Naval Ravikant+

Riding AGI, AI Anxiety, Who Funded COVID, Defending Taiwan, and California Empire

Naval with three founders who are living in the future: Garry Tan (Y Combinator), Daniel Francis (Abel Police), and Farbood Nivi (A-LIST). 00:00 Guest Intros 02:35 Live in the Future 03:58 Will AI Outsmart us? 07:43 In the Anthropic Breadline 09:59 The Tech Genie Is Out 12:33 We Invested in COVID?! 14:25 Good Writing Is Novelty 18:50 Living Like It’s 2028 24:32 Truth dot ai 30:18 Does China have the Weights? 35:38 Everyone has AI Anxiety 39:32 Have Your Agent Talk to My Agent 42:01 What if Open Source takes the Lead? 44:03 The Sun is Setting on Google 48:00 Ride the AGI 50:46 Will There be S

A Return to Code

With agents, you just don’t get stuck anymore. —Max Hodak

Waste Tokens, Save Time

Don’t look at tokens either as inputs or outputs.  Just look at your time and look at the final output. — Naval

AI Software Factories

“Clearly there are 100x or 1,000x engineers now. The world hasn’t adjusted.” — Guillermo Rauch (Vercel) Guillermo: I’ve been really pilled with this idea of software factories. You used to ship the output directly, and everything inside the company was how good is person A at shipping output B? And now what’s happening is the way that I’m judging you as an engineer is, are you producing the factory that will produce multiplicative outputs B through Z, right? We used to believe, and it used to be somewhat controversial, that there’s 10X engineers. Now clearly there’s 100X or 1,000X engineers

Full Episode: The AI Industrial Revolution

Full episode with with 20 minutes of new material at the end. With Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Blake Scholl (Boom Supersonic), and Max Hodak (Science). Software factories, vertical integration, the regulatory frontier, and the autonomous company. Part 1: Waste Tokens, Save Time 00:00 Three Frontier Founders 01:27 AI Software Factories 04:15 Waste Tokens, Save Time 05:47 Models Instructing Humans 09:29 Is Pure Software Dead? 12:03 You Don't Get Stuck Anymore Part 2: Vibe Coding Hardware 14:39 Vibe Coding a Turbine Blade 18:07 Open Source Compounds China's Advantage 20:15 You Always Want the

Waste Tokens, Save Time

A new format for the podcast! With three frontier founders: Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Blake Scholl (Boom Sonic), and Max Hodak (Science). 00:00 Three Frontier Founders 01:27 AI Software Factories 04:15 Waste Tokens, Save Time 05:47 Models Instructing Humans 09:30 Is Pure Software Dead? 12:04 You Don't Get Stuck Anymore Transcript: nav.al/tokens

The Only Way Out

Doom is easy. Optimism takes imagination. The Only Way Out A Podcast Film

The Age of Nonlinear Returns

“We live in the age of nonlinear returns. So there’s no point in fighting over the small pie before it’s fully baked, especially in the tech business.” — Naval “We live in the age of nonlinear returns. The upside is always bigger in the future, and the upside can be 100x, 1,000x, 10,000x bigger. So there’s no point in fighting over the small pie before it’s fully baked, especially in the tech business. Anyone who’s been in for a while will tell you that it’s power law distribution of returns: their number one winner is worth more than numbers two through N put together. Number two is bigg

Business Books Are a Waste of Time

“All frameworks in life—your workout framework, your sales framework, even your building-an-app framework—are all a distant second to your motivation.” — @naval “If you’re not excited about the thing, what are you doing selling it? It’s a miserable life if you’re selling things that you don’t care about. So I think for me, sales is a byproduct of credibility, and obviously it helps to be articulate and it helps to be empathic. In terms of the actual sales skills, I know the whole Cialdini checklist. I might use it once in a blue moon. But I’m not going to artificially fill an email or a pit

