Naval Ravikant Interview (Full Episode) | The Tim Ferriss Show (Podcast)

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fast it's free there's no downside that I can think of now I do have to read a mandatory disclaimer wealthfront Inc is an SEC registered investment advisor investing in securities involves risks and there is the possibility of losing money past performance is no guarantee of future results please visit wealth front comm to read their full disclosure so check it out guys this is one of the hottest most innovative companies coming out of Silicon Valley and they're killing it they've become massively popular just take a look see what portfolio they would create for you and you can use that information however you want wealthfront comm forward slash Tim this episode is brought to you by athletic greens I get asked all the time if you could only use one supplement what would it be and my answer is inevitably athletic greens it is your all-in-one nutritional insurance I recommended it in the 4-hour body did not get paid for that and I travel with it to avoid getting sick I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal performance it just covers all my bases if I can't get what I need through whole food meals throughout the rest of the day and you can get 50 oh my gosh 50% off yes 50% off if you go to athletic greens calm forward-slash Tim that's athletic greens calm forward-slash Tim check it out it's tasty but more important it will help you not screw up when you're doing your nutritional planning so for me just covers the bases takes a load off my mind puts a lot in my body and check it out athletic greens calm forward-slash Tim how's Tim Ferriss welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss show where it is my job to deconstruct world-class performers to tease out their routines habits favorite books etc that you can apply to your own life this time around we have an in-between ax so it's not really in between a suit it is an experimental Q&A episode with navall rava kott the first episode we did with navall was a massive massive success it was nominated for podcast of the year navall at navall and AV al on twitter is the CEO and co-founder of angel list he previously co-founded opinions which went public as part of shopping.com and vast com he is an active angel investor a good buddy of mine and has invested in more than 100 companies including quite a few unicorn mega successes his deals include Twitter uber Yammer post mate swish thumbtack and Open DNS Open DNS was recently bought by Cisco for around six hundred and thirty five million dollars in cash so he's doing all right and he has developed an incredibly diverse set of skills and even if you have zero interest in startups or investing this episode just like the one before it is well worth the listen navall answers your questions the top 10 questions that were submitted and uploaded on reddit and that ranges from art of intelligence and his thoughts on the pros and cons the bull side of the bear side if that makes any sense to money making very practical pragmatic Silicon Valley or non Silicon Valley money making success what he would teach in school favorite books what is on his Kindle as we speak his most popular tweet of all time and the story behind it the five chimps theory and how it applies to your life happiness hacks conflict resolution the list goes on and on so say hello to Duvall on Twitter let him know what you thought ask additional questions at navall nav al and please enjoy this incredibly fascinating monologue with navall rava cod hello everybody and welcome to the tim ferriss show this is Nevada rabbit hunt I will be now going through a large set of questions Andrew bliss asks what are your thoughts on the AI industry which seems to be dominated by an unusual amount of analytic startups most of which do the same thing in an anti zero to one fashion yeah so artificial intelligence is all the rage and people are writing books about and talking about I'm thinking about it I think anybody who is really talking about true general-purpose AI the Skynet kind that'll take over the world and kill us all doesn't really write code much anymore because no one has yet made any of the fundamental breakthroughs required to get to where the general-purpose AI we're just basically making writing similar code to what we're written in the past but it's being executed faster or it's working with more data but the way in which the human brain works is actually very different than the way computers work and I don't think the fundamental theoretical breakthroughs are in place for a general-purpose a I so I think it's mostly technophiles or end-of-the-world types or wishful thinking in a weird way for people who think we're about to get a general-purpose AI that said the field of AI has now broadened into specific AI so computer vision for example self-driving cars drones that pilots themselves these things are real and they're using huge amounts of data as well as lots of processing power plus pretty good code to solve problems that before we would have thought are in the human domain but the real test for AI is passing the Turing test which is can you trick someone can an AI trick so into thinking that they're actually human being and I think we are actually barely any closer to that than we were twenty or thirty years ago now there's another kind of AI that might emerge which might be an emergent AI for example if you take all the computers in the world you stitched them together say through the internet it could just happen that that much compute power that much data that much interaction could create something almost socially out of that computer network a social AI if you will but an AI like that is likely to be slowly softly emergent probably not self modifying in the way we think of a general AI and one that's probably more designed to serve humans because it emerges from a network that is built by humans or it may also just coexist or be completely woven into the human fabric in such a way that it might be inseparable from humanity itself so I'm not too worried about the general purpose AI and I also don't think that the general AI general-purpose AI companies have have much of a future but the specific AI companies the ones that are solving a very specific problem like the computer vision example those I think could be very real Taylor Pearson asks you mentioned Kouzes 1937 paper in your first interview and how Tech is bringing down the transaction cost and led to corporatism what do you think the job and labor market will look like in 20 years and how can people prepare well I mentioned in the first interview that the Industrial Revolution sort of brought people together because a minimum efficient scale to do something especially with a factory was very large so you need to have a hierarchy you need to have people working for each other and working together now I think information technology is lowering the communication cost lowering transaction costs and people can be intermediate had already been disintermediated by computers and work through computers so though you know a not-so-great example is an uber driver who would be getting orders through the through a phone but a better example a more hopeful example might be independent contractors or using Twitter and online sources to find jobs or you know AngelList we have tons of startup jobs or they're places like pic crew or