The 5 Biggest Truths That Society Can't Tell You

w/ Naval Ravikant, Peter Thiel, Chamath Palihapitiya, Mohnish Pabrai

Hey friend!

I compiled 5 important truths about life (from very insightful people) that Society never promotes and has even counter-narratives to them — which are created for the simple reason (as Naval Ravikant argues) that Society (as any other group) optimizes for consensus, rather than truth. Because what’s most necessary for the survival of any group is consensus — which implicitly makes truth seeking, at best, secondary in the list of priorities. Therefore, ideas that ensure consensus will be spread by Society, regardless of its truth/false nature.

Hope you find it valuable :)

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🧠 Top Quotes

"What Society wants for you is not what's always good for you."

- Naval Ravikant

"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”

- George Orwell

"The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects."

- Leonardo Da Vinci

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👨 People

Naval Ravikant is the co-founder of AngelList and co-author of Venture Hacks. He has invested (early-stage) in companies like Uber, Twitter and FourSquare.

Peter Thiel is an entrepreneur and investor. Co-founder of Paypal and first outside investor in Facebook. In 2022, his estimated net worth was 7 Billion $.

Chamath Palihapitiya is the CEO of Social Capital (Venture Capital Fund). In 2007, he joined Facebook and led the User Growth Team. His net worth is estimated to be over 1 Billion $.

Mohnish Pabrai is a renowned investor and entrepreneur. He also founded the NGO "Dakshana" in India, and has a close friendship with Charlie Munger.

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📝 Notes

What Society wants [Naval Ravikant]

"What Society wants for you is not what's always good for you."

- Naval Ravikant

As Naval argues, the biggest problem with truth-seeking is that we have been conditioned by Society, and Society’s objective is Consensus, rather than Truth (this happens with any group of people, and Society is the largest group). Thus, we are conditioned to believe in the consensus-seeking ideas of Society, and this makes it very hard for the individual to seek truth, because it’s hard to un-condition oneself. But the pursuit is worth it because it will give us the right judgement to improve our lives, and see things the way they actually are.

Naval also discusses that Society not only shares wrong ideas, but it also programs you so well that you are your own warden in following (and encouraging that others follow too) these ideas. One instance of this programming is Guilt.

"Guilt is Society's voice speaking in your head."

- Naval Ravikant

Picking Nuggets Note -- Quotes on Society/Truth-Seeking...

"The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste, preferring to deify error, if error seduce them. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” 
- Gustav Le Bon (polymath and psychologist who first discussed behavioral contagion in 1895

"There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” 
- George Orwell

"The truth of things is the chief nutriment of superior intellects." 
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Social “Truth” #1 — Money isn’t gonna make you happy [Naval Ravikant]

This is what Society always promote. But the real truth is that money will get rid of many sources of unhappiness, and will make happiness more controllable and at least a choice.

Social “Truth” #2 — Kids go to school for education [Naval Ravikant]

The School System has many goals, and education is just one of those goals and is not even the most important (in comparison). Goals of the School System:

• Education — Just a tiny bit. And subjects are mostly irrelevant/obsolete and are taught at the speed of the slowest student.

• Indoctrination.

"An educational system isn't worth a great deal if it teaches young people how to make a living but doesn't teach them how to make a life.”

- Richard Feynman

• Socialization.

• Compliance Training.

"Society tames the wolf into a dog. And man is the most domesticated animal of all."

- Nietzsche

• Baby-sitting — It is useful to have a place that takes care of children while parents are working.

• Reduce teenager crime.

Social “Truth” #3 — Competition is Good [Peter Thiel]

"We have been taught that the losers are the people who are bad at competing…

[But] I would suggest that something very different is the case…"

- Peter Thiel

Peter argues that when we compete, we focus too much on the people with whom we are competing and lose sight of what actually matters — which is to make something that is valuable and meaningful.

"We would achieve more if we chase the dream instead of the competition."

- Simon Sinek

Peter admits that is true that competition makes you better at that which you are competing on. But he also argues that this comes at an expensive cost (higher than the benefits), because of 2 aspects:

• As commented previously, you over-focus on the other competitors and focus less on what’s actually meaningful to do (your attention shifts from the intrinsic mission towards just beating the people around you).

• (Psychologically) Imprisons you -- Your sense of self-worth / identity is wrapped up in winning these competitions.

  Peter talks about the time when he was working at a big Law Firm in New York. He commented that from the outside everybody was trying to get in, and from the inside everybody was trying to get out. And when Peter finally left his job (after 7 months) a co-worker told him that it was very re-assuring to see him leaving, as he thought no one could leave “Alcatraz”.

