The Angel Philosopher Naval Ravikant on Reading, Making Decisions, Habits, and the Purpose of Life

[Music] Hey, it's Shane Parrish and welcome to a new episode of The Knowledge Project where we deconstruct actionable strategies that you can use to make better decisions, learn new things, and live a better life. This time around we have the amazing Navall Raava Kaan. Navall is the CEO and co-founder of Angel List. He's invested in more than 100 companies, including Uber, Twitter, Yammer, and so many others. Don't worry, we're not going to talk about her early-stage investing; Navall is an incredibly deep thinker who challenges the status quo on so many things. He's thought deeply about stuff that's near and dear to us, like reading habits, decision-making in life.

Just a heads up, this is the longest podcast I've ever done. Our conversation lasted over two hours, and if you're like me, you're going to take a lot of notes. A complete list of books and sites mentioned is available in the show notes at FarnhamStreetBlog.com/podcast—that's F-A-R-N-A-M Street Blog dot com slash podcast. A transcript is available for members of our Learning Tribe; if you want to join, head on over to FarnhamStreetBlog.com/tribe. In addition to transcripts, we have the world's best online reading group and a host of other goodies. Without further ado, here’s Navall.

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Navall, welcome to the show! I am so excited to get to talk to you today and, you know, ask you a whole bunch of questions that I have on my mind.

Oh, thanks for having me! I'm excited to be here. I've been a longtime fan of your work.

Thank you! Let's get started with something simple. Can you tell me a little bit about what you do?

It's actually not that simple. I have a hard time saying what I do. My day job is that I am CEO of Angel List, the company that I started almost seven years ago now. Angel List is sort of this platform for startups in the tech industry, and we help entrepreneurs raise money, we help entrepreneurs recruit talent into their startups, and we also help people find jobs in startups. And now, recently we acquired Product Hunt, so we also help companies launch to customers. It's basically a one-stop shop for the early-stage tech ecosystem, whether you're raising money, or you're investing money with the largest online platform for that, whether you're recruiting talent or whether you're being recruited with the largest online platform for startup recruiting, and then whether you're looking for a new product to try out or whether they're looking for customers for your product, we're also the largest online platform for launching that, so it's sort of become this bigger thing. That's sort of my day job, but I'm also involved in a bunch of other things. I mean, I invest or advise about 200 companies, I'm on a bunch of boards, occasionally I'll invest in a tweet. I'm also a small partner in a cryptocurrency fund because I'm really into these coins like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Monero, and so forth, and I'm always cooking up something.

You always have a bunch of side projects! How do you keep track of that all? Like, what does your typical day look like?

Well, that's the good part; I don’t have a typical day, nor do I want a typical day. You know, if there is a typical day, I'm usually inside my office at Angel List, but I'm basically just operating mostly on email, or phone, or meetings, or squirreled up at home. So there are days where I just work completely from home; there are days that I don’t work. I'm actually even trying to get rid of this concept of having to be in a specific place at a specific time. You know, all I care about is, am I doing what I want to do, and being productive, and am I happy? I really want to break away from this idea of 40-hour weeks or 60-hour weeks, or 80-hour weeks, or nine-to-five roles or jobs or identities—it just all feels like a straitjacket.

You're one of the best voracious readers I know; you've called yourself a conscious bookworm, and you've read a ton. How did you first get interested in reading?

Reading was my first love, you know? I know that in my childhood when I was around 9, 10, 11 years old, I was a latchkey kid. My mom was working multiple jobs, and then she was going to school at night; we were raised by a single mother, my brother and I, in New York City, and we were in a part of New York City that was very safe. So I basically, the library was my after-school center. So every day I’d come back from school, I just go straight to the library, and I’d hang out there until they closed, and then I’d come home. So that was just my daily routine.

But I think even by that point in time I’d already loved books, I was reading books as a child. I remember my grandparents' house in India; I'd be a little kid on the floor going through all of my grandfather's Reader’s Digest. There was just so much to read there. I mean, now of course there’s a smorgasbord of information out there; everybody can read anything all the time, but back then it was much more limited. So I would read comic books, every Reader’s Digest, storybooks, whatever I could get my hands on—mysteries! I was big into mysteries. So I think I just always loved to read because I was actually antisocial and introverted, and I was just lost in the world of words and ideas from an early age.

I think some of it comes from the happy circumstance that when I was young, nobody forced me on what to read. I think there's a tendency among parents and teachers to say, "Oh, you should read this, but don't read that." The reality is that it's read a lot that by today's standards would be considered mental junk food, but eventually, you just get to like reading, you run out of the junk food, and then you start eating the healthy food over time. Your taste kind of gradually changes. So I think to some extent, that's what happened with me because I started from comic books and then went into mysteries, and then from that into fantasy, then into sci-fi, and then from science fiction into science and then mathematics and then philosophy. So it just kind of kept climbing up the stack.

But I'm lucky that there was no one around when I was seven years old or 16 saying, "Oh, you shouldn’t read that; you should be reading stuff." Most of what you read today—physical or on a computer or Kindle—for convenience, it's mostly Kindle. It's not the Kindle device; it sucks on an iPad. But for books that I really, really like, I will also buy a physical copy. So I have books; so there's no excuse not to read it. You know, a really good book costs 10 or 20 dollars and can change your life in a meaningful way, so it's not something I believe in saving money on. And this was even back when I was broke and had no money; I always spent money on books—I never viewed that as an expense. That's an investment to me.

And I probably spend ten times as much money on books as I actually get through. So in other words, it's like for every 200 dollars worth of books I buy, I actually end up making it to ten percent. So I'll read 20 dollars' worth of books, but it's still absolutely worth it.

You and I have that in common, yeah.

And anything that's one of the grapes—like if I read a book and I know that it's amazing, I'll buy multiple copies, partially to give away, partially because I have the volume around the house. And these days I find myself reading as much or more as I do read because I think there’s a tweet from an account on Twitter that I saw, this guy Illah Service, and he basically said, "You know, I don't want to read everything; I just want to read the 100 great books over and over again." And I think there's a lot to that.

So it's really more about identifying what are the great books to you because different books speak to different people, and then really absorbing those. Because I don't know about you, but I don’t—I have very poor attention. I have to—you know, I scare my speed-read; I jump around, and I could not tell you specific passages or quotes from books, but if some deep level you do absorb them and they become part of the threads of the tapestry of your psyche. So they do kind of weave in there. There are books that I'm sure you've had this feeling where you pick up a book, you start reading, and you're like, "Oh, this is pretty interesting; this is pretty good." And you're getting this increasing sense of déjà vu. And then about two-thirds or halfway through the book, you realize, "Oh, I’ve read this book before." And that's perfectly fine; it means you were ready to reread it.

What are the books you're rereading?

