Naval’s podcast with Joe Rogan has been the most inspiring piece of content that I have come across in 2019 so far. I re-watched the podcast twice and picked fifteen topics that Naval covers throughout the podcast that particularly caught my attention. In this post, I will summarize his key statements and beliefs in regards to these fifteen topics.

This summary is not in the order the topics appear in the podcast. Instead, it is focused on the topics and Naval’s statements regarding these topics. The wisdom that Naval shares in this podcast is mind-blowing and combines ancient Buddhist beliefs with modern thinking inspired by the principles behind Silicon Valley’s success.

Naval, who describes himself as a hero among young male geeks (should I feel guilty as well?), delivers compelling wisdom. The podcast is very condensed despite its considerable length.

1) Art

Naval’s concept of art covers anything that is done for its own sake. For him, art is creativity. Things that Naval describes as art include loving someone, creating something, and playing. Naval’s own work feels like play to him. For that reason, Naval is always working. It may look like work to others, but it feels like play to him. Once you reach a stage where your work feels like play, then no one can compete with you anymore.

Naval is already an accomplished person who has achieved wealth and happiness. Art is what keeps Naval motivated after having achieved these objectives.

On a personal note, I realized that writing is art to me. It is one of the few occasions on which I do creative work, and I do it for its own sake. In that sense, if you’re wondering why I have written this post, then Naval has kind of given you the answer. At the same time, summarizing what Naval said helps me better understand what he actually means.

2) The Meaning of Life

The meaning of life is an issue Naval brings up and enjoys raising. He notes that the question is more interesting than the answer. Everybody should explore this question on their own.

According to Naval, there are three approaches to explaining the meaning of life. The first approach is to infinitely ask “why” without reaching a conclusion. The second approach is circular and refers from reason A to reason B and back to reason A. The third approach is an axiom such as God, science, a simulation, or any other explanation that gives the answer itself.

Naval concludes that there is no answer to this question, and that is the most exciting part about it. If there were a single answer, we would not be free. We would be trapped because we would all need to live under the maxim of this answer, meaning that we all would have one task to achieve. We would need to maximize something, and our lives would be reduced to a simple function. Under these conditions, we would end up like robots, and the beauty of life would be entirely lost. The fact that there is no answer to this question gives us the ability to do whatever we want and makes us free to live a life based on our own judgments.

While there is no answer to this question, it is useful to pursue the question because the act of learning about the underlying philosophical problems gives you inner peace.

3) Trifecta

Naval believes there are essentially three things that every human being wants: fitness, wealth, and happiness. Naval believes that anyone can be taught to achieve these things. All three of them are a choice and can be achieved by anyone.

Naval believes that these three areas need to be in balance to truly succeed in life. He suggests following a long-term approach and putting in the effort to achieve them. Naval explains that there are people who are better qualified than he to give advice about fitness and nutrition. However, regarding the other two goals — wealth and happiness — Naval provides further insights throughout the podcast.

4) Wealth

According to Naval, everybody can get rich. He states that there is no get-rich-quick scheme — that is just someone else trying to get rich off you. To achieve wealth, Naval believes you need to own a piece of a business, equity, or brand. He advises you to focus on a niche in which you can be authentic and perform very well. These niches are best suited for creating wealth, particularly when you have little or no competition.

Naval then goes on to explain that most smart people eventually realize that possessions don’t make them happy. As you get older, you realize that there is no real happiness in material possessions. However, a lack of them is what causes real problems. What you really want is freedom from money problems.

There are essentially two ways to achieve wealth. You can either achieve it by lowering your lifestyle or by making enough money to accomplish your desired lifestyle.

Naval’s statement is backed by basic economic theory, even though he doesn’t explicitly mention it. The law of diminishing marginal utility precisely explains his underlying logic behind wealth accumulation. As you get wealthier and wealthier, the additional utility that you derive from spending your money gets lower and lower. For instance, the first $1,000 that you earn per month gives you tremendous utility because you will need the money to cover your basic human needs such as housing and food. The second $1,000 is still very useful but already a little less so than the first $1,000. As you approach a monthly salary of $10,000, an additional $1,000 per month no longer has a big impact on your well-being. Your utility does not increase linearly with the income you earn.

Once you have achieved a certain economic comfort, you eventually end up aiming for happiness. Because being rich is not what makes you happy, Naval shows a different path towards happiness. And that path starts with understanding desire.

