So we have incredible freedom, but then coming with it is this tremendous loneliness that we try and cover up either through drugs or alcohol or partying or even trying to find a mission like putting people on Mars. But the reality is a lot of that loneliness just comes from being disconnected from growing up with your tribal environment.

• 2:01:28Naval Ravikant?

  So it's important as you get older to figure out how to build your tribe that is always around you. And actually, the more they're in your business, the better. Like when I go to India and my grandparents' house, it's impossible for anyone in that house to be depressed. There are three dogs barking in there, there are seven cousins in your business, your aunt asking you, you know, did you eat enough? Do you want this? Like everyone is always in your business. So depression requires some level of privacy, or at least, you know, kind of the self-absorbed depression. Yeah, there's a chemical form of depression that I am not familiar with and that is a real condition. But there is also kind of the abject loneliness that all of us can feel that comes from being disconnected from our roots and our roots are very tribal.

• 2:02:09Tim Ferriss?

  Right. And I think also, speaking as someone who's had battles with depression before and for whose family it seems to be somewhat hereditary, there are a lot of males in my family who have depression. There's the question of nature versus nurture, obviously, but it's very easy in a Western, kind of pharmaceutical-focused culture to believe that you have a chemical imbalance, therefore, say, you're too lethargic to exercise, as opposed to asking the question, which I like to ask, is, you know, could the direction of the causality be the opposite, right? I'm not exercising, therefore, I feel lethargic and depressed, right? And just testing that.

• 2:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  And like you said, it's like when you have a bunch of people around you and you have other things to do that require you to be interacting with other entities and occupied, it's very hard to be self-absorbed in a way that spirals downward.

• 2:03:10Naval Ravikant?

  I think it's certainly one way that you can help not being depressed or lonely is if you constantly have other people's houses to go to and lives that you can step into. And of course, you don't get to make that choice because other people don't always invite you into their lives or houses, but what you can do is you can open your house to other people, you can open your life to other people, you can love other people, even if they don't love you back, it's okay. The real love is a one-way thing. What we call love mostly in modern society is attachment, it's not love. It's I'm loving you in exchange, you love me, I do this for you, you do that for me. That's a transaction. But if you really admire someone for their values, if you really love them for who they are, it doesn't matter how they treat you, you just treat them the way they deserve to be treated. And then,

• 2:03:50Naval Ravikant?

  again, this is all karma is. Karma is just people are very consistent with their actions and their behaviors. And so over a long enough time period, you get what you deserve.

• 2:04:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And for people who feel lonely out there, two recommendations that I've seen help a lot of people, including myself, check out Couchsurfing. Consider becoming a host for Couchsurfing. And take a look at AcroYoga. If you're in a place where you can find AcroYoga practice, it is one of the most enjoyable, awesome things you will ever do. Two more quick questions. If you could have one billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say? Where would you put it?

• 2:04:27Naval Ravikant?

  I don't know if I have messages to send to the world, but there are messages that I like to send to myself at all times. One message that really stuck with me when I figured this out was that, what is desire? And desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And I don't think most of us realize that's what it is. I think we go about desiring things all day long and then wondering why we're unhappy. So I like to stay aware of that, because then I can choose my desires very carefully. I try not to have more than one big desire in my life at any given time. And I also recognize that as the axis of my suffering. I realize that that's where I've chosen to

• 2:05:12Naval Ravikant?

  be unhappy. Uh, so I think that that is an important one. Um, or even a simpler one is, uh, you know, a lot of meditative, like you said, you did a transcendental meditation course. They give you a mantra, um, the mantra is supposed to have actually no meaning. Maybe the universal mantra, you know, that's been derived through the ages is Om, where you kind of sit there and say Om in your mind to yourself.

• 2:05:34Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:05:34Naval Ravikant?

  It's strange. You can say it to yourself all day long in your mind and it'll make you happier, more peaceful. You start chanting it out loud and they'll lock you up.

• 2:05:43Tim Ferriss?