gigster where you can go and get part-time jobs Elance craigslist oDesk etc so I think that gig economy is gonna be much more of the future and it can actually be a very positive development for example if you were a great journalist today if you're a world-class journalist you take great photographs you report great news you don't really need to go work for the New York Times if you are willing to start in your spare time with a blog with Twitter you can build an independent brand and although you must start off making no money early on kind of near the end of the career when you're a YouTube star or a blog or a very popular blogger you can literally be charging people for access to your blog and you can be making a very good and very independent living where you're getting paid for books and newsletters and working from wherever you want so I think the best way to prepare for the future 20 years is find something you love to do so you have a shot at being one of the best people in the world at it build an independent brand around it with your name not with a company's name or with other people's names around it try to make a creative work so you'll stay interesting you'll stay ahead of the game anything that's not creative society can replicate and then not pay you full value over time so it's better to always solve new problems and do new things and get comfortable with working in a boom-bust fashion where a couple of weeks at a time you may have a lot of work and then a couple of weeks at a time you're on vacation so I think that's kind of where the future is headed it'll be gradual and then it'll be sudden but the best way to prepare is to just not give up your independence in the first place char's audiences Confucius says that you have two lives and the second one begins when you realize you only have one when and how did your second life begin it's a very deep question I think most people who are past a certain age have had this feeling or phenomenon where they've gone through most of life a certain way and and got into a certain stage and then had to make some pretty big changes and I'm definitely also in that boat I think for me it was I struggle for a lot of my life to have certain material and social successes and when I achieved those material and social successes or at least beyond the point where they didn't matter as much to me anymore I realized that my peer group and a lot of the people who were around me and the people who had achieved the similar successes and were on their way to achieving more and more successes just didn't seem all that happy and and in my case there was definitely hedonic adaptation I'd very quickly get used to anything so let me to the conclusion which seems trite that happiness is internal and so then that set me on a path of starting to work more on my internal self and realizing that all real success is internal and has very little to do with external circumstances but one has to do the external thing anyway that's how you're biologically hardwired so it's it's glib to say you can just turn it off you have to do it and you have to have your own life experience that then brings you back on to the internal path so for me it was just basically getting what I wanted was the problem very related to that Daniel D 161 asks do you feel an inner urge to know yourself fully and has your worldly success satisfied this urge I would say yeah I absolutely do have an inner urge to know myself fully and if anything the worldly success has taken has has taken me further away from satisfying that urge the more worldly success you have the more your ego gets built up the more fearful you might be of losing it all the more you care what other people think the more you have to lose the more you get caught up in this dream of who you think you are and so I think worldly success actually hurts if if from a young age you know that you want to know yourself and discover yourself much better if you have that foresight or insight at an early age then material success will actually take you away from it I'm not Christian but there is that famous line in the Bible that you know Jesus is easier than you know a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get into heaven and I think I understand what he means Rasputin 89 says in the first episode navall talked about a few topics that should be taught in school rather than learning the capital on Montana he brought up topics like teaching what he knows that work for him and Happiness nutrition etc can you ask him to elaborate in some of these particularly happiness yeah I mean if I'm running a grade school curriculum for children I would probably optimize happiness nutrition diet exercise how do you build good habits how do you break bad habits how do you have good relationships how do you find your spouse meditation how do you build basic skills and not memorize lots of facts what kinds of books should you read preferably older ones not newer ones that have withstood the test of time I probably have them run a lemonade stand or a small business and you know earn money and so they can understand how that works probably have them work on something charitable related or take them to the third world and show them suffering true suffering so they can get some context prior teach them public speaking business writing basic persuasion maybe a little bit of programming on top of the reading writing and arithmetic I probably eliminate chunks of geography history maybe honestly even second and third languages music unless they have musical inclinations and I know this is going to horrify some people but the time has to come from somewhere so the question is what do you emphasize so I think it's not necessarily good to educate every child in everything you have to find out what their aptitude is for and what's more practical and we're now living in the Wikipedia era we're living in the internet era so a lot of the factual memorization that used to go on is now completely irrelevant you can just look it up so those kinds of things I think need to go away I mean think about the fact that if you have young children right now or you're planning on having children that your children probably will not need to know how to drive a car so there's all kinds of time savings to be had and it can be used for these other things the happiness one is a very complex topic I actually don't think happiness is its own thing I think a lot of what we think of as happiness is actually this pleasure it's physical pleasure either from oh that tasted good or it might be momentary pleasure from oh she loves me or he loves me but I think true happiness comes out of peace and peace comes out of many things but it comes out of fundamentally understanding yourself it comes from looking inside yourself and understanding how much of what you're reacting to our emotional reactions or attachment is self-inflicted suffering its desired that you have four things that you probably shouldn't care that much about there's a great line that my brother Kamal quoted in his book here's a great book called love yourself like you know like your life depends on it and another one called live your truth he's actually the philosopher in the family I'm just yea mature but he had a great line in there where he said I once asked him a monk you know what what is your secret to to peace and happiness and the monk said I say yes to everything that happens I say yes and that's very hard