The Most Life-Changing 20 Minute Video You’ll Ever Watch | Naval Ravikant

0:00 [Music] What is the meaning of life? Uh If I gave you an answer, if I said the meaning of life is to please God, well, which God? Okay, Judeo-Christian God. Well, okay, why that one? Why this thing? The problem is it's a why question. You can keep asking why forever. And you end up in a place called Agrippa's trilemma. And Agrippa's trilemma says that any questioning like this, why, will always end in one of three places. Okay? First is infinite regress.

0:35 Right? Why? Because of this. Why that? Why that? And it'll just keep going forever. The second is circular reasoning. Well, A. Why A? Because of B. Well, why B? Because of A. So, you might get trapped in that. Or the third is an axiom. And the most popular axiom is God. But it could be anything. Because of math, because of science, because of the Big Bang, because of simulation, right? These are all axioms. These are all just stopping points. So, you end up in one of these three dead ends, essentially. Right?

1:01 There is no answer. Uh the real answer is because. [Laughter] If there was a single answer, we would not be free. We would be trapped. Because then we would all have to live to that answer. Then we'd be borg-like robots, each one competing with each other to fulfill that single meaning more than the others. Back to signaling, like I'm better at it than you are. But luckily, there is no answer. So, you just do whatever you want.

1:26 The the currency of life, right? People think it's money. And yes, money is important, and it does let you trade certain things for time, but it doesn't really buy you time. Ask Warren Buffett how much time money can buy you, or Michael Bloomberg. So, you can't trade money for time. Money is not the real currency of life. And time itself doesn't even mean that much, because as we talked about before, a lot of time can be wasted because you're not really present for it. You're not paying attention. So, the real currency of life is attention. It's what you choose to pay attention to. And and and what you do about it. You can put your attention on the news, but that's how you're spending the real currency of life. So, just be aware of that. If you want to, that's fine. There's no there's no right or wrong here. Like maybe it is your destiny to pick something in the news, learn about that problem, adopt that problem, and solve it. But just be careful because your attention is the only thing that you have. And that can also be captured by your own past. By definition of wasted time, yes, I do want some material things in life. And I you know, there there are things that have more value than others within this life. But this life is very short and bounded. So, the true waste of time is the time that you are not present for, when you are not there for it, when you are not doing the thing you want to do to the best of your capability such that you're immersed in it. If you're not immersed in this moment, then you're wasting your time.

2:50 The meaning of life. It's funny that that's the basis of all existential angst, that you don't You don't know why you're here. And you have this feeling that it could be meaningless. You start going, "Jesus Christ, what? Am I just a little piece of this thing?" It's like Well, the answers to all the great questions are paradoxes. Yeah. So, for example, you're asking like, "Do I matter?" That's like really the question you asked, right? Well, how do I matter in this infinite universe? Well, you know, on the one hand, you're completely separated. No one will have your thoughts, your emotions, your feelings, your experience. So, your life is a single-player game. You're trapped inside your head, and you're just aware of a bunch of things going on, and that's it. On the other hand, I cannot say the word Joe Rogan without invoking the entire universe. Joe Rogan Alien comes along, says, "What's that?"

3:37 Joe Rogan. What's Joe Rogan? It's a human. What's a human? Bipedal ape. What's an ape? On the Earth. What's the Earth? Planet. What's a planet? Solar system. Where was the carbon made? Inside stars, right? It's like I have to create the entire universe to just say the words Joe Rogan. So, in that sense, you're connected to everything. It's inseparable. So, the answer to that question of do I matter is I am nothing and I am everything. And you'll find this with all the great questions. The answers are all paradoxes, which is why at some level, it's sort of pointless to pursue them to find a trite answer like I'm giving. But the act of pursuing them is actually really useful, because then it gives you certain intrinsic understanding in your life that brings a level of peace.

4:19 Uh there's an interesting challenge where I think people need to avoid becoming uh a suffering addict. Sort of using suffering as the proxy for progress, as opposed to the outcome of the suffering. Right? It's like I was in pain not eating the marshmallow. I was in pain doing this work. I have attached well-being and satisfaction to pain, not to what the pain gets me on the other side of it. If you define pain as physical pain, then it's a real thing. It happens, and you can't ignore it. But that's not what we mean by suffering. Suffering is mostly mental anguish and mental pain. And it just means you don't want to do the task at hand. Uh if you were fine doing the task at hand, then you wouldn't be suffering.

