Collection: In the Arena

On Elon, iteration and agency

Nivi:  Welcome back to the Naval Podcast. I’ve pulled out some tweets from Naval’s Twitter from the last year, and we’re just going to go through them.

Inspiration All the Way Down

Nivi:  Here’s actually my first question. You told me that you got an early copy of the Elon book from Eric Jorgenson . Anything surprising in there?

Naval:  I’m only about 20% of the way through. It’s really good. It’s just Elon in his own words. And I think what’s striking is just the sense of independence, agency, and urgency that just runs throughout the whole thing.

I don’t think you necessarily learn a step-by-step process by reading these things; you can’t emulate his process. It’s designed for him. It’s designed for SpaceX , it’s designed for Tesla . It’s contextual, but it’s very inspiring just to see how he doesn’t let anything stand in his way, how maniacal he is about questioning everything, and how he just emphasizes speed and iteration and no-nonsense execution.

And so that just makes you want to get up and run and do the same thing with your company. And to me, that’s what the good books do. If I listen to a Steve Jobs speech, it makes me want to be better. If I read Elon on how he executes, it makes me want to execute better, and then I’ll figure out my own way.

The details don’t necessarily map, but more importantly, I think just the inspiration is what drives.

Nivi:  That’s pretty interesting because I think people look to you as inspirational—yes, obviously—but also laying out principles that people actually do follow.

Naval:  I keep my principles high level and incomplete. Partially because it just sounds better and it’s easier to remember, but also just because it’s more applicable. One of the problems I have with the How to Get Rich  content is people ask me highly specific questions on Twitter in 140 or 280 characters, and I just don’t have enough context to respond.

These things require context. That’s why I liked Airchat . That’s why I liked Clubhouse . That’s why I liked spoken format. Back when I used to do Periscopes , when people would ask me a question, then I could ask a follow-up question back to them and they could ask me another question and we could dig through and try to get to the meat of what they were asking.

And then I could say, “Well, given the information that I have, if I were in your shoes, I would do the following thing.” But most of these situations are highly contextual, so it’s hard to copy details from other people. It’s the principles that apply. And so that is why I keep my stuff very high level.

And in fact, I think Eric Jorgenson, the author, has done a good job of trying to break out the little quotable bits and put them in their own standalone sentences. So he is pulling tweets out of Elon’s work.

But I don’t know. I just do my style. Elon does his; he inspires in his own way. Maybe I inspire someone in my own way. I get inspired by him. I get inspired by others—inspiration all the way down.

But when it comes to execution, you’ve got to do it yourself.

Life is Lived in the Arena

Naval:  Life is lived in the arena. You only learn by doing. And if you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is too general and too abstract. Then it truly is Hallmark aphorisms. You don’t know what applies where and when.

And a lot of this kind of general principles and advice is not mathematics. Sometimes you’re using the word rich to mean one thing. Other times you’re using it to mean another thing. Same with the word wealth. Same with the word love or happiness. These are overloaded terms. So this is not mathematics.

These are not precise definitions. You can’t form a playbook out of them that you can just follow like a computer. Instead, you have to understand what context to apply them in. So the right way to learn is to actually go do something, and when you’re doing it, you figure something out about how it should be done.

Then you can go and look at something I tweeted or something you read in Deutsch or something you read in Schopenhauer or something you saw online and say, “Oh, that’s what that guy meant. That’s the general principle he’s talking about. And I know to apply it in situations like this, not mechanically, not 100% of the time, but as a helpful heuristic for when I encounter this situation again.”

You start with reasoning and then you build up your judgment. And then when your judgment is sufficiently refined, it just becomes taste or intuition or gut feel, and that’s what you operate on. But you have to start from the specific.

If you start from the general, and stay at the level of the general—and just read books of principles and aphorisms and almanacs and so on—you’re going to be like that person that went to university: overeducated , but they’re lost. They try to apply things in the wrong places. What Nassim Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiots , IYIs.

Nivi: One of the tweets I was going to bring up is exactly that. From June 3rd :

“Acquiring knowledge is easy, the hard part is knowing what to apply and when.

That’s why all true learning is ‘on the job.’

Life is lived in the arena.”

Naval: I like that tweet.

Actually, I just wanted to tweet, “Life is lived in the arena” and that was it. I wanted to just drop it right there. But I felt like I had to explain just a little bit more because “

The Man in the Arena

” is a famous quote, so I wanted to unpack a little bit from my direction. But this is a realization that I keep having over and over.

If You Want to Learn, Do

Naval: I recently started another company. It’s a very difficult project. In fact, the name of the company is The Impossible Company. It’s called Impossible, Inc. What’s interesting is that it’s driven me into a frenzy of learning. And not necessarily even motivated in a negative way, but I’m more inspired to learn than I have been in a long time.

