Naval Ravikant's AMA on Clubhouse - 3/31/21

The computer is the most powerful tool ever invented by humanity. In your pocket, you're carrying the single most powerful thing that all of humanity has ever invented ... Every little bit you can do to figure out how to use that better than you did before is going to give you enormous leverage.

I tell people to learn to code the same reason why I'm sure, in the 1600s or 1700s, it was good advice to tell people to learn to read and to write. Yes, not everyone is going to be a great author. Yes, not everyone is going to be an avid reader. But they should all know how to read and write. And I think coding is just the new literacy. For the same reason you learn mathematics so you're not innumerate, and for the same reason you learn to read and write so you're not illiterate, it's important to learn to code so that you are not computer illiterate. Computer literacy is a basic fundamental skill that will be a requirement of society going forward.

In the future, either you're telling a computer what to do or a computer is telling you what to do—and you don't want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. If you're an Uber driver, the computer's telling you what to do. You're following orders. Your days are numbered in that job because you're not in a creative job. On the other hand, if you're the programmer for Uber, then you are the one who is instructing all these drivers around.

Nobody who's any good gives actual investment advice online because they know that's not how investing works. If someone tells you what to buy, they're not going to tell you when to sell. And without any underlying explanation of why you should be buying or selling something, you're essentially just listening to an astrologer.

Focus on the long-term, and don't focus on the short-term. Most of the vices, most of the so-called acts of the devil are basically temptations of cheap dopamine, and if you can avoid those and just focus on long-term rewards and payoffs, you will do better on average than someone who focus on short-term.

I buy something when I have conviction, and I sell it when I lose conviction ... As long as you have conviction in something, you sleep well at night. You don't need to worry about it ... The problem happens when you buy something where you don't have conviction, and now you're constantly just revisiting it. And first of all, that's mentally exhausting. Second, you're probably not going to get it right because you didn't spend the time to figure it out to the extent that it could be figured out. And thirdly, you're not going to put enough capital into it because, again, you don't have conviction. So, conviction is the foundation of investing.

I think there's a whole class of university degrees that are pretty worthless. If you're not getting a STEM degree or a degree that can help you build or fix things, then you don't need a degree for it. You can just read books on it. You can teach yourself.

These days, we're over-socialized not under-socialized. We have Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Clubhouse, Twitter, Facebook. We have unlimited ways to socialize virtually ... I would argue that socialization creates far more problems than it solves and that the modern individual is over-socialized. Exceptional people are built in solitude.

You only have to be right a couple of times in the nonlinear world to do well. So, it's much more about keeping your mental and physical bandwidth open for the right opportunity, especially if you have some form of leverage through code or capital, and striking when the right opportunity presents itself.

Remote work is not really about letting the Facebook engineer work from Ohio instead of from Silicon Valley ... It's really about Amit from India being able to work for Facebook in Silicon Valley but while he's in some rural town in India. That's going to disrupt and change lives and [the] global supply chain. Some people will be better off; some will be worse off.

Most actions and most ideas are failures. Just get over it. It's all error correction. That's how Mother Nature works with evolution. That's how invention works with trial and error. That's how science works with conjecture and criticism. And that's just how our lives work.

If you're the kind of person that needs to question whether or not you should go to a university—at least today in 2021—yes, then go to the university.

The human brain is not designed to process all of the world's breaking emergencies in real time.

If you believe in Bitcoin and Etherium... then you're likely to either not agree with them, in which case you wouldn't buy them, or you would agree with them, in which case you'd think they're ludicrously under-priced compared to where they will eventually end up ... I don't think the Warren Buffett strategy applies. I don't think you want to time your entrance or exit into an asset class that is either going to go 10x or 20x from here or go to zero.

Most ideas are bad. Whether made by smart people or dumb people, most ideas are just bad. And it's error correction, it's iteration, it's criticism, it's facing reality that tells us which of our ideas actually survive and do well.

I joke that university degrees are the new taxi medallions in that they're artificially scarce and they're required for certain things, but they're going to be obsoleted relatively soon or already are in many disciplines.

Grit and perseverance tend to be determinant factors. Most startups succeed because the founder doesn't give up and goes through ups and downs.

A rational person can achieve peace or get closer to peace by cultivating an indifference to things that are out of their control.

When you think that your ideas are really good ideas and should be set in stone and not be challenged in the future, that's the ultimate bad idea.

If I had to pick subjects for my kids to learn, I'd really, really drill down on logic, math, computer science, and English.