**Balaji Srinivasan :** Uh, in the meantime, why don't we welcome my friend and colleague, Naval? So, Naval is maybe one of my best friends in tech, a mentor to me for many years, and we both share a belief in self-improvement. One of your most viral tweets of all time was the 'How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky,' and maybe you can talk about that for the audience.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, so that was a random tweet storm that I put out at 4:00 a.m. one night, almost exactly like you see it, and it was just kind of my own principles of wealth creation. You know, I was a kid, I was poor. I went into the American Dream; I moved to the United States when I was young, I was lucky enough, and obviously, I wanted to be successful. You know, if you solve your material problems, it's kind of the base layer of your functioning, and then you can go solve all the other problems in life. And I just kind of wanted to lay out what I felt like were the long-term principles of wealth creation that I had concocted, internalized, absorbed from the world.
 
And I like Twitter. You know, Twitter is a good place for failed poets. If you're good with words but you don't like to write a lot, you don't like to write very long documents, it's a good place to synthesize your thoughts. And these were my own thoughts that had been bouncing around in my head for a while, and they seemed kind of obvious to me, to be honest, and I think they are. And I just wrote them down in a way in which I think every word counted. And Twitter was very good at that because back then, Twitter was 140 characters, and so...
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Just the 280?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** I was against the 280. It definitely took away like a core little superpower of mine when it went to 280, and now, now it's just word salad everywhere, right? And I have actually put up threads on how to tweet well. Everybody ignores them, but there are just a few simple rules, and you know them well. But, you know, you want to speak honestly, you want to say it well, you want to say something that's novel, you want to write for yourself, not for other people. You want to make each tweet stand alone, you want to shave off every extra word, you want to use common words but not so common that they have no meaning, and you want to be opinionated, you want to take a point of view, but, you know, always tell the truth.
 
And so that's kind of it. And so, 'How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky' kind of went viral, it got famous, I did a podcast on it afterwards, it got printed up in a book, and it's not — it's very incomplete, it's very high level, right? It's maybe like 10% of what you and I actually know to be true."
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :**  I know, you know, the funny thing about it is, you said something there, which is—"
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Your mic, your mic is dead.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :**  Oh, okay. Is that better? Okay. You said something there which was, you thought it was obvious. Yeah, and I did too when I saw that. I was like, 'Everybody in Silicon Valley knows this, why is this getting like 120,000 whatever it was, right?' But then I actually thought back to when we were coming out of, uh, when I was coming out of academia, and profit was like supposed to be a function of sufficient malevolence, right? You know, that, say, if you're mean enough, you could make a high profit, right? 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Capitalism is exploitative, and if you have money, you took it from somebody, which is obviously false. Go look at the cavemen. We're not subdividing up the deer carcasses from prehistoric times, so obviously we create things.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** I will say, I think the East Coast has that model because it's actually more true for them.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Absolutely. The older the industry, the more it's about dividing up the spoils and about using regulation and network effects and all that stuff to kind of keep what you have. And this is a common phenomenon you see in societies, you even see with individuals, which is after they've made it, then they become either extractive or they become defensive of the existing system. And so, for example, the current meme among the left is, 'Billionaires are evil.' Well, yeah, some of them maybe, right? Depends on how you got it. I'm always amazed that the monarchy still exists in England. You know, those were extractive at a point, right?
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** One of my big points is, you know, San Francisco's budget, as we both know, is like 12, 13 billion, and there's on the order of, I think, 12 supervisors and one mayor. So, they're all political billionaires, right? They allocate a budget of a billion dollars apiece, right? And that actually, what that means is, uh, that's actually—they're far wealthier. People in government are far, far, far wealthier than the mere tech billionaire, who's actually poor by comparison. That's a provocative post—tech billionaires are poor. Why? Because if you have a billion dollars, you know, net worth, and you might have 50 million, 100 million liquid, most equity holders, and that's over one's entire lifetime. Whereas, if they're spending a billion in cash each year, they're like 100x wealthier.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, it's like, obviously, Elon Musk is the wealthiest man in the world, and rightly so because he's probably doing the most for humanity of anybody. But to say that he's worth $250 billion is not correct. He couldn't cash that out tomorrow. And if you tried to take that all from him, it would just disappear. What he instead has is, he is the best hope for humanity to become a multi-stellar species, to go to the stars. And so, the $250 billion in his net worth really represents the value of humanity's space lift capability. That's where we are today, and if you were to try to extract that from him, and he and his team were to scatter, it would be worth precisely zero. So it's much more a bet on us going to the stars thanks to what he's organized than it is money that he's running around spending like a Scrooge McDuck or swimming in piles of gold.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** That's right. And more generally, so much wealth is actually about expectations of growth in the future, and everything that is being done on degrowth and so on is actually not just slowing the rate of growth, but making us less wealthy in the present. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** This is where I think defining wealth is important. People think of wealth as hoarded money, right? But really, wealth is a byproduct of knowledge. If you look at wealth, it's a combination of two things: David De has a great definition where he says, 'Wealth is the ability to affect transformations.' It's to transform things from one thing to another. So, if I can turn electricity into cars, or if I can turn labor into oil, or whatever, I can transform money into another thing. If I can swap it, then that transformative ability is wealth.
 
