Champion Story 23 | Navid Nathoo
Recorded on December 19, 2018
Biography: Navid Nathoo is Co-Founder of The Knowledge Society, a human accelerator designed for students aged 13-17. The organization's mission is to build the next generation of global leaders who have a strong sense of purpose, tenacity, resourcefulness, leadership, and vision. Prior to co-founding The Knowledge Society, Navid was the AI Product Lead for Box in California.
The Knowledge Society (TKS) has been recognized as a “school of the future” by the World Economic Forum. As a global organization, TKS has 1,200+ students and alumni from around the world who are working on solving the world’s biggest problems using emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, genetic engineering, quantum computing, blockchain, nanotechnology, and more.
Navid holds a Bachelor of Arts in Honors Business Administration (HBA) from Ivey Business School at Western University.
Thank you for agreeing to do this interview. To start off, I am curious about you as a person. What led you to the work you do now? What’s your story?
When my brother and I started building TKS [The Knowledge Society], I was thinking, "What's the ultimate purpose that I want to have in my life?" And my answer was: ‘I want to develop young people to solve the world's most important problems.’ I couldn't think of anything more important than this that was in my area of expertise and the things that I was passionate about. So I decided to work on that.
TKS has now evolved into a global accelerator for ambitious teenagers. We focus on emerging technologies, real-world skills, and most importantly - mindsets. In school, we aren’t taught about self-awareness. We aren’t taught to introspect. We aren’t taught to meditate and build mindfulness. We aren’t taught to understand what makes us happy and what makes us unhappy. We just kind of go through life learning math, science, history then get tested on how well we can remember the information. Learning about these subjects is fine, but I could ask Google any of these questions and get the answer in a second.
What I actually need to understand now is me. I think that high schools and universities should focus a lot more on understanding the self. So in TKS, we have a strong focus on understanding yourself and understanding the world and how it’s evolving.
I'm so curious to understand your personal journey. How did you get here?
It's interesting because this weekend I actually did a session in TKS about our journey, mental models, and our experiences.
When I was growing up, my family would travel to all these different places, like Greece and East Africa. My parents are from East Africa. When we traveled, it wasn't like tourism. We were just locals. So when I was in Greece, I remember we went to Athens, and what do most people do in Athens? They go and see all the cool structures and all that. What did we do? My mom put us in a school and for three days we were in a school with Greek kids. That was it. We were just attending school randomly. Looking back on it, I have no idea how she even thought of that or did it. Those are the types of experiences that we had.
Then when I was in university, my brother and I went to Bangladesh where we interned at Grameen Bank. We helped some of the world's poorest people learn about microfinance and building sustainable income. When we talk about entrepreneurship here, it's about starting unicorn companies. When we talk about entrepreneurship in Bangladesh, it's about buying a goat and selling the milk. That is also entrepreneurship and we forget that definition. I think entrepreneurship is the key to ending poverty in a lot of cases in third-world countries.
We lived in villages. We also lived in the city. But the city is not a great place, especially where we were living surrounded by bed bugs and cockroaches and all the food sickness. A couple of years later, we went to Tajikistan and we helped to expand Early Childhood Development (ECD) centers across the mountainous areas of Northern Tajikistan in the middle of December. It is so, so cold with snow and ice everywhere, and we're driving up mountains. Easily could've had one wrong turn and fallen off a mountain and died. It was a crazy scary experience and there are tons of stories and learnings from Tajikistan.
A few months later, or maybe a year later, I was in East Africa again. This time in Kenya and Mombasa, where we were teaching a program for high school students who came internationally and learned about sustainable development. We worked with slum schools. We worked with social business organizations, social enterprises, all of that cool stuff.
Then another year my brother and I went to Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan and we're with the University of Central Asia. We were doing a bunch of other cool stuff over there, and even just traveling around and seeing that part of the world. How many people say, "Hey, okay, I'm going to Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan for a month"? Not many people go to those types of places and get to meet the people there and have those types of experiences.
We can always make money but we can't always make time. When I think about the purpose of life for me, it's to get unique experiences that are meaningful. So I'm always trying to maximize unique, meaningful experiences. And then, being part of TKS, I'm constantly surrounded by unique, meaningful experiences. Like having a one-on-one with a student that's trying to cure breast cancer using nanotechnology.
That's such a unique experience. I don't think many people get to talk to a 15-year-old about how they’re using nanomaterials to sequence genes. It's pretty crazy to be involved with those types of things. Then flying to Dubai and Portugal and Vegas and all these places to watch these kids speak. That is a meaningful, interesting experience.
Can you explain what moves you? What's your why, if I can ask?
I want to solve the world's most important problems. I think a lot of people look at education and think it's cute. We’re complacent about the education system. I think the fact that is happening in society right now is one of the biggest problems in the world because the two things that drive us are education and media. The people that control education and media control the world. I think people forget education is the fundamental underlier of how we develop people. So TKS is not a typical educational institution. It is a human accelerator. We are focusing on human development, and that's why we don't just talk about AI. We talk about Socrates. We talk about insecurities and confidence building. We talk about the self. We talk about mental models.
This week they're actually looking into Charlie Munger, Ray Dalio, and Warren Buffet. What do they have in common?
They're all some of the richest people in the world, but what else do they have in common? They're also extremely philosophical. If you look at Charlie Munger, he talks about mental models. If you look at Ray Dalio, he talks about the self and failure. They don't just talk about investments and making money. If you want to make money, you'll just end up finding those things that they wrote about making money. But I focus on people and how we should understand people. We should learn about people. We have this in TKS every week, where students research a different successful person. Not successful in terms of monetary success. They have said that I am successful because I have achieved the goals that I wanted to achieve. I think that's directly correlated to happiness and/or impact, and these are those people.
What would you say to these people who are about to embark on this discovery?
I'll give you a quote, a person, and a methodology. The quote is from Epictetus and he says, "Your challenges make you great." The person to look into and follow on Twitter, watch videos, whatever, is Naval Ravikant. He's the founder of Angellist, and the methodology is stoicism. So for those people, your challenges make you great, so what's the implication? You should probably embrace those challenges because those are the things that are actually gonna get you to be that great person you want to be.
If you're not facing challenges then it's pretty much a good sign that you're not gonna achieve greatness. Naval, extremely smart guy. I highly recommend this podcast he did on the Knowledge Project called "The Angel Philosopher." Incredible podcast episode.
Then stoicism just helps you understand emotions better because that's really what this all is. When we're talking about mental health, it is emotional, so I think stoicism is one good toolkit to have for all entrepreneurs.
Thank you for your time.
You're welcome.