Naval Ravikant's Quotes | 635 条名言
Naval Ravikant is an Indian-American entrepreneur and investor who is widely known for his success in building wealth through investments and multiple streams of income. He is the co-founder, chairman, and former CEO of AngelList, and has invested early-stage in over 200 companies including Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, Wish.com, and many more.
"A lot of people think you can go to school and you can study for how to make money, but the reality is, there’s no skill called business."
"Anything you do will fade. It will disappear, just like the human race will disappear and the planet will disappear. Get to Mars, even that group will disappear. No one is going to remember you past a certain number of generations, whether you’re an artist or a poet or a conqueror or a pauper or nothing. There’s no meaning."
"I don’t care how rich you are. I don’t care whether you’re a top Wall Street banker. If somebody has to tell you when to be at work, what to wear and how to behave, you’re not a free person. You’re not actually rich."
"Modern society will shame you for earning money, shame you for being happy, shame you for being raised well, shame you for having children, and ultimately, shame you for existing. It isn’t just religion that controls you by declaring you a sinner."
"Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there’s no concept of right or wrong or good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences… and then you die. How you choose to interpret that is up to you. And you do have that choice."
"At heart I’m an entrepreneur and any day in which I solve the same problem twice in a row, I’m pretty unhappy. So by definition, I like to do something different every day. I think all humans are sort of meant to do that kind of thing."
"I do everything for me. I don’t do anything for other people. None of us do. I think we all like to pretend like we’re doing everything for other people, but the reality is, we’re always just doing it for ourselves. That’s just the truth, and so whenever people ask me why did I do X or Y or Z, it’s always for me; that’s why I did it."
"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."
"Judgment allows us to move through the world, but it’s also what separates us from one another. If I’m judging my friends and family, I’m separating myself from them. I’m creating a gap between us by putting them down and propping myself up."
"In an older society with few resources and mechanical work, the scheduled life is the most productive. In a modern society with permissionless leverage and creative work, the unscheduled life is the most productive."
"The most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram because they’re controlling the spread of information. They’re programming the culture."
"My only schedule is my daily morning workout, and even that I’m not perfect on it, but other than that I try to be as unscheduled as possible because I want to be free."
"I think a lot of what we think of happiness is is just pleasure. It’s physical pleasure, either from, Oh, that tasted good. Or it might be momentary pleasure from, He loves me, she loves me."
"I want to see truth. I want to see the world the way it is. Not through my filters. Not through my desires. Not through the way that other people want me to see it. And I want to accept it the way it is."
"I actually think happiness is the absence of suffering. It comes from peace, and that comes from being very careful about that desire, judgment, reaction. Realizing that you don’t actually need something anymore. That something is not important to you."
"Pick your one overwhelming desire. It’s okay to suffer over that one. But on all the other desires, let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed."
"Children are happy because: 1) They’re not self conscious 2) They lack a sense of time pressure 3) They’ve no goals. The bottom line is they are living from moment to moment, and the mind is not there to interfere in their bliss."
"In an age of permissionless leverage, judgement, not work, determines success and failure. Good judgement is the product of a calm and curious mind, reasoning without motivation and attachment. Whatever strengthens your ego weakens your judgement, and ultimately, your success."
"It’s a contradiction that we all deal with. That we all want to be successful people, but we also want to be happy people. The two of those run in almost diametric opposites to each other."
"When you’re on your death bed, when you’re on your last day, you’d give up every dollar in the bank for a few days, another hour, another minute."
"If you want to be successful, surround yourself with people who are more successful than you are. If you want to be happy, surround yourself with people who are less successful."
"The universe has been around for a long time, and the universe is a very, very large place. If you’ll study even the smallest bit of science, for all practical purposes we are nothing. We are ameba. We are bacteria to the universe."
"This universe has been around probably for 10 billion years or more, and will be around for tens of billions of years afterwards. Your existence, my existence is just infinitesimal. It’s like a firefly blinking once in the night."
"We don’t always get what we want, but sometimes what is happening is for the best. The sooner you can accept it as a reality, the sooner you can adapt to it."
"A happy, calm, and peaceful person will make better decisions. So if you want to operate at peak performance, you have to learn how to tame your mind."
"At the end of the day, we’re all founders. We’re all meant to work for ourselves. We’re not meant to go to nine to five jobs and be told what to do over and over."
