Naval Ravikant
44 statements across 2 episodes · 18 bullish · 9 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Apr 11, 2017 by Naval Ravikant · said 21 times in 15 episodes since 2019 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Naval Ravikant's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Shane Parrish (5), Sahil Lavingia (3), Neil Pasricha (2), Garry Tan (2), Elad Gil (2), Morgan Housel (1), Mike Maples Jr. (1), Kunal Shah (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 7 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Naval Ravikant, oldest first
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant attributes all his material success to daily reading habits.
“I probably read one to two hours a day which, and that puts me in the top point. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, one percent. I think that alone accounts for any material success that I've had in my life and the intelligence that I might have”
Apr 11, 2017
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant: Ethical behavior is short-term unprofitable but long-term selfishly beneficial.
“Working on your values is longterm selfish, although short term, it's absolutely false sacrifices. If being ethical or profitable, everybody would do it. And we wouldn't have to have a separate concept. We wouldn't talk about it. There would be no books on it.…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant: Spending on books is an investment with unlimited upside.
“A really good book costs 10 or 20 dollars, and it can change your life in a meaningful way. So it's not something I believe in saving money on. And this is even back when I was broken. I had no money. I always spend money on books. I never viewed that as an ex…”
Apr 11, 2017
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant: Highly capable people in Silicon Valley inevitably achieve extreme success.
“Generally, at least in the tech business in Silicon Valley, great people have great outcomes. You just have to be patient. Every person that I met at the beginning of my career, 20 years ago, where I looked at it and said, wow, that guy or that gal is super ca…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Ravikant: Evolution and Buddhism are completely reconcilable philosophies
“My philosophy falls down to, and one pole is evolution as a binding principle, because it explains so much about humans and the near side is Buddhism, which is the oldest, most time-tested spiritual philosophy on the internal state of being inside each of us. …”
Apr 11, 2017
Naval Ravikant prioritizes physical health above his own happiness, family, and work.
“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, then it's…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Apr 11, 2017 bullish
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval: The Mind Can Be Reprogrammed Through Continuous Awareness
“So I think that the mind itself is a muscle, and it can be trained, and it can be conditioned. It has just been haphazardly conditioned by society out of our control, and if you look at it with awareness and intent, and it 24 seven job. You're working at every…”
Apr 11, 2017
Ravikant: Minimizing ego and outcome desire enables seeing reality clearly
“So I think the hard thing here is seeing the truth and to see the truth, you have to get your ego out of the way because your ego doesn't want to face the truth. So the smaller you can make your ego, the less condition you can make your reactions, the less des…”
Apr 11, 2017
Ravikant: Acknowledging business failures publicly prevents self-delusion
“So especially in business, if something isn't going well, I try to acknowledge that publicly. And I try to acknowledge it publicly in front of my co-founders and friends and co-workers, because that way then I'm not hiding it from anybody else. If I'm not hidi…”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant evaluates 10,000 startups to find five ultimate winners to back.
“I would rather, my system is, I want to see 10,000 companies, and I want to pick 500 that have a shot of being huge, and then I want the option to double down on the five winners. I don't want to just look at a hundred companies and pick 10 that I think are wi…”
Apr 11, 2017
Apr 11, 2017 neutral
Apr 11, 2017
Naval Ravikant: Investors can predictably spot startup failures, but not outsized successes.
“You can never predict the outside successes, but what you can predict are the failures. You can say, oh, this person doesn't know this field at all. They're way out of their depth. Or this person, they're a short-term thinker. They're not going to last”
Apr 11, 2017 neutral
Naval Ravikant: People chase flow and thrill states to escape ego
“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…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant: Reading junk food first naturally leads to higher-quality books.
“The reality is I just 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, right? Or your tastes kind of graduate.”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Ravikant: Negotiations with high-integrity people are easy and preserve compounding relationships
“Negotiations with high integrity people are usually very easy. You're giving each other things to make sure the other person's happy enough that the deal survives, because unhappy deals get unwound, and they become short-term relationships which don't have any…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant: All significant life benefits come from compounding relationships and habits.
“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 o…”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Ravikant: Claims that habits cannot be broken are BS
“I reject a lot of the stuff that's being peddled around today about how you perform and 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 thin…”
Apr 11, 2017
Apr 11, 2017
Ravikant: Reading routine relies on boredom and desire over strict discipline
“I'm not a very disciplined person, so I don't really set these hard and fast rules for myself. Because I, but the good news is I just love to read, and because I love to read, I, Whenever I'm bored and I have time, I just do it.”
Apr 11, 2017
Ravikant: Multi-year goal is deconditioning habituated responses for cleaner decisions
“I do View a lot of my goals over the next few years of unconditioning previous learned responses or habituated responses so that I can make decisions more cleanly in the moment without relying upon memory or prepackaged heuristics and judgments.”
Apr 11, 2017 bullish
Apr 11, 2017
Naval Ravikant: True freedom is internal freedom from reactivity, not external action.
“My old definition was 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 that I'm looking for is internal freedom. So it's freedom from reaction. It's freedom from feeling angry. It's fr…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Naval Ravikant uses Twitter as his primary note-taking system for reading insights.
“Actually, my note taking is Twitter. So, what I do is I read and read and read, and if I have some fundamental aha insight or concept, then what I like about Twitter is it forces me to distill that into a 140 characters and then I try and put it out there as a…”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Ravikant: People who brag about honesty are probably dishonest
“If someone is going around and talking about how honest they are, they're probably dishonest. That's just like a little telltale indicator I've learned. When someone spends too much time talking about their own values or talking themselves up, they're covering…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Ravikant: Praise specific individuals but criticize general classes of activity
“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 best who's the best example of what y…”
Apr 11, 2017
Naval Ravikant: Dishonesty creates multiple mental threads that fragment the human mind.
“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.”
Apr 11, 2017
Naval Ravikant: Saying you lack time means it is not a priority.
“And I don't have time. It's just another way of saying it's not a priority. So what you really have to do is 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 …”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Apr 11, 2017
Naval Ravikant: Having a child resolves the existential question of life's purpose.
“The moment you have a child, it's this really weird thing, but it's sort of, it answers the built in meaning of life, purpose of life question. And all of a sudden, the most important thing in the universe moves from being in your body into being moving into t…”
Apr 11, 2017 positive
Ravikant: Readers should focus on repeatedly rereading great books
“And these days I find myself rereading as much or more as I do reading. Because I think this was a tweet from an account on on Twitter that I saw. This guy, Illus Sirtis. And he basically said, you know, I don't want to read everything. I just want to read the…”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Naval Ravikant uses daily morning workouts to checkpoint alcohol's negative physical effects.
“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…”
Apr 11, 2017 negative
Naval Ravikant: Non-stop internal monologue aids survival but damages happiness
“That can be good when you're doing long range planning. It 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.”
Apr 11, 2017
Apr 11, 2017 negative
May 13, 2025 positive
Gil: The happiest elite founders evolve from mercenaries into craft artists
“The people that I see who do the most interesting big things over time fall into that latter category where always there was some mercenary piece. Of course you want to have money to survive and all this stuff, and then that morphs into your, you become more m…”