But now, if you look at what allows us to transform one thing to another, some of it is capital stock with machinery, but most of it is know how [Knowledge]. The cavemen had access to all the same resources that we did; they just didn't know what to do with them. To them, uranium wasn't even a thing. Oil was just like a sticky substance that maybe you stumbled across once in a while. So, the vast, vast majority of wealth is actually knowledge, right? So most people who are knowledgeable are actually incredibly wealthy. They just choose not to use it, or maybe they do choose to use it down the road. And I think that's very encouraging, especially now with the internet, knowledge is so readily accessible. Now, of course, the right kinds of knowledge—what I call specific knowledge in my tweet storm—is very important. Knowledge on the edge of what humanity knows and wants, and if you work hard enough at it, or if you're obsessed with it, you figure it out. That kind of knowledge can be monetized much more than certain knowledge, which is now common. For example, if ChatGPT can spit it back to you, you're not going to get it. Everybody else can get access to it too.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** It's funny because AI really does disrupt the bit, but not the person who's like, you know, just if you're doing something in the physical world or if you're doing something genuinely innovative, then you're good. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, true creativity. Like, people confuse creativity with, "Oh, I'm painting," or "I'm writing books." Creativity is solving problems, and it's solving problems in new ways, in ways that aren't just simple extrapolations or interpolations of existing ways. That's something that I still think humans uniquely do that AI does not do.
 
I think AI is a little over-named, but you know, it's natural language computing. It's very effective, but it's not solving new problems that we didn't know how to solve. But that said, most of our lives are spent in drudgery. They were spent in physical drudgery, and physical automation has gone a long way in getting rid of that—dishwashers, washing machines, and all that, and cars. But now, a lot of it is spent in intellectual drudgery: filling out forms, writing reports, essays, emails for things that are kind of obvious. So a lot of work is busy work. The promise of natural language computing and artificial intelligence is to take that over from us and to leave us for true creativity, which is solving problems that we don't yet know how to solve. That is where all the value is.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** So, on that topic, like, just on AI for a second, I think of AI now, at least what it is now, as amplified intelligence, as opposed to agency outside the human. We have that part; it isn't really there. And you can argue that point—you can say drones have agency—but then you can track it back to someone who's giving that direction. I have a technical argument as to why I think it's going to need at least a new technical breakthrough to get there, but I'd like to hear your thoughts. Do you think it's just, you know, a matter of scaling and then you'll get agency as an emergent phenomenon?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** I don't think scaling alone will do it. I'm not saying it's impossible—I think absolutely AGI is possible, which is what I think you're referring to—but I think it requires a different technical approach than we have today. I don't know what it is, but I do think the current AI is incredibly good at—you know, I made a list of things in my head, and it was like six things: translation, which is what it was originally designed for; transcription; driving, or driving assist; coding, coding assist, a more bounded problem than general creativity; generation, like art and video; and then finally categorization and summarization and kind of extrapolation—so all the word games. None of that is solving problems with new ideas.
 
Now, the thing is, humans do that uniquely, but they don't do it that often. It's still rare amongst humans. You know, if you made one fundamental, truly creative breakthrough in your life, that would probably be enough to get you all the material rewards that you want. But that is really the province of human beings. Now, will AI get there? Maybe. I think it'll require different technology; I don't think it's just throwing more compute at it.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Yeah, so my tech argument for this—and I'm sure one of my colleagues will argue with me on this—is that everything you described there is training on a time-invariant target. Like the mapping, for example. The rules of chess are time-invariant; they don't change over time. The mapping from the string "dog" to an actual image of a dog is—English language doesn't change that much. But if you're in the realms of politics or markets where past performance doesn't predict future results, it's a non-ergodic kind of thing. You might not just be able to train things, and people have actually shown significant—that that's how you can get adversarial on AI. AI that's trained on something, and you've got out-of-sample data, and it's actually engineered to go after that.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** There's no reason why it's theoretically impossible; it's theoretically absolutely possible. We are walking AGIs, and we create AGIs. You have children, I have children—we've created AGIs. So it's absolutely doable. And it's not to say there's only one approach to AGI, but fundamentally what we are is we are Turing-complete universal computers; we're universal explainers. And we can get there in other ways, I'm sure. Are we going to get there in some known time scale by throwing compute at it? I don't know, I don't see that. At the same time, is what's going on today very important and impressive? Absolutely.
 
If you've been in a Waymo or a Tesla FSD vehicle, or if you have used AI to help you do research or math, or if you use large natural language databases, I think it's incredibly valuable. But it doesn't have its own agency; it doesn't contradict you, it doesn't have its own desire. And this whole idea that we can somehow make AI safe is nonsense because creativity, by its nature, is unbounded. Any thought can lead to any other thought—you can jump through the entire search space of possibilities in your mind. And so because of that, saying, "I'm going to have an AI that is somehow brilliant and independent, but yet I'm going to constrain the way it thinks," is a logical contradiction. It's like saying in a computer that I know the next place the thing is going to go, even though the code is opaque to me.
 