"All that exists is this moment; it’s all there is. There is no future. That’s a fiction in your head that… nobody can predict the future. There is no past; nobody’s gone back even an inch in their past, not even a second, so that doesn’t exist."
"Literally all that exists is this moment. I feel like you’re dying and being reborn at every moment. It’s just, it’s up to you to choose whether to forget it or to remember it."
"It’s only after you’re bored that you have the great ideas. It’s never going to be when you’re stressed, or busy, running around or rushed. Make the time."
"The reality is you’ve been dead for the history of the universe, it’s 10 billion years or more. You will be dead for the next 70 billion years or so until the heat death of universe."
"The best founders I’ve found are the ones who are very long-term thinkers. Even decisions that maybe they shouldn’t care that much about early on, they fix it because they are not building a house, they’re putting bricks in the foundation of the skyscraper, at least in their minds."
"When building habits, choose consistency over content. The best book is the one you can’t put down. The best exercise is the one you enjoy doing every day. The best health food is the one you find tasty. The best work is the work you’d do for free."
"The best way to prepare for the future 20 years is find something you love to do, to 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 a company’s name or other people’s names around it. Try to make a creative work, so you’ll stay interesting, stay ahead of the game."
"If you look back at your life on your deathbed at all the interesting things you’ve done, they’re all going to be centered around the sacrifices you’ve made and the hard things that you did."
"The modern age is an age of leverage. We’re leveraged through machines, we’re leveraged through media, we’re leveraged through money, we’re leveraged through people working with us."
"As a worker you want to be as leveraged as possible so that your work has a huge impact and it won’t take as much of your time or physical effort. Like you’d rather work with a bulldozer than work with your hands, the same way you’d rather work a computer than you would with a pencil."
"Picking the direction that you’re heading in in every decision is far, far more important than what force you apply. Just pick the right direction to start walking in, and then start walking."
"The maximum leverage would mean that you would have people working for you. It would mean you would have a funding, you would have capital. It would mean that you’d be writing a book, it would mean that you’d be writing code and that you’d be building a media presence."
"Mentors won’t make you rich. Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself."
"Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt."
"I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit."
"The best relationships are peer relationships. When given power over others, our ego justifies it by assuming we are smarter. Better to have people work with us than for us."
"Meditation is intermittent fasting for the mind. Too much sugar leads to a heavy body, and too many distractions lead to a heavy mind. Time spent undistracted and alone, in self-examination, journaling, meditation, resolves the unresolved and takes us from mentally fat to fit."
"The human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world’s breaking news and 24/7 emergencies, injected straight into the skull with clickbait headlines. If you pay attention to that stuff, even if you have a sound mind and body, it will eventually drive you insane."
"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 glad with it. Be happy that you’re in this world."
"I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don’t use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it."
"Your goal in life is to find out the people who need you the most, to find out the business that needs you the most, to find the project and the art that needs you the most. There is something out there just for you."
"Think of Bitcoin as a bank account in the cloud, and it’s completely decentralized: not the Swiss government, not the American government. It’s all the participants in the network enforcing."
"Bitcoin is an exit from the Fed. DeFi is an exit from Wall Street. Social media is an exit from mass media. Homeschooling is an exit from industrial education. Remote work is an exit from 9-5. Creator economy is an exit from employment. Individuals are leaving institutions."
"I think of Twitter as the place where I go to have a great conversation when I can’t have one locally, which seems to be all the time, and the more time that I spend on Twitter, the more I sort of curate this incredible group of very intelligent people that I just get to know purely through the quality of their thoughts."
"Knowledge workers train, sprint, rest, and re-assess. Inspiration is perishable – act on it immediately. Be impatient with actions but patient with results."
"Creativity is the last frontier. Automation over a long enough period of time will replace every non-creative job. That’s great news. That means that all of our basic needs are taken of, and what remains for us is to be creative, which is really what every human wants."
"Perhaps this time is different, automation will permanently destroy jobs, and humanity is incapable of relearning and doing creative work. Perhaps it’s time to drop the tyranny of low expections, and new tools will liberate individuals from a lifetime of drudgery, as they always have."
"I think long-term and on a long enough time scale, maybe it’s 50 years from now or maybe it’s 500 years from now, almost everybody on this planet will work for themselves."
"The three big ones in life are wealth, health, and happiness. We pursue them in that order but their importance is in the reverse."
"Technology is the application of knowledge to control the natural world. It’s the greatest driver of both human prosperity and our capacity for self-annihilation."