So I find myself interrogating Grok and ChatGPT a lot more. I find myself reading more books. I find myself listening to more technical podcasts. I find myself brainstorming a lot more. I’m just more mentally active. I’m even willing to meet more companies outside of investing because I’m learning from them.

And just being active makes me want to naturally learn more and not in a way that it’s unfun or causes me to burn out. So I think doing leads to the desire to learn and therefore to learning. And of course there’s the learning from the doing itself. Whereas I think if you’re purely learning for learning’s sake, it gets empty after a little while. The motivation isn’t the same.

We’re biomechanical creatures. My brain works faster when I’m walking around. And you would think, “No, energy conservation—it should work slower,” but it’s not the case. Some of the best brainstorming is when you are walking and talking, not just sitting and talking.

Which is why for a while I tried to hack the walking podcast thing because I really enjoy walking and talking and my brain works better. And so the same way I think doing and learning go hand in hand. And so if you want to learn, do.

In Most Difficult Things in Life, the Solution is Indirect

Naval: Like in most interesting, difficult things in life, the solution is indirect.

That was part of the How to Get Rich tweetstorm , which is, if you want to get rich, you don’t directly just go for the money. I suppose you could like a bankster, but if you’re building something of value and you’re using leverage and you’re taking accountability and you’re applying your specific knowledge, you’re going to make money as a byproduct.

And you’re going to create great products, going to productize yourself and create money as a byproduct. The same way, if you want to be happy, you minimize yourself and you engage in high flow activities or engage in activities that take you out of your own self and you end up with happiness.

By the way, this is true in seduction as well. You don’t seduce a woman by walking up and saying, “I want to sleep with you.” That’s not how it works. Same with status. The overt pursuit of status signals low status, it’s a low-status behavior to chase status because it reveals you as being lower in the status hierarchy in the first place.

It’s not the fact that everything has to be pursued indirectly. Many things are best pursued directly. If I want to drive a car, I get in and I drive the car. If I want to write something, then I just sit down and write something. But the things that are either competitive in nature or they seem elusive to us—part of the reason for that is that those are the remaining things that are best pursued indirectly.

When You Truly Work for Yourself

Nivi: From April 2nd : “When you truly work for yourself, you won’t have hobbies, you won’t have weekends, and you won’t have vacations, but you won’t have work either.”

Naval: This is the paradox of working for yourself, which every entrepreneur or every self-employed person is familiar with, which is that when you start working for yourself, you basically sacrifice this work-life balance thing.

You sacrifice this work-life distinction. There’s no more nine-to-five. There’s no more office. There’s no one who’s telling you what to do. There’s no playbook to follow. At the same time, there’s nothing to turn off. You can’t turn it off. You are the business. You are the product. You are the work. You are the entity, and you care.

If you’re doing something that’s truly yours, you care very deeply, so you can’t turn it off. And that’s the curse of the entrepreneur. But the benefit of the entrepreneur is that if you’re doing it right, if you’re doing it for the right reasons or the right people in the right way, and if you can set aside the stress of not hitting your goals, which is real and hard to set aside, then it doesn’t feel like work.

And that’s when you’re most productive. You are basically only measured on your output. And you’re only held up to the bar that you raised for yourself. So it can be extremely exhilarating and freeing. And this is why I said a long time ago that a taste of freedom can make you unemployable.

And so this is exactly that taste of freedom. It makes you unemployable in the classic sense of nine-to-five and following the playbook and having a boss. But once you have broken out of that, once you’ve walked the tight rope without a net, without a boss, without a job—and by the way, this can even happen in startups in a small team where you’re just very self-motivated. You get what look like huge negatives to the average person that you don’t have weekends, you don’t have vacations, and you don’t have time off, you don’t have work-life balance. But, at the same time, when you are working, it doesn’t feel like work. It’s something that you’re highly motivated to do and that’s the reward.

And net-net, I do think this is a one-way door. I think once people experience working on something that they care about with people that they really like in a way they’re self-motivated, they’re unemployable. They can’t go back to a normal job with a manager and a boss and check-ins and nine-to-five and “Show up this day, this week, sit in this desk, commute at this time.”

Nivi: I think there’s a hidden meaning in the tweet too, which I’m guessing is intentional. It starts off with “When you truly work for yourself,” which I’m guessing most people are going to take that to mean “You’re your own boss.” But the other way that I read it is that you are working for yourself.

So your labor is an expression of who and what you are. It’s self-expression. And that’s not an easy thing to figure out.

Find Your Specific Knowledge Through Action

Naval: I ultimately think that everyone should be figuring out what it is that they uniquely do best—that aligns with who they are fundamentally, and that gives them authenticity, that brings them specific knowledge, that gives them competitive advantage, that makes them irreplaceable. And they should just lean into that. And sometimes you don’t know what that is until you do it.

