Transcript: http://nav.al/kapil. Kapil:   / kapilguptamd  .

Highlights:

- Sincerity -

Naval: “I can always tell that people who ask for stock tips, aren’t really serious about investing. People who ask for book recommendations aren’t really serious about reading. People who ask ‘What, what business should I build?’ aren’t really serious about entrepreneurship.”

- How-To’s -

Kapil: “Take the person who “made it’ and became world-class in whatever he did. If he went back and retraced his steps and did everything again the same way, but this time he did it by mimicking himself, he would fail.”

Naval: “I can’t watch Roger Federer play tennis and swing the racket the same way, nor will any description from him on how to swing the racket, get me to swing it the right way. Then we go to intellectual efforts. We start asking Warren Buffet why he invested in a company and there he can try and create a mental construct as to how he thinks and how he invests in a company… But there are just as many details to Warren Buffett’s activities, when he decides what to invest in and how he lives his life and how he thinks, as there are to Roger Federer’s body running around a tennis court, hitting a ball. At some level, the details are not transmissible. They’re not copyable.”

Kapil: “The things that you do greatest are the things that you know not how you do.”

- Truth -

Naval: “Society is a set of collective lies that we all believe so we can get along. It allows us to establish a lower common denominator consensus so we don’t all kill each other and we can cooperate. These shared fictions that we have to maintain for society to function are fine. But there’s a cost to that, and the cost is borne by the individual.”

Naval: “One of the ways in which I know that I am finding truths is then that problem is solved for good.”

- Freedom -

Kapil: “Any freedom that leads to the desire for more freedom is not freedom.”

Kapil: “Freedom comes from the understanding of where things come from, not the conscious attempt to end them.”

- Progress -

Kapil: “A human being becomes his environment. It is absolutely critical to savagely and surgically arrange one’s environment in a way that is in accordance with where he wants to go.”

Kapil: “Looking for progress is essentially looking for pleasure. It is the pleasure of self image, which says, I’m in a better place now than I was before.”