Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant

This conversation centers on a tech investor who maintains a balanced perspective on life, prioritizing happiness alongside success. He advocates for a multifaceted approach to life, rejecting the idea of early specialization and encouraging continuous learning and reinvention. The discussion touches on the downsides of social media's curated self-image, highlighting the importance of genuine intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of understanding over superficial achievements. Further topics include the misconception of the automation apocalypse, the flaws of universal basic income, and the challenges of navigating the increasingly polarized online landscape. Finally, the conversation emphasizes the significance of self-reflection, meditation, and finding joy in work through authenticity and passion.

two one boom all right we're live thank you very much for doing this man i really appreciate it i've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for uh quite a while now so it's uh it's great to actually meet you thanks for having me my pleasure my pleasure you are one of the rare guys that is uh you're a big investor you are um you're deep in the tech world but yet you seem to have a very balanced perspective in terms of how to live life as opposed to not just be entirely focused on success and financial success and tech investing but rather how to live your life in a happy way that's a it's a it's not balance yeah you know i think the reason why people like uh hearing me is because like if it's like if you go to a circus and you see a bear right that's kind of interesting but not that much if you see a unicycle that's interesting but you see a bear on a unicycle that's really interesting right so when you combine things you're not supposed to combine right people get interested it's like bruce lee right striking thoughts philosophy plus martial arts and i think it's because at some level all humans are broad we're all multivariate but we get summarized in pithy ways in our lives and at some deep level we know that's not true right every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought uh you know you're ufc comedian commentator podcaster but you're also more than that you're also father uh lover you know thinker etc so i like the model of life that the ancients had the greeks the romans right where you would start out and when you're young you're just like going to school then you're going to war then you're running a business then you're supposed to serve in the senate or the government then you become a philosopher there's sort of this arc to life where you try your hand at everything and as one of my friends says specialization is for insects right so everyone should just be able to do everything and so i don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing you've got one life just do everything you're going to do i couldn't agree more and i i think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is and then they think that that is their niche and they stick with it and they never change and they almost out of fear well it's hard because there's a you know the analogy around mountain climbing like if you find a mountain and you start climbing you spend your whole life climbing it and you get say two thirds of the way and then you see the peak is like way up there but you're two thirds of the way up you're still really high up but now to go the rest of the way you're going to have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path nobody wants to do that people don't want to start over yeah and it's the nature of later in life that you just don't know the time so it's very painful to go back down and look for a new path but that may be the best thing to do and that's why when you look at the greatest artists uh and and creators they have this ability to start over that nobody else does like elon will you know be called an idiot and start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for or when madonna or paul simon or you two come out with a new album their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that they've learned somewhere else and a lot of times they'll just miss completely so you have to be willing to be a fool and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over if you're not doing that you're just getting older yeah i mean i don't even know if it's willing to be a fool it's just to me that the most exciting thing is to try to get better at something to learn things i mean it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress and something that you're completely new to yeah i live for the aha moment that moment when you connect two things together that you hadn't connected together before and it fits nicely and solidly and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind that you can then hang other ideas off of that's what i live for yeah it's like curiosity fulfilled and it's what little children do too you know my little son is always asking why why why why why and i always try and answer him and half the times i realize actually i don't really understand why i just have a memorized answer for you but that's not really understanding yeah those are weird conversations right when you're you're talking to your kids and you say look uh the reality is i don't know a lot of things yes i've just memorized a lot of things and there's certain things that you just can't know yeah you realize that you know you have you have answers for a few things that you've thought through then you sort of have cover-ups like like trap doors like don't go here this is just a cover-up i don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is or how we got here yes and then you've got a whole bunch of memorized stuff because a lot of your uh a lot of intelligence these days just the external brain pack of civilization i know it's out there i know the answers are out there know how to look them up and i've memorized some of them and i i kind of understand how money works and the federal reserve prints it and what this government thing is but not really right so not good enough to teach it in university yeah yeah uh i think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of like have a like a one page a one cheat like a brief summary of what and the explanation for what this very complex subject might be tldr right don't give me the don't give me the lecture give me the book don't give me the book give me the blog post don't give me the blog post give me the tweet don't give me the tweet i just i already know yeah i got really fascinated by the way you read because i thought there was something wrong with me by doing that but you you don't really just read a book to completion you read and then you pick something else up and you just kind of go based on your whims whatever you're interested in well i was raised by my i was raised by a single mom in new york and she used the local library as a daycare center because it was a very tough neighborhood and so she would basically say when you get back from school go straight to the library and don't come out until i pick you up late at night so i used to basically live in the library and i read everything i read every magazine i read every pictograph or every book or every map i just ran out of stuff to read i just read everything so i got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity metric because really when people are putting up photos on twitter instagram of look at my pile of books that i'm reading it's a show-off thing it's a signaling thing yeah sure and the reality is i would rather read the best hundred books over and over again until i absorb them rather than read all the books right yeah because your your brain has finite information in a finite space you get enough advice it all cancels to zero there's a lot of nonsense in books out there too so i don't read anymore to complete books i read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity and it can be anything it could be nonsense it could be history could be fiction it could be science it could be sci-fi these days it's mostly sci-fi philosophy science because that's just what i'm interested in but i will read for understanding so a really good book i will flip through i won't actually read it consecutively in order and i won't even just even finish it i'm looking for ideas things that i don't understand and when i find something really interesting i'll reflect on it i'll research it and then when i'm bored of it i'll drop it or i'll flip to another book thanks to electronic books i've got 50 70 books open at any time in my kindle or ibooks and i'm just bouncing around between them it's also a little bit of a defense mechanism to how in modern society we get too much information too quickly and so our attention spans are very low so you get twitter you get instagram you get facebook you're just used to being bombarded with information so you can take that to you you can view that as a negative and be like i have no attention span or you could view that as a positive i multitask really well and i can dig really fast i can if i find a thread that's interesting i can follow it through five social networks through the web through the libraries through the books and i can really get to the bottom of this thing very quickly it's like the library of alexandria that i can research at my disposal so i i no longer track books read or even care about books read it's about understanding concepts yeah you brought up two awesome points first of all the the social media aspect of of books and basically anything it's like it's such a weird way to display your life because it's you know you're displaying the best aspects of your life