New good question! I'll pull up my Kindle app as we talk. But usually I'm always reading some books in science. I just reread "Seven Brief Lessons in Physics." I think that was the name of it; I read that one at least twice. I’m rereading "Sapiens" again. I love that book so much. I’m pretty much always rereading something by either Jiddu Krishnamurti or Osho—those are kind of my favorites. For other philosophers, I'm reading a book on René Girard's mimetic theory. It's more of an overview book because I couldn't make it to his actual writings. I'm reading "Tools for Titans," Tim Ferriss's book of what he's learned from a lot of great performers. I'm rereading "Stories of Your Life and Others" by Ted Chiang; it's one of my favorite sci-fi novels. I'm reading a book called "Thermal Info Complexity." It's actually by a friend of mine; it's not published yet.

I just finished reading "Pre-Suasion"—or I should say I finished giving "Pre-Suasion" to Robert Cialdini. I don't think I needed to read the entire book to get the point, but it was still good to read it to me. But I did—I recently reread "The Lessons of History" by Will and Ariel Durant. It's a great little book. Yeah, I am currently reading "The Story of Philosophy," also by Will Durant. I have a young kid now, so I’ve got a lot of child-related books that I use more as reference material than anything else. Recently, I read some Emerson, Chesterfield; I've got a Leo Tolstoy book here; I've got another Osho book about illusions. I have pieces of it saved up—Alan Watts, Scott Adams, I reread "Cat's Cradle" recently. Doubt: it's a friend of mine who's rereading it, so I picked it up again. There's tons! Maybe I just go out and hunt. Little von Mises book here; there’s the "Undercover Economist"; there’s a Richard Bach book; there are some Jed McKenna books. I was recently trying to reread "Moby Dick" and "Hamlet" just to try and get back into fiction, but I didn't make it to either.

Do you set aside time in your day to reread or read at all, or is it like a consistent thing, or do you fit it in when you have time?

I read when I'm bored of everything else. But the good news is I get bored very easily, so there's always a book to capture the imagination. Usually at nighttime, before I go to bed is when I'll read. But it's not a flawless thing. When I'm on vacation, I’ll read. But if I'm sitting in a Lyft or an Uber, I'll read. Sometimes in the morning at home after I've worked out, I’ll just read. Sometimes when I wake up, I’ll just grab my phone and read. I don’t set—I’m not a very disciplined person, so I don’t really set these hard-fast rules for myself. But the good news is I just love to read, and because I love to read, whenever I'm bored and I have time, I just do it. And thanks to the iPhone and the Kindle and the iPad, you know, they just make it really easy.

Oh, I've got two books here—Feynman's "Perfectly Reasonable Deviations" is by him, and then "Genius," which is the J. McCloy book about Feynman. So this is—they're talking. I'm flipping through human-looking more evolution of everything—Matt Ridley is one of my favorite authors; I've read everything that there is. I reread everything that there's. Little Dale Carnegie in here, "The Three-Body Problem," "Man's Search for Meaning"; there's lots! Sébastien and a lot of books out there. You can tell, it sounds like my dream.

Well, I'm going to right now; it's hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books I've downloaded. It’s not even like—I mean, we could sit here the entire podcast. I do—you like people—you've said before you think of books as throwaways. How did you come to think about books like that, and what impact has that had on what you read?

I mean, that's really an impact of the Internet. Once the Internet came along, I think it’s destroyed everybody’s attention span because now all of humanity’s works are available to you at any given time, and you're being interrupted constantly. So just our attention span goes down, our bit of focus goes down. But at the same time, we just become more judicious. We also want the meat.

And the problem with books is that to write a book—to publish it, publish a physical dead tree book, just takes a lot of work and effort and money. So sometimes people start putting long, wrapping long books around simple ideas. Those are probably my least favorite books; it's kind of why I avoid the whole business and self-help category because you generally have one good idea and it's buried in hundreds or thousands of pages and lots of anecdotes.

So what happened was I just noticed that sometime in the late '90s, I stopped reading as much as I used to, and I started reading more blogs. I started reading less books and more blogs. And great blogs like Farnam Street, you know, Kevin Simler’s blog, Melting Asphalt, and so on; you get incredibly smart people justifying, simplifying, and writing these great things—but it’s only a page or two or three pages. So I got really into blogs, but then I’d stopped reading books. And a lot of the oldest wisdom is actually in books. And with books, you're now talking about a combined works of all of humanity as opposed to just who happens to be blogging right now.

So I realized I missed that, and then with the Kindle and iBooks coming along, that allowed me to start treating books like I treat blogs, which is when I go to a blog I’ll actually skim through lots of articles until I find one that looks really interesting. I’ll read that whole article all the way through, maybe take notes. So now I treat books the same way, which is I’ll skim through a large number of books. I’ll put down—I’ll jump around, back, forward, middle, until I find a part that's interesting. I’ll just consume that piece and I won't feel guilty about having to finish the entire book.

Because there's a view, and it's a blog archive, right? It’s like a blog might have 300 posts on it, and you can read just 235 that you need right now. I think you can think of a book the same way—and then that opens the world and web of books back open to us instead of it being buried somewhere.

I think, like many people, I know a lot of friends who are currently stuck on a book somewhere, and if you ask people if they read, everybody says they read. Everybody says they're reading a book; they can answer which book they're reading. The reality is very few people actually read and actually finish books, yeah. And I think that's probably because of all these societal and personal rules that we've put up, like you must finish a book, and you must read books that are good for you, and you can't read junk food books, and this is the hot book right now, and so on.

The reality is I don't actually read that much compared to what people think. The reason I probably read one to two hours a day—which puts me in the top 0.01%—I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and the intelligence that I might have because real people don't read an hour a day. Real people, I think, read a minute a day or less. So making it an actual habit is the most important thing, and how you make it a habit doesn't matter. It's very much like exercise or working out—do something every day; it almost doesn't matter what you do.

So the people who are obsessing over, like, "Should I be weight training, or should I be doing tennis, or should I be doing Pilates, or should I be doing high-intensity training method versus the Happy Body?"—which is whatever—they're missing the point. The important thing is to do something every day; it doesn’t matter what it is. So the same way I would argue the important thing is to read every day, and it's not—it doesn't matter. It almost doesn't matter what you read because eventually, you'll read enough things, and your interest will lead you there, that it will dramatically improve your life.

So just like the best workout for you is the one that you're excited enough to do every day, the same way I would say the best books to read are the ones, books or blogs or Twitter or whatever—anything with ideas and information and learning—the best ones to read are the ones that you're excited about reading all the time.

This is the people that I knew that read quite a bit—they have a reading habit like you describe. It's a very visual person. Where did that come from?

Oh, that might have come from the Tim Ferriss podcast. I don't think I'm more habitual than anybody else. I think human beings are entirely creatures of habit. You know, as young children, we’re born with no habit loops. We’re essentially born as blank slates, and then they habituate themselves to learn patterns, and they get conditioned, and they use that to get through everyday life. And habits are good! You know, habits can allow you to background process certain things so that your neocortex, your frontal lobe, stays available to solve brand-new problems.

