Naval Ravikant —Let us not talk falsely now. (Twitter Space, March 15th 2022)

The only moment that really exists is now—even tomorrow or yesterday are just thoughts in the current moment. So, nothing exists outside of right now. You're not necessarily going to be around for any appreciable period of time. Everything you do will be forgotten, like everything in the past has been forgotten, It's not to say it's meaningless, but it's more to say that you create your own meaning; you interpret your own meaning; you are the meaning of your own life.

If you want to operate at maximum productivity, efficiency, and creativity, you're going to work on things that you're excited about at the moment you're excited about them and accept nothing less. It is better to sit on your butt and do nothing than it is to work on things that you are not excited about.

I do believe that 99% of effort in life is 'wasted'. And it's not wasted in the sense that you don't learn something; you do learn something. But if you look back at all the term papers you wrote and all the classes you took and all the people you dated and on all the thoughts you had and all the things you stressed about and all the decisions you made, 99% of them didn't matter; they were inconsequential; and there were a few 1% decisions that did matter.

Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett kind of say that everybody they know who's smart is an avid reader, and I have a hard time refuting that. I have yet to meet someone who I consider to have a very high-functioning level of intelligence who doesn't read for fun. Underline those last two words: for fun.

If there was a meaning to life, then we would all be stuck trying to figure out that meaning, and the moment that a person found that meaning and shared it with everybody else, then we would all be enslaved to that particular meaning. So, I think it's liberating that there's no meaning to life; you can create your own meaning...

Things to aspire to move past in your life: First, you want to get out of your parents' basement. Then you're living with roommates. Then you wanna get away from roommates ... Then you're driving to work. Then you want to get of a commute. Then you're waking up to an alarm clock. Then you want to get away from an alarm clock. Then you're basically living a highly calendared and scheduled life. You want to get away from your calendar. Then, finally, you want to get away from email and text messages.

I do think clear thinking allows you to make better decisions and have better judgment—and better judgment is everything. If you have good judgment in this life, you're going to thrive in the modern world, because you will be applying judgment everywhere.

I think, 100 years from now, people will look back, and it will be considered laughably archaic that we used to pass around pieces of paper, [and we] had something literally called a 'money printing press' that they could [use to] print as much money as they wanted in the background. And so, by doing that, they impoverished all of society in a hidden way.

I just feel like the attacks on free speech are the single most disgusting feature of modern technology and modern society. And the fact that Twitter and Facebook censor so often and so freely... If I could wish anyone out of existence, I would wish the trust & safety teams and their jobs out of existence. I think censorship has no place on these platforms. We are absolutely capable of taking care of ourselves...

Web3 doesn't have to appeal to everyone; it's trying to appeal mainly to the applications that would otherwise be deplatformed or benefit from decentralization or creating a frontier where no such frontier currently exists ... There's no ironclad law of software that all new software movements have to appeal to all people.

When you look back on your life, the moments you're gonna be proudest of is when you rose past circumstances that were difficult, when you rose past your suffering, and then you accomplished something. That's where character is built. That's where resumes are made. That's where people have their proudest moments.

Intelligence is a cheat code ... You can swap it for almost anything else in the modern world. Because the modern world is full of so much leverage, smart people can employ that leverage with code or media or labor or capital to, kind of, magnify what they want. They can make good decisions, and then the impact of the good decisions is magnified by leverage.

If you cannot communicate clearly, then it is a sign that you cannot think clearly.

I think that having a clear mind and clear judgment and clear thinking is a cheat code to life, and I tend to find there is a correlation... between people who are clear communicators, clear thinkers, and have good judgment. And you want to surround yourself with people that have good judgment, because that's how you're gonna win at life in general.

The point of reading is to spark your own creativity and to spark your own thoughts. So, it's almost like you're starting a fire in your brain.

Believe me, your theory of knowledge, right now, is not good enough. Whatever you think it is, you can upgrade it. As we were talking about before, judgment is the most important thing.

You don't need to be right a lot in this world, especially in the digital domain. In the physical domain, being wrong can have very large consequences; but in the digital domain, being wrong can have not much consequences. You may lose the money you bet, or you wrote a piece of code that was useless, but being correct can have huge consequences.

Something like web3, heck yeah, you bet they're gonna try and stop it. You bet they're gonna try and outlaw it. You bet they're going to crack down on it. If they didn't, then it wouldn't actually be that valuable ... That said, I do think that countries that try to ban or stop or slow down web3 are going to find themselves, increasingly, on the wrong side of history.

Governments that try to over-regulate web3 will find that it slips away from them, and it takes its massive wealth creation and innovation elsewhere. And the US is no longer the default place where innovation is going to happen in web3; the default place for innovation in web3 is the Internet, and the Internet is everywhere.

The core of web3 is open source. The core of crypto is open source ... In fact, I think it was Chris Dixon who said that web3 is the business model for open source.

That's sort of my definition of web3—the code is open, the data is owned by the users, and the network is owned by the contributors.

So much of the world, so much of it is your interpretation of the world. So much of mindset is your mindset. To a tree or a rock or a house or even another person, reality is very different. To an object, reality is neutral. To another subject, reality is subjective from their point of view.

One thing I would be careful about is mixing what is true with what you want to be true. And I see this happening in business a lot where a new business trend comes up, people are excited about it because they want to make money, but then they also start projecting all these other fantasies onto it. And I'd be very, very careful about that.

A really good book has to be read slowly. If you're reading books quickly, and you're proud of the speed at which you're reading them, you're reading the wrong books. It's like lifting weights that are way too light; you're just cranking through the exercise.

The fact that we have not yet seen mass Bitcoin adoption in developing countries is a bit of a yellow or red flag for the industry. It means that it's still super hard to use, people don't understand the concept, and they still haven't figured out the advantages.

These days, I just try to have less opinions about things. I kind of feel like I don't need to have an opinion on everything. And that's not for being right or wrong; it's just to kind of have mental clarity and to have peace of mind.

Pessimism and cynicism is a societal-level version of victim mentality. It's even worse than victim mentality. Victim mentality just keeps you down; pessimism and cynicism, especially when articulated by very eloquent people, keep society down.

I would trust a physicist on climate science much more that I would trust the climate scientist. I would trust a computer scientist on AI much more than I would trust an AI researcher ... Once you've adopted a point of view as your identity, you're unlikely to say anything that might contradict it.

I think a lot of the modern conflicts that are otherwise avoidable are driven through fear. So, always be very, very wary of people who are trying to scare you. Usually, they're up to no good.

I think the government that governs best is the one that governs slowly, that makes very few changes and tries not to fix things ... When it tries to fix something, it generally ends up breaking it.