Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant
Uploaded: 2019-06-05T02:25:12.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-06-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-06-05. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant

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 quite a while now, so it's great to actually meet you.
Thanks for having me.
My pleasure. My pleasure. You are one of the rare guys that is, you're a big
investor, 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 an odd balance.
Yeah, you know, I think the reason why people like hearing me is because, like,
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, 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. You
know, you're a UFC comedian, commentator, podcaster, but you're also more than
that. You're also a father, 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 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're almost out of fear.
Well, it's hard because there's an analogy around mountain climbing. Like if
you find a mountain, and you start climbing, and 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.
And it's the nature of later in life that you just don't have 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 and creators, they have
this ability to start over that nobody else does.
It's 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 and to learn things.
I mean, it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in
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 that 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 talking to your kids and you say, look, the reality is I don't know
a lot of things.
Yeah. 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 answers for a few things that you've
thought through.
Then you sort of have cover-ups, 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, 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.
I know how to look them up.
And I've memorized some of them.
And I kind of understand how money works and the Federal Reserve prints it and
what this government thing is, but not really.
Right.
Not good enough to teach it in university.
Exactly.
Yeah.
I think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms of
like have a, like a one page, a one sheet, like a brief summary of what the
explanation for what this very complex subject might be.
TLDR, right?
Yes.
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.
Uh, 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.
I read 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.
Cause really when people are putting up photos on Twitter, Instagram of look at
my pile of books that I'm reading, it's, 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.
Cause your, your brain has finite information, uh, in a finite space, uh, you
get enough advice, it all cancels to zero.
Um, there's a lot of nonsense in books out there too.
So I don't read any more to complete books.
I read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity and it can be anything.
It could be nonsense.
It could be history.
It could be fiction.
It could be science.
It could be sci-fi.
These days it's mostly sci-fi philosophy science.
Cause 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.
Uh, and then when I'm bored of it, I'll drop it or I'll flip to another book.
Uh, 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.
Uh, 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 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 and
some sort
of a glass case.
You know, just, it's an unrealistic version of your life that you cultivate and
you curate.
And I'm, I'm as guilty of that as anybody.
Everybody's guilty of it.
I'm guilty of it too.
Yeah.
You know, I mean, I pose with my dog every time I run.
Yeah.
We're always signaling.
Yeah.
It's like, rather than really looking at yourself, you're looking at how other
people look at
you.
So it's like this one remove mental image and it's kind of a disease because
social media
is making celebrities of all of us and celebrities are the most miserable
people in the world.
Right.
Because they have this strong self image that gets built up.
It gets built up by compliments.
Every time somebody pays you or me a compliment and we're like, oh, well, thank
you.
Right.
Then that builds up an image of who we are.
And then one idiot comes along, one out of 10, one out of a hundred, and they
can easily
tear it down because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of
compliments.
And now you're carrying around this big weighty self image and it's just very
easy to be attacked.
And because you're, you're famous or you're well-known, people want to attack
you.
So being a celebrity is no good.
It's actually a problem.
Like one of my tweets is, and these are all reminders to myself, is you want to
be rich
and anonymous, not poor and famous.
Right.
There's benefits to it.
Of course, of course.
But we wouldn't do it.
It has unusual problems that you don't get trained for.
And you really will not understand unless you experience it.
You know, I was having this conversation with my wife.
We were talking about people that just come up to you and they don't care what
you're doing.
They don't care if I'm with my daughter, if I'm holding her, if I'm feeding her,
if we're,
you know, we're in the middle of an intense conversation.
She's crying.
She could be crying.
And some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture, doesn't
care.
His needs supersede the daughter.
And my wife was saying that before she knew me, she used to think that that's
just part
of the price of being famous.
That people, people like you, that's just part of the price of being famous.
And now when it interrupts her life and, you know, it interrupts the children
and it interrupts
friends.
And, you know, she, now she's like, this is annoying.
Like, this is not, this is not healthy.
This is not a smart way to interact with people.
And that people have this weird challenge, this weird thing that if you're, if
you become
famous, there's this weird challenge where people just want to come to you,
