Interesting Insight...

One of my favourite podcasts is Joe Rogan as he invites people of different backgrounds from movie stars to sports icons, artists, politicans, standup comedians, and even startup founders. The latest I watched is a long yet worth-every-minute interview with Naval Ravikant. You might wonder 'Who the hell is he?!'

He is an Indian American startup entrepreneur who AngelList which matchmakes early startups and angel investors. He has invested in over +200 early-stage startups with successes like Uber, FourSquare, Twitter, and Yammer. So he knows a thing or do about making it in life, at least financially, but then again he is also very solid mentally and stable emotionally. A nice combination that you seldom see in successful people.

Yes you might be hesitant after seeing the duration, but trust me, it will give you many golden nuggets to apply in life, not only work. As usual I put some insightful quotes that give me 'aha' moments. Thanks to Sonix.ai I don't have to spend hours rewinding the video and write them manually =D

One of the quotes that strikes me is from Confucius: "Every man has two lives. And the second starts when he realizes he has just one."

“You're not actually rich. So we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs. And intrinsic in that is that I have to work for somebody else. But the information age is breaking that down. So Ronald Coase is an economist who has this coast here and a very famous theorem, but he basically just talks about why is a company the size that it is. Why is a company one person, instead of ten people, instead of one hundred, instead of a thousand. And it has to do with the internal transaction costs which is the external transaction costs.

Let's say I want to do something -- let's say I'm building a house, and I need someone to come in and provide the lumber. I'm a developer, right? Do I want that to be part of my company? Or do I want that to be an external provider? A lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone externally versus internally. If it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally, I'll bring that in-house. If it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing, I'd rather keep it out of the house.

Well, information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally. It's becoming much easier to communicate with people. Gig economy, I can send you small amounts of money, I can hire you through an app, I can rate you afterwards. So we're seeing an atomization of the firm. We're seeing the optimal size of the firms shrinking.

It's most obvious in Silicon Valley. Tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets. So what look like the small little vacation rental market on Craigslist is now suddenly blown up into Airbnb. It's just one example.” (from 25:00~)

"Oh, your meditation technique is wrong, mine is right." But really, all it is is the art of doing nothing. Okay? And it's important because I think when we grow up, right? All this stuff happening to you in your life. And some of it you're processing, some of it you're absorbing, and some of it you should probably think a little bit more about and work through, but you don't, you don't have time.

So it gets buried in you. It's all these preferences and judgments and unresolved situations and issues. And it's like your e-mail inbox. It's just piling up, e-mail after e-mail after e-mail that's not answered, going back 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And then when you sit down to meditate, those e-mails start coming back at you. "Hey, what about this issue? What about that issue? Have you solved this? Do you think about that? You have regrets there? You have issues there?" And that gets scary. People don't want to do that. Like, "It's not working. I can't clear my mind. I better get up and not do this."

But really what's happening is it's self therapy. It's just that, instead of paying a therapist to sit there and listen to you, you're listening to yourself. And you just have to sit there as those e-mails go through one by one, you work through each of them until you get to the magical inbox zero. And there comes a day when you sit down, you realize the only things you're thinking about are the things that happened yesterday, because you've processed everything else. Not necessarily even resolved it, but at least listen to yourself, and that's when meditation starts. And I think it's a very powerful thing that everybody should experience and that's when you arrive upon the art of doing nothing." (from 01:19:50~)

"Exactly. So, now what I realized is that the biggest mistake was memorization. Right? Because when you're actually trying to live your life in congruence with reality, you want to have a deep understanding what you do and why you do it. And so it's much more important to know the basics really well there is to know the advanced. Knowing calculus wouldn't help you today, doesn't help you in business, doesn't help you in most things. But knowing arithmetic really well will help you, really, whether it's at the corner grocery store counting change, to figuring out the value of your podcast business, to figuring out how to do the probability math on, you know, some action that you want to take.

So understanding basic mathematics cold is way more important than memorizing calculus concepts. And the problem is -- and this is true of, I think, all reasoning, it's much better to know the basics from the ground up solid foundation of understanding, a steel frame of understanding, than it is to just have a scaffolding, we're just memorizing advanced concepts.