It's probably the level of the halting problem, although that's a different discussion. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Well, you know, one of the things I've been thinking a lot about is how the "cloud" takes land, and embodied AI is digital AI taking drones..…and I mean, whether it's taking it or it's being put into it as a vessel for, right? So, it's being put into drones and self-driving cars and now humanoids, and so on. And then, what we're doing here is we're taking these social networks and we're materializing them in the physical world, right? And I'd like to know, you know, you've actually been—you’re about 10 years older than me—you’ve seen the internet even more poo-pooed than it is now. Are people taking the internet seriously enough? They're not, or what? That's my view. What do you think?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, the future is very unevenly distributed. I think one of the things that we are constantly surprised by in the tech industry is just how technically illiterate people are, you know? So, I don't want to be negative, but the real problem in modern society is not illiteracy—we’ve conquered illiteracy—it’s innumeracy. Most people are incredibly uncomfortable with even basic mathematics, and that’s kind of a travesty. It’s an indictment of the educational system. But if you have basic numeracy and basic computer literacy, you are living in the future. You're way ahead of the vast majority of people. And so, the internet is here, but, you know, as—I forget who famously said—it's, you know, the future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed. Maybe it’s Alan Kay; I just attribute all the great quotes to him.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** It's interesting…it’s, uh, sorry—it’s bad to be illiterate, but it’s acceptable to be innumerate.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Right. And I would argue numeracy is almost more important. It’s almost impossible to be illiterate in modern society. If you’ve got, you know, YouTube with captions, and if you kind of just pay attention a little bit, you catch up on literacy. Numeracy is not only harder to acquire, but it’s sort of more acceptable to dodge it. It’s okay to say, ‘Well, I’m not a math person.’ Well, if you want to make money, if you want to be functional, if you want to understand how to navigate modern society, I would argue that basic mathematics is probably more important than anything else. I'm not talking about anything advanced, I’m not even talking about stats—probability, statistics, basic mathematics. I’m not talking about calculus or anything like that.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** So, somewhat swinging back to the original thing, so, you know, ‘How to Get Rich Without Getting Lucky.’ One of the things that they aren't teaching people, for example, is—and this has been said many times—they don’t teach kids in school compound interest. They don’t teach them about credit cards. They don’t teach them about taxes. They don’t teach them about all of this kind of stuff. And so, to what extent—I mean, a lot of what you talk about is something that I also believe in, of course—our community, the tech community, everybody here believes in, which is self-improvement, getting better. And, um, you know, how much of that… some of it is, quote, ‘skill.’ Have you heard the term ‘skill’? You know the phrase, whatever—‘skill issue’?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Skill issue, yeah, yeah.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Yeah, yeah. So that is sort of the inverse. Most of what I think you talk about, and what we talk about, is how to get better in a ‘Hey, you should improve yourself’ way. And the flip side of that is, ‘Okay, you didn’t get better. You didn’t improve yourself. It’s a skill issue. It’s on you,’ right? And so, I think that's true to an extent, but I also think there are other things where you might need a sovereign collective, and not just a sovereign individual. I’d love to know your thoughts on that.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, I mean, I think the only real improvement is self-improvement, as you know. I don’t really believe in groups, other than as a vehicle for the individual to improve themselves. All rights are fundamentally individual rights. All truth-seeking is an individual thing. Curiosity is an individual thing. Groups are effective for getting things done. Humans are an organized species. We're not hive-minded like ants or bees, but we are meant to rally together, use our ideas, tell stories to each other, inspire each other, and then use collective efforts to get what we want. But if you're looking to improve yourself, or if you're looking to figure out the truth, you're probably much better off as an individual following your own natural curiosity. 
 
And that’s really what it boils down to: curiosity and a sort of commitment to learning the correct answer. And I think if you have that, then you can fulfill almost any desire. All the tools are there. You know, as I’ve quipped before on Twitter, ‘The means of learning are abundant; it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.’ And that’s true even within me. Most of the time, I’m exhausted. I don’t want to learn; I just want to relax or do the things that I’m already good at. But at the same time, if I look back on my life, almost everything great that I’ve managed to pull off—great by my own definition, not by the world’s definition—has come from following my own natural intellectual obsessions.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Yep.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** So, I think if you can get obsessed over something, and if you can dive into it and just let yourself go and learn everything about it with no motivation other than you just want to know the answer, I think that that is kind of the basis for all of the so-called self-improvement out there. You have Brian Johnson here somewhere, you know, he’s obsessed with not dying and aging well. He's obsessed, and that's great—he's following his intellectual obsession, and we all get to learn from that. You’re following your obsession on the network state. There are people out there following their obsession on AI, on crypto. There are people who are following their obsession on history—Roman history, whatever it is. But if you get obsessed with something, you can figure it out to a detail that other people don't. It can satisfy yourself, and if you go deep enough into anything, you find the same commonalities, you find the same philosophies.
 
As a weird aside, I've gotten into photography recently. You know, I have young kids, so don’t ask me why, but it's just kind of a way of combining art and science, being social and antisocial, doing something utilitarian. But sure enough, I’m obsessed with photography. I’m reading all the philosophical photography blogs where the author is talking about what is the meaning of life and what is art, what is science, and etc. It’s like, if you go deep into anything, you'll find the same kind of common threads. So, I think self-improvement really just comes from letting you be yourself, following the things that you really want to follow, figuring out the things that you want to figure out, not worrying about what other people want or think. And then, you kind of find yourself in the same place at the end, no matter which route you take.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** So that's really good. So, uh, you've had—there's, uh, there's one thing that I—well, let me actually poke a little bit on something, right? Which is, I mean, think about this more, and here's a frame that, um, maybe you'll agree with, maybe you'll disagree with. So, you know, people who are capitalists, who are good at markets and so forth, we see a lot of people who say, 'Oh, I'd love to, you know—' they think making money is easy, or creating wealth is easy, or they think that Elon is dumb or something like that. We see lots of people who say things like this, and we're like, 'If you only knew how hard it was, why don't you get in the ring and try it,' right?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** And here is—this is not completely true, but the somewhat symmetrical thing, it's not completely symmetrical, is a lot of people in tech feel, 'Why is the government—why are regulations hitting me,' and so on and so forth, but haven't actually said, 'Okay, what does it take to actually get serious about getting political power?' It's sort of like, you know, the people who are good at politics are often bad at markets, and the people who are good at markets are often bad at politics. But you need to kind of play both your left and right hand, and that's something I think about more and more. That's why I think about the sovereign. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Politics and markets are very different. Politics—my definition of politics is that it's the exercise of power without merit, alright? It’s basically, you get to allocate resources, you get to control things that you didn’t create. And so it's kind of an awful thing, and I think a lot of people who are creative don't want to play the political game. But the problem is, politics finds you, and then people get dragged into it.
 