But we also unconsciously pick up habits in the background, and we keep them for decades, and we may not realize that they're bad for us, so we could move on from them to some extent. You know, our attitude in life, our mood, our happiness levels, depression levels, these are also habits: how do we judge people, how often do we eat, what kinds of food do we eat, do we walk or do we sit, do we move, do we exercise, do we read—these are habits as well! And you absolutely need habits to function. You cannot solve every problem in life as if it’s the first time it’s thrown at you.

But what we do is accumulate all these habits; we put them in the bundle of identity, ego, ourselves, and then we get attached to that, "I'm Shane; this is the way I am. I'm Navall; this is the way I am." And it’s really important to be able to uncondition yourself, to be able to take your habits apart and say, "Okay, well, that's a habit that I probably picked up from when I was a toddler, and I was trying to get my parents' attention", and now I'm just reinforced it and reinforced it and reinforced it, and I call it part of my density. But is it serving me anymore? Is it making me happier? Is it making me healthier? Is it making me accomplish whatever I want to set out to accomplish right now?

So I don't think I'm anymore— in fact, I would argue I'm less habitual than most people. Like, I don't like to structure my day. But to the extent that I do have habits, I'm trying to make them more deliberate rather than accidents of history. So what's a habit that you're trying to change right now? What are you working on?

Well, I did a lot of habit changes over the last few years. So I've now got a daily workout that I do, which is a great habit. I cut down heavily on drinking; it's not fully eliminated, but it's mostly gone. I dropped caffeine. I'm not on the Paleo diet, although I’ve adapted it—I call it the "Paleo diet," which is I try to be paleo but I fail constantly. But I don't beat myself up over it, because I feel that even approximating towards it is better than where I have been historically.

So, you know, I try to build a meditation habit but I failed. But I have made a habit of being meditative. So I've gone through lots of habits. Probably the one that I currently would like to cultivate is doing yoga more regularly, but I haven't really formed a plan around that. And by the way, I reject a lot of the stuff that's peddled around today about how you break habits. I know there's this very popular book—one that I even recommended—which talks about the science behind habits, and one of its depressing conclusions, I think this came out of Stanford, but that you can't break habits; you can only replace them. And that's BS.

I've definitely broken habits completely, and so I think you can uncondition yourself; you can untrain yourself. It’s just hard, so it just takes work; it takes effort, and usually, the big habit changes come when there are strong desire-motivators attached to them. So, you know, the yoga one I’m going to work on; I don’t yet have a great plan on that one; I haven't tackled that one properly yet.

A big habit that I'm working on, which is going to be really hard to explain in any way that any normal human being will understand this, but I'm trying to turn off my monkey mind. I think we are, when we were born as children, we were pretty blank slates; we're living very much in the moment, and we're essentially just reacting to our environment through our instincts, and we're living in what I would call the real world.

And then when puberty comes along, that's the onset of desire. It's the first time you really, really want something, and you start long-range planning for it. And then because of that, you start thinking a lot and start building an identity and ego to go and get what you want. And this is all normal and healthy; it's part of being the human animal. But I think at some point it gets out of control, and then we are constantly just talking to ourselves in our heads; we're playing little movies in our heads, walking down the street, but no one’s actually there.

Now, of course, we started voicing this thought in your head that you're always having—you'd be a madman and they'd lock you up—but the reality is if you walk down the street, no two-thousand people in the street, I think all thousand are talking to themselves in their head at any given point; they're constantly judging everything that they see; they're playing back movies of things that happened to them yesterday; they're living in fantasy worlds of what's going to happen tomorrow.

And they're just holed out of base reality, and that could be good when you're doing long-range planning; you can be good when you're solving problems; it’s good for the survival and replication machines that we are, but I think it’s actually very bad for your happiness. And so in my mind, the mind should be a servant—a tool, not a master. It's not something that should be controlling me and driving me 24/7.

So I've taken on this idea that I want to break the habit of uncontrolled thinking, which is hard because the five sani says, "Don’t think of a pink elephant." I just put a pink elephant in your head. So it’s an almost impossible problem, so it’s more something that has to be guided by feel than guided by actual thinking or thought process. But I'm deliberately cultivating experiences, states of mind, locations, activities that will help me getout of my mind.

I know, you know, all society does that to some extent. In some sense, the people chasing thrills and action sports, or flow states, or orgasm, or any of these states that people really strive to get to. A lot of these are basically just trying to get out of your own head; they’re trying to get away from that voice in your head and this overdeveloped sense of self.

At the very least, I do not want my sense of self to continue to develop and become stronger as I get older; I want it to be weaker and more muted so that I can live a much more impressive everyday reality and accept nature and the world for what it is and appreciate it very much. I would, and then not have to seek happiness through external circumstances chasing two fits of preconceived notions that I have while there's a lot that I want to ask questions on.

Is there a difference between turning off or suppressing your monkey mind?

Absolutely, yeah. Suppression doesn’t work because when you try to suppress, that’s the mind suppressing the mind; that’s just you playing games with yourself. So I think it's a very hard problem, and I want to go back to kind of unconditional—you basically stopped drinking alcohol—how did you work on deprogramming yourself from the social settings and environments that you're in where alcohol is probably available all the time?

And what benefits have you seen as a result of like are you isolating these habits when you're changing them? So, you know, I think the alcohol one is an interesting case study because the alcohol habit came from two things. One was availability, just being in situations where alcohol is available and accepted and something you’re supposed to do. And then the second is the desire, right? You want to do it because you're trying to accomplish something else.

So when I unpacked that, I realized a couple of things. The availability came from, "Oh, I'm just out. If I'm out at night in an environment where alcohol is being served, that’s the availability." So if you want to avoid that, stay in. Not staying in is not fun, so what do you do? Well, I started this daily workout regimen in the mornings. If you're working out in the mornings, you can't stay up too late at night, and if you can’t stay up too late at night, you can't be drinking too much.

You screw up—a few times your morning workout is terrible; you have a headache; you feel bad; you don’t feel as good. And when you're working out every day, you can checkpoint yourself very easily: like, "Oh, well this exact thing that I do every single morning is suddenly harder, so therefore I'm weakened from the alcohol from last night."

So the morning workout checkpoint really helped me understand the consequences of consuming alcohol before. And then the more interesting question is, "Well, why am I doing it?" And that basically boiled down to: I was doing it to survive longer in social environments that I wasn't particularly happy in. I essentially had to stun my brain into submission.

So there are better ways to do that. One of those is only associating with people where you don’t have to drink to be around them, and that really narrowed my friend circle and narrowed the kind of events that I go to. There’s a little bit of a substitution effect, and some of what the substitution effect was I was drinking so that I wouldn’t be thinking. And so what I went back to is like, "What can I cultivate these states of not thinking too much?" And if I can get there another way, then that will take away some of the urge to drink.

And then there’s some substitution; for example, I switch from hard alcohol to red wine. Red wine is inherently self-limiting, you know? You have two cocktails; the next thing you want is another cocktail. You have two glasses of red wine, at least for me, I usually have a headache, so I’m done at that point. It’s very self-limiting.

