9 Nuggets from Naval
Web3, Self-awareness, Scare Tactics and more
Hi there,
Naval just dropped a podcast QnA recently.
If you haven't heard of him, he's basically a smart guy who drops ideas that are worth a sumo wrestler's weight in gold.
This session touched upon so many topics- web3, reading, self-awareness, physics...it was a total doozy. Now, I know you guys don't have the time to listen to a 90-minute pod, given that you’re busy ordering milk cartons, taking your dog for a walk and what not.
So like that good friend of yours (who probably doesn’t exist), I decided to summarise this into a 9-point summary...because who doesn't like reducing beautiful stuff down to a few bullet points?
Here's the long and short of it, if you haven't dozed off yet:
🌐 Web3 : Naval is bullish on Web3. If you’re wondering what the heck that means, just think of apps/protocols where users own their data (instead of a central platform), all code is open-source, and users and contributors own the network (not just the shareholders sitting in posh board rooms). Pseudonymity will be a big feature of web3: you can publish content and build a reputation without revealing your real-world identity. We can already see this on Reddit and Twitter- some of the really good accounts are anon because you really can’t spit out the raw truth without inviting a civil war by an army of offended people who’ll get your ass cancelled.
🧠 Self-awareness : 99% of life is ‘wasted’. Most of our decisions, worries, thoughts, concerns, desires are inconsequential in the long run. Yeah, maybe nobody laughed at your stupid joke last week. Maybe you felt damn anxious about quitting your job. But most of those things don’t have a lasting impact. It’s just a tiny set of decisions that have the biggest impact on the trajectory of your life- and you want to bring out your A-game while making those. This is where self-awareness comes in. The ability to observe your thoughts, critique them with a third-person view, knowing what to even want from your life: these are some things that are possible only when you’re acutely self-aware. So how do you get better in this department? My suggestion is to start meditating.
📖 Books and reading: My favourite Navalism that I keep repeating is “Read what you love till you love to read”. Top advice. I strongly believe that we should all be reading a lot more than we do. We often try hard to make a start but get bogged down: maybe the book you picked up is boring as hell. Or just too complex and way above your pay grade. Who cares? Drop it and just find something you enjoy. Get hooked. Explore more of it until you start enjoying the process of reading and look forward it. As you become a better reader, you’ll naturally gravitate to stuff that’s more ‘intellectual’: non-fiction, theories and big ideas. But nobody cares about how many complex books you’ve conquered or how thick your stack is. Just fall in love with reading and chip away at that deadly ignorance which infects us all.
⚡ Physics: Physicists are the bosses. They have to deal with high levels of abstraction but also work within the framework reality, which is a kind of mental Kung Fu that most of us will never really comprehend. No wonder I sucked at physics and almost never made it out of college. But the subject continues to fascinate me and there are so many pop-sci books to learn it from scratch. Some cool trivia: IQ tests of PhD students reveal that the physicists are the smartest. Think average IQ scores of 160. We can poke holes about the efficacy of those tests and what they reveal till the cows come home, but there is some truth to what he’s getting at. You need to be at a certain level to even become a physicist.
🧬 Life: Life is a single player game; and the game will end some day. The good part is you can give whatever meaning you want to it. You can choose to optimise for happiness or be grumpy and complain about the kids destroying your society’s garden. You’re free to look at the world with any lens you want. Or, you’re condemned to be free, as the existentialists would put it. And while you’re it, you’ll always be constantly engaged in problem-solving (and you can’t do shit about it, no matter how much it sucks). Which is where a solid foundation of knowledge is critical. Which loops us back to the point on reading.
👽 Aliens: This was interesting. While discussing views on UFO sightings, he said that he has a lot of arguments against the possibility of our alien friends lurking close by. A quote that I really liked was “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. Makes so much sense in this context. Another fact to note is that all photographic proof has been just as grainy as it was in the 60s even though the quality/quantity of cameras has grown exponentially since then. For all you know, it’s just some clandestine military op people see…before running naked through the town and yelling “The aliens are here!!!”
💡 Knowledge: We’re all used to thinking that we’re running out of resources. That soon all that useful stuff under the Earth will be over and we’ll all enter the gates of hell. Nope. Uranium was useless for thousands of years till we discovered nuclear tech. Basically, most stuff is useless till we acquire the knowledge needed to put it to work. There’s enough crap on and inside the Earth and the solar system. We just need to stop being stupid and understand how to harness them. Knowledge is maybe our only real limitation.
😱 Scare tactics: Beware of them. Everybody’s busy busting our greedy tendencies but fear is where a lot more negative action takes place. There’s a simple evolutionary idea here. We’re far more attuned to be fearful. If you were too greedy, maybe you’d gobble down a dozen extra nuts or be a real prick while divvying up resources in the savannah. But if you weren’t fearful enough when the tiger came around your jungle or a warring tribe descended upon your crew, you’d be dead meat. The media, scammers and hucksters know about this little human quirk and do their best to incite fear and get us to react. So be very cautious when you find someone trying to stoke fear. No wonder so many financial scams start with “Sir, do this or your account will get blocked”.
🤐. Finally, let us talk about free speech: Censoring people, cancelling and blocking the shit out of them, etc are anti-enlightenment ideas. One of the big reasons we’ve made so much technological progress is that we witnessed a culture of criticism and doubt- what we know as the Enlightenment Era today. Without testing our ideas and being open to counter-views (and subsequent iteration), we risk submitting ourselves to authorities (think people with degrees who tell us what we should do and how that’s the only correct way to do things) and sacrificing independent thinking. So think for yourself, don’t give a rat’s ass if someone tells you “but this isn’t your expertise, stay in your domain” and keep reading my newsletter.
I hope you enjoyed this as much as I enjoyed the pod. And if you’re wondering why there are 9 nuggets and not 10, it’s just because I wanted the title to be an alliteration. Sounds much cooler that way.
Until next time.
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That was a good read!