Who Naval Ravikant cites

Quotes

As Nassim Taleb says, it is easier to macro bullshit than it is the micro bullshit.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Credits

Nassim Taleb famously talks about ergodicity, which is a fancy word for a simple concept: What is true for 100 people on average isn’t the same as one person averaging that same thing 100 times.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Quotes

Or there’s Nassim Taleb’s Silver Rule, which is, “Don’t do unto others what you don’t want them doing unto you. ”

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Quotes

I’ll leave you with a quote from Nassim Taleb that I liked. He said, “To become a philosopher king, start with being a king, not being a philosopher.”

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Credits

one of the reasons why Nassim Taleb rails against them is because they have no skin in the game.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Credits

They try to apply things in the wrong places. What Nassim Taleb calls the Intellectual Yet Idiots, IYIs.

Life is Lived in The Arena · 17 Jul 2025

Quotes

Charlie Munger had a line on this. Somebody asked him about making money. He said what the questioner actually was asking was, “How can I become like you, except faster?”

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Disagrees with our reading

I think mental models are interesting, but I don’t think explicitly in terms of mental-model checklists. I know Charlie Munger does, but that’s just not how I think.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019 · The korrent

Quotes

As Charlie Munger says, if you could be working on incentives, don’t work on anything else.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Credits

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.

Inspiration All the Way Down · 15 Jul 2025

Disagrees with our reading

Steve Jobs famously said, “Creativity is just putting things together.” I actually don’t think that’s correct.

A Motorcycle for the Mind · 19 Feb 2026

Builds on our reading

Steve Jobs famously said that a computer is a bicycle for the mind. It lets you travel much faster than walking, certainly in terms of efficiency. But it takes the legs to turn the pedals in the first place. And so now maybe we have a motorcycle for the mind, to stretch the analogy, but you still need someone to ride it, to drive it, to direct it, to hit the accelerator, and to hit the brake.

A Motorcycle for the Mind · 19 Feb 2026

Credits

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.

Pause, Reflect, See How Well it Did · 6 Aug 2025

Disagrees with our reading

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.

Most Books Should Be Skimmed, A Few Should Be Devoured · 26 Sept 2025

Quotes

And this is what I think Andrej Karpathy meant when he said, “English is the hottest new programming language.”

A Motorcycle for the Mind · 19 Feb 2026

Credits

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.

It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature · 22 Sept 2025

Quotes

And Graham said, “Actually, you’re overpriced, free is overpriced.” And Graham was absolutely right.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Quotes

It’s like Bruce Lee said, “I don’t fear the man who knows a thousand kicks and a thousand punches, I fear the man who’s practiced one punch ten thousand times or one kick ten thousand times.”

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Quotes

A Confucius saying I like: “A sick man only wants one thing, a healthy man wants 10,000 things.”

Happiness · 12 Mar 2021

Credits

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.

Find the Simplest Thing That Works · 1 Oct 2025

Quotes

Kapil Gupta, who’s written far more on this topic than I have, said, “Wisdom begets stoicism. Stoicism does not beget wisdom.”

Happiness · 12 Mar 2021

Builds on our reading

Marc Andreessen came up with the concept of the “product-market fit.” I would expand that to “product-market-founder fit,” taking into account how well a founder is personally suited to the business.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Quotes

It was Osho who said, essentially: “Every time I meet a prostitute, she wants to talk about God. And every time I meet a priest, he wants to talk about sex.” Whatever you deny yourself will become your new prison.

Happiness · 12 Mar 2021

Credits

Peter Thiel talks a lot about how competition is besides the point. It’s counterproductive. We’re highly memetic creatures. We copy everybody around us. We copy our desires from them.

How to Get Rich (every episode) · 28 Dec 2019

Quotes

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.”

Blame Yourself for Everything, and Preserve Your Agency · 25 Aug 2025

Credits

Richard Feynman used to say that he wasn’t a genius. He was just a boy who applied himself and worked really hard.

It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature · 22 Sept 2025