  Similar to, I will be an amazing cartoonist.

• 2:05:46Naval Ravikant?

  Exactly.

• 2:05:46Tim Ferriss?

  I want to interview the guy who like sat outside the bathroom and was like, there's no fucking man going in there. I'm going to get.

• 2:05:51Naval Ravikant?

  Exactly. Until Scott Adams shuts up. Um, but Om, Om has no meaning, I think, but to me it has a meaning and the meaning is just accept. Just accept. Uh, in any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. Those are your three options. What, what, what is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it, but not changing it. Wishing you would leave it, but not leaving it and not accepting it. So, uh, it's that struggle, that aversion, uh, that is responsible for most of our misery. So probably the phrase that I use the most to myself in my head is I just tell myself one word, accept. So anytime I look at myself and I'm judging something, I just say, accept.

• 2:06:36Naval Ravikant?

  And, and it's only very, very, very few things that I will choose not to accept. And if I don't accept something, it's for one of two reasons. Either I'm aware that this is something that I, it's just so important to me right now that I can't accept it. And now I'm going to put up with a mental battle for it. Or more likely, I've just lost control of my thoughts. I'm no longer present. I'm dreaming. I'm in a highly emotional state.

• 2:06:59Tim Ferriss?

  I need to do more of that myself and, uh, I'm sure that there, we could go on for a very long time. And I'm sure we will continue to do this another time. Uh, but what ask, if any, or request would you make of the people listening to this?

• 2:07:18Naval Ravikant?

  Well, I mean, I think I love books. I love to learn. I want to be good at, you know, everything that matters to me for my own reasons, not to impose or show off anything to anybody else. So what I would ask you is, what is the one book that you've read that had the greatest influence on your life? It can be anything. But with the realization that all knowledge is ultimately personal, you know, none of us should be, we should never be taking our advice and thoughts and pre bundled beliefs and systems. Both Bruce Lee and Krishna Morti were real believers in this. Like Bruce Lee was, you know, he set up a school of

• 2:08:00Naval Ravikant?

  Jeet Kune Do, which was his style of fighting that he created. And they set up the school and then he sort of had a realization that no, no, all real learning is, is unique to the person who's doing the learning and, and you cannot be taught, you have to learn for yourself. So he actually tried to dismantle the school. He, he decided that it wasn't the right way to go about because the act of teaching alone caused you to formulate a system and that system traps you from, from thinking outside of the box and, and really self discovery. So I, I don't, I, I don't want to turn anything that I've recommended, nor what people recommend to me as a prescription, this is how you should live your life. But what I would love to have is just a collection of amazing books

• 2:08:42Naval Ravikant?

  that have great insight from people who have solved hard problems.

• 2:08:47Tim Ferriss?

  Cool.

• 2:08:48Naval Ravikant?

  And, and generally, the older the book, the better it is. That's, that's one of my criteria. So don't hesitate to recommend something that might be 500 years old.

• 2:08:55Tim Ferriss?

  And would you, would you like people to put those in the comments on the blog post that's going to accompany this podcast or let you know on Twitter? What's your preference?

• 2:09:04Naval Ravikant?

  Yeah, I think either mechanism, the comments would probably be ideal. So we have them all in one place. But just pick the one book that has most influenced you. It's probably, it's probably that dog year'd book that you read five, 10, 20 times. It could be fictional, it could be whatever, it could be embarrassing, it could be sexual, it doesn't matter. Obviously, it had an impact, it moved you in some deep way, you reread it over and over, you probably have parts of it memorized. What is that book?

• 2:09:31Tim Ferriss?

  Awesome. So guys.

• 2:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  Answer that question, the one book that's had the biggest impact on you that comes to mind, and leave that in the comments. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com/podcast, all spelled out, or you can just go to 4hourworkweek.com and click on Podcast, and then you will find this podcast, or you can just search Naval Ravikant Tim Ferriss Podcast, and this will pop up, and leave it in the comments. Naval, where can people find you on the interwebs and learn more about you and what you're up to?