5) Desire

Naval’s thinking regarding desire is strongly influenced by Buddhist wisdom. Buddhist literature states that the entire life is suffering. The suffering is caused by desires that can never be fulfilled. Naval defines desire as a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy. He argues that despite it being natural to have desires, you should not have too many of them because desires cause suffering. He suggests letting the majority of your desires go so that you are more calm, peaceful, and relaxed.

Naval advises you to focus only on one desire and let go of the others. Once you free yourself from desires, you can achieve happiness and peace. A happy, calm, peaceful person will make better decisions.

Naval describes desires as something that does not provide the path to happiness. Whatever it is that you want, as soon as you get it, you will be back to zero. Your brain will soon adapt to the new reality, and you will have new desires. Therefore, the state of happiness is not achieved by satisfying your desires.

6) Happiness

According to Naval, life is a single-player game. Whatever you think and believe will shape your reality. The world reflects your feelings back to you. Reality itself is neutral and has no judgment.

Happiness is a choice. Once you start believing it is a choice, you can start working toward achieving it. Naval says that he became happy before he obtained wealth. He says that he achieved happiness gradually — with time, he became happier and happier.

A wall with quotes by Naval

Naval works slowly through all the negative judgments that he has until he starts seeing the positive side. However, he acknowledges that there are some situations where you can’t do that; Naval classifies these situations as a teacher. Naval states that positive thoughts move quickly out of the mind, while negative thoughts persist longer. By thinking positively, your thoughts go away faster.

Naval says that there are some simple hacks to achieve happiness. Some of them include exposing yourself to more sunlight, smiling, hugging, spending more time in nature, and watching your mind all day long.

Naval offers a very interesting quote by Confucius, which is in line with other ancient Asian beliefs that influence his thinking. Confucius is said to have said that every man has two lives, and the second one starts when he realizes he has just one. Acknowledging your mortality and starting to make the best of your life today is a powerful shift towards a better life.

Naval believes that the struggle many people experience in their lives is a good thing. The struggle is what eventually creates meaning. It is harder for children who are born rich to find meaning in their life than it is for those who are born not rich. The interesting things that you do in your life are most often associated with the sacrifices you make and the hard things that you accomplish.

If you have achieved things such as a great job or a perfect partner very early on, then these things may not have sufficient meaning for you. Peaking too early in life and achieving things easily is not a good foundation for giving you purpose in life. Unlimited desires may be another obstacle to achieving peace and happiness.

7) Meditation and Spirituality

Naval describes our era as a time of great freedom where we are no longer attached to anything: neither religion nor country nor tribe. This means we are essentially free. However, he goes on to describe something that he calls the modern struggle. The modern struggle is represented by companies that are weaponizing sugar, social media, and porn against the individual. You, as an individual, need to find a way to resist this weaponization. However, doing so is tricky because you are on your own and no one will help you.

Because we have everything in abundance, we need to retreat and become more like an ascetic to cope with these external pressures. The solution is to turn things off and disconnect.

To escape the modern struggle, Naval suggests meditation. To practice meditation, he suggests being on your own, sitting down, closing your eyes, and making sure you are in a comfortable position. He believes you need to learn to enjoy this state to be on your own without any external interruptions.

For Naval, meditating is the art of doing nothing. As you start meditating, you are first processing things from the past. At some point, you will arrive in a state where there is nothing. While meditating, Naval himself is not putting in any effort; he is not even focused on breathing. Essentially, the objective of every meditation technique is witnessing. Naval believes you need to do this for one hour a day for at least 60 days in a row until you get meaningful results.

Naval has managed to achieve psychedelic states through meditation. The place he is looking for through mediation is peace, which is the state where he wants to end up.

Meditation is watching your thoughts and reflecting on why you are having those particular thoughts. In that sense, you can meditate all the time. For people who are constantly stressed and depend on external resources to calm down, Naval suggests they use that resource. He states that if you need your glass of wine to de-stress and calm down, that is probably better than flying off the rails.

8) Education

Naval believes that education is the key to managing a fast-growing world. He sees education as a tool to create a world in which everyone can be well-off.

With technological progress, we have witnessed the emergence of new education forms. Naval does not believe that we will run out of work. Instead, he believes that people will adapt to automation and the changing requirements of the labor market. Education will play a key role in this adaptation.

Naval shared his experience of learning new concepts. He believes that when you are memorizing something, that is an indication that you don’t understand the concept behind it. Instead, you should be able to recall everything on the spot if you truly understand the concept behind it.

Naval uses his Twitter account to write down concepts as an anchor. These anchors help him recall concepts that he once understood.