So this is life lived in the arena. You are not going to know your own specific knowledge until you act and until you act in a variety of difficult situations. And then you’ll either realize, “Oh, I managed to navigate these things that other people would’ve had a hard time with,” or someone else will point out to you. They’ll say, “Hey, your superpower seems to be X.”

I have a friend who has been an entrepreneur a bunch of times. And, what I always notice about him is that he may not necessarily be the most clever or the most technical, and he is very hardworking, that’s why I don’t want to say he isn’t hardworking. He’s actually super hardworking. But what I do notice is he’s the most courageous.

So he just does not care what’s in the way. Nothing gets him down. He’s always laughing or smiling. He’s always moving through it. And this is the kind of guy that a hundred years ago you would’ve said, “Oh, he’s the most courageous. Go charge that machine gun nest.”

He would’ve been good for that. But in an entrepreneurship context, he’s the one who can keep beating his head against the sales wall and just calling hundreds of people until finally one person says yes. So he’ll call 400 people and get 399 nos. And he’s fine with one “Yes.” And that’s enough.

Then he can start iterating and learning from there. So that’s his specific knowledge. It is knowledge. It’s a capability that he knows that he’s okay with it. There’s an outcome on the other side that he’s willing to go for and that’s a superpower. Now, maybe if he can develop that a little further or combine it with something else, or maybe even just apply it where it’s needed, that makes him somewhat irreplaceable.

And so you find your specific knowledge through action—by doing—and when you are working for yourself, you’ll also naturally tend to pick things and do things in a way that aligns with who you are and what your specific knowledge is.

You Have to Enjoy It a Lot

Naval:  For example, if you look at marketing, marketing is an open problem. People try to solve marketing in different ways. Some people will create videos, some people will write or tweet. Some people will literally stand outside with a sandwich board. Some people will go make a whole bunch of friends and just throw parties and spread by word of mouth.

Now, it may be the case that for your business, one of those is much better than others, but the most important thing is picking a business that is congruent with whichever one you like to do. So for example, I have a lot of friends approach me and say, “Hey, let’s start a podcast together.” And I’m like, “Do you genuinely enjoy talking? Do you genuinely enjoy talking a lot?”

Because if you don’t, you’re not going to enjoy the process of podcasting. You’re not going to be the best at it. And they’re just trying to market. And so they start a podcast, they do two or three episodes, and then eventually they drop off.

And they drop off because, first, they don’t enjoy podcasting. I don’t mean enjoy a little bit, you have to enjoy it a lot. If you’re going to be the top at it, you have to be almost psychopathic level at which you enjoy the thing. And so they’ll record a few episodes and then their readers or their listeners will pick up on, “Actually this person is just asking a bunch of questions, kind of flat-faced and doesn’t seem to really enjoy it, and is doing the podcast equivalent of looking at their watch.”

Whereas someone like

Joe Rogan

—he’s so immersed—he’s so into talking to all these weird people that he has on his podcast that the guy would be doing it even if he had no audience, and he was doing it when he had no audience, when he was on Ustream with just him and live streaming late at night on one random website.

So it’s no coincidence he’s the top podcaster. So when you’re marketing, you want to lean into your specific knowledge and into yourself. If you enjoy talking, then try podcasting. Maybe you enjoy talking in a more conversational tone, in which case you try a live network, like Twitter Spaces .

Maybe you enjoy writing. If you like long-form writing, Substack . If you like short-form writing, X. If you like really long-form writing, then maybe a bunch of blog posts that turn into a book. If you enjoy making videos, then maybe you use one of the latest AI models and you make some video and you overlay onto it.

But you have to do what is very natural to you. And part of the trick is picking a business where the thing that is natural to you lines up nicely or picking a role within that business or picking a co-founder in that business. It is a fit problem. It is a matching problem. And the good news is in the modern world, there are unlimited opportunities.

There are unlimited people, there are unlimited venues, there are unlimited forms of media. There’s just an unlimited set of things to choose from. So how are you going to find the thing that you’re really good at? You’re going to try everything and you’re going to try everything because you’re going to do. You’re going to be in the arena. You’re going to be trying to tackle and solve problems.

So the first time you do it, you might do a whole bunch of things you don’t enjoy doing, and you may not do them well, but eventually you’ll hone down on the thing that you really like to do and then you hopefully find that fit.

Pause, Reflect, See How Well It Did

Naval: We talked about in the past how “Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true.” And Akira made a song out of it. Akira the Don , God bless him. And I think that’s absolutely true. You want to be the best in the world at what you do, but keep redefining what you do until that’s true. The only way that redefining is going to work is through the process of iteration, through doing. So, you need that carrot, you need that flag.

You need that reward at the end to pull you forward into doing, and you need to iterate. And iterate does not mean repetition. Iterate is not mechanical. It’s not 10,000 hours, it’s 10,000 iterations . It’s not time spent. It’s learning loops.