But some of it is this function of age. I mean, I'm 42 now. I don't know how I can make it through a single glass of wine without having some negative consequence build up, so I still drink. I don’t believe in the words “never” and “always” because I think that’s a way of limiting yourself and self-disciplining yourself, making you less free and unhappy at some level. But I just want to be naturally in a position where I don’t need it and I don’t desire it. It’s about kind of what I've been working more on.

What happened? Would you say most positively impacts your life?

I think it’s the daily morning workout that has been a complete game-changer; it’s made me feel healthier, younger. It’s made me not go out late, and it came from one simple thing, which is everybody says, "I don’t have time." Basically whenever you throw any so-called good habit at somebody, they'll have any excuse for themselves, and usually, the most common is, "I don’t have time."

And "I don’t have time" is just another way of saying "it’s not a priority." So what you really have to do to say, "Is it a priority or not?" And if something is your number-one priority, then you will get it. That's just the way life works. But if you've got a fuzzy basket of ten or fifteen different priorities, you're going to end up getting none of them.

So what I did there was I basically just said my number one priority in life, above my happiness, above my family, above my work, is my own health. And it starts with my physical health, and then second is my mental health, and then third is my spiritual health, and then it's my family's health—that is, my family's well-being. And then after that, I can go out and do whatever I need to do in the rest of the world.

So there's a series of concentric circles starting out from me. And so because my physical health became my number one priority, then I could never say I don’t have time. So in the mornings, I just work out, and however long it takes is how long it takes, and I do not start my day, and I don’t care if the world is imploding and melting down, taking—wait a minute—30 minutes until I’m done working out.

And do you take any breaks from that, or is that every day?

It’s pretty much every day. There are a few days where I’ve had to take a break because I’m traveling or I’m injured or sick or something, but I can count on one hand the number of breaks I take every year.

You mentioned happiness being one of your top priorities. What is happiness to you? What does that mean? What does that word mean? Can you unpack that?

Yeah, it’s a very evolving thing. I think, like all the great questions, you know, when you open, you're a little kid, and you go to your mom and you say, "What happens when we die? Is there Santa Claus? Is there a God? Should I be happy? Who should I marry?" Those kinds of things—there are no glib answers to that because there are no answers that apply to everybody.

So these questions, the search for truth, these kinds of questions, they ultimately do have answers, but they have personal answers. So the answer that works for me is going to sound like nonsense to you and vice versa. So whatever happiness means to me, it means something different to you, and it means something different to the listener.

But I think it’s very important to explore what it is, and for some people, I know it’s a flow state; for some people, satisfaction; for some people, it’s a feeling of contentment. My definition keeps evolving, so the answer I would have given you a year ago would be different than what I tell you now.

But today, I believe that happiness is—it’s really a default state. It was there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life. And we are highly judgmental survival and replication machines; we're constantly walking around thinking, "I need this; I need that," trapped in the weather. Because happiness is that state when nothing is missing, and when nothing is missing, your mind shuts down, and your mind stops running into the future or running into the past, they regret something or to plan something, and then in that absence for a moment, you have internal silence.

And when you have internal silence, then you are content and you're happy. I think people believe mistakenly, you know, feel free to disagree because again it’s different for everybody, but people believe mistakenly that happiness is about positive thoughts and positive actions. But the more I read, the more I've learned, the more I've experienced, because I verify this for myself—every positive thought essentially holds within it a negative thought. It’s a contrast to something negative.

The Dao De Jing says it more articulately than I ever could, but it’s all duality and polarities. So if I say I’m happy, that means that I was sad at some point. If I say he’s attractive, that means that somebody else is unattractive. So every positive thought even has a seed of a negative thought within it and vice versa, which is why a lot of greatness in life comes out of suffering. You have to view the negative before you can aspire to and then appreciate the positive.

So, all that said, long-winded to me, happiness is not about positive thoughts and stuff; it's not about negative thoughts. It's about the absence of desire, especially absence and desire for external things. And so the fewer desires I can have, the happier I can be. The more I can accept the current state of things, the less my mind is moving. Because the mind really exists in motion towards the future of the past. The more present I am, the happier and more content I will be.

But if I latch on to that, if I say, “Oh, I’m happy now, and I want to stay happy,” then I'm going to drop out of that happiness because now suddenly the mind is moving and is trying to attach to something. It's trying to create a permanent situation out of a temporary situation. So happiness to me is mainly not suffering, not desiring, not thinking too much about the future and the past, really embracing the present moment and the reality of what is, the way it is.

Because nature has no concept of happiness or unhappiness. To a tree, there is no right or wrong; there is no good or bad. You know, nature follows unbroken mathematical laws and a chain of cause and effect from the Big Bang to now, and everything is perfect, exactly the way it is. It’s only in our particular minds that we're unhappy; you're not happy, and things are perfect or imperfect because of what we desire.

But I think I've also come to believe in the complete and utter insignificance of the self, and I think that helps a lot. Like for example, if you thought you were the most important thing in the universe, then you have to bend the entire universe to your will. Because if you're the most important thing in the universe, then how could it not conform to your desires? And if it doesn't conform to your desire, something's wrong.

However, if you view yourself as a material amoeba or if you view all of your works as riding on water or building castles in the sand, then you have no expectation from how life should actually be. Life is just the way it is, and then you sort of accept that and you have no cause to be happy or unhappy. Those things almost don't apply, and what you're left with in that neutral state is not neutrality.

I think people think, "Oh, that would be a very bland existence." No, this is the existence the little children live. And if you look at little children, on balance, they're generally pretty happy because they're really immersed in their environment, in the moment, without any thought of how it should be given their personal preferences and desires.

So I think the neutral state is actually a perfection state, and one can be very happy as long as one isn't too caught up in their own heads.

What does your internal monologue go like when you find yourself trying to attach to something by default?

Yeah, I try to keep an eye on my internal monologue; it doesn't always work. But in the computer programming sense, I try to run my brain in debugging mode as much as possible. And when I'm talking to someone like I'm talking to you right now, or when I'm engaged in a grouped activity, it's almost impossible because your brain has too many things to handle.

But if I’m by myself, like just this morning, you know, I’m brushing my teeth, and I start thinking forward to the podcast, and I started going to this little fantasy where I imagine you asking me a bunch of questions, and I was fantasy answering them, and then I caught myself. I put my brain in debug mode, and just watch every little instruction go by, and I said, "Why am I fantasy-future planning? Why can't I just stand here and brush my teeth?"

Right? And it’s just the awareness that my brain was running off into planning some fantasy scenario out of ego that I was like, "Well, do I really care if I embarrass myself in Shane’s podcast? Who cares? I want to die anyway; this is not going to go to zero, and I won’t remember anything." So at that point, I shut down; I went back to brushing my teeth, and then I was noticing how great the toothbrush was and how good it felt. And then the next moment I’m off to thinking something else, and then I think that; look at my brain again, and I say, "Do I really need to solve this problem right now?"