This is why that a lot of people I'm sure that you listen to who are really smart, they use a lot of jargon and you can't quite follow their reasoning. You don't know how they're putting things together and you -- this deep down suspicion, "They don't even really understand." Right? So if you look at the most powerful thinkers especially the ones where money or life is on the line, they have to understand the basics really, really well.

Richard Feynman, the famous physicist was able to -- he had this piece in one of his lectures where he takes you from counting numbers on your hand, all the way to calculus in four pages of text aurally but written down to four pages of text. And it's a complete unbroken logical chain that takes you through geometry, trigonometry, pre-calculus, analytic geometry, graphs, everything, all the way to calculus. He understood numbers at a core level. He didn't have to memorize anything. When you're memorizing, it's an indication that you don't understand. You should be able to re-derive anything on the spot. And if you can't, you don't know it." (from 01:32:45~)

"You're (Joe Rogan) involved in that whole scene (UFC - mixed martial arts competition). You just have a unique set of skill-sets. So because of this unique what I call specific knowledge, because of the accountability that you have with your name, because the leverage that you have through your media, you're a money making machine. I'm sure at this point, I can make you start over tomorrow, wipe out your bank account. You'd be rich again in no time. Because you have all the skill-sets.

So once people have those skill-sets, and the beauty is the way you've done it, is you don't have any competition. There's no substitution. If Joe Rogan were to disappear off the air tomorrow, it's not like random podcast number twelve would step in and fill that thing. No. It's just gone. So the way to get out of that competition trap is actually to be authentic.

The way to retire is actually to find the thing that you know how to do better than anybody. And you know how to do that better because you love to do it. No one can compete with you if you love to do it. Be authentic and then figure out how to map that to what society actually wants. Apply some leverage, put your name on it, so you take the risks, but you gain the rewards. Have ownership and equity in what you do and then just crank it up." (from 1:51:25~)

"And actually that principle applies larger than just travel. It applies to life in general. This -- One of the secrets to happiness is to really embrace what you're doing in that moment. That's trite. But where that comes from is saying, "I only want to do actions that are complete in and of themselves," right? If I'm looking for some ulterior motive down the line, it's not gonna materialize. And if you think it is, maybe -- even if it does, it'll be pretty short lived. Anything you want in your life, whether the car or whether it's a girl or there's plenty, when you got it, a year later, you're back to zero. Your brain had hedonically adapted to it, and you were looking for the next thing." (from 02:07:50~)

"Yeah, we all go through this learning. It's, you know, it's riding the Ferris Wheel of Life. It's like you get out the bottom like I want to get the top. That's so exciting. You ride it up, you get a little dopamine rush and get little serotonin. Then you ride it back down as that wears off and you need another high. Then you ride it back up and ride it back down. In fact the more highs you get, the harder it gets to go around the wheel, the more bored you get of it, the harder it goes to go back up." (from 02:08:50~)

(Joe Rogan asked: "So what lights your fire now? Like, what gets you motivated to do things into act?) "(Naval answered art because) Art is this creativity. It's just, anything that's done for its own sake. So what are the things that are done for their own sake? There's nothing beyond. Loving somebody, creating something, playing, art -- to me, creating business is a play. I create businesses early stage because it's fun, because I'm into the product. Even when I invest, it's because I like the people, I like hanging out with them, I learn from them and I think the product is really cool. So these days, I will pass on all kinds of great investments because I'm like I just -- the product's not interesting, it's boring. I'm not gonna learn anything." (from 02:09:15~)

"It's a goal. When I was younger, I used to be so desperate to make money that I would done anything. If you'd shown up and said, "Hey, I got a sewage trucking business and you're going to go into that," I said, "Great, let's do it. I want to make money." Thank God no one gave me that opportunity. I'm glad that it went down the road of technology and science which I genuinely enjoy. And so I got to combine my vocation and my avocation. I mean, what are you doing? You're playing. You're having fun." (from 02:10:10~)

"I'm always "working" but it looks like work to them but it feels like play to me. And that's how I know no one can compete with me on it, because I'm just playing 16 hours a day. And if they want to compete with me, and they're gonna work, they're gonna lose, because they're not gonna do it 16 hours a day, seven days a week." (from 02:10:40~)