And what iteration means is you do something and then you stop and you pause and you reflect. You see how well that worked or did not work. Then you change it. Then you try something else. Then you pause, reflect, see how well it did. Then you change it and you try something else. And that’s the process of iteration, and that’s the process of learning. And all learning systems work this way.

So evolution is iteration where there’s mutation, there’s replication, and then there’s selection. You cut out the stuff that didn’t work. This is true in technology and invention where you’ll innovate, you’ll create a new technology and then you’ll try to scale it and either survive in the marketplace or it’ll get cut out.

This is true as David Deutsch talks about in the search for good explanations. You make a conjecture, that conjecture is subject to criticism, and then the stuff that doesn’t work is weeded out. And this is the true scientific method.

It’s all about finding what is natural for yourself and doing it by living life in the arena, high agency, process of iteration until you figure it out and then you are the best in the world at “it,” and “it” is just being yourself.

Blame Yourself for Everything, and Preserve Your Agency

Nivi: Let’s talk about one more tweet which I liked when I first saw it, or I might have retweeted it. I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven’t figured out how to say yet, but they knew in their head, but it’s just implicit—it hadn’t been made explicit.

I think that’s when people are like, “I need to retweet this.”

So this one was January 17 : “Blame yourself for everything, and preserve your agency.”

From my end it’s like: Take responsibility for everything, and in the process of taking responsibility for something, you create and preserve the agency to go solve that problem. If you’re not responsible for the problem, there’s no way for you to fix the problem.

Naval: Just to address your point of how it was something you already knew, but phrased in a way that you liked. Emerson did this all the time. He would phrase things in a beautiful way and you would say, “Oh, that’s exactly what I was thinking and feeling, but I didn’t know how to articulate it.”

And the way he put it was he said, “In every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty.” And I just love that line. It’s what I try to do with Twitter, which is I try to say something true, but in an interesting way.

And not only is this a true and interesting way to say it, but also it has to be something that really has emotional heft behind it. It has to have struck me recently and been important to me. Otherwise, I’m just faking it. I don’t sit around trying to think up tweets to write. It’s more that something happens to me, something affects me emotionally, and then I synthesize it in a certain way.

I test it. I’m like, “Is this true?” And if I feel like it’s true, or mostly true or true in the context that I care about, and if I can say it in some way that’ll help me stick in my mind, then I just send it out there. And it’s nothing new for the people who get it.

If it’s not said in an interesting way, then it’s a cliché, or if they’ve heard it too much, it’s a cliché. But if it’s said in an interesting way, then it may remind them of something that was important, or it might convert their specific knowledge, or might be a hook for converting their specific knowledge into more general knowledge in their own minds.

So I find that process useful for myself and hopefully others do too. Now, for the specific tweet, I just noticed this tendency where people are very cynical and they’ll say, “All the wealth is stolen,” for example, by banksters and the like, or crony capitalists or what have you, or just outright thieves or oligarchs.

“You can’t rise up in this world if you’re X.”

“You can’t rise up in this world if you’re a poor kid.”

“You can’t rise up in this world if you are from this race or ethnicity, if you were born in that country, or if you are lame or crippled or blind,” or what have you.

The problem with this is that yes, there are real hindrances in the world. It is not a level playing field, and fair is something that only exists in a child’s imagination and cannot be pinned down in any real way. But the world is not entirely luck. In fact, you know that because in your own life there are things that you have done that have led to good outcomes and you know that if you had not done that thing, it would not have led to that good outcome.

So you can absolutely move the needle, and it’s not all luck. And especially the longer the timeframe you’re talking about, the more intense the activity, the more iteration you take and the more thinking and choice you apply into it, the less luck matters. It recedes into the distance.

To give you a simple example, which most people won’t love because they’re not in Silicon Valley, but every brilliant person I met in Silicon Valley 20 years ago, every single one, the young brilliant ones, every single one is successful. Every single one. I cannot think of an exception. I should have gone back and just indexed them all based on their brilliance. By the way, that’s what Y Combinator does at scale, right? What a great mechanism.

So it works. If people stick at it for 20 years, it works. Now you might say, “Easy for you to say, man, that’s for the people in Silicon Valley.”

No one was born here. They all moved here. They moved here because they wanted to be where the other smart kids were and because they wanted to be high agency. So agency does work, but if you’re keeping track of the time period, you’re going to be disappointed.

You’ll give up too soon. So you need a higher motivator. That’s why Elon goes to Mars, and that’s why Sam wants to invent AGI. And that’s why Steve Jobs wanted to build, 50 years ago, in the eighties he was talking about building a computer that would fit in a book.

He was talking about the iPad. So it’s these very long visions that sustain you over the long periods of time to actually build the thing you want to build and get to where you want to get.

