Joe Rogan Experience #1309 - Naval Ravikant

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Two, one, boom. All…

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:00

      Two, one, boom. All right. We're live. (slaps table) Thank you very much for doing this, man. I really appreciate it.

   2. NRNaval Ravikant0:05

      Oh.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:05

      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, to actually meet you.

   4. NRNaval Ravikant0:12

      Thanks for having me.

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:13

      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, that's an odd balance.

   6. NRNaval Ravikant0:46

      Yeah. You know, I, I think the reason why people like, uh, hearing me is because, like, if ... I- it's like if you go to a, 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?

   7. JRJoe Rogan1:01

      (laughs)

   8. NRNaval Ravikant1:01

      So when you combine things you're not supposed to combine-

   9. JRJoe Rogan1:03

      Right.

   10. NRNaval Ravikant1:03

       ... people get interested. It's like Bruce Lee, right? Striking Thoughts Philosophy Plus Martial Arts.

   11. JRJoe Rogan1:08

       Mm.

   12. NRNaval Ravikant1:09

       Uh, and, 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?

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:20

       Yeah.

   14. NRNaval Ravikant1:20

       Every human basically is capable of every experience and every thought. Uh, you know, you're a UFC comedian, commentator, podcaster, but you're also more than that. You're also a father, uh, lover, you know, uh, thinker, et cetera. 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, uh, as one of my friends says, uh, "Specialization is for insects," right?

   15. JRJoe Rogan2:00

       Mm.

   16. NRNaval Ravikant2:00

       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 gonna do.

   17. JRJoe Rogan2:10

       Y- I couldn't agree more, and, uh, I, I think that sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is, and then they think that that is their niche-

   18. NRNaval Ravikant2:19

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan2:19

       ... and they stick with it, and they never change, and they, they ... uh, almost of- out of fear.

   20. NRNaval Ravikant2:24

       Well, it's, it's hard because, uh, there's a, you know, uh, the analogy around mountain climbing, like if you find a mountain and you start climbing it 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 gonna have to go back down to the bottom and look for another path. Nobody wants to do that. People don't wanna start over.

   21. JRJoe Rogan2:46

       Hm. Yeah.

   22. NRNaval Ravikant2:47

       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, uh, and, and creators, they have this ability to start over that nobody else does. Like Elon will, you know-

   23. JRJoe Rogan3:04

       Mm-hmm.

   24. NRNaval Ravikant3:04

       ... 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 U2 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.

   25. JRJoe Rogan3:19

       Yeah.

   26. NRNaval Ravikant3:19

       And a lot of times, they'll just miss completely, so y- 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.

   27. JRJoe Rogan3:29

       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, uh, things. I mean, it's r- it's really exciting when you just have incremental progress in something that you're completely new to.

   28. NRNaval Ravikant3:44

       Yeah, I, I live for the aha moment, that moment when you connect two things together that b- you hadn't connected together before-

   29. JRJoe Rogan3:50

       Hm.

   30. NRNaval Ravikant3:50

       ... and it fits nicely and solidly, and it, it kinda 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. It's y-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Mm-hmm. …

   1. NRNaval Ravikant15:00

      but, you know, happiness and inner peace and calm and all that. Because what you want is, you don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high strung, high stress, and unhappy-

   2. JRJoe Rogan15:10

      Mm-hmm.

   3. NRNaval Ravikant15:10

      ... and leaving a trail of emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones.

   4. JRJoe Rogan15:13

      Which is more common than not.

   5. NRNaval Ravikant15:15

      Because you gotta focus-

   6. JRJoe Rogan15:16

      Yes.

   7. NRNaval Ravikant15:16

      ... and it's very hard to be great at everything. You wanna be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly, you know, quietly, uh, without struggle.

   8. JRJoe Rogan15:26

      Mm-hmm.

   9. NRNaval Ravikant15:26

      Uh, you wanna be the person who's the, when there's a crisis going on, you wanna be the calmest, coolest cucumber in the room, who still also figures out the correct answer.

   10. JRJoe Rogan15:35

       Mm. If you can be. You were-

   11. NRNaval Ravikant15:37

       Why not?

