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Most people are asking the wrong question about AI.
They're asking: "Will AI take my job?" Naval Ravikant is asking something entirely different: "How do I become the person who uses AI to do something impossible?"
That's the shift. And it changes everything.
I've been following Naval's thinking for years — his frameworks on wealth, leverage, and clear thinking have quietly shaped how I approach most things in life.
So when I came across his recent podcast with Nivi, I sat with it for a long time.
Not because it was full of hot takes about the latest models. But because Naval has this rare ability to zoom out and tell you what's actually happening — even when it makes you uncomfortable.
Here's what stuck with me.
Everyone Is Now a Spellcaster
Naval's most striking idea from the conversation is this: we've just handed a magic wand to every human being on the planet.
For decades, programmers were the wizards. They had memorised arcane commands. They could speak to machines in a language no one else understood. That gave them enormous leverage over everyone else.
Now? You can just talk. In any language. To a machine that will actually listen and build what you describe.
"Vibe coding," as Naval calls it, is the new product management. You describe an app. You give feedback in plain English. The AI builds it, tests it, fixes the bugs, and iterates — without sleep, without ego, without ever getting offended.
The barrier between idea and product has essentially collapsed.
This isn't a small improvement. This is a category shift. When Python came out, programmers thought "wow, this is almost like writing in English." They were wrong. Now you literally are writing in English. And the computer understands.
The Abstraction Stack Just Got a New Layer
Naval frames AI not as a replacement for programming, but as the latest layer in a long history of abstraction.
We went from transistors → assembly language → C → Python → massive libraries. Each layer made the layer beneath invisible — unless you needed to peek under the hood. AI coding tools are just the newest, most powerful layer yet.
But here's where Naval drops something important that most people miss.
Abstractions are leaky.
Every layer hides complexity, but it never eliminates it. When something breaks — and it will — the person who understands what's happening underneath will always have an edge. The software engineer who knows computer architecture will catch bugs faster, build cleaner systems, and specify better applications than the pure vibe coder.
This makes a lot of sense as solid advice. But there's a missing piece here — and Naval acknowledges it. You don't need to understand everything beneath the abstraction. You just need enough to know when the abstraction is failing you.
The Only True Test of Intelligence
This is where Naval gets philosophical.
He argues that the only real test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.
Not your IQ. Not your degrees. Not your technical skills. Whether you can navigate the world — its complexity, its chaos, its randomness — and land somewhere that feels like yours.
By that definition? AI fails instantly.
Because AI doesn't want anything.
It has no skin in the game. No survival instinct. No authentic desire. It's a proxy.
An incredibly powerful one — but a proxy nonetheless. The human holding the wand still has to decide where to point it.
This is why Naval is so unbothered about AI "taking over." The things that matter most — creativity, authentic desire, embodied judgment, real-world agency — these are still deeply human. An AI can generate a thousand tweets for you. But it can't want to be heard. It can't feel the sting of being ignored or the joy of being understood.
Entrepreneurs especially have nothing to fear.
Naval put it bluntly: no entrepreneur worries about AI taking their job. Why? Because being an entrepreneur is not a job. It's the opposite of a job. Entrepreneurs are trying to do impossible things, and any tool that helps them is an ally — not a threat.
The Anxiety Cure Naval Prescribes
Naval noticed something that I think is worth sitting with.
Most people's fear of AI comes not from understanding it — but from not understanding it. Anxiety is a non-specific fear. It's your brain telling you to do something, without knowing what.
His prescription? Action. Curiosity. Open the hood.
You don't have to understand how to build a model. You don't need to write training loops or tune hyperparameters. But you should understand enough to know what this thing is — what it can do brilliantly, where it completely falls apart, and where you should trust it versus question it.
The people who will thrive in this era aren't the ones with the highest AI anxiety. They're the ones who leaned in early, got their hands dirty, and developed an intuitive feel for the tool — its strengths, its hallucinations, its blind spots.
Early adopters always have an edge. But the window doesn't stay open forever.
What Naval Is Really Saying
Strip away the tech specifics and Naval's core message is surprisingly timeless:
- Leverage has always gone to the people who understand the layer beneath the current abstraction
- Winners in competitive markets are almost always those who are best at something, not average at many things
- The goal was never to have a job. It was to create something. To have your material needs handled so your mind can work on what matters.
AI accelerates all of this. It doesn't change the underlying game.
"Become the best in the world at what you do. Keep redefining what you do until this is true." Naval said this years ago. It applies now more than ever.
Ask yourself:
- Are you using AI to do the same things faster — or to do things that were previously impossible?
- What's the one niche where you could be the best in the world, with AI as your ally?
- If the barrier between idea and product has collapsed, what have you been waiting to build?
The wand is in your hand. The question is what spell you're going to cast.
Listen to the whole podcast here -