Don’t Manage, Lead

“A taste of freedom can make you unemployable.” — Naval “Management is telling people what to do, and leadership is making them want to do it. And I think leadership is one of the core, core things that you have to drive in an organization. You just have to inspire people to want to do the work. But it can’t be fake. It has to be a true motivator rolled into their capabilities and their own objectives — what they want out of life. So you do have to take the time to listen to what those people want, and then figure out where there’s an overlap in what you want done, and then inspire them to

Feed Your (Good) Obsessions

“Don’t look for balance. Feed your (good) obsessions.” — @NavalR “Vibe coding is just my latest obsession. I have an obsessive personality. Every six months I get obsessed with something new, and I’ve learned over time, there are bad obsessions — like, if you are overeating, or if you’re doing drugs, or you’re playing too many video games — that’s a bad obsession. But there are good obsessions. The intellectual obsessions are good obsessions. So I’ve learned to feed my intellectual obsessions. I go out of my way to indulge in it. I don’t look for balance. I look to feed my obsessions. And t

I Don’t Sell

“I don’t sell. Humans are hardwired to resist being sold to.” — @NavalR “I actually don’t believe in sales. If you feel like someone is selling to you, and if you feel like you’re being sold, it’s a turnoff. Humans are hardwired to resist being sold to. So I think what matters much more is credibility. Credibility is way more important than sales. If you want to be good at “sales,” then really what you want is you want to be credible. You want people to trust you. You want to be the real estate agent that steers people away from bad deals and bad neighborhoods and bad houses, so that when

The Logic of Violence // A podcast film

"If you really hate somebody, in the future, a drone will be able to get them." – @NavalR “I think drones are still underleveraged, even though they’ve come to prominence on the battlefield recently. We still haven’t seen anywhere near the end game of drones. There’s nothing in particular I’m trying to figure out there. I mean, I think drone defense is going to be very difficult, because a drone that’s attacking has the advantage of both kinetic energy—because it’s coming down on you—and it’s got the advantage of surprise, where the attacker can mass all the attack drones in one area, wher

Sell the Truth

00:00 Be Credible 03:18 “Yes, And” 04:31 Selfish Honesty 05:37 Charisma Is Confidence + Love 07:56 Don’t Manage, Lead 11:16 Hunt Together 14:51 Feed Your (Good) Obsessions 18:57 Sell the Truth 21:07 Good Deal or No Deal 23:39 The Age of Nonlinear Returns -- Transcript: http://nav.al/sell USVC is a product of AngelList, where we are founders and hold equity.

The Beginning of the End of Apple’s Dominance

“If I want an app, I literally open up Claude on my phone. I can operate a remote terminal, which is running on my desktop, or I can just use Claude in the cloud. It can connect to Xcode. I give it a two-line description. It builds me an app. It ships it to my app store. I open my app store app. The app is sitting there. I click install. 30 seconds later, I have a working app on my phone. That’s magical. You can literally be at dinner with someone having a conversation, they describe some app they want, you can describe it to Claude, and five minutes later you’re showing them that app on yo

Coding Agents As Customer Service Reps

“The other thing is within the app that I’m building, I have a bug reporting infrastructure, where if someone sees a bug, they tap on a button, the bug sends the logs up and the bug files into a server. And then I have Claude go every 24 hours through all the bug reports and it just fixes them all, by itself, without my having to intervene. And it puts all the fixes into side branches for me to review. And then all I have to do is just review the fixes and say, “Ah, that wasn’t really a bug. That wasn’t a good fix. Don’t ship that.” “Oh, that looks good. Makes sense. Ship it.” I’m just the

A Place for Each Model

“AI is jagged intelligence, as they say, where it’s incredibly smart at some things and incredibly dumb at others. And it’s structured very differently than humans in that when you’re using Claude, you’re using the same AI model—even if you have 10 instances of it running. So 10 of them talking to each other doesn’t really improve its thinking in the same way that 10 humans talking to each other do, because those humans are trained on 10 different datasets. Humans are just inherently very creative and think out of bounds. Whereas the AI agents are trained on the same data distribution. They’r

