How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky) | Eric Jorgenson on Naval Ravikant

Somebody said to him, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?" And he's like, "Oh, I can apply my intelligence to this problem and I can break it down." Desires are contracts you make with yourself to be unhappy and to get what you want. If you can learn the discipline of having few desires carefully chosen, you spend a lot more time being content, being happy, not holding a strong, burning desire that is like making you unhappy every minute until you've achieved something. This episode is an important step back from a world that increasingly wants to tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We're bringing on my friend Eric Jorgensen, one of the best writers of our time on brilliant billionaires and philosophers like Naval Ravacan. He's spent the last 10 years studying him, now we're gonna steal his homework. Naval has a line that's very jarring about how a salary is like the most addictive form of heroin. The three most addictive substances, he's heroin, carbohydrates, and monthly salary. Like, not push to get you out of the comfort zone. Are you a risk taker? Are you exposed? Or are you kind of like a lamb in the paddock? Can you get really rich on a 9-5? What I took from Naval building a book when I was like 30 is like, you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue all the way to like winning the game, give the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that like, not if it matters. One of my favorite quotes from Naval is, forget rich versus poor, white color versus blue. It's now leveraged versus unleveraged. What does that mean? Leverage is to me one of the most important things that Naval talks about. If you don't understand leverage, a lot of things about the world and the outcomes that you see are not gonna make sense and you're gonna get like bitter and confused at doing it unfair. But it's actually just the normal workings of leverage. And so as Naval explains it, there are many forms of leverage. The modern forms of leverage are code, media, and capital. Zero marginal cost and uncapped and accesses this sort of global marketplace. And it's really unintuitive. Like we're not programmed to think that way. And so understanding that we're in the age of leverage and it totally changes like what businesses can be built and where your priorities are. And we're seeing unbelievable businesses get built that sort of have this understanding of leverage of the core of them. It's so funny. You say that I was at this YouTube thing this week. And so I have top of mind. But one of the creators there, I think it was Mark Rober who has like a huge science YouTube channel. And he did something with like the Discovery Channel or another science channel. And so the CEO of YouTube was joking with them and he was like, yeah, it was really nice of you to do that thing with Discovery Channel. It's incredible to co-lab with smaller channel. Their viewerships like 10x smaller than Mark Rober's on YouTube. And so it's interesting like this idea of capital, code, and media. How do you judge whether you have those kinds of leverage or you don't if you're a normal person? Ideally you want your earnings, your inputs and your outputs to be separate from each other. You don't want to have to work an hour to earn 10 bucks or 100 bucks or a thousand bucks. You want to earn independent of your input. If you're in a normal job, your linear inputs and outputs. If you are working on a podcast, you record the same podcast, you publish it. Whether 100 people listen to it or 100,000 people listen to it, you put the same amount in, but you get an unbelievably higher reward from doing the same amount of work. If you're investing in a company, whether you invest $100,000 or a million dollars is the same decision, but the rewards for doing it are an order of magnitude higher. So you want to look for these places where your inputs and your outputs are uncorrelated. And the more leverage you are, the bigger that difference it's going to be. And the way you get leverage is by winning a smaller leverage game. So start small and just let those things accruing incrementally. Like we talked about Elon Musk, he's the most leverage person alive. And it's because people choose to give him capital. People choose to go work for him. People choose to support his companies and invest in him. And they do that because they trust his judgment. They trust that he's going to use that well and give them good rewards for doing so. Yeah, it's so interesting because in today's age, it's even more normal. Like it used to be maybe even like 30 years ago, I would say. Most people had none of this, right? You had no money capital. You had no code. You weren't an engineer and you had no media because you weren't CNN. So it was like, unless you were a top 10% or 1% in any of these three, you had zero. But now everybody could actually have all three really easily. So you can literally just ask yourself, am I making money and thus am I taking my money and investing in other things? That's leverage. Can I code no, but now I've got all these AI tools. So I can now use code. That's leverage. And media, do I own CNN? No, but I actually have a podcast or I have an email newsletter or I have an Instagram account that I talk about. And so yeah, I actually am levered with all three. And then it's degrees of them, but it's a wild time to be alive because for the first time ever, any