In an ideal world, we wouldn't have to spend a lot of time on politics, but as you know, the sovereign individual thesis is that violence undergirds everything, the ability to inflict and resist violence.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** So I would—here’s why I slightly argue with this—is, if, at least I’ve started to think about politics as the market for votes, and like any market, a market can be corrupt. It can have oligopoly, it can have collusion, especially if it's an old market, and so on and so forth. But in other markets, that doesn't really stop us. I mean, all the, you know, car manufacturers colluded and so on, and Elon figured out a way, right? And if we start thinking about it as a market for votes, we might be able to figure out a way to reframe it into something that actually we can put our minds to work on. That’s why I—
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Well, there's two very different things here that I think might be getting mixed up, which is, uh, there's the mob, and there's markets. And both of them seem like they're, 'Oh, it's just groups of people and it's wisdom of crowds.' No, they're very different things. A market is when you have a bunch of independent actors who are making their own decisions and being punished or succeeding based on their predictions. Uh, but it is a crowd, but it is the wisdom of crowds. A mob is herd mentality—that's a group of people who think exactly the same instead of thinking differently. So a group of people thinking differently and cooperating is a market. A group of people who are thinking the same is a mob, and mobs are inherently very powerful; they can be very violent. You don't want to be in the way of a stampeding herd. But at the same time, that's not a truth-seeking mechanism. That’s not who is going to get the correct answer. So you can talk about democracy, right?
 
But democracy—one person, one vote, true democracy—is the tyranny of the majority. That’s 51% controlling the other 49%. But a market-based democratic voting mechanism is a very different thing. That's where it's saying, 'I have the right to exit. I have the right to vote with my money or with my time or with my effort.' And that’s going to lead to a very different outcome that is probably, depending on the situation, that may be a better political system.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Right, and I think, you know, the reason I think about this type of stuff is, over the very long scope, there are certain words that are so big that they contain both, like, X and its opposite. Like, Christianity was both the religion that tore down the Roman Empire and that basically served as a justification for the later Holy Roman Empire. You know, it was both the slave religion and a religion of kings, and there are many things that are like that. Um, and democracy has meant very different things, you know, in the sense of, like, the agrarian democracy to the industrial-era democracy to now, information-era democracy. So the market for votes, with States competing for citizens, is of course, you know—you’ve written about something like this with your securitizing citizenship thing a while back. That’s—I was kind of—
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, I have this blog post from a long time ago. I love it. Years old. It's called 'Securitized Citizenship,' but what it was pointing out was that right now, immigration is this zero-sum game where a couple of people get to decide how much immigration there is, whether they enforce the laws, and who comes in, and so on. And mostly, the natives just lose out on it, although a few of them win out on it, or they wouldn’t do it. Uh, maybe it’s politicians importing voters at the most cynical side, or maybe it’s just importing cheap labor. But the problem is that then the immigrants, you know, they compete with the locals, and so you have this issue of, like, 'Is immigration good or bad?' Well, if we could just bring in Elon Musks, immigration would be great. We’d all be incredibly wealthy.
 
So I think what’s important is to separate legal from illegal immigration, to separate high-skill from low-skill immigration, and to give people a stake in it. So my glib extreme thought exercise was, well, what if you gave every person an extra passport? It’s a blank passport, and then they can sell it off. They can choose who the immigrant who comes in is. Well, then you’d go looking for the next Elon Musk, and you’d say, 'Hey man, I want 10%, right? 10% of whatever you do in the future, and you get to come in.' Now, you have to make it so it doesn’t, you know, create slavery and it’s enforceable and all that kind of stuff, but you could literally sell off America and retire. You could give every American an extra passport; they could choose who comes in, and all of America retires in the extreme case.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Yeah, I mean, like a referral bonus, right? That’s really-
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, it’s—or it’s like, yeah, it’s a recruiting bonus. Well, I mean, we laugh at it in the country context, but if you’re running a company, that’s exactly how you would do it. You’d basically say, 'Hey, you get to recruit somebody, and then this person either works for you or works with you, and then it reflects upon you whether this person you recruited was good or not.' And if they’re bad, you’ve got to fire them, and if they’re good, then you get a piece of whatever they create, or they create equity value for all of us.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** It's funny, you know, I'm not sure if Paul Davidson of Clubhouse had heard you talking about that, 'cause they implemented—you know, Clubhouse, people may know this inspired Twitter Spaces. It had a really big surge, and you know, one of the things they implemented was something you were talking about, where you could see who had invited who in the app. Often, you've forgotten about that—like you installed an app five years ago, and who you got the invite from is not something you'd easily remember. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** It's how humans normally work: if you go to a friend's event or party and bring someone who's boorish or trouble, you're not going to get re-invited. You need some accountability. The systems we're using for these large governments now, for these oversized, bloated governments, they require trust, but they don't have trust because these are very heterogeneous societies with lots of mobility, nuclear families instead of extended families. So trust-based mechanisms have broken down, and they're low-trust societies. Then you get brutal, top-down enforcement: okay, there's one healthcare system for everybody, there's, you know, a police system which is kind of like random, that treats everybody as a criminal up to a point.
 
So you need to have trust, and the nice thing about the internet is you can actually create trust-based accountability. You can do it based on who invited whom, who's got what reputation, and what rights. In crypto land, it's putting money at stake, and it gets slashed if you don't follow through on your commitments, and so forth. So I do think that the internet, marrying it to local governance, allows you to do much more clever governance.
 
And I think this might have been in one of your slides earlier, where you had basically come up with a way to do voting, adjudication, policing, and taxation, all voluntary with exit rights through the internet. Voting, it's like: yeah, I pledge my vote to this slate, this candidate, and this set of policies. I pledge my money, my tax, my tithing to these sets of people who I trust to administer it. And if they're doing a bad job, I can route it elsewhere. Policing: I put money or my citizenship at stake, and it can be slashed by these people. Adjudication: this is the jury of my peers that I select to be governed by.
 
And this kind of opt-in, voluntary system enabled by the internet, I think, is very powerful. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** I think—yeah. So I gave a talk on this; if anybody here was at Token 249 or the Don't Die Summit, I gave a talk on tech democracy there, and I will publish it online. That's what Naval is speaking about. And I think the core—at least for me, the core insight—was that the same technology that's used to securely send one coin can be used to securely send one vote.
 
