What’s considered to be true is fought over. Individuals search for truth but groups search for consensus—and society is the largest group. So the biggest problem we run into is this: What society wants for you is not always what’s good for you. Even smart, critical thinkers go along with many of society’s truths, knowing deep down they are lies. Here’s a simple example: “Money won’t make you happy” More| Naval
We’ve all seen the pictures of the Raptor engine for the SpaceX rockets, and if you look at the various iterations, they go from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary. Because the most recent version just doesn’t have that many parts that you can fool around with. The earlier versions have a million different parts where you could change the thickness of it, the width of it, the material, and so on. More| Naval
I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about memes and meme theory—that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology, conjecture, and criticism. And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth: the set of physical transformations that you can effect. More| Naval
For the state of the art on the philosophy of knowledge, which people call epistemology, you can basically skip everything and jump straight to David Deutsch. I think that’s right. If you just want to know epistemology, read David Deutsch—full stop. That said, for some people it helps to know the history, the counterarguments, where he’s coming from. More| Naval
Unlike Schopenhauer, you are an industrial philosopher. Like an industrial designer, your philosophy is designed for the masses. People suggest you read the great books—Aristotle and Wittgenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers. I’ve read almost all that stuff, and I’ve gotten very little value from it. More| Naval
You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset. Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too. More| Naval
Let’s talk about one more tweet which I liked when I first saw it, or I might have retweeted it. I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven’t figured out how to say yet, but they knew in their head, but it’s just implicit—it hadn’t been made explicit. More| Naval
We talked about in the past how “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” And Akira made a song out of it. Akira the Don, God bless him. And I think that’s absolutely true. More| Naval
We’re hiring an editor for the Naval Podcast, and Naval is also hiring a personal chief of staff. If you’re not interested in either of these, you can move on to the next episode. Let me give you some details on both of them. First, the editor for the Naval Podcast, which as you already know, is the most timeless and overproduced podcast in human history. More| Naval
Marketing is an open problem. People try to solve marketing in different ways. Some people will create videos, some people will write and/or tweet. Some people will literally stand outside with a sandwich board. Some people will go make a whole bunch of friends and just throw parties and spread by word of mouth. More| Naval
I ultimately think that everyone should be figuring out what it is that they uniquely do best—that aligns with who they are fundamentally, and that gives them authenticity, that brings them specific knowledge, that gives them competitive advantage, that makes them irreplaceable. And they should just lean into that. And sometimes you don’t know what that is until you do it. More| Naval
Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. New: Discuss this episode on Airchat. We don’t really have an agenda. There is no goal to the conversation. The closest we can come up with is just to have a spontaneous free flowing talk about anything you want to talk about. More| Naval
Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see The Deutsch Files I and The Deutsch Files II. Proving Something About AGI is Inherently Impossible On exactly that, the fact that the more that we summarize what I think is an exceedingly clear body of work in The Fabric of Reality and in The Beginning of Infinity; when nonetheless you explain it to people, as Popper says, it’s impossible to speak in such a way as to not be misunderstoo...| Naval
Brett Hall and I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see The Deutsch Files I. The universality of computation and explanation So let’s go through The Fabric of Reality—the four theories. More| Naval
We spoke about specific knowledge, we talked about accountability, we talked about leverage. The last skill that Naval talks about in his tweetstorm is judgment, where he says, that “Leverage is a force multiplier for your judgment.” We are now living in an age of nearly infinite leverage, and all the great fortunes are created through leverage. More| Naval
Talk a little bit about what industries you should think about working in. What kind of job you should have? And who you might want to work with? So, you said, “One should pick an industry where you can play long-term games with long-term people.” Why? Yeah, this is an insight into what makes Silicon Valley work, and what makes high trust societies work. More| Naval
I interview David Deutsch, physicist and author of The Beginning of Infinity. Also see Part 2. Background My goal isn’t to do yet another podcast with David Deutsch. There are plenty of those. I would love to tease out some of the very counterintuitive learnings, put them down canonically in such a way that future generations can benefit from them, and make sure that none of this is lost. Your work has been incredibly influential for me. More| Naval
Haseeb and I interview Vitalik Buterin about Ethereum and blockchains. Also see Part 2. Transcript Welcome back to the podcast. We have with us Haseeb Qureshi, who is a partner at Dragonfly and someone I used to work with back when I was more active in crypto-land. More| Naval
Knowledge is the thing that makes the existence of resources infinite. The creation of knowledge is unbounded. We’re going to keep on creating more knowledge and, thereby, learning about more and different resources. There’s this wonderful parable of europium in The Beginning of Infinity where David talks about when the first color television started to be manufactured about 60 years ago. More| Naval
Groups never admit failure. A group would rather keep living in the mythology of “we were repressed” than ever admit failure. Individuals are the only ones who admit failure. Even individuals don’t like to admit failure, but eventually, they can be forced to. A group will never admit they were wrong. More| Naval
Marc Andreessen summarizes this nicely as “strong opinions, loosely held.” As a society, if you’re truth-seeking, you want to have strong opinions but very loosely held. You want to try them, see if they work, and then error-correct if they don’t. But instead what we get is either strong opinions strongly held—which is the intolerant minority—or we get weak opinions loosely held—which is this compromised model where no one really takes the blame, no one gets credit, no one gets ...| Naval