human really, at least in most established worlds, can have all three of them for almost a zero dollar cost except capital. Yeah, if you can get a device that can get on the internet, like you can enter the global meritocracy essentially. And like most people aren't even trying. And most people are just on the consumption side. And so if you do, if you start creating, if you start coding, you start trying to build products like and you think about it in terms of where do you get those uncoordinated inputs versus outputs and try to build a business, that's where you're going to get those exponential returns. And this is true in every industry, right? Like I think people, you know, running a plumbing company would probably say like, yeah, that's all well and good for a podcaster or a hedge fund, but like I run a plumbing company. Every business is just, their growth is determined by how levered they are and how elegant they are and how long those levers can get. And Neval has a great, it's a long thing. I will take you all the way through it, but he has to go step by step all the way through the real estate industry where, you know, you could be a day laborer working on a house. You could be a general contractor. You could be a real estate investor. You could be a developer of big properties or you could take the final leap into like maximum leverage of external investors and technologists and everything build Zillow, right? And so the difference between a day laborer and Zillow is just like how leveraged are you and how comfortable are you using each of those different forms of leverage? It's a really good point. I actually even found that before. I'd be interested to put names on the tiers, you know, because every industry actually has that. Everyone has the day labor all the way to the CEO, to the level of CEO of what kind of company you are, to investor, to like, I don't know, capital allocator plus risk taker. So it's actually an interesting way to think about the world. I think a lot of times people just think, am I entry level? How much do I make? But they don't think about what is the game, the company that they're in is playing too. And I feel like Neval is the king of contextual awareness. Like, you know, understanding the game that you're playing. There would be a fun game like books to build of just like breaking down the business from the beginning all the way up the whole ladder. Because we hear these incredible stories of people who like entered as a dishwasher in the restaurant industry and over the course of their career built like a 50 restaurant chain. And those people, those are people who just sort of figured out, you know, what is the person above me know that I don't know what tool did they know how to use? What are they able to access? Like, how can I figure it out? How can I take that next step, that next risk and climb all the way up the ladder? And Neval talks about something that is kind of controversial these days. He says hard work is overrated and judgment is underrated. What do you think he means by that? I think the like, you know, the Archimedes quote, like, give me a lever long enough in a place to stand and I can move the world like one totally correct decision can dominate everything. And Neval is really, he's an elegant thinker. I think he's like really enamored with the idea of like, where can you flip one domino and everything takes care of itself? Which is like this incredibly kind of like zen business thing. What's the smallest action I can take to create the biggest result? It's very different than somebody like Elon or Goggins or whatever, who are just kind of like trying to get the most out of themselves possible. But I think that's a really interesting approach. It's a good tool for thought to just be like, yeah, how easy could this be? He describes himself as lazy, which I don't think he is. But he's like, you know, I just want the greatest reward for my effort. And I don't want to expend effort wastefully. Yeah. There is something to this idea of how you become incredibly ambitious while also being lazy. And lazy and like the things that you will allow to take up your time, because if you're crazy, particular about the things that take up your time, then you have time to figure out where to flick that domino. Like that's going to live right free in my mind actually. Like you could spend a lot of time in the middle. And you will never actually have the full effect. Then if you spent the time to find the beginning. And the real thing is like hard work has a limit eventually. Like you can't work 100 hour weeks forever. Hard work is, you know, respectable and admired. And yes, we should work hard. But hard work can only get you a two or three X improvement in what you're doing. And if you don't learn to improve how you're working or the elegance or improve your leverage, like learn where you can have those 100 X, you know, where one hour of work or 10 hours of work can have a 10 X or 100 X impact. Like you're going to be kind of stuck in that two to three X improvement. Yeah. Window no matter what you do. I think the part that then becomes hard. So then you're like, okay, that makes sense. Of course I'd want to find, you know, the full Grum. Or of course I'd wish to find the first place to flick the domino. But then the question becomes how do you know? And like, Nval has great sort of critical thinking frameworks. But what does he mean by live like a lion? If you go see a lion on Safari, like they're just chilling