for us to imagine because in life we're used to fighting for everything we used to getting whatever you want we're used to reacting we're used to immediately saying that stinks that's good that's bad we're used to constantly judging things and the act of judging something separates you from that thing and over time as you judge that judge you invariably judge people you judge yourself you separate yourself from everything and then you end up only and that feeling of disconnection and loneliness is what eventually leads to suffering and then you struggle you resist against the world the way it is and that that is what your ego does it helps you operate in the real world by resistant against against things you don't like and that is a source also of a lot of unhappiness so I actually think happiness is the absence of suffering it comes from peace and that comes from just being very careful about desired judgment and reactions realizing that you don't really need something anymore that that that something is not important to you so to get very practical about it I have a whole series of tricks that I use to try and be happier in the moment and I started doing these a few years ago at first they were silly and difficult and required a lot of attention but now some of them have become second nature and I think doing them I've just religiously I've managed to increase my happiness level quite a bit the obvious one is meditation and Insight Meditation so working towards a specific purpose on it which is to try and understand how my mind works but then just being very aware in every moment so if I catch myself judging somebody then I can stop myself and say well what's the positive interpretation of this so I used to get annoyed about things now I always look for the positive side of it and it used to take a rational effort used to take a few seconds for me to come up with a positive now I can do it sub-second my brain is trained to do it automatically similarly I try you know there are other hacks I could try to get more sunlight on my skin that's an easy cheap one look up and smile tell yourself tell your friends that you're a happy person then you'll be forced to be to conform to it you'll have the consistency bias you have to live up to it your friends will expect you to be a happy person these are little hacks I mean they add up over time they're not gonna pull you out of a severe depression that's a much deeper more difficult thing but if you're just trying to upgrade your happiness ever so slightly you can do it another hack would be just any time you catch yourself desiring something say is it really that important to me that I'd be unhappy unless this goes my way and you're gonna find the vast majority of things it's just not true I think I'm dropping caffeine made me happier it made me more of a stable person working out everyday makes me happier if you have peace of body you have it's much easier to have peace of mind so there's there's lots and lots of these things that can go on this could be a full podcast but I'm still discovering and learning these things myself I think it would be interesting to maybe catalogue them but I suspect that a lot of them are deeply deeply personal if I step back for a second and answer the question properly the most important trick I think to being happy is to realize that happiness is a skill that you develop and a choice that you make you choose to be happy and then you work at it it's just like building muscles is just like losing weight it's just like succeeding at your job it's just like learning calculus you decide it's important to you you prioritize it above everything else you read everything on the topic and then you work at it and again I think the Buddhists have done a lot of good work on this I don't think modern science has good answers here I think the modern world is actually really bad the modern world is full of distractions things like Twitter and Facebook are not making you happy they're actually making you unhappy you're essentially playing a game that's created by the creators of those systems and yes it can be a useful game once in a blue moon but most of the time you're just wasting your time you're engaging in envy dispute and the resentment comparision jealousy anger about things that frankly just don't matter the refined man asks how do you tend to handle conflict when it arises I handle conflict very poorly I get angry I'm an angry person so I have to catch myself in the moment and I have to talk myself down I have to recognize the anger for what it is I have to sense the bodily reactions and then I have to see if I can stay calm and usually throw you're hard for me it's my nature to try and solve a problem the moment arises I don't do well with long term stress where it is an unsolved problem hanging out there probably the single best piece of advice I can give other than being mindful and just aware when you're engaging in conflict is to not associate with high conflict people when someone is when we all know people in our lives who just tend to get a little more angry a little more judgmental or they're always in a fight with somebody else if you see someone who's always fighting with somebody else they're eventually gonna fight with you so I have just slowly cut those people out of my life not in an overt explicit way but just by choosing to hang out with them less and less there are plenty of smart successful kind and happy people in the world and you just have to make space for them in your life by letting the people who still have lessons to learn drift off and go learn their lessons it's not your job to educate them sometimes very unhappy people all sort of have this air about them like a drowning person where they're thrashing and making a big ruckus but if you if you grab them and try to save them unless you're an extremely happy person yourself you're gonna drown too so I would say the first rule of of handling conflict is don't hang around people who were constantly engaging in conflict what insight about life have you acquired that seems obvious to you but might not be obvious to everybody else this is a tough one it's a deep question I do have one fundamental recent belief that have acquired the last few years that I don't think most people would agree with but it's such a personal thing and it came about in such personal circumstances that I'm not sure anybody else will get there in the same line of reasoning that said I'll lay it out anyway which is I'm not afraid of death anymore and I think a lot of the struggle that we have in life comes from a deep deep fear of death and it can take it's it can take form in many ways one can be that you know we want to write the Great American Novel or we really want to achieve something that this will build something we want to you know build a great piece of technology or let's start an amazing business or we want to run for office and make a difference and a lot of that just comes from sort of this fear that we're gonna die so we have to build something that lasts beyond us obviously also the obsession that parents have with their children I mean a lot of that is warrant in biological love but some of that is also the quest for immortality even some of the beliefs are some of the more outlandish parts of organized religion I think fall into that and I don't have that quest for immortality anymore and I think I came to this fundamental conclusion I thought about it a