5:00 And then the question is, what's more effective, to suffer along the way, or just to interpret it in a way that is not suffering? You hear from a lot of successful people, they look back and they say, "Oh, the journey was the fun part, right? That was actually the entertaining part, and I should have enjoyed it more." You can go back into your own life and uh try to put yourself in the exact position you were in 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. And you try to remember, okay, who was I with? What was I doing? What was I feeling? And see if there's any advice you'd give yourself, anything you'd do differently. Just knowing what you know now in terms of your temperament and a little bit of age-related experience, how would you have done things differently? And I think it's a worthwhile exercise to do, but I'll tell you for me, uh I would have done everything the same, except I would have done it with less anger, less emotion, less internal suffering. Because that was optional. It wasn't necessary.

5:56 And I would argue that someone who can do the job uh at least peacefully, but maybe happily, is going to be more effective than someone who has unnecessary emotional turmoil. Right? The outcome may have been the same, but the entire experience of getting there. And and the journey is not only the reward, the journey is the only thing there is. So, whether you're happy or unhappy at the end, it tends not to last. Now, I don't want to be glib and say that, "Oh, there's no point in making money or being successful." There there absolutely is. Money solves all your money problems. So, it is good to have money.

6:28 Money can buy you happiness if you earned it. Because then along the way, you have both pride and confidence in yourself, and you have a sense of accomplishment, and you, you know, set out to do something and you were right. So, I I'll bet that lingers. And then, as I said, money solves your money problem. But I would say in general, this this loop that we run through um of desire, dopamine, fulfillment, unfulfillment. Like you you have to enjoy the journey. The journey is all there is, right? 99% of your time is spent on the journey. So, what kind of a journey is it if you're not going to enjoy it? You got to have it before the money.

7:00 >> Mostly, yeah. How did you get happy before the money? I started getting older, you know? I just realized like life is short. I'm going to die. Again, trite, right? Trite. Trite. >> Yeah. Well, Confucius had a great saying that uh you know, every man has two lives. And the second starts when he realizes he has just one. Wow. And I read that. It was one of those book-dropping lines. You know, it's like mic drop. Or another one is next time you get sick, you know, cuz everybody gets sick every now and then. It's like a happy person wants 10,000 things. A sick person just wants one thing. Right?

7:35 So, it's your it's your unlimited desires that are clouding your peace, your happiness. Have desires. You're a biological creature that stands up and says, "I can do something. I I move. I resist. I live." But just be very careful of your desires. This is the oldest, most trite wisdom. Desire is suffering. That's what it means, right? Every desire you have is an access where you will suffer. So, just don't focus on more than one desire at a time. The universe is rigged in such a way that if you just want one thing and you focus on that, you'll get it. But everything else, you got to let go. How do you shortcut that desire contract?

8:13 You could focus. You could decide that I don't want most things. I think we have a lot of unnecessary desires that we just pick up everywhere. We have opinions on everything, judgments on everything. Uh so, I think just knowing that those are the source of unhappiness uh will make you be choosy about your desires. And frankly, if you want to be successful, you have to be choosy about your desires. You have to focus. You can't be great at everything. You can't be great at everything. You're just going to waste your energy and waste your time.

8:38 At the end of the day, I I do think, even despite what I said earlier, life is really a single-player game. It's all going on in your head. You know, whatever you think, you believe, will very much shape your reality. Both from what risks you take and what actions you perform, but also just your everyday experience of reality. If you're walking down the street and you're judging everyone, you're like, "I don't like that person because of their skin color. I don't like that Oh, she's she's not attractive. That guy's fat.

9:04 This person's a loser. Oh, who put this in my way? You know, the more you judge, the more you're going to separate yourself. And you'll feel good for an instant, because you'll feel good about yourself. I'm better than that. But then you're going to feel lonely. And then you're just going to see negativity everywhere. The world just reflects your own feelings back at you. Reality is neutral. Reality has no judgments. To a tree, there's no concept of right or wrong or good or bad, right? You're born. You have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations and lights and colors and then you die. Yeah. And how you choose to interpret that is up to you.

9:36 So, this is what I meant, that happiness is a choice. If you believe it's a choice, then you can start working on it. And I can't tell you how to find it, because it's your own conditionings that are making you unhappy. So, you have to uncondition yourself. But you have to believe it's possible, and it is absolutely possible. Is fame a worthwhile goal? [Music] Uh it gets you invited to better parties. Gets you into better restaurants.