  This personal story from Peter illustrates this big downside that comes with fierce competition — your identity gets so wrapped up into winning the game and staying ahead of the other competitors, that it’s really hard to just leave the game and opt out of the competition (even when you realize the game isn’t important for you or is meaningless and empty). This is why Naval Ravikant calls this the “Competition Trap”. And this downside (getting trap in a worthless game) is much more important than the upside (improving thru Competition), because why does it even matter to improve on something if the prize is meaningless to you?

"You’re playing a stupid game — You’re going to win a stupid prize. It’s not obvious right now because you’re blinded by competition. But three years from now, it’ll be obvious."

- Naval Ravikant

Personality Matters…

Most of the successful companies in Silicon Valley were founded by people with mild Asperger. And Peter argues that this is the case because the less social you are, the more you will believe in *your* own ideas. Whereas the more social you are, the more likely it is that you will just do what everyone else is doing (falling into the Competition Trap), because you are more influenced by what other people say — You will over-focus on the people and focus less on your own original ideas/goals.

So the highly social type of people might just open a restaurant after all his original ideas has been talked out by other people. Whereas the person with mild Asperger will just do what he truly wants to do, regardless of how other people feel about his ideas.

Picking Nuggets Note:

I don’t think Peter has mild Asperger, but he is deeply interested in philosophy (he also did his Bachelor’s Degree in this field), so that probably helped him to be aware of these issues about Competition and resist being influenced by other people (at least after quitting his job at the Law Firm to start Paypal with Elon Musk). Besides, he was very influenced by Stanford teacher Rene Girard, who created a whole theory around the theme of Imitative Behavior.

Peter concludes saying that highly social people are at a disadvantage when it comes to doing something that is truly valuable.

Social “Truth” #4 — Mistakes are bad [Chamath Palihapitiya]

Society tells you (mostly in a subtle way) that you shouldn’t make mistakes. And if you do them, the consequence is a loss of status (people looks down at you when you fail).

Chamath argues that mistakes are obviously necessary for success, and more specifically…

“The really successful people realize that… is the cycle time of mistakes that get you to success.”

Because the more mistakes that you make, the more you can observe and learn from them. And this consequently decreases your error rate (paradoxically), which ultimately leads to success. Thus, mistakes are necessary for success. And the faster you make mistakes, the faster you will be successful.

Internal Motto at Facebook — “Move Fast and Break Things”

"Experience never errs; it is only your judgments that err by promising themselves effects such as are not caused by your experiments."
- Leonardo Da Vinci

Picking Nuggets Note -- Good ways to frame mistakes...
Chamath says that he only uses the word "mistake" because that's how Society understands it, but to him it means just learning. 

Other people like Leonardo Da Vinci frames mistakes as experimentation, and he argues that this is critical to do because it's only the experiments that give you the real objective feedback! Kapil Gupta also frames it as experimentation, and he only uses the term failure when it is ultimate failure (e.g./ a startup that shuts down).

Nassim Taleb also frames it as experimentation, as long as when the experiment fails the downside is small and when it succeeds the upside potential is hugely big (or at least it puts you in a better direction to keep experimenting and be more likely to find that big upside pay-off eventually // Nassim calls this an "up-regulating" process).

Chamath also mentions that just following a established path to (almost surely) have no failures and the approval of other people comes at a great cost — when you don’t put yourself in a position where failure can happen (and the odds of failing are significant), you don’t know what you are really capable of achieving. You will not realize your full potential.

"If you don't fail at least 90% of the time, you are not aiming high enough."

- Alan Kay

“The degree of success in your life is not correlated to the hard work you put, but the degree of failure and uncertainty you are willing to tolerate”.

- Guy Spier (interview with Boston College)

Are your parents Baby-Boomers?

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel also presents an interesting idea to why most parents today (at least in the US) cheer their sons to follow the established path (make a career in a big Corporation). He links it with the kind of life that the Baby Boomers (1946-1964) had…

“Recent graduates’ parents often cheer them on the established path. The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Then, when technological progress stalled in the 1970s, increasing income inequality came to the rescue of the most elite Boomers. Every year of adulthood continued to get automatically better and better for the rich and successful. The rest of their generation was left behind, but the wealthy Boomers who shape public opinion today see little reason to question their naïve optimism. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their kids, too.”

Little Reflection

I think that a big part of that avoidance of mistakes and risk-aversion comes from the School System.

Nassim Taleb argues (on his book Antifragile) that being right or wrong is fundamentally different when we are talking about papers / schools compared to the real world. What happens in Academia or the School System is that you normally need to be right at least slightly more than wrong, whereas in the real world (which runs under a Power Law Distribution of events) we have asymmetries going on.