So a cynical belief is self-fulfilling. A pessimistic belief is like you’re driving the motorcycle, but you’re looking at the brick wall that you’re supposed to turn away from. You will turn into the brick wall without even realizing it.

So you have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things. You’re born with agency. Children are high-agency. They go get what they want. If they want something, they see it, they go get it. You have to preserve your agency. You have to preserve your belief that you can change things.

It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature

Naval: You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset.

Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too. But at some level, truth is very important. You don’t want to fake it.

From what I have observed, the truth of the matter is: People who work very hard and apply themselves and don’t give up and take responsibility for the outcomes on a long enough time scale, end up succeeding in whatever they’re focused on. And every success case knows this.

Richard Feynman used to say that he wasn’t a genius. He was just a boy who applied himself and worked really hard. Yeah, he was very smart, obviously. But that was necessary, but not sufficient. We all know the trope of the smart, lazy guy.

And I like to harass all of my friends—including Nivi—that one of the problems I notice with these guys is you’re just operating way below potential. Your potential is so much higher than where you are. You have to apply some of that into kinetic.

And ironically that will raise your potential because we’re not static creatures.

We’re dynamic creatures. And you will learn more. You will learn by doing. So just stop making excuses and get in the ring.

Nivi: You also like Schopenhauer . What have you learned from Schopenhauer, or is there anything surprising in his work?

Naval: Schopenhauer is not for everybody and there are many different Schopenhauers. He wrote quite a bit, and you could read his more obscure philosophical texts, like The World as Will and Idea , where he was writing for other philosophers. Or you could read his more practical stuff like On the Vanity of Existence .

He was one of the few people in history who wrote unflinchingly. He wrote what he believed to be true. He wasn’t always correct, but he never lied to you—and that comes across. He thought about things very deeply.

He didn’t care that much what people thought of him. All he knew was, “What I am writing down I know to be true.”

He also didn’t put on any airs. He didn’t use fancy language; he didn’t try to impress you.

People call him a pessimist. I don’t think that’s entirely fair. I think his worldview could be interpreted as pessimistic, but I just read him when I want to read a harsh dose of truth.

What Schopenhauer did uniquely for me is that he gave me complete permission to be me. He just did not care at all what the masses thought, and his disdain for common thinking comes out.

Now, I don’t necessarily share that—I’m a little bit more of an egalitarian than he was. But he really gives you permission to be yourself. So if you’re good at something, don’t be shy about it. Accept that you’re good at something.

And that was hard for me because we all want to get along. If you want to get along in a group, you don’t want to stand out too much. It’s the old line: The tall poppy gets cut.

But if you’re going to do anything exceptional, you do have to bet on yourself in some way. And if you’re exceptional at something, that does require you acknowledging that you’re exceptional at it—or at least trying to be—and not worrying about what other people think.

Now, you don’t want to be delusional either. Anyone who has been in the investing business is constantly hit by people who say, “I’m so great at something,” and they’re a little delusional. No, you don’t get to say you’re exceptional at something. Other people get to say you’re exceptional at something, and your mom doesn’t count.

Feedback from other people is usually fake. Awards are fake. Critics are fake. Kudos from your friends and family are fake. They might try to be genuine, but it’s lost in such a sea of fakeness that you’re not going to get real feedback.

Real feedback comes from free markets and nature . Physics is harsh: either your product worked, or it didn’t. Free markets are harsh: either people buy it, or they don’t. But feedback from other people is fake.

You can’t get good feedback from groups because groups are just trying to get along. Individuals search for truth, groups search for consensus . A group that doesn’t get along decoheres. It falls apart. And the larger the group, the less good feedback you’re going to get from it.

You don’t want to necessarily rely on feedback from your mom or your friends or your family, or even from award ceremonies and award systems.

If you’re optimizing your company to end up on the cover of a magazine, or to win an industry award, you’re failing.

You need customers. That’s your real feedback. You need feedback from nature.

Did your rocket launch?

Did your drone fly?

Did your 3D printer print the object within the tolerances that it was supposed to, in the time it was supposed to, in the cost budget that it was supposed to?

It’s very easy to fool yourself. It’s very easy to be fooled by others.

It is impossible to fool Mother Nature.

The Best Authors Respect the Reader’s Time

Nivi: Unlike Schopenhauer, you are an industrial philosopher. Like an industrial designer, your philosophy is designed for the masses. People suggest you read the great books—Aristotle and Wittgenstein and all the supposedly great philosophers.

I’ve read almost all that stuff, and I’ve gotten very little value from it. Where I have gotten value is the philosophizing of people on Twitter, like you. Anybody who wants to read philosophy, I would just tell them to skip it and go read David Deutsch.

Naval: You’re not wrong. I can’t stand any of the philosophers you talked about. I don’t like Plato either.