And the reality of that is, 95% of what my brain runs off and tries to do, I don’t need to tackle at that exact moment. In fact, if it’s like a muscle, then I’ll be better off resting it being at peace. And then when a particular problem arises, I immerse myself in it. So what I would rather dedicate myself to is, for example, right now, as we're talking, to be completely lost in the conversation and to be 100% focused on this as opposed to thinking about, "Oh, when I brushed my teeth, did I do it the right way?" or, you know, planning something else in my mind.

So I think the ability to singularly focus is related to the ability to lose yourself and be present, happy, and actually, ironically, more effective.

That’s fascinating. It’s almost like a relativity issue, or you’re taking yourself out of a certain frame, and you’re just moving over to another frame and watching things from a different perspective, even in that you're in your own mind.

Yeah, I think that a lot of the things that Buddha talks about is awareness versus the ego. What they're really talking about is you can think of your brain, your consciousness, as a multi-layered mechanism. There's kind of a core base kernel-level OS that's running, and then there's applications that are running on top.

I like to think of it as, you know, computer geek speak, where I’m actually going back to my awareness-level OS, which is always calm, always peaceful, and generally happy and content, and I’m trying to stay in that mode and not activate the monkey mind, which is always worried and frightened and anxious but serves incredible purpose. But I’m trying not to activate that program until I need it.

Because when I need it, I want to just focus on that program, but if I'm running it 24/7 all the time, I'm wasting energy, and it’s just—it becomes me, and I am more than that, right? I think, like another thing that spirituality or religion or Buddhism or anything you follow will teach you over time is that you are more than just your mind; you are more than just your habits; you're more than just your preferences; you're your level of awareness; you're a body.

And, you know, modern humans, we don't live enough in our body; we don't live enough in our awareness; we live too much in this internal monologue in our heads, all of which, by the way, is just programmed into you by society and by the environment from when you're younger. You're basically a bunch of hardware DNA written that then reacted to environmental effects when you were younger, and then you recorded the things that were good and bad, and we use that to prejudge everything that's going to be thrown against you, and then you're using that to constantly try and predict and change the future.

But as you get older and older, some of these preferences that you've accumulated, it's very, very large. Some of these reactions, habitual reactions that you have, it’s very, very large, and then they end up as runaway freight trains that control your mood. Well, we should control our own moods; why don't we study how to control our moods? What a masterful thing that would be if you could say, “Well, right now I would like to be in a curious state,” and then you can genuinely set yourself into that curious state.

Or you say, “I want to be in a mourning state; I’m mourning a loved one, and I want to grieve for them, but I really want to grieve; I really want to feel that. I don’t want to be distracted right now by a computer programming problem; let’s do that tomorrow.” So I think that the mind itself is a muscle, and it can be trained, and it can be conditioned. It’s just been haphazardly conditioned by society out of our control, and if you look at it with awareness and intent, and it’s a 24/7 job you’re working at every moment of every day, I think you can unpack your own mind and your emotions and your thoughts and your reactions and you start reconfiguring; you can start rewriting this program to what you want.

You mentioned before in one of your interviews that you have foundational values, but you didn't elaborate, so I'm curious, what are those?

Yeah, it's a question I’ve never actually listed them or articulated them. But to define values, first of all, as a set of things that you will not compromise on. Foundational values to me are things that I've looked at very, very carefully about myself, and I've deliberately chosen and said, "You know what? This is a habit; this is a way of life, and I'm not going to compromise that; I'm going to stay this way forever."

I just don’t want to live life any other way. Now, I’ve never fully enumerated them, but you know, examples of them—like I think honesty is a core, core, core value. To give you examples of what I mean by honesty: I want to be able to just be me. I don't want to—I never want to be in an environment around people who have to watch what I say because if I disconnect what I'm thinking from what I'm saying, that creates multiple threads in my mind; that means that I'm no longer in the moment. That means that I now have to work future planning or past regretting every time I'm talking to somebody.

So anyone around whom I can't be fully honest, I don’t want to be around. Another example of a foundational value is I don't believe in any short-term thinking or dealing. So if I see anybody who's even around me, like let’s say I'm doing business with somebody and they think in a short-term manner with somebody else, then I don’t want to do business with that person anymore because I think all the benefits in life come from compound interests—whether in money or in relationships or love or health or activities or habits.

So I only want to be around people that I know I'm going to be around with for the rest of my life, and I only want to work on things that I know have good long-term payouts. Another one is I only believe in pure relationships; I don't believe in a hierarchical relationship. So I don't want to be above anybody, nor do I want to be below anybody. If I can't treat someone like a peer and if they can't treat me like a peer, then we have to—then I just don't want to interact with that human.

Another one is I don't believe in anger anymore. I mean that was something that was good when I was young and for testosterone, but now I was like the Buddhist saying that anger is a hot coal that you hold in your hand while you do it at somebody. So, you know, I want to be angry, and I want to be around angry people, so I just cut them out of my life. And I'm not judging them. I mean, I went through a lot of anger too and so you know, they have to work through it on their own, but go be angry at someone else.

I don't know if that necessarily falls into the classical definition of value, but it's a set of things that I won't compromise on and that I've just lived my entire life by. And I think everybody has values, and a lot of finding great relationships, great coworkers, great lovers, wives, husbands is finding other people where your values just line up, and then the little things don’t matter. Generally, I find that if people are fighting or quarreling about something, it’s because their values don’t line up. If their values aligned up, the little thing wouldn’t matter.

How is radical honesty—like how radical is your honesty, and how has that kind of impacted your life?

I mean, it’s pretty honest. I’m not like, I think Ray Dalio from Bridgewater is saying the same—he’s theoretically honest. So I’m not going to go and call somebody ugly to their face; I’m not trying to make a big show of it, and I’m trying to say, “Hey, I’m so honest, and I’m going to shock you.”

What radical honesty just means is that I want to be free. Part of being free means that I can say what I think, and think what I say; they're highly congruent and integrated. And it also means, you know, Richard Feynman famously said you should never ever fool anybody, and you are the easiest person to fool. So the moment you tell somebody else something that’s not honest, you've lied to yourself, and then you'll start believing your own lie, and then that will disconnect you from reality and take you down the wrong road.

So it’s really important for me to be honest, but I don’t go out of my way volunteering negative or nasty things. I would combine radical honesty with an old rule that Warren Buffett has, which is to criticize generally and praise specifically. And I try to follow this. I don’t always follow it, but, you know, I think I’ve followed it enough that it made a difference in my life, which is if you have a criticism of someone, then don’t criticize the person—criticize the general approach, or criticize kind of that class of activities. But if you have to praise somebody, then always try and find the person who’s the best example of what you’re praising, and praise that person specifically.

And that way, people’s egos and identities, which we all have, don’t work against you; they work for you.

Having values changed at all, or have you given more thought to them since becoming married and becoming a parent? I mean, how has that changed you?