lot and we've been the universe has been around for a long time the universe is a very very large place if you study even the smallest bit of science you realize that for all practical purposes we are nothing we're we're like we are amoeba we're bacteria to the universe we were basically monkeys on a small rock orbiting a small kourt's star in a huge galaxy which is in an absolutely staggering a gigantic universe which is self may be part of a gigantic multiverse and this universe has been around probably for ten billion years or more and will be around for tens of billions of years afterwards so your existence my existence is is just impetus amo it's like a firefly blinking once in the night so we're not really here very long and we don't really matter that much and nothing that we do lasts so eventually you will fade your works will fade your children will fade your thoughts will fade this planet will fade the Sun will fade it'll all be gone their entire civilizations that we just remember now with one or two words like Sumerian or Mayan you know do you know any Sumerians or Mayans do you hold any of them in high regard or steam have they outlived their natural lifespan somehow no so I think we're just here for an extremely short period of time now from here you can choose to believe in an afterlife or not and if you really do believe in an afterlife then that should give you comfort and make you realize that maybe you know everything that goes on this life is not that consequential on the other hand if you don't believe in an afterlife then you should also come to a similar conclusion where you should realize that this is such a short and precious life that it's really important that you don't spend it being unhappy there's no excuse for spending most of your life in misery you've only got 70 years out of the 50 billion or so the universe still be around and whatever your natural state is it's probably not this this is your living state your dead state it's true over a much longer time frame so when I think about the world that way I sort of realized that it's just kind of a game which is not to say that you go to a dark place and you start acting unethically and immorally quite the contrary you realize just how precious life is and how it's important to make sure that you enjoy yourself you sleep well at night you're a good moral person you're generally happy you take care of other people you help out but you can't take it too seriously you can't get too hung up over it you can't make yourself miserable or I'm happy over it you just have a very short period here on this earth nothing you do is gonna matter that much in the long run don't take yourself so seriously and then that just kind of helps make everything else work so yeah that's that's an insight about life that I've acquired that now seems obvious to me but it's really not I think obvious to most people related to that predict Steven asks what's your philosophy of life or grand goal and living in other words of the things in life you might pursue which is the thing you believe to be most valuable another great question I think before when I had the usual quest for immortality fear that almost all of us do that's coated into our genes and that was driving me I was trying to build lasting things create things make money build businesses write books that sort of thing now I realized a lot of as meaningless that's just stuff that keeps us busy it's entertaining it might have some social good it might help build this as moral character and human beings but it's not really the purpose of life is there a purpose of life that's that's tough it's a philosophy of life that's tough I think the closest I can articulate and I'll probably change my mind on this next year is to keep growing and learning in this short period of time that you have to seek truth and to accept things the way they are to see the world the way it really is and then just to live your life I think that's it I think any deeper meanings or goals just lead to ideologies which lead to desires and belief systems and disappointments and conflict it's better just to live the life that you have on this earth enjoy it while you go try and see things the way they truly are not the way you wish they were and to be in harmony with things the way that they are easier said than done a number of people asked me what books I'm reading now and this is a very difficult question to answer because at any given time I probably about 50 books in my Kindle and probably about 6 or 7 hardcover or softcover physical books that I'm cycling through so literally I opened up my Kindle I look through based on my mood I'll flip to whichever book matches up to my mood I'll flip to whatever part of it looks the most interesting and I'll just read that part so I don't read in a sequential order and the most important thing that does for me is it lets me just eat I'm sorry let's me read on a regular basis and so I can actually just pull up my kindle here and I can read off the names of some of these books that are reading that can give you mini reviews but I haven't actually finished any of them so they're all in progress so at any given time I was reading some science fiction because sci-fi is always very imaginative in terms of hypothesizing how the world's going to work out usually as an interesting point of view you learn a little science so just based on friends recommendations I've been flipping through Greg Egan brilliant writer physicists I believe who has written two very hardcore sci-fi stories so I've been reading a book from him called distress I've always got collections of science fiction I finished the Martian which was decent but I felt like it went on a little bit too long I know it's a very popular book with some people loved graphic novels so I've been rereading the boys recently which is one of my favorite graphic novels of all time getting into kind of the more evolution science kind of books Matt released the evolution of everything I recommend everything by Matt Ridley actually I think he's great so I really highly highly recommend picking up a genome the Red Queen origins of virtue the rational optimist and the evolution of everything that I'm reading the essential Gandhi Mahatma Gandhi been reading let's see I've got here the dowel philosophy Alan Watts I've got allusions Richard bog which I read before but I'm flipping through again I just like the way it's it flows the better Procrustes aphorisms by Nassim Taleb who's famous for the Black Swan fool by randomness but I sort of liked his collection of ancient wisdom in the bed of pro Krusty's the lessons of history by will and Ariel Durant which was actually recommended by one of the listeners in the first podcast great book I really like how it summarizes the larger themes of history very incisive and unlike most history books is actually really small and it covers a lot of ground I've actually been reading my brother's book I just finished how to love yourself like it yeah like your life depends on it and I thought it was great very simply written obviously a plug for my bro I was reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas although I think I'll put that down I get it but halfway through it's just a giant drug and in skew old orgy by heart arrest Thompson and his friends so that it was entertaining but I sort of gave up after a bit richard fineman been really perfectly reasonable deviations and also reading