And the main issue with Bitcoin was whether people thought it was real and that the settlement layer was actually on-chain. So the key psychological step would be whether people think this quote-unquote "election" is real if it's happening purely online or on-chain, and I think that's now a solvable thing. So, you know, wait for more on this, but basically, if you can accumulate a million technocratic democratic votes, like essentially a bunch of people pledging—like voting for president but voting for the president of a network state on-chain—then you actually have more democratic support than many legacy governments, and it's provable and cryptographically verifiable. Every vote counts because you can count all the votes. So this is a way of using the internet to deal with some of these older problems, but in a third way, like a clever cloud way. Go ahead. Give me—
 
**Naval Ravikant :** It's incredible. I had thought that the internet would solve a whole bunch of the problems that we see in modern society today. Like, for example, I thought ubiquitous cameras would solve crime, because then you couldn't have physical crime since you'd just see and immediately arrest the person. But we got around that by just deciding not to enforce the laws in a lot of the West.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Right. In the West, yeah.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Or the same way—you would expect that like, okay, now we have the technology to do secure, verifiable online voting. You can use a blockchain, you can get your audit trail record, and with your private key, you can keep the vote anonymous, yet you can verify it as part of the total. The technology already exists. Nope! Instead, we're going to have mail-in ballots and sketchy drop-off boxes, and we're going to have ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing, and no ID requirement. It's just going to be all over the place. And it's because the political desire is not there. People are much more intent on hacking the system to get to their outcome rather than having a 'fair' system.
 
So the only way to create something or the only way to do something that actually uses these technologies is to build something new from the ground up.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Yes, that's right. And I think, like, you know, the way I sort of classify the world right now is: we have these existing institutions that are denying while declining. We have the people who recognize they're declining and are trying to fix them. And then, actually waiting in the wings and much, much stronger than anybody in the West really wants to admit: China is strong.
 
Zan is wrong. I like Peter Zan; I'm not dissing him. But China is strong, and they're getting stronger every day. And I'm not, like—you know, China's a complicated topic. There's lots of great Chinese people and so on and so forth. But essentially, power is a vacuum. And one of the things that's happening, which is very underreported—I'm not sure if this is on your radar—but, like, US troops are being pulled back from places like Mali and Niger, and all these places in the Sahel. They left Afghanistan. Russian troops are moving in. Chinese troops—you know, there's a power vacuum around the world that's actually being filled by China, or sometimes China plus Russia. You know, in Southeast Asia, China's more active, and so on and so forth.
 
And the reason that's important is, you know, there's this illusion in the West that, 'Oh, we can just figure it out one day like cramming for a test, we'll get a supply chain that's the equivalent of China, just like in 1945 again.' This is a common belief among many of our friends, actually. Right. Go ahead.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Well, I mean, I think militarily, things are shifting a lot. The Russia-Ukraine war is turning into a drone war. And drone technology—the Chinese lead everybody, mostly because we banned drone flights in the US. The FAA is very restrictive, and I understand there are good reasons why, but nevertheless, there is no homegrown US drone industry that can compete with the Chinese mass-market drone. Now we have companies like Anduril, who are doing incredible things on the defense side, but we don't have the mass production capability of small drones coordinated like China does.
 
And so I think the next war, you know, we might be in for a very rude surprise. A well-targeted drone swarm is as disruptive as nuclear weaponry; it can literally take over entire nations very quickly. And so I think, in a weird way, the US is now dependent upon a very small number of innovators, like Palmer Luckey. Maybe Elon will get into it. You know, people who are building high-quality drones. But you can see this in Ukraine and Russia: it is entirely a drone war now. Everything that's going on, and the future of technological warfare, is: if you can see it, you can kill it. Drones are guided bullets.
 
And just one last point on that. People make this mistake where they think like, 'Oh, we'll just stop them with an EMP.' Nope, they're going to be inertial-guided, self-guided, they're going to be autonomous. 'Oh, we can stop them with lasers.' No, that technology does not exist yet; it's really far off and very expensive. 'Oh, we'll have counter-drones.' Nope, because the attacker has the advantage of surprise, concentration, and gravity on their side—kinetic forces. So the combination of intelligence and drones is going to be the dominant weapon system in the future, or already is today. And as far as I can tell, Western militaries are completely asleep at the wheel on this. They're still buying aircraft carriers and submarines and wasting money on those kinds of things—F-35s, and so on.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** And the reason for that is similar to the guys on, um, you know, on horseback at the start of World War I. They just had to be cut to ribbons, unfortunately, by machine guns because they had built up a whole culture around being a cavalry officer, and there were budgets allocated for that, and it was noble. 'My grandfather did it, and I've got the mustache,' and all that kind of stuff. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** And yeah, it’s absolutely right—cavalrymen charging machine guns is a good analogy for what's going to happen. You can already see this. The Houthi rebels, who essentially should be, yeah, they should be nobodies, they’ve basically taken over the Red Sea, and every American carrier battle group had to flee out of the region before it got blown up. That's right, they're just big sitting targets.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** If we actually add up, I mean, here’s a bunch of things I'm seeing, you're seeing a bunch of things, here are things I'm tracking: A. The Houthis have basically won in the Red Sea. Like, if you look at it, it's unusual that there's like a graph that determines the outcome, like a single scalar graph unambiguous in terms of the outcome of a conflict, but all these ships still have to go around Suez, unless they're China and Russia approved that they go on—sorry—they have to go around the Cape of Good Hope unless China and Russia allow them to go through Suez. Okay, that's a defeat for the U.S. military. B. They're being forced to pull out of all these regions. C. There are these infographics that I post from time to time: the U.S. military is made in China.
 