   12. JRJoe Rogan15:38

       You, one of the things that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is something that you can learn, and then you can teach yourself to be happy even just by adopting the mindset that you are a happy person and proclaiming that to your friends. And so you've sort of developed a social contract, "I'm a happy person," and then, "Well, I have to live up to that."

   13. NRNaval Ravikant15:57

       (laughs) Yeah, the, I've got hundreds of techniques. Uh, but the most-

   14. JRJoe Rogan16:00

       How did you develop that one?

   15. NRNaval Ravikant16:01

       Oh, well, there's just a, there's social consistency, right? Humans have a need to be highly consistent with their past pronouncements.

   16. JRJoe Rogan16:10

       Mm-hmm.

   17. NRNaval Ravikant16:10

       So the way I started my first tech company was I was in a, in, working inside a larger organization, and I told everybody that I was gonna go start a company. I was like, "I hate this place. I'm gonna do my own thing. I'm gonna be a successful entrepreneur." Six months pass, nine months pass, then people start going, "You're still here? I thought you were gonna go start a company. What's-"

   18. JRJoe Rogan16:28

       Hmm.

   19. NRNaval Ravikant16:29

       "... are you, are you lying?"

   20. JRJoe Rogan16:30

       Yeah, right.

   21. NRNaval Ravikant16:30

       Right? That was the implication. So we kind of know this, right? Social contracts are very powerful. Like if you wanna give up drinking, right, and you're not serious about it, you'll say, "I'm gonna cut back. I'm gonna have only one drink a night. I'm gonna only drink on weekends," you tell yourself. But if you're serious, you'll announce it on Facebook. You'll tell-

   22. JRJoe Rogan16:47

       Hmm.

   23. NRNaval Ravikant16:47

       ... all your friends. You'll tell your wife. You'll say, "I'm done drinking. I'm throwing everything out of the house. You will never see me drink again." When you say that, you know you're serious. So I think a lot of these are choices that we make, and happiness is just one of those choices. Uh, and this is unpopular to say, 'cause there are people who are actually depressed, you know, chemically or what have you, and there are people who don't believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them. It says, "Oh, now if I'm, you're saying if I'm not happy, that's my fault." I'm not saying that, but I'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice, health can be a choice, nutrition can be a choice, working hard and making money can be a choice, happiness is also a choice. If you're so smart, how come you aren't happy?

   24. JRJoe Rogan17:28

       Mm-hmm.

   25. NRNaval Ravikant17:28

       How come you haven't figured that out? That's my challenge to all the people who think they're so smart and so capable. If you're so smart and capable, why can't you change this?

   26. JRJoe Rogan17:37

       Mm. There are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being miserable. There, there's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other pursuits, that in, in their eyes it, it is, it is the, the peak, the pinnacle, the most important thing.

   27. NRNaval Ravikant17:59

       It's not a trade-off.

   28. JRJoe Rogan18:00

       Hmm.

   29. NRNaval Ravikant18:01

       I would argue that if... Now when I say happy, uh, happy is one of those words that means a zillion different things.

   30. JRJoe Rogan18:06

       Right.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Yeah. …

   1. NRNaval Ravikant30:00

      jobs will be created? It's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs will be created. If I told you 10 years ago that podcaster was gonna be a job or that, uh, you know, playing video games is gonna be a job or commentating on video games is gonna be a job, you would have laughed me out of the room.

   2. JRJoe Rogan30:15

      Yeah.

   3. NRNaval Ravikant30:15

      Those are nonsense jobs. But yet here we are. So society will always create new jobs. Civilization creates new jobs, but it's impossible to predict what those jobs are. So the question is how quickly is that transition happening?Well, the reality is even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse, we're at a record low unemployment. Explain that. Where's the transition?

   4. JRJoe Rogan30:37

      Donald Trump, that's how- (laughs)

   5. NRNaval Ravikant30:39

      All I'm saying is, it's- it's- it's... I don't see it in the numbers, I don't see it actually happening.

   6. JRJoe Rogan30:44

      Right.

   7. NRNaval Ravikant30:44

      The question is, how quickly can you retrain people? So it's an education problem. The problem with UBI, there's a couple of problems with UBI. One is, you're creating a straight... uh, you're creating a slippery slide transfer straight into socialism, right?

   8. JRJoe Rogan30:59

      Mm.