"My number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. It starts with my physical health. Second, it’s my mental health. Third, it’s my spiritual health. Then it’s my family’s health"
"On what is the purpose of life: To keep growing and learning in the 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. Then, just to live your life. I think that’s it. Any deeper meanings or goals just lead to ideologies, which lead to desires, and belief systems, and disappointments and conflict."
"You can escape competition through authenticity, when you realize that no one can compete with you on being you. That would have been useless advice pre-internet. Post-internet, you can turn that into a career."
"We are overexposed to everything. The way to survive in modern society is to be an ascetic, it is to retreat from society. There’s too much society everywhere you go. You have society in your phone, society in your pocket, society in your ears… It’s socializing you and programming everyone. The only solution is turn it off."
"The modern struggle – Lone individuals summoning inhuman willpower, fasting, meditating, and exercising, up against armies of scientists and statisticians weaponizing abundant food, screens, and medicine into junk food, clickbait news, infinite porn, endless games and addictive drugs."
"The pace of technological change is accelerating so much that I think we do have the reach for all humans to live a life of abundance in our grasp."
"Humans are basically habit machines […] I think learning how to break habits is actually a very important meta skill and can serve you in life almost better than anything else."
"Don’t do things that you know are morally wrong. Not because someone is watching, but because you are. Self-esteem is just the reputation that you have with yourself."
"The more you judge people and things, the more you’re going to separate yourself. You’ll feel good for an instant… but then you’re gonna feel lonely and then you’re just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you."
"If you’re struggling through a subject, unless you need it for graduation, drop it. Go learn something that you want to learn."
"The reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone. You’re going to die alone. All of your interpretations are alone. All your memories are alone. You’re gone in three generations and nobody cares. Before you showed up, nobody cared. It’s all single-player."
"A great goal in life would be to not have to be in a given place at a given time… Being accountable for your output rather than your input. I would love to be paid purely for my judgment."
"On the meaning of life: You get to make up your own answer and that’s the beauty of it. If there was a single answer, we wouldn’t be free. We’d be trapped because we’d all have to live to that answer. We’d be robots competing with each other trying to fulfill that meaning more than the next person. (Related: What’s the Meaning of Life? | Joe Rogan and Naval Ravikant ,YouTube video)"
"I think happiness is a skill, nutrition is a skill, diet is a skill, investing is a skill, self awareness is a skill. And skills get built up over decades with feedback loops and you just have to constantly keep working on it."
"If you learn how to learn, it’s the ultimate meta skill and I believe you can learn how to be healthy, you can learn how to be fit, you can learn how to be happy, you can learn how to have good relationships, you can learn how to be successful."
"When you’re memorizing something, it’s an indication that you don’t understand it. You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot and if you can’t, you don’t know it."
"The most important trick to be 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."
"We just play games in life. You grow up, you’re playing the school game, you’re playing the social game. Then you’re playing the money game; then you’re playing the status game. These games just have longer and longer and longer-lived horizons. At some point, at least I believe that these are all just games. There are games where the outcome really stops mattering once you see through a game."
"Identify your strengths and apply them to what you care about. Iterate at the edge of knowledge. Building it will feel like play to you, but look like work to others."
"Keeping your intellectual curiosity alive is really important. The only way that’s going to happen is if you learn what you love, if you read what you love, if you do what you love."
"To me happiness is not about positive thoughts. It’s not about negative thoughts. It’s about the absence of desire, especially the absence of desire for external things."
"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, not memorize lots of facts?, What kinds of books should you read?"
"What’s really important is to develop a love of learning. That is more important than anything else; it’s more important than what you learn. It’s more important than what school you go to, and it’s more important than what job you have."
"I think every child has the love of learning. Children are learning machines. They stop learning either because their ego gets too big and thinks that it knows everything or that it thinks it doesn’t needs to know more. Or because society somehow fails them."
"Real happiness only comes as a side-effect of peace. Most of it is going to come from acceptance, not from changing your external environment."
"Knowing something about everything allows you to navigate life. But knowing everything about something can show you what depth has to offer. It also gives you a joy and appreciation for what life has to offer. (See also: )"
"There’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition. We don’t teach cooking. We don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships. We don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. We just say sports. We don’t teach happiness. We don’t teach meditation."
"We are born with happiness, we are intrinsically happy creatures but we become unhappy because our egos create desire. The desire pulls us out of the moment. So something is missing right now then we chase that and we wonder why we are unhappy."