genius rereading genius I'm rereading the power of myth by Joseph Campbell sometimes I think it's better just to reread the greats than it is to read something you know that's not as great in the philosophy side I've been reading rereading the daodejing and I just finished falling into grace by re Ashanti which I thought was very good see also read some Chad McKenna recently he's a weird one I'm not sure I'd recommend him for everybody gods debris by Scott Adams very interesting the origin of consciousness and the breakdown at the bicameral mind there's a mouthful for you by Julian James mastering the core teachings the buddha by daniel ingram that's a great book actually recommended to me by a friend it's available online I would I would get that one I thought it was for if you're interested in Buddhism meditation insight I thought that one was a great one that brought everything together while leaving the mysticism out of it so I mean that's that should give you an indication I'm always really something about Krishnamurti usually it's total freedom which is the book that I just reread over and over the most very difficult book doesn't necessarily make sense for everybody but when you're ready for it there's nothing else like it I also recently finished the power of habit or close to finish as close as I ever get that one was interesting not because of its content initially but just because it's good for me to always keep on top of mine how powerful habits are habits are everything humans are basically habit machines we form habits when we run in those habits all day long and have it's gonna be great because they help us get things done very efficiently without having to reprocess them all the time they can also be terrible because we can have addictions doesn't be obvious bad habits but also they allow us to go through our life unconsciously and mindlessly so it's very important to be aware of your habits and know how to break habits and know how to make habits and you know I have this daily workout that I do that I think I mentioned in the last podcast and a lot of people ask about it I think that one is interesting but the specific technique matters less the most important thing is just doing some kind of physical activity every single day and if you can make it the same activity at the same time because that right there will teach you the power of habits if you do something seven days a week with no exceptions and you work out early in the morning or when you first get out then it will automatically fix all kinds of other bad habits that you have you can't be out drinking late at night you can't be out partying you can't sleep in you can't consume too much caffeine there are all kinds of other habits in your life that may be bad that get fixed if you stick to your daily workout habit and then it teaches you what the power of a habit is and then as you shed other bad habits then you realize that habits can be broken and you start breaking them so I think learning how to break habits is actually a very very important Metta skill that can serve you better in life than almost anything else and although you can read tons of books on it and I recommend you shouldn't go read all the books on it the reality is you're never going to learn how to break bad habits until you just break them and so one thing I try to do is I try and break a bad habit every six months and I try and pick up a good habit every six months to a year and you you can't beat yourself up too much on it but I don't think it's too much to ask if you were to save yourself in 2016 I'm gonna break one bad habit I'm gonna do everything in my power just to take down that one habit and everything else will be static I'm not gonna get new worse but that will that will help move the ball forward and then you get gradual improvements in your life that you stick with like I used to be a pretty overweight and I've lost weight over the last decade where now I feel I'm pretty fit and healthy it hasn't come through any single big epiphany or realization although definitely going paleo help and understanding low-carb helped and helped and getting rid of processed foods helped and all those kinds of things but it came from it mainly came from just habit changes and changing habits slowly but steadily over the course of a decade so the good news is I've almost never slid backwards I don't and I've never felt endanger regaining the weight that I've lost and now at the age of 42 I'm probably within one pound of my lightest weight since I was an adult and I think that just comes from having stacked down a bunch of good habits and haven't gotten rid of a bunch of bad habits so I would say the power to make and break habits learning how to do that is really important and if you're gonna if you're gonna leave this podcast and pick up two skills in life I would say and it depends on the person because many of you I mean Tim's entire audience is a bunch of overachievers so many of you are way ahead of me on both of these but for those of you who may be behind on one of them I would say first realize that happiness is a choice and it is a skill and you can dedicate yourself to learning that skill and making that choice and telling people about it and working on it and you can slowly but steadily over the course of years make yourself happier and similarly I would say that habits are breaking habits is a skill and it is something you can learn and start with a small habit and tried different techniques to break it try substituting try going cold turkey try weaning yourself off try social proof by telling other people that you're gonna break the habit try putting other habits around it they'll leave you no time for that habit try to remove the triggers try toning down the rewards do whatever it takes but break one bad habit this year and once you pick up that skill it's it's a beautiful thing because then slowly you can shed all your bad habits and make room for good habits in your life breakout list asked a big bunch of questions when I answer just one of them right now come back to yours later break how this says what personal efficiency or life management things do you do on a semi-regular basis eg some kind of life review exercise where you rate certain categories etc the answer is none I am lazy that way I choose to live a spontaneous and free life I don't want to live a very structured life I know people who are married friends of mine who are married and they actually have quarterly meetings with their wife and they have you know reports and how are we performing as a marriage and what our objectives and what are our key results and you know what's our one-year plan what's our five-year plan and I just don't plan I'm not a planner I prefer to live in the moment and be free and flow and be happy I think projecting too much in the future judging yourself setting yourself up in very difficult ways other than as I talked about just like one habit or one desire if you start trying to control yourself on a micro basis if you try and micromanage yourself all you're gonna do is make yourself miserable and you're gonna get nothing done so just focus on the one or two really really important things and everything else just surrender to it just take it as it comes just accept it be happy with it be glad that you're in this world be glad that you're clothed and fed and that you're not getting bombs dropped in your head like some people in the world are