   9. NRNaval Ravikant30:59

      The moment people can start voting themselves money, combined with a democracy-

   10. JRJoe Rogan31:03

       Right.

   11. NRNaval Ravikant31:03

       ... then it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves are everything to the top 49.

   12. JRJoe Rogan31:07

       Yes.

   13. NRNaval Ravikant31:07

       And y- it just- it- it... and- and by the way, slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy. I know- I know people like saying that, but they haven't thought it through. Um, but the moment you start having a direct transfer mechanism like that in a democracy, you're basically doing away with capitalism, which is the engine of economic growth. You're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here. Uh, the estimate I saw for 15K a year, uh, basic income for everybody would be three quarters of current GDP. And of course, GDP would shrink in response as all the entrepreneurs fled. So you would essentially bankrupt the country. Uh, another issue with UBI is that people who are down on their luck, they're not looking for handouts. It's not just about money, it's also about status, it's about meaning. And the moment I start giving money to you and put you on the dole, I've lowered your status. I've made you a second-class citizen. So I have to give you meaning, and meaning comes from education and capability. I have- you have to teach a man to fish, not to basically throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say, "Here, eat the scraps."

   14. JRJoe Rogan32:05

       Mm.

   15. NRNaval Ravikant32:06

       So it doesn't solve the meaning problem. And lastly, it's nonsense to hand 15K out to everybody. You wanna means test people, there's no reason to give it to you and me. So you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't. So I think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have, and we provide those in abundance through technology-based automation. So get basic housing, get basic food, get basic transportation, get high- high-speed internet access, get a phone in your pocket. Those are the kinds of things you wanna give people. Um, and finally in terms of the rate of automation, I think we can educate people very quickly. One of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated. We view education as this thing where you go to school, you come out when you're out of college and you're done, no more education. Well, that's wrong. You have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up. There are ones that'll even pay you to go there now. Um, you can educate people en masse, and you can educate them in the creative professions. People who are talking about AI automating programming have never really written serious code. Uh, coding is thinking, it's automatic structured thinking. An AI that can program as well or better than humans is an AI that just took over the world. That's Endgame, that's the end of the human species. Uh, and I can give you arguments why I don't think that's coming either. Um, people who are think... and- and I know I take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate, but we're nowhere near close to general AI, not in our lifetimes. You don't have to worry about it.

   16. JRJoe Rogan33:39

       Even in our lifetimes? Really?

   17. NRNaval Ravikant33:41

       It's so overblown. Uh, it's- it's another... it's a combination of Cassandra complex, you know, it's fun to talk about the end of the world-

   18. JRJoe Rogan33:49

       Mm-hmm.

   19. NRNaval Ravikant33:49

       ... um, combined with a God complex, like people who have lost religion so they're looking for meaning in some kind of end of history.

   20. JRJoe Rogan33:56

       Right, right.

   21. NRNaval Ravikant33:57

       Um, the reason why I don't think AI is coming anytime soon is because a lot of the advances in so-called AI today are what we call narrow AI. They're really in pattern recognition, machine learning to figure out, like, what is that object on the screen or how do you find this signal in all of that noise. There's nothing approaching what we call creative thinking. Uh, to actually model general intelligence, you run into all kinds of problems. First, we don't know how the brain works at all. Number two, we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amoeba, let alone a human brain. Number three, there's this assumption that all of the, uh, computation is going on at the cellular level, at the neuron level, whereas nature is very parsimonious, it uses everything at its disposal. There's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing calculations that is intelligent that isn't accounted for, and the best estimates are it would take 50 years of Moore's Law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly, and probably 100 years before we can build a brain that can simulate inside the cells. So putting it at saying that I'm just gonna model neuron as on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic. Furthermore, I would posit there's no such thing as general intelligence. Every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in, so you have to evolve an environment around it. So I think a lot of people who are peddling general AI, the burden of proof is on them. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general AI. Instead we're solving deterministic, closed-set finite problems using large amounts of data, but it's not sexy to talk about that.

   22. JRJoe Rogan35:25

       If you- you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells or are you talking about recreating the actual mechanism? Like what- what- what is-

   23. NRNaval Ravikant35:36

       Yeah.

   24. JRJoe Rogan35:36

       ... going on inside cells and- and biological organisms?