"When I find something really interesting, I’ll reflect on it, research it, and then when I’m bored of it, I’ll drop it or I’ll flip to another book."
"The best way to read is to: Pick up a lot of books. Start reading them all. Put down any book instantly that doesn’t grab you. And just keep going until you find something that speaks to you."
"Happiness is that state when nothing is missing. When nothing is missing, your mind shuts down and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past to regret something or to plan something."
"At any given time I’m reading somewhere between ten and 20 books. I’m flipping through them. If the book is getting a little boring, I’ll skip ahead."
"Happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future or the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, the way it is."
"I feel no obligation whatsoever to finish the book. If at some point I decide the book is boring, or if it’s got pieces of it that are incorrect so now I can’t trust the rest of the information in there, I just delete it."
"In today’s day and age, many people think you get peace by resolving all your external problems, but there are unlimited external problems. The only way to actually get peace on the inside is by giving up the idea of having problems."
"The most important trick to be happy is to realize that happiness is a choice that you make and a skill that you develop. You choose to be happy, and then you work at it. It’s just like building muscles."
"I like to stay free because then I can see the little miracles in life. There are little miracles everywhere; it’s just we have taken them for granted."
"The problem happens when we have multiple desires. When we have fuzzy desires. When we want to do ten different things and we’re not clear about which is the one we care about."
"You don’t want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high-strung, high-stress, and unhappy while leaving a trail of emotional wreckage for you and your loved ones."
"On meditation: Sit down, close your eyes, get in a comfortable position, and whatever happens, happens. If you think, you think. If you don’t think, you don’t think. Don’t put any effort into it."
"Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. It isn’t this thing you achieve after 30 years of sitting in a corner meditating. It’s something you can achieve moment to moment and you can be a certain percentage enlightened every single day."
"You literally have to free up your time because the world will assault you with its own agendas. You have to say no to everything and free up your time so you can solve the important problems."
"Quick relaxation hack: Drop face, soft belly. The face is usually wearing a mask to signal to others. The belly is often chronically tensed in a fight-or-flight response."
"Figure out what you’re good at and start helping other people with it; give it away. Pay it forward. Karma sort of works because people are very consistent. On a long enough timescale, you will attract what you project."
"What you want to do in life is, you want to be in control of your time, so you want to get into a leveraged job, and then you want to get into one where you control your own time and you’re tracked on the outputs."
"On how to deal with anxiety: I remember that I’m going to die — memento mori, as they say. It’s hard, though. Anxiety is the human condition. It’s probably the single most pervasive emotion. I don’t think people understand how deep anxiety runs. If I conquered anxiety, I’d be the Buddha; so would you if you conquered anxiety."
"A contrarian isn’t one who always objects – that’s a conformist of a different sort. A contrarian reasons independently, from the ground up, and resists pressure to conform."
"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 that the universe is going to be around."
"I have no time for short-term things: dinners with people I won’t see again, tedious ceremonies to please tedious people, traveling to places that I wouldn’t go to on vacation."
"The fact that you can listen to this podcast on an iPhone or whatever you’re listening to it on mans you’re already better off than a lot of people."
"Asymmetric opportunities: Invest in startups. Start a company. Create a book, podcast, video. Create a (software) product. Go on many first dates. Go to a cocktail party. Read a Lindy book. Move to a big city. Buy Bitcoin. Tweet."
"Be ruthless about not scheduling things. You will have to disappoint people, but when they want your time, that’s their problem, not yours."
"We all get shaped by adversity. All the great things that have happened to me in my life that I consider highly positive… they all started with something highly negative."
— Naval Ravikant
"We spend so much time in relationships. The average relationship probably lasts a couple years. We spend very little time deciding which relationship to get into. We spend so much time in a job, but we spend so little time deciding which job to get into. Choosing what city to live in can almost completely determine the trajectory of your life, but we spend so little time trying to figure out what city to live in."
"On who he considers successful: to me the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don’t even play the game; who rise above it. Those are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self awareness that they need nothing from anybody else."
"No one can compete with you on being you, no one can compete with me on being me, so when I think about what my profession, what my job, what my work is, it’s just being me."
"You’re meant to do something. You’re not just meant to lie there in the sand and meditate all day long. You should self-actualize. You should do what you are meant to do."
"You want to rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle into your mind. Now, I look forward to solitary confinement. You leave me alone for a day, it will be the happiest day I’ve had in awhile. That is a superpower that I think everybody can attain."