• 2:10:01Naval Ravikant?

  If you go to Angelist, which is angel.co, I'm on there as angel.co/Naval. I have a blog at startupboy.com, which is highly neglected. I haven't updated in years, but some of my older random stuff is there. My Twitter account, where I tweet every now and then, some startup stuff, some not, that twitter.com/Naval. But the reality is, you don't need to find me. You need to find, we all need to find ourselves. So if I have something interesting to say, you'll see it somewhere on the interwebs. The internet's a great thing.

• 2:10:33Tim Ferriss?

  So I will, I will encourage people to say hi to you on Twitter. So it's twitter.com/Naval, N-A-V-A-L, and it's especially awesome when Naval gets really riled up about something and goes into full-on tweet war with someone, very often Startup L. Jackson. It's great to watch. And Naval, thanks so much, man. This has been great fun. I always love our walks. I love our walk and talks dinners. We'll find a substitute for the wine that might all usually be consumed. But I really appreciate you taking the time, man. This is good fun.

• 2:11:10Naval Ravikant?

  Thank you. I really appreciate your having me. And I'm happy to engage with people on Twitter. It's actually a great mechanism and medium for having conversations. So if anybody wants to talk on Twitter, let's go ahead and do that. I didn't focus that much on startups and technology and all that stuff, which I know is really what I'm supposed to be talking about. But we can always continue that on Twitter as well.

• 2:11:31Tim Ferriss?

  There's no supposed to. And I mean, a lot of people associate you with startups, but I think what is important for people to realize, or at least recognize my intention to be, is that you're excellent at startup investing. You're known in that world. But the conversations that we have often center on good thinking and asking good questions. And I think that the good thinking and the good questions is part of what makes you very good at startup investing. But those two skills are transferable almost everywhere. So I wanted to explore non-startup areas for two reasons. Number one, to try to demonstrate that. And number two, because you talk about startups in so many other places. And people

• 2:12:13Tim Ferriss?

  should definitely explore more of what you have to say. And for those people interested, I'm also on Angel List. I do all sorts of stuff. And you can see all of my angel investments at angel.co/tim. And let us know on Twitter if you'd like us to do a round two and explore other stuff. But until next time, Naval, thanks, brother.

• 2:12:34Naval Ravikant?

  Thanks, Tim. This has been great.

• 2:12:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric, as I do. It could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends,

• 2:13:23Tim Ferriss?

  for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com, all spelled out, and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it.

• 2:13:46Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if you could only use one supplement, what would it be? And my answer is inevitably Athletic Greens. It is your all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body, did not get paid for that, and I travel with it to avoid getting sick. I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance. It just covers all my bases. If I can't get what I need through whole-food meals throughout the rest of the day. And you can get 50, oh my gosh, 50% off, yes, 50% off if you go to athleticgreens.com/tim. That's athleticgreens.com/tim. Check it out. It's tasty, but more important, it will help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional

• 2:14:31Tim Ferriss?

  planning. So for me, it just covers the bases, takes a load off my mind, puts a lot in my body. And check it out, athleticgreens.com/tim. This episode is brought to you by 99designs, your one-stop shop for all things graphic design-related. I've used 99designs for everything from banner ads to book covers, including sketches and mock-ups that led to The 4-Hour Body, which later became number one New York Times, number one Wall Street Journal. And the brainstorming, a lot of it took place with designers from around the world. And here's how it works. Whether you need a t-shirt, a business card, a website, an app thumbnail, whatever it

• 2:15:11Tim Ferriss?

  might be, you submit that project and designers from around the world will send you sketches and mock-ups and designs. You choose your favorite and you have an original that you love, or you get your money back. It's that straightforward. And many of you who are listening have already used it and created some amazing things that I'll be sharing in the future. But in the meantime, if you want to see some of my competitions, some of the book covers, as well as get a free $99 upgrade, go to 99designs.com/tim. That's 99designs.com/tim. And until next time, thank you for listening.