Every other piece of philosophy I’ve picked up and put down relatively quickly because they’re just making very obscure arguments over minutiae and trying to come up with all-encompassing theories of the world. Even Schopenhauer falls into that trap. When he tries to talk to other philosophers, he’s at his worst.

When I like him is in his shorter essays. That’s where he almost writes like he’s on Twitter. He would have dominated Twitter. He has high density of ideas—very well thought through; good, minimal examples and analogies. You can pick it up, read one paragraph, and you’re thinking for the next hour. I think I’m a better writer, a better thinker, and a better judge of people and character thanks to what I read from him.

Now, he’s writing from the early part of the 19th century. Whenever he wanders into topics that are scientific or medical or political, he’s obviously off base—that stuff doesn’t apply anymore. But when he’s writing about human nature, that is timeless.

When it comes to anything about human nature, I say go read the Lindy books—the older books, the ones that have survived the test of time. But if you want to develop specific knowledge, get paid for it, do something useful, then you want to stay on the bleeding edge. That knowledge is going to be more timely and obsolete more quickly.

Those two make sense. What doesn’t make sense to me is just reading stuff that’s not Lindy, or that’s not about human nature, but is old. I also shy away from stuff that’s low density in the learnings, like history books.

I like The Lessons of History by Will Durant because it’s a summarization of The Story of Civilization , which was his large 12-volume series. But I’m not going to go read the 12-volume series. I’ve read plenty of history. I know he’s referring to these kinds of things, so I’m not just taking his word for it on high-level concept.

But at the same time, at this point in my life, I want to read high-density works. You can call it the TikTok Disease or the Twitter generation, but it’s also just being respectful of our time. We already have a lot of data. We have some knowledge. Now we want wisdom. Now we want the generalized principles that we can attach to all of the other information we already have in our minds.

We do want to read high-density work, but I would argue that Schopenhauer is very high-density work.

All my favorite authors are very high density. Deutsch is extremely high density. Borges is very high density. Ted Chiang is very high density. The old Neal Stephenson was very high density (then he just got high volume, high density, high everything).

But the best authors respect the reader’s time, and Schopenhauer is very much in that vein.

Most Books Should Be Skimmed, A Few Should Be Devoured

Nivi: For the state of the art on the philosophy of knowledge, which people call epistemology , you can basically skip everything and jump straight to David Deutsch.

Naval: I think that’s right. If you just want to know epistemology, read David Deutsch—full stop.

That said, for some people it helps to know the history, the counterarguments, where he’s coming from.

The existing theories of knowledge—like the justified true belief theory or the inductive theory of knowledge—these are so deeply embedded into us, both by school learning, but also by everyday experience.

Induction seems like it should work: You watch the sunrise every day, the sun is going to rise tomorrow. That just seems like common sense.

So many people believe in that, that if you just read Deutsch, you would see him shooting down these things, but you yourself would not have those things on solid footing. So you might imagine some counterexample exists.

When I first read Deutsch a long time ago I didn’t quite get it. I treated it just like any other book that any other physicist had written. So I would read Paul Davies and Carlo Rovelli and Deutsch, and I would treat them with the same level of contemplation, time, and respect.

It turned out I was wrong.

It turned out that Deutsch was actually operating at a much deeper level. He had a lot of different theories that coherently hung together, and they create a world philosophy where all the pieces reinforce each other.

It might help to read others and not just skip to Deutsch, but I would definitely start with Deutsch. Then, if you’re not sure about it, I would read some of the others and then come back to Deutsch and try again, and then you’ll see how he addresses those issues.

Deutsch himself would refer you to Popper . He would say, “Oh, I’m just repeating Popper.”

Not quite true. I find Popper much less approachable, much harder to read, much less clear of a writer. Although I think here both Deutsch and Brett Hall would disagree with me—they find Popper very lucid; I find him very difficult to read.

For whatever reason, I find Deutsch easier to read, maybe because Popper spent a lot more time elucidating core points. Popper was writing for philosophers. Deutsch is not writing for philosophers. Deutsch is not even writing for scientists. Deutsch is not writing for you. I get the feeling Deutsch is writing for himself. He is just elucidating his own thoughts and how they all connect together.

I also don’t think you’re going to get maximal value out of Deutsch just reading the epistemology, although that is absolutely where everybody should start. That’s the first three chapters of The Beginning of Infinity .

Ironically, in

The Beginning of Infinity , the first few chapters and the last few chapters are the easiest and the most accessible. The middle is a slog because that goes into quantum computation, quantum physics, evolution, et cetera.

That’s where I think people struggle because it does require—not necessarily a mathematical or scientific background but at least a comfort level with scientific concepts and principles. And he’s making a strong argument for the multiverse , which most people don’t have a dog in that fight. They haven’t thought that far ahead. They’re not wedded to the observer collapse theory of quantum mechanics because they don’t really care about quantum mechanics. It doesn’t impact their everyday life.