"You have to get out of that relative mindset because if you get into that relative mindset, you’re always going to hate people who do better than you, you’re always going to be jealous, you’re going to be envious of them."
"Artists calling for censorship don’t know what art is. Scientists citing consensus don’t know what science is. Teachers indoctrinating students don’t know what teaching is. Journalists parroting propaganda don’t know what reporting is. Programming us all day long."
"The fewer desires I can have, the more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving because the mind really exists in motion towards the future or the past."
"Everything is perfect exactly the way it is. It is only in our particular minds that we’re unhappy or not happy and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire."
"Arm yourself with specific knowledge, accountability, and leverage. Specific knowledge is knowledge that you cannot be trained for. If society can train you, it can train someone else, and replace you."
"On the mind: It is like a monkey flinging feces, that’s running around the room, making trouble, shouting, breaking things. It’s completely uncontrollable. It’s an out-of-control mad person."
"I think the number one thing that clouds us from being able to see reality is that we have preconceived notions of the way it should be."
"In almost any salaried job, even at one that’s paying a lot per hour like a lawyer, or a doctor, you’re still putting in the hours, and every hour you get paid. So, what that means is when you’re sleeping, you’re not earning. When you’re retired, you’re not earning. When you’re on vacation, you’re not earning. And you can’t earn non-linearly."
"Set and enforce an aspirational hourly rate. If fixing a problem will save less than your rate, ignore it. If outsourcing a task will cost less than your rate, outsource it. Get comfortable disappointing people whose expectations will eat your life up, one hour at a time."
"When you have children, you learn to love something more than you love yourself, and you can talk about that all day long, but you have never had that feeling until you’ve had a child."
"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 fearful my might be about 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. I think worldly success actually hurts."
"We’re not really here that long, and we don’t really matter that much. Nothing that we do lasts. Eventually, you will fade. Your works will fade. Your children will fade. Your thoughts will fade. These planets will fade. This sun will fade. It will all be gone."
"The purpose of wealth is freedom. It’s nothing more than that. It’s not to buy fur coats, or drive Ferraris, or sail yachts, or jet around the world in your Gulfstream. That stuff gets really boring and really stupid, really fast."
"The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there is no concept of right or wrong, good or bad. You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die. How you choose to interpret them is up to you—you have that choice."
"There are fundamentally two huge games in life that people play. One is the money game. Money is not going to solve all of your problems; but it’s going to solve all of your money problems. I think people know that. They realize that, so they want to make money."
"Wealth is assets that earn while you sleep; it’s the factory of robots cranking out things. Wealth is the computer program running at night that’s serving other customers. Wealth is money in the bank that is reinvested into other assets and businesses."
"To be the winner, there must be a loser. Fundamentally, I don’t like status games. They play an important role in our society, so we can figure out who’s in charge."
"The problem is, to win at a status game you have to put somebody else down. That’s why you should avoid status games in your life—because they make you into an angry combative person."
"Even in nature, there are more parasites than there are non-parasitical organisms. You have a ton of parasites in you, who are living off of you. The better ones are symbiotic, they’re giving something back. But there are a lot that are just taking. That’s the nature of how any complex system is built."
"the reality is everyone can be rich. We can see that by seeing, that in the First World, everyone is basically richer than almost anyone who was alive 200 years ago."
"I don’t think capitalism is evil. Capitalism is actually good. It’s just that it gets hijacked. It gets hijacked by improper pricing of externalities. It gets hijacked by improper yields, where you have corruption, or you have monopolies."
"He presents this vision that there are four fundamental theories from science and outside science: quantum theory, the theory of computation, evolution by natural selection, and epistemology—which is the theory of knowledge. Together they form the worldview, or lens, through which you can understand anything that can be understood."
"Deutsch’s worldview is that reality is comprehensible. Problems are solvable, or “soluble,” as he writes. It’s a deeply rationally optimistic worldview that believes in good scientific explanations and progress."
"It states that we are at home in the universe and the universe is ours as a resource to learn about and exploit; that material wealth is a set of physical transformations that we can affect; that everything that is not forbidden by the laws of physics is eventually possible through knowledge and knowledge creation."
"Of course, everyone wants to know how the laws of nature work. But if we want to understand how the universe is going to evolve over time, whether it’s locally on our own planet or, eventually, the galaxy, we’re going to have to talk about the knowledge that people create and the choices that they’re going to make into the future."