most of the time. 30, 45 hours at a time. There's laying there and sleep and whatever. And then when they are both hungry and see, pray, they leap into action, like maximum adrenaline, full sprint, unbelievable violence and attack and take down this thing and have an incredible feast. And then just lay there and sleep again for like 30 hours. And I think Navale's sort of learned wisdom is that this is how he now approaches projects. Like he'll see an opportunity, see an investment. Just kind of be like reading and casually working, learning, going about into life. And then an opportunity will arise or a person will make themselves known. It's kind of like, all right, we all leap into action. We got to have a sprint. We got to start a company. We got to make an investment. We got to get up to speed on this really, really quickly. But if you were mired in something else, just like plotting along on not the biggest opportunity, rather than having the space to jump on the best opportunity when it came about, then you might miss it. And that's the live like a lion kind of mindset. Is like you want to have the space to evaluate and attack the most important thing at any time. You know, it's interesting you talk about that because one of the things I've been obsessed with lately is people sitting in meetings that they shouldn't be in. And it's a big phenomenon. And you know, my team will all sort of chuckle about this because I will often say, like, you guys don't have anything to do in here. Why are you still in here? But what I haven't gotten to yet is where they self-select to leave the meeting because there's so much social normative behavior of just, no, no, I'm supposed to be here from this time to this time. And I'm paying attention. And I'm sitting here. And it's like, why are we being such good little girls and boys? Instead, you really should be saying, you pay me. And we are here to do this mission. And if I am sitting here doing this thing that is not top priority, I'm actually wasting your time, our money, our mission, all of it. But somehow we've all become way too politically correct to say anything like that. And so we just sit in meetings that we know our ways of time. We tell nobody. And we think that's normal. And then to see how I might like it. I feel like there's probably two types of person in that meeting. One is like, this looks like work. And it's the easiest thing I can do today. So I'm just going to sit in here and like, I'm going to be in a meeting. I'm doing my job with the lowest effort possible. And then there's somebody else who's like sitting there in their skin is crawling because they're like, I hate this. I'm useless. I feel like I can't leave. I've got more important work to do. Like, please let me out of here. Yeah. But both are caught in the like, if you make the first step of meeting, like, what is the point of this meeting and who belongs in it? Like, who has a hand in the solution that we're trying to arrive at and spend the first five minutes of a meeting on that and make it a cultural norm to dismiss people from meetings that are not like, I don't have a good case for being here. And great. I want to be somewhere else. Yeah. It seems like such a no brainer. But I think, even at our company where I say people, say this to people, I don't think we've done a good enough job giving them permission to beat it. You know, I feel like Cody, I don't think this meeting is relevant to me. I don't think I've ever gotten mad at anybody for that. But I'm like, oh, yeah, right, right, get out of here. Yeah. There's a dynamic where people, I think, want to be in the same room as the person, the CEO, the leader, or whatever, like that. Those meetings are an opportunity for FaceTime probably in some ways that are like more about the political game than the output. I've actually never thought about that. That's a very good point. I think it's another screen that happens like the more successful you get, the more you forget that, you know, your presence can have negative or positive effects. Yeah. I think I'm going to have to be a little bit more careful because I'm going to have to be a little bit more careful that is to look at the things that you did as a kid. Like when you were like 10, 12, ask your family, ask your friends, one of the things that you were naturally drawn to. What are the things that you do in spare time? What are the things that you do even though nobody's paying you to do it? Or what's the 10% of your job that you really, really love and find yourself doing it more than you should. These are all maybe signs that you're drawn to do a particular thing. And I've experienced this in my life is like the stuff that you do for fun or without expectation of reward is sometimes turns out to be the most rewarding thing. - Do you do this book? You didn't even make money on this, really, right? Didn't you give away most of the money from this book? - We've given away like five million copies of this book, but we've also sold millions. So I have made a lot of money, but when I wrote it, I fully expected like 1,000 people to buy this thing. I thought it was gonna be a passion project for Navale nerds like me that would never make any money, but I would have learned a lot by doing it. I did learn a lot by doing it, and I'm still completely shocked that people of all ages and races and countries and languages are reading this thing and finding revisiting it and finding joy in it. And I'm delighted by it. I think it's just