and you know just it's it I think it's I think I'd like to stay free because that way I can see the little miracles in life you know and there are little miracles everywhere it's just we have taken them for granted the fact that you were in clothes the fact that you have enough food to eat the fact that you're in a in a place of shelter yes you can roll your eyes about it yes you can say yeah that's obvious everybody has it but actually not everybody has it it would be great to go take a trip to a third-world country or to a refugee camp and see how little some other people have and I think it's a bad habit that we developed that we forget how to appreciate what we do have and so not obsessing about the future and not beating yourself up over what you don't have is very important because then you can actually pay attention and be grateful for what you do have hephæstus to ask for more book recommendations especially any book recommended by the listeners in the podcast last podcast that stood out and had an impact in your life yeah actually the the last podcast was a treasure trove in a comment section of good books and you know I I recommended and I got back even more great books so I must have bought at least 10 or 15 books just from the comments section and a couple that ever had really stood out to me I mentioned the lessons of history I thought that was really good too soon old too late smart that was a fun light read and the profit by Gibran which I had actually never read but it literally read like a modern-day poetic religious tome you know up there with the bhagavad-gita the daodejing the Bible the Koran it sort of was written in that style where it had that feel of religiosity and truth but it was very approachable and beautiful and nondenominational and non secretarial so I really like that love that book he has a gift for poetically describing what children are like what lovers are like what marriage should be like you know how you should treat your enemies and your friends how you should work with money what can you think of you know every time to kill something to eat it how do you deal with that so I felt like like the great religious books it gave a very deep very philosophical but very true answer to how to approach the major problems in life I recommend the Prophet for everybody whether you're religious or not or whether you are Christian or Hindu and Jewish or atheists and I think it's a beautiful book and it's worth reading so thank you to whoever recommended that one now I'm gonna switch gears for a second and in the final section is podcast I'm gonna just focus on the questions that are very vocational focused it's funny I got a whole bunch of questions that say probably about two-thirds were about philosophy and life and reading and learning and growth and those are fun for me to answer because the new feel for me myself and I learned from it too by talking about it and by hearing responses about it but there's a set of questions that are very particular about how do I make money how do I get a good venture capitalist how to run my company etc and I've been sort of putting those off because to me those are almost old hat but I'm gonna answer those now in in this so let me go through those I know I covered a few those before but they're all the remaining ones from this point are out are very practical so if you are more interested in the philosophical issues or the books then this is then we're done with that section you can probably just stop the podcast if you want to ever discuss any of those topics the best way to find me is on Twitter you can find me as at navall and AV al and I'm usually reasonably responsive there as long as it's not too open-ended it's kind of an interesting conversation so let's dive right into it the money-making questions Vick Rush said let's assume that you're in your late twenties with no real money college education you decide to begin your journey with business and startups what would you begin with what would you do oh yeah and you don't live in SF well unfortunately I'd say move to SF and if you can't move to SF move to a startup hub and that could include depending on where you are in the country that could be Austin that could be LA that could be New York that could be in Boston that could be brilliant that could be London it could be Bangalore it could be Shanghai it could be even parts of Delhi or Beijing so unfortunately all the other people who are in startups are in these places so you have to get in the flow now the good news is once you get in the flow you're gonna figure out if you're motivated what to do you'll be able to maybe go to a school where you can learn how to code and there's tons of them around tons of great academy like app academy and hack reactor and general assembly does classes where you can learn how to code you can volunteer for startups you can you know start up and maybe customer service or you can start off in operations or in you know just keeping the office running do whatever it takes but get into the startup scene and startups are moved forward by people who are just willing to do the work and you don't necessarily have to be a genius or I have to have a technical background but if it won't do the work and you want to learn and you're in the right hub you'll you'll figure your way out within a couple of years duet 14 says you study computer science and economics how do these fields impact your thinking and if you can go back would you still pursue the same education and why or why not I would pursue similar I would say that microeconomics was incredibly useful macroeconomics was mostly useless the part of computer science that was very theoretical like algorithms and mathematics is actually the most useful because that stuff doesn't change over time the part that was learning to program in Java or Fortran was used less or less useful because it fades over time so I would probably do more math more physics stick to micro everything and I would have promptly studied some psychology and some evolution because I think those are really important to understanding how humans work and at the end of the day you're interacting with humans everywhere you go I want to focus on theory and principles over facts because facts phaidor facts can be looked up and probably the most important skill is not really even what what you major in what you study it's just knowing how to learn and if you have a good grasp of mathematics and if you'd like to read there's nothing you can't learn on your own be tense a man asks hey Tim and navall question from an eighteen year old in the Philippines what advice would you give to ambitious 18 year olds who want to be successful in founding startups and investing like univille ha basically the question is how do I get as rich as you but faster cuz nobody wants to put in the time well as I said before first move to a startup hub if you're gonna be in that industry or just go to the hub for whatever your industry is so if you want to be an actor go to Hollywood if you'll be in Broadway go to New York if you want to be in finance go to New York or London or Hong Kong second I think Charlie Munger had a great answer there's Charlie Munger is Warren Buffett's right-hand man and he gets asked these kinds of things all the time he's a self-made multi billionaire and very wise in his ways and I think I'm gonna paraphrase him Mangal is answer but you should look it up he basically said you