What I got out of reading all of Deutsch was I got to see how his theory all hangs together. Every piece touches upon and relies upon another piece.

He actually came up with the theory of quantum computation and extended the Church–Turing conjecture into the

Church–Turing–

Deutsch conjecture when he was trying to come up with a way to falsify his theory of the multiverse—which was a quantum physics theory. And to do that, he had to invent quantum computation, because to invent the experiment for how to falsify the multiverse theory he had to—in his mind—imagine an AGI , get inside the AGI’s brain and say, “If that AGI is observing something, does it collapse?”

“But now I need to be inside the brain.”

“Well, how do I get inside the brain of a quantum AGI? How do you even create a quantum AGI? We don’t have quantum computers!”

“Okay, we need quantum computers.”

So he came up with the theory of quantum computation, and that launched the field of quantum computing.

That’s an example of how quantum physics and quantum computing are inextricably linked.

Good Products Are Hard to Vary

Naval: I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about memes and meme theory—that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology, conjecture, and criticism.

And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth: the set of physical transformations that you can effect. That takes into account both capital and knowledge, and it clearly shows that knowledge is a bigger component. And then that can be brought into business and applied into your everyday life. It can apply to the wealth of nations and it can apply to the wealth of individuals.

So there are a lot of parts that interconnect together.

He says that good explanations are hard to vary . So when you look back on a good explanation, you say, “Well, how could it have been otherwise? This is the only way this thing could have worked.”

All these different parts fit together and constrain each other in such a way that there’s now some emergent property or some complexity or some outcome that you didn’t expect—some explanation that neatly explains everything.

That doesn’t just apply to good explanations. It applies to product development.

Good products are hard to vary .

Go look at the iPhone: this smooth, perfect, beautiful jewel. The form factor hasn’t really changed that much since the original one. It’s all around the single screen, the multi-touch, embedding the battery, making it fit into your pocket, making it smooth and sliding in your hand—essentially creating the Platonic ideal of the truly personal, pocketable computer.

So that product is hard to vary. Both Apple and its competitors have tried to vary it across 16 generations of iPhone and they haven’t been able to materially vary it . They’ve been able to improve the components and improve some of the underlying capabilities; but materially, the form factor is hard to vary. They designed the right thing.

There’s a famous saying, I think from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , where he says the airplane wing is perfect “ not because there’s nothing left to add, but because there’s nothing left to take away. “

That airplane wing is hard to vary.

When we figure out the proper design of the spacecraft to get to Mars, I will bet you that both at a high level and in the details for quite a long time, that thing will be hard to vary until there’s some breakthrough technology.

The basic internal combustion engine design was hard to vary until we got batteries good enough and then we created the electric car. And now the electric car is hard to vary.

In fact, there’s a complaint now among some designers that in modern society, products and objects are starting to look all the same. Is that because of Instagram? Why is that?

Well, at least in the car case, they all look like they’ve been through a wind tunnel design because that is the most efficient design. The reason they all look swoopy and streamlined is because they’re all going through a wind tunnel and they’re trying to find the thing that cuts through the air with minimal resistance. And so they do all end up looking the same because that design is hard to vary without losing efficiency.

Good writers write with such high density and interconnectedness that their works are fractal in nature. You will meet the knowledge at the level at which you are ready to receive it.

You don’t have to understand it all. This is the nature of learning. You read it, you got 20% of it. Then you go back through it, you got 25% of it. You listen to one of Brett Hall’s podcasts alongside it, now you got 28% of it. Now you go to Grok or ChatGPT, you ask it some questions, you dig in on some part, now you got 31% of it.

All knowledge is a communication between the author and the observer or the reader, and you both have to be at a certain level to absorb it. When you’re ready to receive different pieces, you will receive different pieces, but you’ll always get something out of it no matter what level you’re at, as long as you can even just communicate and read the language.

Find the Simplest Thing That Works

Nivi: We’ve all seen the pictures of the Raptor engine for the SpaceX rockets , and if you look at the various iterations, they go from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary. Because the most recent version just doesn’t have that many parts that you can fool around with.

The earlier versions have a million different parts where you could change the thickness of it, the width of it, the material, and so on. The current version barely has any parts left for you to do anything with.

Naval: There’s a theory in complexity theory that whenever you find a complex system working in nature, it’s usually the output of a very simple system or thing that was iterated over and over.

We’re seeing this lately in AI research—you’re just taking very simple algorithms and dumping more and more data into them. They keep getting smarter.

What doesn’t work as well is the reverse. When you design a very complex system and then you try to make a functioning large system out of that, it just falls apart. There’s too much complexity in it. So a lot of product design is iterating on your own designs until you find the simple thing that works. And often you’ve added stuff around it that you don’t need, and then you have to go back and extract the simplicity back out of the noise.

