Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse - 3/18/21

I think counting on the government to save you in anything is sort of silly. They can't take care of your health ... The FDA Food Pyramid has literally been upside down for the last 50 years, but no one calls them out on it. Grains and simple carbs are at the top still, and the whole thing is complete nonsense.

The value of a university degree is going down. University degrees are becoming like taxi medallions now—they're like this scarce thing that gives you a medium outcome, but everybody sort of knows it doesn't mean what it used to mean, and it's just one Uber-like destruction away from being rendered irrelevant.

I think, for most people, school is an attractive bundle of daycare plus socialization plus education all rolled into one, but it's unpopular to talk about the daycare part.

The people who are hoping that artists are going to get rich off of NFTs are probably going to be sorely disappointed. I think there is a small head of artists who are going to get extremely wealthy, like a very small head, and the vast, vast, vast majority will get lost in the long tail.

The government is there as a safety net as the lowest common denominator, as a catch-all. It should be there as a safety net and the lowest common denominator for the people who would otherwise slip through the cracks—that's their job. But when they try and tell everyone what to do, they sort of destroy productive civil society in the process.

COVID, I would argue, is more a disease of the mind than anything else. Look at how it's driven people insane about lockdowns versus masks versus vaccines. It's as much a mental virus.

You can get an education without going to Harvard. You can build a great alumni network without going to Harvard. What you can't get is you can't get that easy stamp, that credential—that credential of 'I went to Harvard.' The doors that opens, that is the part that's incredibly difficult to replace, and I'm not sure how or who is going to replace that.

If you really genuinely cared about your child's education, you would not outsource it to a public school or even a private school; you would take responsibility for it.

Without the border control, lockdowns don't make any sense ... It's like peeing in a swimming pool, right? It's like having a peeing section and a non-peeing section in a swimming pool. It doesn't work.

Crypto is decentralizing finance and governance; and if you think about it, those are actually two of the most locked down, regulated, protect entities around. So, if you can take out those two systems and decentralize them, then you have a shot at decentralizing everything else.

If there was only one mobile operating system we'd all converged on—whether it was Apple or whether it was Google, if either one of them had won—there would almost be no Silicon Valley as we know it because that one monopolist would be extracting all the profits out of the ecosystem and would have very, very little incentive to behave.

When the government tries to solve problems for everybody, they end up being the biggest problem.

Crypto apps are composable, which means they plug into each other like LEGO blocks. Every crypto app, essentially, not every but within certain parameters, can work with many other crypto apps.