Arjun Khemani
@arjunkhemani
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Joined September 2020
My conversation with @naval. Enjoy!. (0:00) - The Theory of Everything.(4:48) - How do you know what’s true?.(7:51) - Groups search for consensus, individuals search for truth.(13:07) - We have never run out of a single resource.(15:25) - Are we destroying the Earth?.(17:48) -
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@Ishansharma7390 It’s sad to see so many people attacking you for being Indian instead of addressing the matter objectively. You’re allowed to question customs, whether you’re American or not.
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Peter Thiel: I went to the World Economic Forum in Davos the last time in 2013, and of course, they have the same ideas as the mob. And in some ways, it is a mob. And people are there only in their capacity as representatives of corporations or of governments or of NGOs. And it
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.@elonmusk (worth $250B) answers why he’s still working:. I think it's a good question you asked, because it goes to, like, at a foundational level, what is my philosophy, and why does it lead to this conclusion?. So the reason is that when I was a teenager, I had, like, an
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Naval took his own advice
Tweet sober, reply drunk.
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“Everything that we can privatize we are going to privatize. We do not believe in the entrepreneurial state. In reality, the state can do nothing well. It does everything wrong.” — @JMilei
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My favorite ChatGPT prompt is: “I want you to keep talking to me and asking me questions until I understand [any hard topic I want to learn about].”.
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.@naval: First of all, I don't think of myself. I just want to be clear on that. And that's not a rule. It's just a habit I've kind of developed because I found that thinking about yourself is a source of all unhappiness and misery. Self obsession is the root of all unhappiness.
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“Mommy, why are we so rich?”. “Because your father was a shitposter.”
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Jensen Huang got his best career advice from a gardener in Japan.
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.@naval: If I look back on my life, almost everything great that I managed to pull off—great by my own definition, not by the world’s definition—has come from following my own natural intellectual obsessions. So I think if you can get obsessed over something, and if you can dive
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Peter Thiel on many great startups being run by people suffering from a mild form of Asperger’s and how we should view this as an indictment of our society.
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You’re taking cold showers, meditating, and journaling, meanwhile this is the average billionaire’s morning routine.
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“I would never bet against Elon. In anything.” — Peter Thiel
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“We’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make it.”. Wildest edit of yesterday’s launch + catch.
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Talulah Riley: “Elon said, would you like to come to my hotel room to look at rocket videos? And we did get into his hotel room, and he did just show me rocket videos.”
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.@naval’s number one reading advice: “Go read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality [by @DavidDeutschOxf]. They rewired my brain, made me smarter.”
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.@naval: Smart people, capable people, don't let themselves be pigeonholed into one definition. That is a disease of credentialism because we created this university system, and now you have to go to university and get a degree in something. Then people ask, "What is your
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Naval on the presidential debate:. It's obviously a disaster for the Democrats. They've got 40 days to find a replacement for him, which is going to be really difficult. 40-day limit is because of the Ohio ballot rules. To get on the ballot, I think you have till August 4th. In
So, who’s been in charge all along?.
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Paul Graham recommends these books to learn about history
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.@elonmusk: Generally, you want education to be as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make
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.@naval: Are we running out of resources?. No, we’ve never run out of a single resource, ever. There’s not a single resource you could point to that was a resource in the classic commodity sense that had any real value, where we ran out in some harmful way. Because technology is
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Jeff Bezos: Thinking small is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It’s generally human nature to overestimate risk and underestimate opportunity. And so, I think entrepreneurs in general would be well advised to try and bias against that piece of human nature. The risks are probably
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“A person who makes money by serving others, making things convenient, better quality, cheaper, is a hero.”. — @JMilei .
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Peter Thiel: This PayPal book that @DavidSacks and I thought of writing had a chapter on @elonmusk, and it was entitled “The Man Who Knew Nothing About Risk.”
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Charlie Munger: I never saw any good become of feeling like a victim. Even if you are a victim, I think it’s a mistake.
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.@naval: If you’re ending up in Forbes 30 under 30 or on the cover of magazines, that’s not conducive to being a good founder. All the value comes from a few hundred genuine, brilliant tinkerers who are there for the love of the game. They’re there for the love of the craft.
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Peter Thiel: Maybe you should think of wokeness as hyper Christianity.
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Biographer @WalterIsaacson on @elonmusk’s secret to productivity:. “On the night that the Twitter board accepted his offer, Elon went to Boca Chica in south Texas, and spent time fixating on a valve in the Raptor engine that had a methane leak issue, if I remember correctly. And
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Javier Milei’s message to entrepreneurs at the WEF Annual Meeting 2024:. Don’t be intimidated by the political caste or the parasites who live off the state. Don’t yield to a political class that only wants to prolong its power and preserve its privileges. You are social
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Books I reread this year (and will probably reread again next year):. - The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.- The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch.- Man, Economy, and State by Murray Rothbard.- Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.- The Meaning of It All by Richard Feynman.- The.
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.@naval: The dominant view globally is that you raise the children for society, not for the parents…. An enlightened society would go from ‘we’re raising the kids for the state,’ to ‘we’re raising the kids for the parents,’ to finally, ‘we’re raising the kids for themselves.’
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.@naval: Looking for truth is the opposite of looking for social approval. “I’m deeply suspicious of groups of people coming to the truth in anything, because it’s not to say groups are bad. Humans are cooperators by nature. We need groups to get things done. But groups need
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11 Books I never tire of rereading:. - The Beginning of Infinity.- The Fabric of Reality.- Objective Knowledge.- Conjectures and Refutations.- Science and Human Values.- The Almanack of @Naval Ravikant.- 1984.- Siddhartha.- The Sovereign Individual.- Atlas Shrugged.- The.
