#473: Naval Ravikant on Happiness, Reducing Anxiety, Crypto Stablecoins, and Crypto Strategy

I don't want to have to work hard. I don't want to have to roll out of bed at a certain time. I don't want to have to answer to somebody. I optimize for independence and freedom ... I'm lazy. I wake up at 7, 8, 9, 10 AM. I go to sleep at 2 [or] 3 AM. I don't work a lot of days. Some days I work morning to night ... I never want to have to answer to a boss. No one's ever going to tell me what to do.

The most important relationship you have is with yourself—it's with this voice in your head that is constantly rattling every waking hour. It's this crazy roommate living inside your mind who's always chattering [and] never shuts up. And you can't control these thoughts—they just come up out of you don't even know where ... Those conversations you're having in your head all the time—that is your world ... That's going to determine the quality of your life more than anything else.

Proper meditation—proper examination—should ruin the life that you're currently living. It should cause you to leave relationships. It should cause you to re-establish boundaries with family members and colleagues. It should cause you to quit your job. It should cause you to change your eating patterns ... If it doesn't do that, it's not real examination. If it doesn't come attached with destruction of your current life, then you can't create the new life in which you will not have the anxiety.

The lottery is for losers. Lotteries are just attacks on people who can't do math. Get-rich-quick schemes are just other people getting rich off of you. There are no shortcuts.

Pretty much everybody's anxious all the time. It's a rare human being who isn't anxious ... Anxiety is built into the core of who we are. In fact, you could argue that all the mind does all day long is fear-based scenario planning for survival and then maybe a little bit of greed for replication. So, anxiety is at the core level of who we are.

Anything social is about groupthink and group behavior. Individuals can search for truth, but groups search for consensus. Because if a group doesn't have consensus, it can't get along; if it can't get along, it falls apart and there's conflict. So, the last place you're going to find truth is in large groups.

We waste so much energy through anxiety. If you can be calm and still go about your business, it's a superpower.

If you're doing something that you love, if you're running a business that you enjoy, it is probably going to be more fun than playing a video game. If you come home at night from work, and your first instinct is to play a video game, you're suffering at work.

When I say money, I mean wealth. I don't mean [working at] a law firm where you make a couple hundred bucks an hour, but you're still tied to the clock. I mean you wake up when you want; you go to sleep when you want; you live where you want; and you have freedom. So, to me, the purpose of money is freedom, and for that, you need to create wealth.

One of the things you learn after you make money is that money doesn't make you happier. It takes care of your money problems, but it's not necessarily going to put you in a place where you're in some kind of bliss all the time. In fact, there's nothing out there that will make you happy forever.

If you can just adopt long-term thinking in your mindset, you're just going to have a much easier life. As our favorite trainer, Jerzy Gregorek, says, 'Hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life.'

You always want to strive for understanding, not for memorization. You should be able to rearticulate it five different ways in every language that you know. Otherwise, you don't really understand it.

When the best hour of my day is spent by myself, then the world has very little to offer me. I can still participate in it, but it doesn't have that grip on me that it used to—I don't fear solitary confinement. And I think that is a superpower.

The human brain is not designed to manage every emergency in the world in real-time. We're not designed to process all the breaking news in the planet in our heads ... The goal of the media these days is to make every problem your problem. That's how they get attention. That's how they get clicks.

Understanding is the thing. That's what separates humans from the other animals. That's what separates us from the robots—that we actually understand what's going on underneath.

Judgment comes from clear thinking. The clear thinking comes from having time to reflect and to pursue your genuine intellectual curiosity.

This pervasive nonspecific anxiety where you're just constantly on edge about everything—that comes from an unexamined life.

My heroes are scientists because I think applied science is the engine that pulls humanity forward ... I think scientists are still the most unsung heroes of human history.

[Richard Feynman] famously said, 'Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts' ... There's no such thing as science with a capital 'S.' The foundation of science is doubt. It is all about falsifiability.

It's the difference between memorization and understanding. Understanding is the thing that you want. You want to be able to describe it in ten different ways in simple sentences from the ground up and re-derive whatever you need. If you just memorize, you're lost.

The ideal would be to make money with your mind, not with your time. So, if I can just make one good decision a year, and that makes me all the money that I need for that year, then that's perfect.

Find the people [where] it doesn't take work to be around. The best relationships don't feel like work.

When you're in a relationship, just watch how the other person treats their worst enemy because, eventually, they'll just redefine you as [an] enemy, and you'll get to feel that behavior ... The number one criteria I look for in a relationship is that the person has to be kind—they just have to be a nice person ... You can always be reclassified from friend to enemy.

Not fooling yourself, paying attention to yourself, not taking yourself too seriously, examining your own thoughts from first principles, and doing activities that are done intrinsically for you as opposed to the external world—they just make your life better.

[Nassim Taleb] had a great tweet recently ... He said, 'The opposite of education is not ignorance; the opposite of education is an education in social science.'

If you don't own a piece of a business, it's going to be extremely hard to get wealthy. It will be nearly impossible—almost not worth that route.

Everybody wants to start where they are. Nobody wants to go back down the mountain to find the path going to the top. Everybody wants to stay on the path they're on, maybe make a few tweaks, and get to the top.