Naval highlights that in today’s world, we have an abundance of educational resources available. However, once he finds a really good book, he only reads one page in a night. Then he spends hours and hours thinking about the content and chasing down more information about it.

9) Artificial Intelligence

Naval’s thoughts on artificial intelligence may be controversial and contradictory to certain other prominent technology evangelists. At the same time, they are very refreshing and relieving because they reduce our fears of AI.

Naval believes that we are nowhere close to near general AI. General AI can be described as a machine that can perform any task that a human can perform. Naval believes that this won’t happen in our lifetime.

According to him, the AI that is used today is mostly a narrow AI. It is better summarized as pattern recognition and just called artificial intelligence because that’s a fancy name. Nothing of what is currently conducted is approaching creative thinking. What we are currently doing is solving deterministic finite problems using large sets of data.

Creativity is the last frontier of AI, and we are far from achieving it. Naval believes that this is great news. All the non-creative work will be taken care of by machines. What will remain for us is to be creative. His beliefs about AI are overwhelmingly optimistic and in sharp contrast to the potential doomsday scenarios that other technology evangelists are predicting.

10) Reading

Naval states that you should feel no pressure to read books from the beginning to the end. It is completely fine to start a book in the middle and only read the interesting passages. If there is a book that does not resonate with you, it is best to move on. Naval believes that it is better to read really good books over and over again than focus on the total quantity of books that you read, which he discards as a vanity metric.

As you read, do not read with the objective of completing books. Instead, read to satisfy your intellectual curiosity. Read for a deep understanding of concepts and watch out for interesting ideas in the books you read. As you come across them, reflect on the most intriguing ideas. Research them beyond the book you are reading. It is totally fine to read various books at the same time, switch between them, and complement your reading with additional research on the internet.

Naval concludes that attention spans are very low. Therefore, do not track the number of books you read. Instead, focus on understanding concepts because this is the real benefit you can obtain from reading.

11) Work

Naval defines work as a set of things that you have to do but that you actually don’t want to do. If you enjoy doing these things, Naval would define them as play and art but not work.

It is very important for Naval that you set an hourly rate for yourself and that you outsource everything below that rate. If the outcome of what you do is not worth your hourly rate, then don’t do the work. Naval gives international business travel as an example. Naval figured out that this kind of travel would not pay off for him based on his hourly rate. Therefore, he does not travel for business unless he has a genuine interest in visiting a specific place that goes beyond work.

Naval describes modern knowledge workers as athletes who should work like lions rather than like machines. To conduct your work effectively, you should train hard, sprint, rest, reassess through feedback loops, train even more, sprint again, and rest.

The reward for your work will not be linear. Linear output is something that makes sense for machines. What you do, with whom you do it, and how you do it are the decisive factors that really make the difference.

Our time gives you incredible opportunities for leverage through which you can multiply your actions a hundred times. Examples of leveraging your work are writing code or broadcasting content.

Humans originally worked for themselves before the Neolithic revolution. The industrial age created fabrics and hierarchies and led to the emergence of large company agglomerates and the standardized 40-hour work week. We live in this reality today that is all about employment and jobs with the notion of working for someone else. Naval states that there are two great addictions: heroin and a monthly salary. However, Naval believes that the digital age is going to reverse the evolution of work, and people will go back to working more independently.

Information technology is making it easier and easier to do transactions externally through outsourcing, which means that the optimal size of the firm is shrinking. Naval expects that ten to fifteen years from now, high-quality work to be available in a gig economy fashion. People will take as much work as they want. Gone will be the time of fixed work schedules — that is, working eight hours per day with a limited holiday allocation. Work will become more remote and be on your own time and in your own way. Naval believes that this is the kind of work in which we are most productive. Through these developments, people will eventually go back to work for themselves. According to him, it is your highest calling to start your own company.

Naval values smaller companies more than larger ones. He defines them as small groups of creative bunches of individuals setting out to do missions. Naval believes that people in smaller companies are happier. Naval does not believe that we will run out of jobs due to automation. He believes that new jobs will be created, and they will be better and more creative jobs.

12) Retirement

According to Naval, retirement is when you stop sacrificing today for some imaginary tomorrow. You have achieved retirement when today is complete by itself. He also relates retirement to a financial component and defines it as having enough money to cover your expenses based on your burn rate. To achieve this goal, you can either decrease your burn rate to zero and become a monk, accumulate enough wealth to cover your needs, or do something you love that you don’t feel like you are doing for the money.