"“The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.”"
"We are, so far as we know, the sole place in the universe that is creating knowledge, an open-ended stream of knowledge that could transform the rest of reality."
"This is another aspect of the world view that we never have the final word—and that’s a good thing. That’s optimistic because it means we can keep improving, we can keep making progress, and we can keep discovering new things. There is no end of science."
"One is Nassim Taleb, who popularized the idea of the black swan, which is that no number of white swans disproves the existence of a black swan. You can never conclusively say all swans are white. You can never establish a final truth. All you can do is work with the best explanation you have today, which is still far better than ignorance."
"One of the points that he makes is that Gödel’s incompleteness theorem doesn’t say that mathematics is junk; the theorem isn’t a cause for despair. Gödel’s incompleteness theorem says that no formal system—including mathematics—can be both complete and correct. Either there are statements that are true that cannot be proven true in the system, or there will be a contradiction somewhere inside the system."
"This could be a cause of despair for mathematicians who view mathematics as this abstract, perfect, fully self-contained thing. But Chaitin makes the argument that, actually, it opens up for creativity in mathematics. It means that even in mathematics you are always one step away from falsifying something and then finding a better explanation for it."
"Comparing that to mathematics, if necessary truth is the subject matter of mathematics, mathematicians are engaged in creating knowledge about necessary truth. Because a mathematician has a brain—which is a physical object—and all physical objects are subject to making errors of degradation via the second law of thermodynamics—or simply the usual mental mistakes and errors that any human being makes—a mathematician is just as fallible as anyone else. So what they end up proving could be in error."
"in general relativity, the idea is the opposite. It says things can continuously vary, and the mathematics requires that things be continuously variable so they can be differentiated and so on. The idea is that you can keep on dividing up space and you can keep on dividing up time."
"What is the fundamental nature of reality? Is it that things can be infinitely divisible, or is that we must stop somewhere or other? If it’s infinitely divisible, then quantum theory might have to be subservient to general relativity. We just don’t know."
"Does probability actually exist in the physical universe, or is it a function of our ignorance? If I’m rolling a die, I don’t know which way it’s going to land; so therefore I put in a probability. But does that mean there’s an actual probabilistic unknowable thing in the universe? Is the universe rolling a die somewhere, or is it always deterministic?"
"All probability is actually subjective. Uncertainty and randomness are subjective. You don’t know what the outcome’s going to be, so you roll a die. That’s because you individually do not know; it’s not because there is uncertainty there deeply in the universe. What we know about quantum theory is that all physically possible things occur."
"Even many of the things that we say we have seen, we’ve actually just seen instruments detect those things. We’re watching the effects through instruments and then theorizing that there are other universes out there where the photons are interacting with the photons that we can see."
"Now, if you’re an inductivist—or even a Bayesian reasoner—and you don’t know anything about the boiling temperature and what phenomena happen at that temperature, you can join all of those lovely lines into a perfectly diagonal straight line and extrapolate off into infinity."
"The idea that there’s extra-sovereign money that’s native to the Internet and programmable is foreign to them because their money is always something that has been provided by the government and controlled by the government. They just cannot imagine it any other way."
"At the moment we’re very concerned about the pollution and the loss of certain species, and these are legitimate concerns for some people. But it should never be at the expense of the long-term vision that we can solve all of those problems—and far more—if we could progress at a faster rate by using the resources that we have available to us."
"I’m guilty of having recorded one of these doomsayer podcasts about enders blowing up the Earth. That was the one podcast I regretted the most. We had a great conversation, but I don’t fundamentally agree with conclusions that we should slow down because the world is going to end."
"So, generally, the Silicon Valley startup model tends to work best. It’s not the only way, but it is probably the most common way, when you have two founders, one of whom is world class at selling, and one of whom is world class at building."
"I think if you only had to pick up one, you can start with building and then transition to selling. This is a cop-out answer, but I think that is actually the right answer."
"Other people will push you towards the things you’re good at, too. Because your smart bosses, co-workers and investors will realize you’re world-class in this one thing."
"Unfortunately, there’s a pessimistic assumption here that people make that human creativity is bounded, and I think it’s the people who have not built things, who have not created new things from scratch, who seem to feel this the most."
"Even so-called empty space has a lot of matter and a lot of things that could be converted into energy. There is no limit to the number of resources out there. There’s purely a limit to knowledge."
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