Values almost by definition don’t change that much over time, but they take some time for you to figure out your own foundational values. I think everybody has them; it’s just that maybe we’re not that aware of them until later. And so mine have changed a little bit, but not a lot. I mean, my wife is an incredibly loving, family-oriented person, and so that was one of the foundational values that brought us together.

The moment you have a child, it's this really weird thing, but it sort of answers the built-in meaning of life's purpose-of-life question. All of a sudden, the most important thing in the universe moves from being in your body to being moving into the child's body, so that changes you. And your values inherently become a lot less selfish. You know, I would say that the biggest such change was when I was younger—I really, really, really valued freedom. Freedom was one of my core, core values, and ironically it still is; it’s probably one of my top three values.

But it's a different definition of freedom. My old definition was freedom to—freedom to do anything I want, freedom to do whatever I feel like whenever I feel like. And now I would say that the freedom I'm looking for is internal freedom, so it’s freedom from reaction; it's freedom from feeling angry; it's freedom from being sad; it's freedom from being forced to do things. But I'm looking for freedom from internally and externally, whereas before, I was looking for freedom to.

I like that a lot. What’s the biggest mistake you’ve ever made in your life, and how did you recover?

I’ve made a class of mistakes that I would summarize in the same way, and I made this class of mistakes, and it was obvious to me looking at the mistakes I’ve made only in hindsight through one exercise, which is you probably heard the "When you’re thirty, what advice would you give your 20-year-old self?" Yeah, I mean, you're 40; like, what advice would you give your twenty- or thirty-year-old self?

So if you do that exercise decade by decade, or maybe if you’re younger, you can do it in five, really sit down and say, "Okay, you know, 2007, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2008, what was I doing? How was I feeling? 2009, what was I doing? How was I feeling?" And at least for me, that’s remarkable consistency emerged, and that consistency was that everything that I was doing, I should have still done, but with less emotion, and especially less anger.

Because I used to be very angry when I was younger, but especially it’s less emotion. Life is going to play out the way it’s going to play out—some good, some bad—but most of it is actually just up to your interpretation. And you’re born; you have a set of sensory experiences; then you die. And how you choose to interpret those sensory inputs is up to you, and different people interpret them in different ways.

But really, I wish I had done all of these things, but with less emotion and less anger. The most celebrated example would be, you know, when I was younger, I started a company, and the company did well, but I didn't do what else I should have said to some of the people involved. And it was a good outcome for me in the end, and everything worked out okay, but there was a lot of angst and a lot of anger.

And really, today, you know what I would do is I wouldn't go down the angst and the anger; I would have just walked up to the people and said, “Look, this is what happened; this is what I’m going to do; this is what’s fair; this is what’s not.” But I would have realized that the anger and the emotion themselves have this huge consequence. It's just completely unnecessary. So now, I’m just trying to learn from that, and to do the same things that I think are the right thing to do, but to do them without anger and to do them with a very long-term point of view.

So I think if you take a very long-term point of view and if you take the emotion out of it, then I wouldn't consider those things mistakes anymore other than that. I mean, there was a—I think—the perspective I like to adopt is that everything that I did and everything that was done to me—and you know, there’s some impossible to separate combination—brought me to this exact moment here today talking to you, and this is a good moment.

Surf the gram or whatever. So whatever set of circumstances conspired to bring us here, we're good because here I am.

Was there a moment you would say when you realized that you could control how you interpret it? I mean, I think what the problems that a lot of people have is they don't recognize that they can control—not what happens to them per se, but how they respond and how they interpret a situation.

I think everyone knows it's possible, and the reason we know it's possible is there’s a great Osho lecture that he calls the attraction of drugs and spirituality. It talks about what do people do drugs. Everything from alcohol, psychedelics, to cannabis; you name it, and they're doing it to control their mental state, and they're doing it to control how they react. Sometimes it’s worse, and sometimes it’s better, but some people drink because then they don't care as much, or they're potheads because they can zone out, or they do psychedelics so they can feel, you know, very present or connected to nature or what have you.

But the attraction of drugs are spiritual. So to some extent, we already know that we can control our internal state; we just use external bioactive substances to do it. And now there are lots more techniques that are out there in the public domain—many of them dug up from older times—but you know, these ones from cognitive therapy and behavioral psychology to meditation to taking long walks in nature, you can control your mental state. It's just we're used to doing it by hacking our external circumstances to then come back around and control our mental state.

And for example, sitting on a—there's a famous line that says that all of man's problems arise because he can't sit by himself in a room for thirty minutes.

Plaster women, too. Yeah, exactly. So you know, if a man or a woman can sit by themselves on a cushion for thirty minutes—and that's hard! It’s really hard to do. That’s meditation; you are essentially struggling with in controlling your internal state. And the first thing to realize is that you can actually observe your mental state.

So just the advantage of meditation is not that you're going to gain a superpower to control your internal state; it’s that you will recognize just how out of control your mind is. It is like a monkey flinging feces that’s running around the room making trouble, shouting, breaking things—it’s completely uncontrollable; it's an out-of-control mad person! And you have to see this mad creature in operation before you feel a certain distaste towards it, and you start separating yourself from it.

And in that separation is liberation. When you realize that, “Oh, I don’t want to be that person! Why am I so out of control?” Just that awareness alone calms you down. So there are many techniques one can use. Another one, for example, that I think a lot of smart people say is, "If you're in a bind about something, or if you get an unhappy email and you want to respond," don’t respond for 24 hours. Right?

What does that do? It just—you calm down; the emotions subside; the hormones go down, and you’re in a better mental state 24 hours later. So I think people already know this, but we just don’t act on it because socially we're not conditioned to act on it. Socially, we're told “go work out; go look good” because that's a multiplayer competitive game; other people can see if I'm doing a good job or not, or we’re told “go make money; go buy a big house”—again external multiplayer competitive game.

But when it comes to learn to be happy, train yourself to be happy, it’s completely internal; no external progress, no external validation—100%. You’re competing against yourself. It’s a single-player game. Again, we’re such social creatures; we’re more like bees or ants that we’re externally programmed and driven, that we just don't know how to play and win at these single-player games anymore. We compete purely on multiplayer games, but the reality is life is a single-player game. You’re born alone; you’re going to die alone; all your interpretations are alone; all your memories are alone, and you’re gone.

Three generations, nobody cares before you showed up; nobody cared. It’s all single-player.

I think Buffett has a great example of that when he gives the “Do you want to be the world’s best lover and known as the worst, or the world’s worst lover and known as the best?” In reference to an inner or external scorecard—yeah, exactly right. I mean, all of your scorecards are internal, and the sad thing is, you know, we sit there like jealousy. Jealousy was a very hard emotion for me to overcome when I was young; I had a lot of jealousy in me, and by and by, I learned to get rid of it, and it still crops up every now and then.