Like, I love Elon, I love, you know, Palmer, they're amazing, but in many ways, it’s like Neil Ferguson (who’ll be speaking later today) and his post, 'We’re all Soviets Now,' where history is running in reverse. And this time, the U.S. side has a small group of, like, you know, the U.S. had Sputnik, it had a few really bright spots of technology, but fundamentally, it just didn't have the depth. And so, you can point to the top end, and the top end is competitive—they had some amazing scientists, mathematicians, engineers—but their system just didn’t allow that to scale. It was just too dysfunctional. That’s where I think the West is on a lot of this.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, I mean, where the West could still win is on creativity, but you would have to kind of unlock the entrepreneurs a little bit, you know? Because if Elon has factories that are making robots, and then those robots are making drones, and he was unfettered, then I think we would have a much better chance. But on the current trajectory, it doesn't look that great.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** That’s right. So, my view is from Christendom to the West to the internet—like, this—I mean, we're on the other side of the world, we're not really the West, right? But there’s something continuous still.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, well, it's the, uh, it's the British Enlightenment tradition. The tradition of criticism, science, learning, progress in a technological sense, freedom, innovation. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Version 3.0—because V1 was U.K. common law, V2 Constitution, V3 encryption and smart contracts, right? And so, like, version 3.0—the internet, internet capitalism—is going to make even more money than, you know, Anglo-American capitalism, and internet democracy, I think, is going to be more powerful, and so on and so forth. So, in many ways, I think actually—here’s a thesis for you—I think of the world, if you really reduce these 8 billion people to four forces right now (this is going to be my closing talk), but, um, China is up, Indians as a group are rising (the Indian diaspora globally), the internet is up, and the Western establishment, or the state, is down. And Americans, if they're aligned with the network, are rising; if they're aligned with the state, are generally declining. And that’s actually the right axis of thinking about that because there are lots of Americans, lots of Westerners, who are doing very well if they’re aligned with the internet. And the more they rely on the state, the worse they’re doing. And that split, if you just apply that lens, you can actually, I think, determine people.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** It's a level of freedom that sort of drives innovation and creativity and learning, and, uh, freedom is a big word, it means lots of things to lots of people. But it is very much, you know, as you get larger and larger states, it gets on the run. It almost doesn’t even matter who's in charge—once you get past a certain size, the fact that somebody's in charge and that they're disconnected from things on the ground, you just get too much control, and you get the stifling of freedom.
 
Historically, the frontier was always where you had a lot of little city-states. So, if you go back to Athens and Greece, that was the place to be during those times because you had lots of little city-states, and people had the freedom to move around and go to wherever their intellectual peers were, and do whatever they could do at that time without somebody else breathing down their neck saying, 'No, you can’t do that.' That happened with the Italian city-states, that happened with, uh, you know, even, uh, Germany and parts of Europe during the Renaissance period. Um, that happened with the U.S. under federalism when states' rights were dominant, the federal government wasn't that large, and you had the frontier, and people were going West. So, it’s always a question of where is the new frontier?
 
And I think what’s interesting here is you're creating a series of new frontiers on Earth, uh, scattered around in pop-up areas in city-states and network states, and they're sort of connected by the internet, and people can move around and reorganize as needed. Elon wants to go to Mars, uh, and, you know, terraform that place. Um, there are also interesting things going on, like, for example, if you go to Dubai or Saudi Arabia, they’re using cheap energy and desalination plants to terraform and make entire areas habitable. Uh, and the internet itself is an intellectual frontier where you can live as an anon on the internet, you can deal in crypto, and you're an anon on Twitter, and you can just live your life there and build your life there.
 
So all the innovation is always going to come in the places that are freest. The places that are freest are the frontier. Eventually, the masses get there, and then they want to cut off the bottom. They want to, you know, make things predictable and safe, but then they cut off the top too. They stop the innovation. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** So, one of my mental models is the fractal frontier, right? You've got all of these pockets that we're expanding now with everybody here around the world, right? And what's interesting is, physically, it's distributed, but intellectually, it's concentrated because these are the same chat groups and stuff. There's a section of the global network that we hang out in, and America was the opposite, where it was physically concentrated but it was fractal, with all these different kinds of people around the world that wanted to come to that location, right? So we just sort of inverted that pattern. That's how I kind of think about the world today, right?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, America was very successful because it was a magnet for the best people, and it just brought in the most ambitious. Yeah, the most freedom. I mean, it still does; it's a network effect. All these institutions and all these brands have a network effect, and they can keep going for quite a while. In fact, empires take a long time to fade. They can keep going for generations and generations, although in the age of the internet, everything gets sped up. But now, like, if you are an incredibly ambitious person, the first thing you want to do is you want to learn English because that's the lingua franca of the internet. So that gives you access to the most data and insight. That may change, by the way; AI translation is really, really good, which I think will be great for humanity.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** One remark on that, by the way, is English and Chinese are arguably the two most surveilled languages. If you step outside of that into something that's more of a dialect, it's harder. They just have less training data, and so like the anti-surveillance languages.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** That's going to be short-lived. The translation engines are really good even in the obscure languages. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Yeah, I guess you're right. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** I tested that out. You can run Whisper in different languages, including some very obscure ones, and it works really well.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Actually, you're right; N. Freed's thing was partially solved by AI. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, but I think if you're an ambitious person who wants to operate in the frontier today, the first thing you do is you get good at the internet, and you do that by being good at English and being maybe a little numerate and knowing how to navigate the less safe parts of the internet, controlled parts of the internet.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** This is why I say 'internet first' as distinct from, let's say, 'America first.' I'll say it in the right way: 'Internet first' is kind of a play on words of 'America first' but also 'mobile first,' where it's both a technical strategy but also a sort of social or political strategy. Like, you know, for example, take migration problems or what have you. Well, actually, if you accelerate immigration, let's assume that, you know, this particular polity doesn't work anymore. With the internet, we can reduce the barrier to exit, so we can get people out, and then we can also group them somewhere else. And almost anything, if we ask, 'What's the internet first solution to that? What's the internet first solution to the Fed?' It's Bitcoin. 'What's the internet solution to NASA's decline?' It's SpaceX, etc. And that's how we kind of think. But I think, at least until I phrase it that way, I don't think we put a thumb on it in our community in quite that way. Let me know your thoughts.
 