Let's take the example of Entrepreneurship. In Entrepreneurship, you can be wrong most of the time as long as each individual mistake is inconsequential and when you are right the win is massively consequential.

So, in the real world, is not about the relative proportion of mistakes and wins, is about the consequential magnitude of those mistakes and wins.

Social “Truth” #5 — You should be original and not copy others [Mohnish Pabrai]

(this might seem contradictory to Peter Thiel’s arguments against mimetic behavior, so at the end of this chapter I tried to clarify how these differ and why they don’t contradict)

Opposed to this Social “Truth”, Mohnish Pabrai argues that Cloning (that is, copying from other people) is incredibly powerful because…

• You can implement into your work things that are already working well (from other people) or you think that are objectively good ideas.

  This reminds me of a quote from Nassim Taleb...
  "Suckers try to win arguments. Non-suckers try to win."
  
  The idea being that it doesn't matter (eventually) if *your* own opinions/ideas are the right ones, what matters is only the final outcome. Shane Parrish also calls it "Outcome over Ego" (on his podcast with Scott Adams). So drop your Ego and focus on the outcome!

• So few people are willing to do it. Most people “look down at cloning”. They think is beneath them. This is why Mohnish says that if you are willing to embrace cloning, you will have a huge edge over most people.

How to be a Cloner…

Whenever you see something that (positively) impresses you… Clone it!

For instance, when Mohnish was running his IT business, he saw a businessman with very nice presentation cards. So, Mohnish just shamelessly cloned that and started to use the same cards in his business — with the same design and colors!

Picking Nuggets Note:

Over time, the accumulation of things (that you clone from others) will result in something, ironically, original!

"If you have one person you are influenced by, everyone will say you are the next whoever. But if you rip off a hundred people, everyone will say you are so original"
- Gary Panter

“I steal from every single movie ever made.”

- Quentin Tarantino

“No man who cares about originality will ever be original. It's the man who's only thinking about doing a good job or telling the truth who becomes really original -- and doesn't notice it.”

- C.S. Lewis (author of The Chronicles of Narnia)

So you don’t have to be original all the time. There are so many good ideas / practices that other smart people have already figured out!

"If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants."

- Isaac Newton

Picking Nuggets Note:

The truth from Peter Thiel on Competition might seem like it conflicts with the truth from Mohnish Pabrai on Copying good practices from other people. But I think they don't conflict because what Peter Thiel opposes is pursuing a competitive goal. Whereas Mohnish Pabrai is only in favor of copying other people's best practices, when it makes sense for you to do it. So Peter is talking about copying and competing over goals (which is the end) whereas Mohnish is talking about copying practices and methodologies (which are just means of an end).

Also, the kind of copying that Peter talks about is driven by the sheep-like behavior that is common in humans, as explained by Social Epistemology. Whereas the kind of copying that Mohnish talks about is driven by independent thinking from the individual on what makes sense to him to incorporate into his work (depending on his personal goals).

Check out the YouTube Video!

This Blogpost is brought to you by Shortform - The platform that I love using to get nuggets from Books!

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The mark of a great (non-fiction) author...

“It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book.”

-Friedrich Nietzsche

📚 Passages I loved

Passage 1

Peter Thiel on the Formula for Success👇

"This book [Zero to One] offers no formula for success. The paradox of teaching entrepreneurship is that such a formula necessarily cannot exist; because every innovation is new and unique, no authority can prescribe in concrete terms how to be innovative. Indeed, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas."

Elon Musk on First Principles👇

"I do think there is a good framework for thinking. It is physics – you know the sort of first principles reasoning … What I mean by that is boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy."

Passage 2

Peter Thiel on the condition for every successful business👇

“In the real world outside economic theory, every business is successful exactly to the extent that it does something others cannot. Monopoly is therefore not a pathology or an exception. Monopoly is the condition of every successful business.

Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina by observing: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Business is the opposite. All happy companies are different: each one earns a monopoly by solving a unique problem. All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition [they compete because they try to solve the same problem -- leading to tiny or non-existent profit margins].

....

Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business."

(If you enjoyed these passages, you might wanna connect with me on Twitter/Linkedin — I consistently post there the best passages from books I’m reading!)

👨‍💻Other content I have found super valuable lately…

- 2 great episodes from the podcast The Diary Of A CEO (I recently discovered it):

- Shane Parrish interview with Scott Adams

- New Episode released by Naval Ravikant:

Until next time :)

Julio xx