But it’s such a poisonous emotion because at the end of the day, you’re no better off; you’re unhappy, and the person you’re jealous of is still successful or good-looking or whatever they are. But the real breakthrough was for me was when I realized at a personal fundamental level—I mean, the problem with these kinds of podcasts is I can give glib answers all day long, but you have to discover your own personal answer because your personal answer is going to be different than mine.

I’ll speak to you, but the one that I discovered that spoke to me was the day I realized that all these people that I was jealous of—I couldn’t just cherry-pick and choose a little aspect of their life. I couldn’t say, “I want his body; I want her money; I want his personality.” You have to be that person! Do you want to actually be that person with all of their reactions, their desire, their family, their happiness level, their outlook on life, their self-image? And if you’re not willing to do a wholesale 24/7, 100% swap with who that person is, then there’s no point in being jealous, I think.

And so I got it. Once I came to that realization, jealousy just sort of faded away because I don't want to be anybody else; I'm perfectly happy being me. And by the way, even that is under control to be happy being—it's just, there's no social rewards for it! But there's a lot of internal rewards, yeah.

There’s—it's almost anti-social rewards because when you're working on your inner stuff, people don’t love that. It’s not—they don't dislike it; your friends, of course, support you, but they’re not getting anything out of it. And even when I look at my own peer group and to the extent that they’re working on themselves, and everyone, their 40s, at some level is most ever engaged in grouped activities: “Hey, let’s do a group meditation! Hey, let’s form this group of that! Hey, let’s thought of this group lecture!”

And I keep coming back to this one line that I read, like, everything I just read, but which said, "Only the individual transcends." Nobody reaches enlightenment or inner happiness or does serious internal work in group settings; it is a very lonely kind of task. So to some extent, I think that people who are constantly looking for social affirmation in their internal work aren’t that serious about it. What they did—and it’s fine; I’m not judging—but just as they’re craving more social interaction than they’re really craving internal work.

What big ideas have you changed your mind on in the last few years?

There’s a lot. On kind of a life's level, there’s a couple. Obviously, in the business level, I think on a more practical basis, I just stopped believing in macroeconomics. I studied economics in school and computer science, and there was a time when I thought I was going to go be a Ph.D. in economics and all that. But the further I get, the more I realize, microeconomics—the combination of who does complex systems and politics, and you can find macroeconomists to take every side of every argument.

So I think that discipline, because it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions—which is the hallmark of science—because it doesn’t make falsifiable predictions, it’s become corrupted because you never have the counterexample on the economy; you can never take the U.S. economy and run two different experiments at the same time.

And because there’s so much data, people kind of cherry-pick or whatever political narrative they’re trying to push. So to the extent that people spend all their time watching the macroeconomy or, you know, the Fed forecasts or, you know, which way the stocks are going to go to the next year—is it going to be a good year of value? That’s all junk; it’s no better than astrology. In fact, it’s probably even worse; it’s less entertaining; it’s more stress inducing.

So I just think of macroeconomics now as junk science, and all apologies to the macroeconomists. I’d say micreconomics and game theory are fundamental, and I don’t think you can be successful in business or even navigating through most of our modern capitalist society without a very good understanding of supply and demand and labor versus capital and game theory and tit for tat and those kinds of things.

So that’s not true in macroeconomics, but it’s true in everything. I don’t believe in macro environmentalism; I believe in micro environmentalism. I don’t believe in macro charity; I believe in micro charity. I don’t believe in macro improving the world; there are a lot of people out there who get really fired up about, “I’m going to change the world! I’m going to change this person! I’ll change the way people think!”

I think the entire class of beliefs the unfalsifiable, they're based—they're almost religious, you know? There are things that people got into when they were young; nobody actually knows which system is the better one. Nobody actually knows which one maximizes happiness versus output, which is whatever. I know there’s a lot of smart economists and people studying it. There's a lot of good data and science, but at the end of the day, I just—and the more I look into it, the more I come away saying, "Well, maybe I don't know how best to organize society."

Maybe society should not have just one organization but should have multiple organizations so you can choose; you can go into which our society where you’re most bound to thrive. But I don’t think there is a single right answer for human culture and society anymore, except to the extent that given the increasingly destructive technologies along a timescale—a longer time scale—you can 3D print a nuclear weapon along a timescale; you can create a singularity in your backyard as part of your high school physics project.

So I think as a human race, we do have to sort of get past this idea that we’re separate organisms and almost getting some kind of multicellular organism situation, otherwise we'll just destroy ourselves. It'll just be too easy to blow ourselves up, and that obviously runs very, very counter to my libertarian instincts of everyone should be free to do whatever they want, etc., etc.

So I just don’t know how to organize society anymore, and I think any beliefs that I have, any remnant beliefs that I have from being younger about the optimal way to organize society probably wrong, and the future thriving society that we end up with maybe a thousand years from now will probably look like something that I would argue very strongly against today because they will have no room for the individual.

Maybe you can explain for listeners the singularity and kind of what your thoughts are around that?

Yeah, the singularity is this idea that technological change is accelerating and at some point, the acceleration gets so great that there’s massive change in our lifetimes. We create things like general AI; we start living forever, and just the nature of who we are as humans change. The consequence of that is most associated with a general AI. We produce a general-purpose artificial intelligence; that artificial intelligence could then hack its own code, make itself smarter, and out of all of us.

The point where we’re either obsolete or immortal or something in between. My thoughts, I think it’s fanciful to say the least. Nick Bostrom wrote a very famous book called "Superintelligence," which lays out the past, but there are good rebuttals to superintelligence, so I wouldn’t just read that book, you know, breathless and wide-eyed and believe everything. And there are people, like in a singularity institute, who are looking forward to this coming.

But I think it’s religion for nerds; you know, it's got all the same characteristics; it’s unfalsifiable until it happens. It basically says the chosen will be saved, the world’s going to end; you know, we will be immortal. It’s very hard—exactly. It’s very hard to part from a biblical kind of story, and I find the people who are pushing it the most are what I would call armchair technologists; they might understand a little bit of science, but these are not the PhDs in physics who are pushing this.

It’s not like those field medal-winning mathematicians pushing this. You know, I was trained in a little bit of science, and I consider myself an amateur scientist, and I know just enough to know how little we know. You know, physics still can't solve the three-body problem; collide three billiard balls together and can't tell you what happens; we cannot properly model complex systems; we can't tell the weather next week.

We still can't solve the vast majority of chronic diseases; we're just starting to connect the gut and the brain and bacteria in our system together. There is so much complexity in nature, and humans have just begun to scratch the surface that to believe we are going to sort of go into this world of perfection through technology, I think it’s far-fetched.

Look, there’s AI; everyone’s talking about AI. None of these people have written real code; we are no closer to creating a general AI than we were 20 years ago. Now, there are huge advances that were made in specific AI, but these are data processing problems. Basically, if I dump huge amounts of real-world images into a neural network, then I can do better image recognition. No question; that is real; that is a data-driven solution.