**Naval Ravikant : Yeah, human creativity is nonlinear. Idea space is a nonlinear domain where the right idea can be worth almost an infinite amount, and the wrong idea, not so much. So it's only a small number of innovators that are needed to really, really drive any endeavor you can name, whether it's philosophy or law or politics or technology or society. Just assembling a small number of the right people to interact with each other will drive everything. Every revolution, whether it's scientific, political, technological, or physical, is driven by a small number of like-minded people who are kind of at the cutting edge of thought, getting together and brainstorming with each other. That's true of Lenin and Trotsky and the Bolsheviks, that's true of the Founding Fathers, that's true of the scientific revolution in the 1800s, that's true of, you know, the times of Edison and all the people creating stuff in the US, and that's true of Silicon Valley. So you just need to figure out how to get a small number of very innovative people who think in idea space together and cooperating with each other to sort of create the next round of institutions.**
 
Unfortunately, most of the world lives in heuristics. They go with the old institutions. They're like, 'Oh, Harvard, that's an institution. New York Times, that's an institution. They must be right. Oh, Science Magazine or Nature Journal, they must be right.' Well, no. These are brands that have been hijacked to a large degree. They are using the brand. Yes, there are still some legitimate actors and some good stuff that comes out of there, but a lot of it now is politicized or not very high quality.
 
So, unfortunately, we have to build new institutions that are highly legit. They have to be ten times more legit. They have to prove on-chain voting; they have to have a commitment to truth; they have to fess up when they're wrong; and they have to attract the absolute best and brightest thinkers in the world to kind of be together. Arthur Schopenhauer, who’s one of my favorite philosophers, has this great saying: ‘**To be alone is the fate of all great souls.’** Right? So if you’re intelligent, at some point, the thing that you crave the most, more than anything else, is the company of other intelligent people.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** You get a balance.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** You get away from all the rules and all the systems that are designed by the midwits, you know, as you like to say, to keep the dimwits, you know, in control. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** I have no problem with obviously people of any intelligence; whatever is fine, it’s good. It’s only if they’re arrogant and condescending, and they’re also ignorant—that’s not good.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Well, yeah, arrogant and condescending is also a form of non-intelligence because to be intelligent, you have to be curious. And if you’re curious, you care about the truth, and you don’t care about being wrong. I’m wrong all the time. I’ve been wrong; people call me out like, ‘Oh, have you revised reviews on AI? Were you wrong?’ Like, I’m wrong in everything, right? But I’m just trying to figure out the answer. I’m not trying to be consistent with the image you have of me; I could care less.
 
So, in any case, I think what I’m saying is that creating institutions and communities that let smart people gather to innovate doesn’t take a lot. A few dozen, a few hundred, a few thousand people can come up with the right ideas that will completely change things for everybody. And that, I think, is the promise of Network School, what you’re putting together here.
 
Yes, so not to be an ad for Network School; I’m not attending, but I’m a supporter. Yes, I’m a fan.  
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Thank you. And, um, we actually have a lot of smart people in this room. And actually, how many of you have the ‘Nalmanac’ by Naval? Right? Okay, it’s sold about a million copies. So, okay, that’s actually a pretty good chunk.
 
So, in our time remaining, we’ve got about seven minutes. What is the involmanac 2024? What should all these people be thinking about? What’s top of mind? You’re young, you’re smart, or you’re young at heart; there are, you know, a lot of obviously cutting-edge people in this room. What are you thinking about? What should they be working on?
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Well, I think you should be working on, you know, whatever you want to work on. That’s number one. Your own native obsession and curiosity will take you much further than trying to follow anybody else’s path. You cannot follow anybody else’s path. That said, I view, you know, in life, all life is problem-solving, as David Deutsch likes to say. And I would recommend to everybody to go read ‘The Beginning of Infinity’ and ‘The Fabric of Reality.’ They rewired my brain and made me smarter.
 
I think that’s like my number one reading advice. And people who say, ‘Go off and read it,’ and they come back a week later—you didn’t really read it! Like, actually properly absorb it. There’s a whole coherent philosophy in there that is grounded in physics, mathematics, reality, but also teaches you how to or gives you good mental frameworks for how to think and what is life and what is intelligence.
 
Okay, so that’s one thing. But what are the important things in life? The important things in life, to me, are number one: you’ve got to take care of your material needs. You have to have some physical leverage in the physical world. So that means you have to create something that society wants. And, as a byproduct of that and the knowledge that you’ve accumulated, you can make some money. Great! Money is just stored-up value, and this frees up your time.
 
And this frees up your time to help others and to go do what you want. Now, what are the other things that you want out of life that you can’t get out of money? My personal list is three things that you can’t buy, and it’s my favorite little note to myself on the internet, which is: **a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love.** These are the things that cannot be bought; they must be earned. Right? It’s a constant reminder to myself.
 
There is a fourth, which is respect, but I would argue you don’t chase respect because that becomes fame. The easiest way to kind of not be someone worthy of respect is to chase respect. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Respect is emergent.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** It’s kind of emergent. But at the same time, you can’t become a slave to it; otherwise, you become like a celebrity. And the celebrity of the most miserable people in the world.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Can I share an observation with you on this? 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Sorry.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Can I share an observation with you on this? Basically, I had the realization there, Dave, spending some time in academia, because I was an idiot and spent time in academia, that, um, it’s not just that Google PageRank and backlinks are citations. It's that citations themselves are backlinks; that is to say, they don't involve any replication of a paper. You just have a social network called Academia, and they link to each other. If you get two links, that's a paper; it's like two likes on your article, and it's peer-reviewed. Okay? So, all you really need to do to build up something that is the equal of these declining Academia is to build another social network that links to each other internally and that's of higher IQ and higher quality. In that respect, it is actually emergent because people will start citing it over this. Right? 
 