Pure Software is Uninvestable

“Naval: There’s never been a better time to be alive as a creator of software. Now, are the same market opportunities still there? That’s a big question. They’re shifting very, very fast. It may be the case that the big companies are vulnerable because now anyone can create software. It may be the case that they have more of an advantage because they have distribution. They can just fill all the gaps with all the software they can dream up. But I actually think this is a renaissance for individual software creators. Now, one other tweet that I put out was something like, “There’s no market fo

‘Nothing Ever Happens’ Is Over

00:00 The Fully Interconnected Startup 04:14 You Don’t Need the Explicit Intranet Anymore 06:55 May You Live in Interesting Times 10:40 Drones Democratize Violence 12:43 Biothreats Could Also Get Democratized 15:09 AI Interfaces Unlock Hardware 17:35 Optimism Requires Creativity -- Transcript: http://nav.al/over USVC is a product of AngelList, where we are founders and hold equity.

On Vibe Coding

00:00 A Return to Coding 03:08 The Personal App Store 06:12 Vibe Coding Is a Video Game with Real-World Rewards 10:23 Pure Software Is Uninvestable 14:09 A Place for Each Model 17:44 AI Is Eager to Please 21:58 Why Math and Coding? 24:04 The Beginning of the End of Apple’s Dominance 27:43 Coding Agents As Customer Service Reps -- Transcript: http://nav.al/code Presented by AngelList: http://angellist.com/podcast We founded AngelList and have equity in the company.

All true learning is on the job

You start with reasoning and then you build up your judgment. And then when your judgment is sufficiently refined, it just becomes taste or intuition or gut feel, and that’s what you operate on. But you have to start from the specific. If you start from the general, and stay at the level of the general—and just read books of principles and aphorisms and almanacs and so on—you’re going to be like that person that went to university: overeducated, but they’re lost. They try to apply things in the wrong places. What Nassim Taleb calls the intellectual yet idiots, IYIs. One of the tweets I was g

You only learn by doing

"Life is lived in the arena. You only learn by doing. And if you’re not doing, then all the learning you’re picking up is too general and too abstract. Then it truly is Hallmark aphorisms. You don’t know what applies where and when. And a lot of this kind of general principles and advice is not mathematics. Sometimes you’re using the word rich to mean one thing. Other times you’re using it to mean another thing. Same with the word wealth. Same with the word love or happiness. These are overloaded terms. So this is not mathematics. These are not precise definitions. You can’t form a playbook

Best products are opinionated.

"Every great founder I’ve seen up close, or even from afar, is highly opinionated and they’re almost dictatorial in how they run things. Also, early-stage teams are opinionated. And the products they build are opinionated. Opinionated means they have a strong vision for what it should and should not do. If you don’t have a strong vision of what it should and should not do, then you end up with a giant mess of competing features. Jack Dorsey has a great phrase: “Limit the number of details and make every detail perfect.” And that’s especially important in consumer products. You have to be ex

Get comfortable with repeated slow failure.

It's not 10,000 hours, it's 10,000 iterations.

"Malcolm Gladwell popularized 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours is directionally correct, but it’s not exactly correct. It implies that if you spend 10,000 hours doing something, you get mastery. Let’s put aside whether 10,000 is the right number or not. It’s not just hours put in—it’s iterations. How many learning loops do you have that drive the learning curve? What is an iteration? An iteration is when you do something and then you look at the result; you test the result somehow—ideally against a free market, nature, or physics. Then you ask, “Did this work or not? What part of this experiment

You can't fix motivation

"The thing you can’t fix is motivation. If someone’s just unmotivated, if they don’t want to apply themselves fully, if they have other things going on in their life, then you just have to cut them off at this point. One of the things that’s less talked about is often you’ll meet the right person at the wrong time. They just have internal problems—life problems, home problems, health problems, things that are going on—that make them not capable of functioning at the level that you need. And that’s a sad situation, but it happens all the time. On a related note: People say, “Oh, I’m burned o