The algorithms haven’t gotten any better, and the structure of how the human brain works and how the human body works is still so far advanced beyond our machine capabilities that certainly, if there’s going to be a singularity, it’s not going to happen in my lifetime. And I think in that sense, some things like the singularity are pernicious. They’re pernicious for the same reason that the afterlife is pernicious because it takes you out of the moment; it gives you hope for the future so you stop living for today, and you start living for tomorrow.

And I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s actually a big deal. Any given time, when you’re walking down the street, a very small percentage of your brain is focused on the present. The rest is future planning or regretting a memory; and that’s keeping you from an incredible experience; it’s keeping you from seeing the beauty in everything, and for being grateful for where you are.

And I think it can literally destroy your happiness if you spend all your time living in delusions of the future. So I do think the singularity thing is good in the sense that it pushes forward technological advancement; we put more resources on it; we spend more time developing some of the great things that the human race—that’s some of the great technologies we’re going to take advantage of.

So in that sense, it pushes science forward; it’s a good thing, but I think it’s delusional to think that you're somehow going to be saved before you die by some combination of AI and magic science. You just have to live the life you have.

That’s pretty profound! Even when you're living backwards, you're not really living, right? You kind of have to be in the moment to have any sort of experience!

There is nothing there! There is actually nothing but this moment! You know, one has never gone back in time, and no one has ever been able to predict the future successfully in any way that matters. And so literally, the only thing that exists is this exact point where you are in space at that exact time that you happen to be, and it’s like all the great profound truths; it’s all paradoxes.

So any two points are infinitely different; any moment is perfectly unique, but that moment itself slips by so quickly that you can’t grab it.

What is your opinion on the current education system? When I asked people on Twitter what they wanted to ask you, this question came up a couple of times, which was, you know, how would you fix it? What’s your opinion on the education system? What are your thoughts on that?

I think there’s no question it’s completely obsolete. The education system is a path-dependent outcome from the need for daycare, from the need for prisons for college-aged males who would otherwise overrun society and cause a lot of havoc. The original medieval universities had guard towers that face inwards, for example, because you have to put a curfew in there and you can lock up the young 18-year-old males before they go out with swords and daggers and create trouble.

So colleges and schools and what we think about them—they come from a time period when books were rare, knowledge was rare, babysitting was rare, and crime was common, violence was prevalent; there was no such thing as self-guided learning. So I think schools are just byproducts of these kinds of institutions, and now we have the Internet, which is the greatest level of knowledge ever created—completely interconnected!

So it's very, very easy to learn if you actually have the desire to learn. Everything is on the Internet; you can go on Khan Academy, get MIT and Yale lectures online; you can get all the coursework, get interactivity; you can read blogs by brilliant people; you can read all these great books. So the ability to learn, the means of learning, the tools of learning are abundant and infinite; it’s the desire to learn that’s incredibly scarce.

So I just don’t think that schools matter for self-motivated students, but what the schools matter for is wanting to keep the kids that are the parents here while the parents are working. It creates socialization because kids want to be around their peers and they want to learn how to operate in society with their peers.

But I think if it’s purely learning you’re after, then that learning can be done much more easily on your own or through the Internet, or by uniting through the Internet with like-minded groups. So I think that’s one problem with the current educational system.

The second problem is, what do you choose to learn? And the current educational system has to have a one-size-fits-all model; it has to say, "Well, you have to learn X now, and then you have to learn Y." And, you know, to give you examples of—this is obsolete—memorization! Right? In a day and age of Google and smartphones, memorization is absolutely—why should you be memorizing the Battle of Trafalgar?

Why should you be memorizing what the capital of this or that state is? But we still put undue weight on that just because that's the way it's always been done, and we did it in a pre-Google world. Another example is how when we're moving along at a certain pace—I’m sure not everyone, but I'm certain 90% of your listeners have had this happen to them, which is they were learning mathematics, and at some point in there, they were keeping up—they were doing arithmetic, then they were doing geometry, trigonometry, precalc, then calculus, and somewhere in there, they got lost.

Somewhere in there, while building the massive edifice of logical structure that mathematics is, they missed one lesson, they missed one concept in those five classes, or they just didn’t—they just—brain couldn’t think a certain way—that something was being explained to them and should have been explained visually, but it was being explained numerically. Or it should have been explicit symbolically, and it was being explained in cartography; but what have you? But they were not able to keep up, and the moment you lose that rung in mathematics, normally you miss that rung in the ladder, you can't go to the next one because not on the next one the teacher’s like, "Okay, we’re done with precalculus and now we’re moving on to calculus." You're saying, “Wait! I didn’t understand precalculus! I didn’t understand how precalculus leads from trigonometry to calculus” and you missed that whole part.

So now I get to calculus; I don’t understand the fundamentals, so now it gets down to memorization! So now I’ve got, “Okay, dx/dy,” when I see that symbol I do this. Yeah, but now you’ve lost the actual learning! You’ve lost the connection to the underlying principles. So I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well, over and over because life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced stuff in things that you truly love and where you understand the basics inside out. But that’s not how our system is built.

We teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all, when really they would have been better off serving just doing arithmetic and basic computer programming the entire time. So I think there’s a pace of learning issue, and then there’s, finally, what to learn. And there’s a whole set of things we don’t even bother trying to teach. We don’t teach nutrition; we don’t teach cooking; we don’t teach how to be in happy, positive relationships; we don’t teach how to keep your body healthy and fit. You know, we just say, "Sports."

We don’t teach happiness; we don’t teach meditation; maybe we shouldn’t teach some of these things—it’s different kids who have different aptitudes—but maybe we should. Maybe we should teach practical construction of technology, and, you know, like maybe everyone in their science project, instead of building a little chemistry volcano, maybe it should be building a smartphone!

So we just haven’t kept up, and I have to believe that we can change the system, but we’re not. But you never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. I don't believe a bit of certain value in tech business enough to know that you're better off changing it just by creating something brand new.

So one fantasy idea I’ve had is, you know, after I’m done with Angel List, or if I have more time on my hands, I would like to create a successor to the One Laptop project in MIT. Nicholas Negroponte had the One Laptop per Child project, but then I saw this fascinating write-up. This is a really long time ago; maybe five years ago—maybe it was in the Economist, or somewhere.

It was a story about how they left a box full of unopened Android tablets in a little village in Pakistan, and when they came back months later, the kids had opened up the box; they’d all figured out and booted the tablets; they had hacked them; they’ve gotten past the user administration login; they installed a whole bunch of apps; they’d got a little economy set up; the older kids are teaching the younger kids; they’re teaching their grandmothers how to run businesses; they’re surfing the Web; they’ve taught themselves English. You know, kids are learning things—they just need the tools!

So to that end, what I would love to do is create a very low-cost, very rugged, easily powered, cheap Android tablet that’s hard to destroy, and basically distribute them around the world with pre-built learning applications so that you can literally fire one up, and it works with you interactively in 30 seconds. It figures out what language do you speak; you know, if any—you’re going to school—what level of aptitude are you at? Are you a second grader, or a third grader, or a fifth grader?

And of course, you