know you just get up early in the morning you work really hard you learn something every day you put one foot in front of the other and if you live long enough eventually you will get what you deserve and that's it so there's no certainty in life you can put in the hours you can put in the time but you can't really expect the outcome unfortunately one of the one of the things that investing has really taught me it's just how much randomness there is in the world how many times you think you can do something right but it still doesn't work out so I often see that you know individual entrepreneurial efforts often fail but individual entrepreneurs over their careers rarely fail as long as you can keep taking shots on goal and you keep getting back up eventually you'll get through so let's just just stick at it and although you might win early that's rare those stories are very very rare more likely users have to put in the time and people who tend to win very early in life don't learn the right lessons they tend to lose that money in fact I made a small fortune when I was very young just by being in the right combo company in 1999 and then of course I held on to it too long and I lost the whole thing and that was a really good lesson because it meant that as I made a little bit of money later in life now I knew how rare and precious it was and I knew how to hang on to it I didn't have the contempt for money that comes from making it too easily I had a deep respect for how hard it is to make so put in the hours practic Steven asked what advice would you give a talented software engineer who was at Google Facebook Microsoft Amazon continues to work they should they continue to work there and get promoted should they move to an established startup like Airbnb should they move to an early-stage startup or should they bootstrap a software product or should they found to start up and play the VC funded game and is there a slight comfort of interest people advice to would-be founders from investors well yes investors giving advice is always self-serving advice so don't take your advice from investors and you can't help it because they have their particular view of the world and just realize that incentives are everything Charlie Munger who I mentioned earlier says incentives or superpowers and he also said if you could be working on incentives then you shouldn't be working on anything else he means like in a context of with your employees or your product incentives are everything that said what path should you take heck I don't know I mean they're all good paths it depends what you want a lot out of life you could try them all if you know you want to start a company you know what the company is and you know who you want to do it with and you feel like you have a good understanding of the space and go do it you're ready on the and if you don't know how to do it or you don't yet know what it is then you should probably get as close to it as possible and that would mean joining a startup and if you want to be a founder then you probably want to join a start-up that's very early if you're more interested in making having a good lifestyle or making money for your family then you may want to go to a later stage startup the one that is more clearly on the path of success so I think this questions like this unfortunately don't have glib answers there's highly highly contextual but the fact that you're thinking about it means you're going about it the right way startups are a young person's game it's better to do them early in life before you settle down before you have too many obligations before you've gotten kind of set in your ways so if you if you're gonna do a startup you should at least take one shot at it before you're 30 or 35 after that I find it gets a lot harder that's me personally though there are plenty of great entrepreneurs who are executing in their 40s and 50s and 60s and I think t boone pickens who's still an entrepreneur an operator is something as 80s or something like that it's a very practical question what is your advice to those on US visas how can they go about launching a start-up in the value of keeping their primary job in the short term and what communities and incubators can they reach out to for help and advice actually there's a there's a great accelerator incubator that I'm a small investor in call unshackled I think there unshackle CO and what they solve exactly this problem they help great engineers designers entrepreneurs start companies while retaining their visa status and they have a way to work that out that's perfectly legal and ethical and good and it helps immigrants create jobs and create wealth and create products for the rest of us so I highly recommend checking out unshackled and now there may be others like it that's just the one that I happen to be aware of Travel Vinny asks a good question in a world where the majority of people will guard money much more than time how do you protect your own time and still not offend people or damaged relationships both professionally and personally any strategies are Goodreads and this you could suggest yeah this is the bane of my existence I get hit up for coffees lunches meetings obligations to dues phone calls for a little while I was a little ornery about it and I used to own the domain I don't do coffee comm and I would reply to emails from an avowal that I don't do coffee calm but that was rude and stupid and that was the petulant younger more brash version of me these days I've become sort of a master at evading meetings that suck up time the reality is time is all you have in this world and when you're young you're seeking out opportunities so you look forward to serendipity you're taking new meetings dynamics energizing you meeting people as you get older you have too much opportunity you're too many people you have too much family obligations you're too many things to do too many places you could be and then you just end a busy busy busy busy busy and busy is the is the death of productivity and happiness Derek Siver's who I think Tim had a great podcast with said you know I'm not gonna say yes or no I'm gonna say hell yes or no like basically unless I'm really excited about something I'm not gonna do it I think that's a good heuristic to try out and you know so what if it offends people you have a very short life on this earth you have to spend it being happy and doing what is productive and what matters with the people closest to you and I think all the great nests and life comes from all the great outcomes and let come from compound interest whether it's in investing or whether it's in relationships so like my most popular tweet of all time is this one that kind of glib but it says if you can't see yourself working with somebody for life don't work with them for a day now of course you're not gonna like say no I'm not gonna work with you because I'm not working with you for the rest of my life but it's a good reminder that if you knew that any relationship is short-term or temporary it's really not gonna pay all the dividends that you want later in life so it's better to just kind of treat a lot of your time as a search function where you're searching for through the set of jobs you're searching through the set of dates and spouses you're searching through the set of friends you're searching through the set of hobbies until you find things you love and when you find things and people that you love you go