Essentially, retirement is a state in which you have enough money to sustain your desired lifestyle. It may be scary for many people, including me, to no longer feel the economic pressure of pursuing work or independent economic activities that pay you a financial return. However, it is extremely empowering to reach a state in which you can choose what to work on, how much time you want to invest in work, and when and where you do your work. As Naval points out, it is the suffering that creates meaning. If your entire life consists only of play and fun, you will need to find an alternative approach to create meaning.

13) News

For Naval, news has been commoditized in the digital age. With the internet, everyone has become a journalist.

He states that the internet creates one giant aggregator for everything; examples of such aggregators are Google, Amazon, Uber, Airbnb, and Upwork. This digital transformation is essentially the process of getting rid of intermediaries. Next to the giant aggregators, we observe the emergence of small individual brands. The ideas that Naval presents in this context are very well summarized by David Perell in the first chapter of his blog post on mass media, “What the hell is going on?”

14) Social Media

Since the emergence of social media, people would rather look at how other people look at them than look at themselves. Social media is making celebrities of all of us, and celebrities are the most miserable people in the world. Even though this statement is hard to believe, it must be somehow true, given the high suicide rate among celebrities, with Avici as a recent example. According to Naval, you should want to be rich and anonymous, not poor and famous.

Social media is designed to be addictive. The best of a cohort of graduates are paid very high salaries to make social media as addictive as possible. The brightest minds of our generation are trying to figure out how to create mechanisms so that you can’t put your phone down and keep refreshing and clicking again.

Naval believes that the most powerful people in the world today are those who are writing the algorithms for Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Instagram. These people are controlling the spread of information, and they are doing it subtly. All the algorithms that these companies use are hidden and secretive but influence the hearts and minds of everyone.

Naval says that if you want to see who rules over you, see who you are not allowed to criticize. According to him, being active on social media and engaging in politics is the activity that least brings you peace.

15.) Politics

A political party comes with a set of positions. Every political party is a tribe. If you are a critically thinking and authentic individual, you cannot be in such a party. As soon as you start signaling out of that bundle of positions, you will get attacked. It is obvious that there will be a position that the party takes that is against your own principles. Adhering to all the beliefs of a political party makes you an unclear thinker. Eventually, you will be forced to defend the values of your group that are not necessarily your values. If you defend something that others believe but are not convinced about yourself, then you are no longer authentic. Your beliefs are socialized — that is, taken from other people.

If you are a critical thinker, then it makes the most sense for you to stay away from politics — or at least away from political parties. Individuals who seek political power are often not people with strong principles. In many cases, they are showmen with very flexible beliefs. They adjust to what their party or the majority of people want and defend it. An example of this is Boris Johnson, who waited until the last minute and took his time before eventually announcing that he would support the Leave campaign in the lead up to the Brexit referendum. Another very good example is Angela Merkel, who repeatedly changed her position fundamentally and suddenly, particularly after the Fukushima nuclear incident. In the end, the people who get to the top of politics are entertainers who love media attention. Donald Trump was a media personality before he entered the political arena, and Barack Obama is now doing a bunch of media activities since he retired from politics.

Naval points out that many people try to engage in politics with the objective of succeeding so that their people will have won. This victory is an illusion because political beliefs in a society slowly change, mostly by a shift in the demographic composition of the society.

What you can conclude from Naval’s analysis is that if you are a critical and independent thinker, engaging in political parties will not make you happy.

Conclusion

Many of the beliefs and conclusions that Naval shares resonate with me a lot based on my own experiences and thoughts. Naval is able to summarize and present his ideas in a very clear, mindful, and aesthetically pleasing way.

Besides the summarized topics, Naval also discusses universal basic income, capitalism, socialism, and a number of other issues. Naval believes that capitalism is a positive-sum ethical game. However, he is aware of the shortcomings of our economic system. Some of the statements that Naval makes in the podcast may be considered political statements. Nevertheless, he does not want to be put on one political side or the other because he is an independent critical thinker without socialized beliefs.

Note that this blog post summarizes what I took away from Naval’s podcast. It presents my summary and interpretation of his words and may not always be 100% aligned with Naval’s original thoughts, and it may not be the content that is most valuable for you. To derive the most meaning out of this podcast, I recommend watching it on your own:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qHkcs3kG44

There is also a good tweet storm summarizing the podcast:

https://twitter.com/loopuleasa/status/1136957843452678144

Finally, there is another solid blog post summarizing the podcast:

https://podcastnotes.org/2019/06/05/naval-joe-rogan/