**Naval Ravikant : It doesn't matter who listens to you or likes you; as long as the right people—the people that you listen to and like—like you, that's what matters. So I would rather have the respect of ten people whom I respect rather than the respect of the masses. That's just a popularity contest. And sure, that made more sense in Monkey times, but, you know, in modern times, I would argue that having the right ten people listen to you is far more important than having everyone listen to you.**
 
In terms of, you know, the checklist of a fit body, I know you've taken that to heart with Network School. Brian Johnson is here, and he's obviously going way into that. Yeah, he will whip you all into shape. I think the answer there is pretty obvious: work out hard, lift heavy weights, and don't eat sugar. Right? We all know what to do. It's having a discipline to do it, which is hard.
 
You know, a calm mind is a bigger problem, but I think everybody wants to have a calm mind. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** Well, meditation—I mean, that actually does. You've talked about that before. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, meditation is an overloaded word; it means everything to every person. I think understanding is probably a better route in that what you want to be is you don't want to be meditative for an hour a day while you sit there with your eyes closed. You want to be meditative all the time.
 
Anything that is consistent with you is a byproduct of understanding. It's a deep conviction, and you're only going to get there by thinking it through for yourself. In a way, reading other people's philosophy, including reading the almanac, is like reading the answers to a bunch of math problems. Like, you got a math textbook, then you skip to the end, and you start reading the answers. Well, that's not going to do anything for you. What you want is the understanding so you can get inspired by other people, but you have to figure it out for yourself.
 
When you have deep conviction, they do modify your psyche; they do modify your mind; they do modify your internal state. And so, that's the kind of meditation that you want. You also don't want to be self-obsessed too much; you want to find things outside of yourself if you want a calmer mind. Because, you know, all depressed people are victims of rumination; they're self-obsessed. They're constantly thinking about themselves.
 
You can see that people who are either highly religious or have children—they have something that they love more than themselves. They're not self-obsessed, so they can kind of get out of their own minds. So in that sense, I think modern therapy, where you can just sit there with a therapist and go in circles for ten years, can be a trap because you're just obsessing about yourself all over again.
 
The more seriously you take yourself, the less happy you're going to be. Because, at the end of the day, there's nothing—you know, unless Brian Johnson gets us living forever, you exit this world the same way you came in: with absolutely nothing. You can't take it with you. And then finally, a house full of love is actually the easiest one, but people wrap themselves up in knots over it.
 
Because, uh, you can create it anytime you want. Just love the people in your life that you know. You express your love; it's the wanting love back—the neediness, that craving—that is the problem. But you can create love anytime you want. So, I think if you can kind of make your money and work on those three, then you're in pretty good shape. And that, to me, is what self-improvement is.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** It's interesting, so, you know, people like, uh, I would have somewhat expected you to say, in addition to all that, what areas of, for example, tech you're looking at now today. But that's actually all secondary to what's upstream.
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Oh, the tech comes and goes; the frontier always moves around. I mean, I'm highly inspired by Elon and all the stuff he's doing. Uh, you know, Tesla is doing self-driving and robotics and electric cars and stuff that he's done in solar—getting, you know, cheap and viable. And obviously, SpaceX is just such an inspiration.
 
Uh, and I'm waiting for Elon to start his drone company because that seems to be the missing link—somewhere between Tesla and SpaceX. We can meme him into doing one, obviously. What Andre is doing is also interesting.
 
So, I think tech is interesting; AI is interesting. Uh, maybe like a little overplayed in Silicon Valley, where every company is now, instead of saying the word software, they're saying AI.
 
Um, but, uh, tech—I think it was Danny Hillis who said technology is a set of things that doesn't quite work yet. And there's a lot of things that don't quite work yet. So, uh, every time we try to build things and make them better and make them work, and then we try to automate them, there's an opportunity for technology.
 
One that I'm personally curious about is—and it kind of goes towards your network state philosophy—is terraformation. Terraforming physical spaces. So, if we can make energy incredibly cheap with nuclear power or with solar, and we can desalinate large amounts of water, then we can green deserts.
 
And now, with Starlink, you got internet; with solar panels, you have power wherever you want; with desalination, you have incredible amounts of water available. Uh, we can start turning more and more of the earth into Mediterranean zones. 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** I love all of this. I think one of the things I realize is everything that we're doing—we have to win the market for votes to enable that. Somehow, then we'll get the political...
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Yeah, if you could take, uh, you know, Forest Island, and you could turn it into Mediterranean weather, everybody would be beating down your door, right? Everybody would still be beating down your door. It's a small place, but less than 1% of the earth's land is Mediterranean climate. That's the cradle of civilization. These are either the wealthiest or most fought-over places in the world.
 
And frankly, uh, you know, governments that have access to those regions use them as a weapon. They use them as a way to kind of, you know, keep people there. For example, the Bay Area is Mediterranean weather; the San Diego to LA corridor has the best weather in the world. And that becomes, as you know, Peter T. Thiel said, that becomes their resource curse; that's their oil.
 
So they can run it like, uh, you know, Saudi Arabia might have used to run their country. You know, it can be very controlled. Uh, but you don't leave because the weather's too good, the geography is too good, the infrastructure is too good, the food is too good, and the climate is too good.
 
But I think we're going to start fixing that. I'm kind of hopeful. I heard somebody say the other day that they're going to green Dubai; they're going to make it like the greenest city in the world by 2030. You know, God bless them if they pull that off.
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** I think we all agree San Francisco needs some competition. 
 
**Naval Ravikant :** Exactly! 
 
**Balaji Srinivasan :** All right, great, guys. Okay, have some lunch, and we'll see you in about an hour. Thank you.
                    








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