10:00 Uh, fame. So, fame is this funny thing where a lot of people know you, but you don't know them. And, uh, it does get you put on a pedestal. Uh, it can get you what you want uh at a at a distance. So, I wouldn't say it's worthless. Obviously, people want it for a reason. Um, it's high status, so it attracts the opposite sex. Uh, especially for men, it attracts the women. Uh, that said, it is high cost.

10:22 It means you have no privacy. Um, you do have weirdos and lunatics. Uh, you do get hit up a lot for weird things. Uh, and you're on a stage, so you're forced to perform. So, you're forced to be consistent with your past proclamations and actions, and you're going to have haters and all that nonsense. But, the fact that we do it, the fact that we all seem to want it, means that it would be disingenuous to say, "Oh, no, no, I'm famous, but you don't want to be famous."

10:47 Um, that said, I think fame, like anything else, is best produced as a or pursued as a byproduct of something potentially more worthwhile. Um, wanting to be famous and craving to be famous and being famous for being famous, these are sort of traps. Fame for fame's sake. >> Yeah, exactly. So, it's better that it's earned fame. So, generally, the higher up you rise by doing things for greater and greater groups of people, the higher level you're operating at, the more people you're taking care of, the more you sort of earn respect and fame. And I think those are good reasons to be famous. If if fame is empty, if you're famous just cuz your name showed up in a lot of places or your face showed up in a lot of places, then that's a hollow fame.

11:29 And I think deep down you will know that, and so it'll be fragile, and you'll always be afraid of losing it, and then you'll be forced to perform. Mhm. So, the kind of fame that uh pure actors and celebrities have, I wouldn't want. But, the kind of fame that's earned because you did something useful, uh why dodge that? You know, when I was growing up, there was this statement, I think it was Pascal, he said, you know, all of man's problems arise because he cannot sit by himself in a room for 30 minutes alone. And it's a disease. It's actually the road to misery. And now that I'm older, I realize like you actually want to, again, rest your mind. You want to learn how to settle into your mind. Imagine how effective you'd be if you weren't anxious all the time. Is is one of yours. And anxiety is the emotion du jour.

12:11 What have you come to learn about anxiety and dealing with it? So, anxiety and stress are interesting. They're very related. Stress is when uh like if you look at an iron beam, when an iron beam is under stress, it's cuz it's being bent in two different directions at the same time. So, when your mind is under stress, it's because it has two conflicting desires at once. So, for example, you know, you you want to be liked, but you want to do something selfish, and you can't reconcile the two, and so you're under stress. Uh, you want to do something for somebody else, you want to do something for yourself, right? These are examp- you you don't want to go to work, but you want to make money, so you're under stress, right?

12:47 So, you have two conflicting desires, and I think one of the ways to get through stress is to acknowledge that, "Oh, I actually have two conflicting desires." And either I need to resolve it, I need to pick one, and then be okay losing the other, or I will decide later. But, at least just being aware of why you're stressed can help alleviate a lot of stress. And then anxiety, I think, is sort of this pervasive, unidentifiable stress, where you're just kind of stressed out all the time, and you're not even sure why. And you can't even identify the underlying problem. And I think the reason for that is because you you have so many uh unresolved problems, unresolved stress points that have piled up in your life that you can no longer identify what the problems are. And there's this mountain of garbage in your mind, and it's a little bit of it poking out the top like an iceberg, and that's anxiety.

13:37 But, underneath, there's a lot of unresolved things. And so, you just need to kind of go through very carefully every time you're anxious. Like, if you can kind of identify and unravel and resolve these issues, then I think that helps get rid of anxiety. Uh, a lot of the anxiety's piled up because we move through life too quickly, not observing our own reactions to things. But, you reflect on the problems to observe them and solve them. You don't reflect on them to feel better about yourself.

14:02 >> If you're doing it to just feel better about yourself, that could be strengthening your personality and your ego, and could be creating a more fragile personality. You know, one one big anxiety resolver for me is just ruminating on death. I think that's a good one. You're going to die. It's all going to zero. Happiness is being satisfied with what you have. Success comes from dissatisfaction. Is success worth it, then? So, very complicated topic, but I always like the Socrates story where he goes into the marketplace, and they show him all of these luxuries and fineries, and he says, "How many things there are in this world that I do not want." And that's a form of freedom. So, not wanting something is as good as having it.

14:44 In the old story with Alexander and Dionysius, right? Alexander goes out and conquers the world, and he meets Dionysius, who's living in a barrel, and Dionysius says, "Get out of the way, you're blocking my sun." And Alexander says, "Oh, how I wish I, you know, could be like Dionysius in the next life." And Dionysius says, "That's the difference. I don't wish that I could So, Diogenes Diogenes. Diogenes says, "I I I don't wish to be Alexander."