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.@naval on regulating AI and the free access of mathematics:. Almost all the innovation of the last 50 years has come in the unregulated industries. If you go to the regulated industries like healthcare, it’s a nightmare because there’s just too many bureaucrats who are there
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.@rabois on the most important lesson he learned from Peter Thiel: You can’t hire anybody over 30. “Peter might not say it exactly the same way today, but basically, what he was trying to say is this: by the time you’re 30, everyone on the planet knows how to assess you pretty
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. @naval: I don’t think you need to have a PhD to be a scientist. If you are naturally curious and you’re rigorous and you discover new things, you’re a scientist. One of my Twitter quips was, “The only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life,” and that
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.@naval: Democrats are better organized. They’re collectivists by nature. That’s what they do. What they have though is they have worse leadership because the great men tend to be more on the right, so to speak. The great man theory of history. You’re just more likely to be on
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This is what increasing your surface area for serendipity looks like
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My conversation with David Deutsch (@DavidDeutschOxf). David is the author of The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity. He is known as the father of quantum computing for his contributions to the field. He is an advocate of Taking Children Seriously, a new,
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Peter Thiel (2018): Ambition is just not considered “cool” in Europe.
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.@naval: The reality is, if you have to go, I don't care how rich you are. I don't care whether you're a top Wall Street banker. If somebody can tell you when to be at work, what to wear, and how to behave, you're not a free person. You're not actually rich. We're in this
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. @naval: Wealth is the set of physical transformations that you can effect… We’re not running out of resources, we’re just redefining things that before we didn’t know were resources as resources.
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Biographer @WalterIsaacson on @elonmusk’s secret to productivity:. “On the night that the Twitter board agreed to the deal. This is huge around the world, I’m sure you remember, Musk buys Twitter. It wasn’t when the deal closed, it was when Twitter accepted his offer. I thought,
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.@naval: Marxism, besides denying human incentives, also has a problem where it just assumes that everything is finite and we're all just dividing up the same small set of things. Well, the cavemen didn't have color TVs, computers, cars, antibiotics, or medicine. They were not
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.@naval: “The means for learning are now abundant… but it’s the desire to learn that’s scarce. College is a checkbox. And the easiest way to see that is if we say, OK, you can go to college but you wouldn’t get a diploma—would you still do it?’”
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.@naval: “If you’re interested in it now, then you’ll be interesting about it later.”. “@DavidDeutschOxf has a great criterion, which he calls the fun criterion. He says, just do whatever’s fun, and you’ll kind of find your way to it. And there’s a lot to that because that’s
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.@naval: If I had to summarize how to make money, at least from what l’ve learned in life, you basically get rewarded by society for giving it what it wants and it doesn’t know how to get elsewhere. And a lot of people think you can go to school and you can study for how to make
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“I think Trump is so bad that I would vote for virtually any other human being over him.”. Sam Harris has full-blown TDS.
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Silicon Valley can be replicated anywhere in the world
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.@elonmusk: Generally, you want education to be as close to a video game as possible, like a good video game. You do not need to tell your kid to play video games. They will play video games on autopilot all day. So if you can make it interactive and engaging, then you can make
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.@elonmusk: A lot of people—once they become independently wealthy—just can’t bring themselves to work or they don’t want to work. And that’s totally understandable. No judgment. I have a lot of friends who are extremely talented, and they had some success earlier in life, and
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The secret to life, the universe, and everything lies in these five words.
you can just do things.
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.@ScottAdamsSays: The world is like a reverse casino… the more stuff you do, the more you give luck a chance to find you.
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this is what billionaires are thinking about. what are you doing with your life?
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.@naval: 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
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.@naval: The greatest threats to the future are suppression of freedom of speech—freedom of mathematics, freedom of expression, and freedom of creation. And those are pointless if they can’t be backed up by violence. If you don’t have your own ability to inflict violence, it
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Dude is catching so many rare Pokémons
“People who converge upon the truth converge with each other.”. — David Deutsch
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He just wanted your private conversations to be left alone
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Naval’s wisdom per word ratio is higher than anyone I’ve ever met.
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I’m excited to announce that I’m directing a documentary about:. 1) our deepest theory of knowledge,.2) the contemporary battle between the Enlightenment forces and its enemies,.3) and the central role that people have to play in the cosmic scheme of things.
Thank you, @HumanProgress, for publishing the piece I co-wrote with @ChipkinLogan for my upcoming documentary.
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I had the pleasure of sitting down with @DavidDeutschOxf in his lovely garden in Oxford a few months ago. Here’s our conversation. Links to watch on YouTube or listen on popular podcast platforms below. Timestamps:.1:01 - A tragic view of human history.7:04 - Why did it take so
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If you’re not an Elon fanboy, you’re just objectively wrong.
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The hottest people aren’t on Instagram, the best employees aren’t on LinkedIn, but the smartest people in the world are on X.
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. @naval being 100% transparent about his new social media startup @getairchat. “We’re simply building the product that we want to use.”. Here’s what the Airchat team looks like:
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BREAKING: Telegram CEO Pavel Durov has been released from police custody.
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.@naval: “I actually volunteered for public service (I never thought I’d do it). I just put the word out. I said, ‘Hey, if you want me to do something in this government, I’m happy to do it because I want to protect the American dream for my kids.’”
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Steve Jobs: We started with nothing. So whenever you start with nothing, you always can shoot for the moon. You have nothing to lose. And the thing that happens is when you sort of get something, it's very easy to go into cover-your-ass mode. What we're trying to do is to
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