all-in on them so when you find the person that you love being around 24/7 and if they're attractive and of the opposite sex you marry them if there's you know friends that you just never get tired of hanging around with well those are gonna be the three four or five friends that you spend most your rest of your life with hopefully there are happy people because it'll rub off on you there's a theory called the five theory where you can in zoology you can predict the mood behavior patterns of any chimp by which five chimps they hang out the most with so choose your five chimps carefully so I would say yes people can get offended making damaged relationships if you blow them off or if your non-responsive but you have very little room in your life long term for real relationships so guard that time and it's really it's actually really important to have empty space if you don't have a day or two days a week in your calendar where you're not always in meetings and you're not always busy then you're not gonna be able to think you're not know that have good ideas for your business you're not going to have good judgments so I also encourage taking at least one day a week preferably two because if you budget two you'll end up with one a day a week where you have nothing on your calendar and you just have time to think it's only after you're a board that you're gonna have the great ideas it's never going to be when you're stressed or busy or running around or rushed so make the time the same way with people you need to have space in your life where you're not booked with the people that you already know so this way once in a blue moon an invitation will come along and a person will come into your life that's suddenly really interesting and now you'll be able to make the time for them so I think you have to be pretty ruthless about saying no to things about turning people down and leaving room in your life for serendipity and and in my experience normally if you don't make time for people when they're requesting time for you yes it's a little painful it's a little socially awkward but the people aren't going to disrespect you if anything they want to hang out with even more because they realize you're very discriminating with your time but guard your time forget the money I mean money is actually the least important thing there's a discount rate to money I like asking my friends which is okay if you could keep your friends and family and you keep everything you know but you lost all your money and your job and you had to start over but in exchange you get to be younger you get to be physically younger how many years of your life would you have to get back in exchange for giving up everything you've earned and put away and I have friends who say you know 5 years or 10 years for me personally it's about 2 to 3 years I'd start over with everything he gave me back two or three years of youth frankly but the older you get the smaller that number gets when you're on your deathbed when you're in your last days you'd gave up every dollar at the bank for another week another few days another hour another minute so money has a very steep discount rate as you get older and you just realize you get older that it matters less and less and less outside of course outside the bare necessities which you know unfortunately most the world is still struggling with but the fact that you can probably listen to this podcast on an iPhone or whatever you're listening to it on means you're already better off than a lot of people so guard your time it's all you have a gv8 asks what has been the best lesson that investing has taught you what investing has taught me is humility it has taught me that nobody knows anything I think so many companies are gonna be great so if you actually work out it shows how much luck there is involved and in the system so it's important is to set up a system for yourself Scott Adams actually has a great book on this I think it's called like how to fail that I've had to succeed Without Really Trying or how to fail that everything is still succeed I forget the exact name which you can look it up you can go to a blog that Dilbert calm or just Google Scott Adams look at his books but he has a great book that talks about how you should have systems in life and you should look for patterns and that way you are not bound to any specific outcome if you have a system eventually given all the randomness in the world the system will eventually pull signal out of the noise it will overwhelm the randomness and let you get to your goal but you have to have a system because the world is really random no individual investments gonna work out no individual persons can be the perfect one no individual situation is going to be a huge breakthrough in fact there's another great saying that I love which basically the per gate principle that says that bad news come suddenly but good news takes time so the good things in your life develops slowly over time because you have systems and nets out there to catch them but bad things like someone you know had a heart attack or you lost you you know the stock market crashed you lost a bunch of money that kind of stuff tends to have very very suddenly see this new patient not get too caught up it's not the end of the world that something bad happens and you have a systems for good things which systems and habits are actually very related I'm gonna have to get off this podcast and give the pulpit back to Tim so thank you all for listening thank you for inviting me back a second time I hope it was useful and not just the you know ramblings of a strange person and I hope to see you all on Twitter or otherwise good luck to everyone in their lives I wish you happiness I wish you health I wish you consciousness I wish you fulfillment I wish that this year you add a good habit maybe you even break a bad habit and don't take anything too seriously thanks everyone hey guys this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off number one this is five bullet Friday do you want to get a short email from me and would you enjoy getting a short email for me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week that could include favorite new albums that I've discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do it could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short it's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend so if you want to receive that check it out just go to 4-hour workweek dot-com that's 4-hour workweek com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you enjoyed this episode is brought to you by athletic greens I get asked all the time if you could only use one supplement what would it be my answer is inevitably athletic greens it is your all-in-one nutritional insurance I recommended it in the 4-hour body did not get paid for that and I travel with it too boy getting sick I take it in the mornings to ensure optimal 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Channel: Tim Ferriss

Views: 73,180

Rating: 4.9101124 out of 5

Keywords: tim ferriss, 4 hour workweek, 4 hour body, 4 hour chef, forbes, timothy ferriss, entrepreneur, author, writer, best-seller, public speaker, angel investor, ferriss, twitter, Facebook, stumbleUpon, evernote, uber, tim ferriss blog, timothy ferriss speaker, Naval Ravikant, Naval Ravikant Interview

Id: I53WciFh6ik

Length: 65min 7sec (3907 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 20 2016