You can see this in personal computing where macOS is still quite a bit harder to use than iOS. iOS is closer to the Platonic ideal of an operating system. Although an LLM-based operating system might be even closer—speaking in natural language.

Eventually, you have to remove things to get them to scale, and the Raptor engine is an example of that. As you figure out what works, then you realize what’s unnecessary and you can remove parts.

And this is one of Musk’s great driving principles where he basically says: Before you optimize a system, that’s among the last things that you do. Before you start trying to figure out how to make something more efficient, the first thing you do is you question the requirements.

You’re like, “Why does the requirement even exist?”

One of the Elon methods in Jorgenson’s new book is you first go and you track down the requirement. And not which department came up with the requirement; the requirement has to come from an individual.

Who’s the individual who said, “This is what I want.”

You go back and say, “Do you really need this?”

You eliminate the requirement. And then once you’ve eliminated the requirements that are unnecessary, then you have a smaller number of requirements. Now you have parts, and you try to get rid of as many parts as you can to fulfill the requirements that are absolutely necessary.

And then after that, maybe then you start thinking about optimization, and now you’re trying to figure out how can I manufacture this part and fit it into the right place most efficiently. And then finally, you might get into cost efficiencies and economies of scale and those sorts of things.

The most critical person to take a great product from zero to one is the single person— usually the founder —who can hold the entire problem in their head and make the trade-offs, and understand why each component is where it is.

And they don’t necessarily need to be the person designing each component, or manufacturing or knowing all the ins and outs, but they do need to be able to understand: Why is this piece here? And if Part A gets removed, then what happens to Parts B, C, D, E and their requirements and considerations?

It’s that holistic view of the whole product.

You’ll see this in the Raptor engine design. The example that Elon gives that I thought was a good one—he was trying to get these fiberglass mats on top of the Tesla batteries produced more efficiently.

So he went to the line where it was taking too long, put his sleeping bag down, and just stayed at the line. And they tried to optimize the robot that was gluing the fiberglass mats to the batteries. They were trying to attach them more efficiently or speed up that line. And they did—they managed to improve it a bit, but it was still frustratingly slow.

And finally he said, “Why is this requirement here? Why are we putting fiberglass mats on top of the batteries?”

The battery guy said, “It’s actually because of noise reduction, so you’ve got to go talk to the noise and vibration team.”

So he goes to the noise and vibration team.

He’s like, “Why do we have these mats here? What is the noise and vibration issue?”

And they’re like, “No, no—there’s no noise and vibration issue. They’re there because of heat, if the battery catches fire.”

And then he goes back to the battery team like, “Do we need this?”

And they’re like, “No. There’s not a fire issue here. It’s not a heat protection issue. That’s obsolete. It’s a noise and vibration issue.”

They had each been doing things the way they were trained to do—in the way things had been done. They tested it for safety, and they tested it by putting microphones on there and tracking the noise, and they decided they didn’t need it, and so they eliminated the part.

This happens a lot with very complex systems and complex designs.

It’s funny—everybody says “I’m a generalist,” which is their way of copping out on being a specialist. But really what you want to be is a polymath, which is a generalist who can pick up every specialty, at least to the 80/20 level, so they can make smart trade-offs.

Nivi: The way that I suggest people gain that polymath capability—being a generalist that can pick up any specialty—is if you are going to study something, if you are going to go to school, study the theories that have the most reach.

Naval: I would summarize that further and just say study physics.

Once you study physics, you’re studying how reality works . And if you have a great background in physics, you can pick up electrical engineering. You can pick up computer science. You can pick up material science. You can pick up statistics and probability. You can pick up mathematics because it’s part of it—it’s applied.

The best people that I’ve met in almost any field have a physics background. If you don’t have a physics background, don’t cry. I have a failed physics background. You can still get there the other ways, but physics trains you to interact with reality, and it is so unforgiving that it beats all the nice falsities out of you.

Whereas if you’re somewhere in social science, you can have all kinds of cuckoo beliefs. Even if you pick up some of the abstruse mathematics they use in social sciences, you may have 10% real knowledge, but 90% false knowledge.

The good news about physics is you can learn pretty basic physics. You don’t have to go all the way deep into quarks and quantum physics and so on. You can just go with basic balls rolling down a slope, and it’s actually a good backgrounder.

But I think any of the STEM disciplines are worth studying. Now if you don’t have the choice of what to study and you’re already past that, just team up with people. Actually, the best people don’t necessarily even just study physics. They’re tinkerers , they’re builders, they’re building things. The tinkerers are always at the edge of knowledge because they’re always using the latest tools and the latest parts to build the cool things.

So it’s the guy building the racing drone before drones are a military thing, or the guy building the fighting robots before robots are a military thing, or the person putting together the personal computer because they want the computer in their home and they’re not satisfied going to school and using the computer there. These are the people who understand things the best, and they’re advancing knowledge the fastest.