15:05 So, two paths to happiness, and uh one path is with success, you get what you want, you satisfy your material needs, or like Diogenes, you just don't want it in the first place. I'm not sure which one is more valid. Um And it also depends what you define as success. If the end goal is happiness, then why not cut to the chase and just go straight for it? >> Mhm. Uh, does being happy make you less successful? That is a conventional wisdom. That may even be the practical earned experience of your reality. You find that when you're happy, you don't want anything, so you don't get up and do anything. On the other hand, you know, you still got to do something. You're an animal. You're here. You're here to survive. You're here to replicate.

15:42 You're driven, you're motivated. You're going to do something. You're not just going to sit there all day. Unlikely. Some people do. Maybe it's in their nature. But, I think most people still want to act. Is that a realization you think you could have gotten to had you have not had some success in the first place? [Music] At least for me, I always wanted to take the path of material success first. I was not going to go be an ascetic and sit there and renounce everything. That just seems too unrealistic and too painful. Uh, in the story of Buddha, he starts out as a prince, and then he sees that it's all kind of meaningless because you're still going to get old and die, and then he goes into the woods looking for something more.

16:22 The reason to win the game is to be free of it. So, you you play the games, you win the games, and then you get hopefully get bored of the games. You don't want to just keep looping on the same game over and over, although a lot of these games are very enticing and have many levels and are relatively open-ended. Uh, and then you become free of the game uh in the sense that you're no longer trying to win it. You know you can win it. Uh, and either you move to a different game, or you play the game for the sheer joy of it.

16:49 What is happiness? I think it's just basically being okay with where you are. Not wanting. Not wanting things to be different than the way they are. Not having the sense that anything is missing in this moment. I think most people, if you were to ask them when they were happiest for a sustained period of time, not for a brief moment, because pleasure can override happiness and create kind of this illusion of happiness. But, if you ask people when they were happy for a sustained period of time, they were probably doing some variation of nothing.

17:25 That's interesting. Because in the chase is this sort of lack, this contingency. That's right. But, then you get bored. If you just sit around all the time, you get bored. So, you want adventure, you want surprise. Like, there's the funny thought experiment of the bliss machine, right? Which is suppose I could drill a hole in your head and put electrode in, and they did this with monkeys, and I can put a wire in there, and I can stimulate just the right part of your brain, and I can put you in bliss.

17:52 You'll just be in bliss. Would you Would you want that? Then most people would say, "Well, I don't want that. I want meaning. I don't want just bliss. I want meaning." And you're like, "Okay, well, I'll put an electrode in there, and I'll give you meaning. How about that?" And if you kind of run this thought experiment long enough, I think most people realize, "Actually, what I want is I want surprise. I want an want the world to surprise me, and I want to wrestle with it in ways that are somewhat predictable, but somewhat not."

18:17 And you kind of end up back where you started. You know, in every moment, in everything that happens, you can look in the bright side of something, right? And so, I used to do that forcibly, and then I trained it until it became second nature. So, for example, like a friend of my wife's was over, and she when we were dating, and she took all these photos. She took like hundreds of photos, and then she sends them all to us. And my immediate reaction was like, "Why are you dumping hundreds of photos on my phone? I don't need hundreds of photos." That's a judgment. That was my immediate reaction. And then I could say, "Actually, how nice of her. She sent me hundreds of photos. I can pick the one that I like."

18:50 Right? There are two ways of seeing almost everything. There are a few things that are like high suffering, so you can't do that other than just saying, "Well, this is a teacher." Right? But, I slowly worked through every negative judgment that I had until I saw the positive in it. Now, it's second nature to me. I also realized that like what you want is you want a clear mind. So, you want to let go of thoughts.

19:10 Happy thoughts disappear out of head automatically, very easy to let go of them. Negative thoughts linger. So, if you interpret the neg- the positive in everything very quickly, you let it go, right? You let it go much faster. Um, simple hacks, get more sunlight, right? Learn to smile more, learn to hug more. These things actually release serotonin in reverse. They aren't just outward signals of being happy, they're actually feedback loops to being happy. Watch your mind. Watch your mind all day long.

19:36 Watch what it does. Not judge it, not try to control it, but you can meditate 24/7. Meditation is not a sit down, close your eyes activity. Meditation is just basically watching your own thoughts like you would watch anything else in the outside world, and say, "Why am I by that thought? Does that serve me anymore? Is that conditioning from when I was 10 years old? [Music]