   25. NRNaval Ravikant35:40

       Yeah, we just don't know how intelligence works.

   26. JRJoe Rogan35:43

       Right, we don't know what consciousness i-

   27. NRNaval Ravikant35:44

       We have no idea. So most of the AI approaches basically say we're gonna try and model how the brain works-

   28. JRJoe Rogan35:51

       Mm-hmm.

   29. NRNaval Ravikant35:51

       ... but they model at the neuron level, which is saying this neuron's on, that neuron's off-

   30. JRJoe Rogan35:55

       Right.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Yes. …

   1. NRNaval Ravikant45:00

      with my uncles, with my mom-

   2. JRJoe Rogan45:01

      Yes.

   3. NRNaval Ravikant45:01

      ... with my family, I'm a socialist. That's the right way to live a loving, happy, integrated life.

   4. JRJoe Rogan45:07

      Yes.

   5. NRNaval Ravikant45:07

      But when you're dealing with strangers, I mean, you wanna be a real socialist? Great, open all your doors and windows tomorrow.

   6. JRJoe Rogan45:13

      (laughs) Yeah.

   7. NRNaval Ravikant45:13

      Please, everybody, come take what you want. See how that works out. (laughs)

   8. JRJoe Rogan45:16

      (laughs) Yeah. Um, this idea of income inequality, that always strikes me as a very... it's a deceptive term, income inequality.

   9. NRNaval Ravikant45:25

      Well, flip it around. It comes from outcome in- inequality.

   10. JRJoe Rogan45:29

       Yes.

   11. NRNaval Ravikant45:29

       And the outcome inequality is there because you made different choices. Now again, going back, if it was because you didn't have the same opportunities, that's a problem.

   12. JRJoe Rogan45:37

       Yes.

   13. NRNaval Ravikant45:37

       So society should always try to give people equal opportunities. So for example, instead of basic income, what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric which said that every four years or every six years, or whatever it is, maybe it's every 10, you can take one year out, and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely. And you can go into any profession you like that has some earning power and output, uh, hopefully a creative long-term profession, and you can reeducate yourself. That would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying, "Now you're gonna be the dole for the rest of your life."

   14. JRJoe Rogan46:13

       Hmm. Yeah, just, you'd have to lead that horse to water and then make him drink.

   15. NRNaval Ravikant46:19

       It requires people-

   16. JRJoe Rogan46:20

       Yes.

   17. NRNaval Ravikant46:20

       ... to put in some effort.

   18. JRJoe Rogan46:21

       Yes.

   19. NRNaval Ravikant46:21

       But, you know, we can't all just sit around. (laughs) it's just not 100% true.

   20. JRJoe Rogan46:24

       Well, that's my, my perspective on income inequality. There's always effort inequality and, and thought inequality.

   21. NRNaval Ravikant46:30

       Exactly.

   22. JRJoe Rogan46:30

       I mean, there's just some people that are obsessed, and if those people become successful, it doesn't mean they stole from you. It just means that they put in the amount of energy and effort that res- that's required to reach where they're at.

   23. NRNaval Ravikant46:40

       And there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now where people say, "Well, it's 'cause you're privileged."

   24. JRJoe Rogan46:43

       Yeah, there's a lot of that.

   25. NRNaval Ravikant46:43

       It's like, "Well, you know, you know what the greatest privilege is? You're alive."

   26. JRJoe Rogan46:46

       Mm-hmm.

   27. NRNaval Ravikant46:46

       "85% of humanity is dead."

   28. JRJoe Rogan46:48

       Yeah.

   29. NRNaval Ravikant46:48

       "So how privileged are you? Then you're living in the First World, then you're, you know, you have four limbs," et cetera. So you can take that argument all the way. It's kind of a nonsense discussion.

   30. JRJoe Rogan46:56

       Well, it's a very weird progressive argument, and it, it, as it pertains to, uh, race is always a weird one, right? Because white privilege, to me, it... although it, you could look at what they're saying on paper, like, yes, yeah, I'm sure there's more Black people that are harassed by the police. I'm sure there's more Black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and, and the like.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:09:54

   Mm. …

   1. NRNaval Ravikant1:00:00

      just a really long tail of millions of independent people. So this idea of who's a journalist and who's not, you know, is Assange a journalist or not? Everyone's a journalist. That's the world that we're headed towards. I do think that extreme power, the most powerful people in the world today, and this is not well-known, but the most powerful people in the world today are the people who are writing the algorithms for Twitter and Facebook and Instagram because they're controlling the spread of information.

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:26

      Mm.

   3. NRNaval Ravikant1:00:26

      They're literally rewriting people's brains. They're programming the culture, and they're doing it very subtly. Like Google, I believe that, you know, one of their execs got up in front of Congress and the congressman asked him, uh, you know, "Do you manipulate search results?" And he said, "No, we do not manipulate search results." Really? That's your job. That is literally all Google does. Google has one job, which is to manipulate search results, to pull them out of the noise and rank them properly. And the al- the precise algorithms of how they do that is very hidden, very complex, but influences the hearts and minds of everybody, including all the voters. Now, if Google, Facebook, and Twitter had been smart about this, they would not have picked sides. They would have said, "We're publishers. Whatever goes through our pipes goes through our pipes. If it's illegal, we'll take it down, give us a court order. Otherwise, we don't touch it." It's like the phone company. If I call you up-

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:01:17

      Right.

   5. NRNaval Ravikant1:01:17

      ... and I say something horrible to you on the phone, the phone company doesn't get in trouble. But the moment they started taking stuff down that wasn't illegal because somebody screamed, they basically lost their right to be viewed as a carrier. And now all of a sudden they're, they've taken on liability. So they're sliding down the slippery slope into ruin...... slope inter- ruin, where the left wants them to take down the right, the right wants them to take down the left, and now they have no more friends, they have no allies. Traditionally, the libertarian-leaning Republicans and Democrats would have stood up in principle for the common carriers, but now they won't. So my guess is as soon as Congress, and this is, this day is coming if not already here, it might even been here today actually 'cause I just saw something related in the news, the day is coming when the politicians realize that these social media p- uh, platforms are picking the next president, the next congressman. They're literally picking, and they have the power to pick, so they will be controlled by the government.

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:02:12

      In, in what way? How do you think they're going to be controlled? Well, do you think they're gonna have to adhere to strict principles of freedom of speech?

   7. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:18

      No, no.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:02:19

      First Amendment.

   9. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:20

      Unfortunately, it's, unfortunately it's headed the opposite direction, right? (laughs)

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:02:22

       The opposite direction.

   11. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:22

       I, I, I wish it was freedom of speech. Uh, much more likely they're gonna be, uh, in the short to medium-term, they're going to be hauled in for hearings. Uh, they're going to be pressured massively, "Do this, don't do that." Um-

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:02:32

       My f- my concern about that is the, the hearings that I saw with Zuckerberg, those people were completely incompetent. They don't-

   13. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:37

       They are incompetent.

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:37

       ... seem to understand.

   15. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:38

       They don't. They don't. But they're just applying pressure. They're just trying to scare him so he'll do what they want. And-

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:02:43

       What do they want him to do?

   17. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:44

       They want him to basically suppress the other side.

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:02:48

       Mm-hmm.

   19. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:48

       So if you're right wing, you want to suppress the left wing. If you're left wing, you want to suppress the right wing. And if you just see where these companies are headquartered in Silicon Valley, um, all the censors, and that's really what they are-

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:02:58

       Mm-hmm.

   21. NRNaval Ravikant1:02:58

       ... they're censors working inside these companies that are just called, they're called by different names obviously, right? It's double speak. You call it-

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:03:04

       Mm-hmm.

   23. NRNaval Ravikant1:03:04

       ... the Department of Defense when it's the Department of War, so in this case, the Department of Safety and Trust when really it's the Department of Censorship. The censors are inside Silicon Valley, so it's going to reflect Silicon Valley's politics.

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:03:14

       Which is extremely progressive left wing.

   25. NRNaval Ravikant1:03:16

       Yeah.

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:03:17

       And if you're not that, you really have no place. There's, I mean-

   27. NRNaval Ravikant1:03:20

       That's right.

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:03:20

       Try being a conservative, an open conservative at Google. Good lord.

   29. NRNaval Ravikant1:03:25

       No, you'll get lynched. (laughs)

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:03:26

       (laughs) Yeah, it's just, it's crazy.

Episode duration: 2:11:56