a testament to how far reaching some of the principles that Navale puts forward are. - Yeah, what about this idea of, he talks about in the book, no one is going to beat you at being you. - Yeah. - And specific knowledge. And how important it is that you have specific knowledge in what you're doing. What does that mean? And if somebody is struggling to figure out what they should do, how do they figure out if they have specific knowledge? - I think, I mean, the word should is a thing that he talks about of like, there is no shoulds, but it's so hard to train yourself out of that, right? We spent the first 20 years in our lives sitting in classrooms all being taught the same thing and being assessed on the same thing. And so then we go out into the work world and we're sort of like, all right, what's the job? What am I told to do? And what you find in successful people is that they're rewarded to the degree that they are unique and authentic and excellent. Actually, they're rewarded to the degree that they're unique and excellent. And that is usually downstream of them being authentic, right? Like your business works because you have fun being you and you're authentically interested in all these concepts and building businesses and buying businesses, you buy crazy stuff all the time. And you have so much fun telling everybody about it. And I don't know how many of them work out, but it doesn't matter 'cause it's all fun to watch, right? Like, I remember watching you buy vacant land in Texas, abandoned land in Texas at an auction or something. I was like, that's just cool. And you're clearly just having fun doing it. And like, for whatever reason, I'm sure it would be a nightmare for plenty of people, but I have funds, meaning thousands of hours, like breaking down very specific useful ideas and articulating them and finding support or arguments for them and like putting them all together in this thread that helps me remember it and helps other people identify with it. Like, these are examples of specific knowledge that are outcomes of just how we chose to live. And we just continue to do things that felt authentic and unique to us and people responded to it. And we sort of iterated through like, "All right, I had fun doing that and the world enjoyed it, so I'm gonna do it again." And I'm gonna do it in a new way and I'm gonna continue it. Like, and we both ended up in unique careers that would have been very difficult to predict or define ahead of time. There were no blueprints for, you know, this is not a existing genre, like your particular combination of businesses is not one that there's a ton of historical precedent. For example, you said I was gonna build a real estate brokerage and I'm gonna do it using all the best practices of real estate brokerage, right? Like, this combination of media and capital is like new and emerging and dynamic and everybody's kind of doing it in a new way. So I think that mixture of like authenticity and excellence, like me yourself, do it to the best degree you possibly can and specific knowledge will sort of come downstream of that. I know you build early on and he's like, you know, become this incredible student of your industry. And if you set 10 people down and said, like, "Are you all gonna go study the history of venture capital?" The build the early, great venture capital. Those 10 people are all gonna study different things or you're gonna make different branching decisions all the way down and one might become an expert in the history of biotech or green tech or fintech. Like, those people will make authentic human decisions that makes them ever more unique. And one of my, like, the degree that you specialize, even if you set out to be a generalist, you will end up becoming a specialist. A sufficiently like advanced generalist becomes a unique specialist and you should aspire to be a unique combination of authentic traits performed to excellence. And like, those are the careers that you are going to enjoy and products that are gonna end up being unique. - It says to your point, maybe Scott Adams talks about the skill stack, right? Which really is a lot of what Naval talks about, too, I think, in different ways. He would say specific knowledge and Scott Adams would say skill stack and then he would talk about how you could either go become Michael Phelps and do 10,000 or really 100,000 hours in order to become Michael Phelps or just do hundreds of hours at totally disparate tasks that when you stack them together, create an unfair advantage. And so I think that's super interesting. I'm gonna sort of back to this idea on sheds because you have very interesting takes on it and you've caught me twice on it and Naval is very aggressive on sheds, too. Like, do you believe in the word shud? Does Naval Rava comp believe in the word shud? And how should we speak to ourselves? - So shud is one of those words that just indicates to you that you will. might be feeling more of an obligation than an interest in something. And so you hear people talk about like, ah, I should go workout. Like, yeah. But also your relationship to that thing is now like, I don't want to end the voice in my head is telling me that I have to. And the common thing is like, I get to workout. So just like change your phrasing about, you know, you have the opportunity to go do this thing that you want to do. There's a bunch of funny, like little reveals in language that like when you're paying attention to people's relationships with things, um, that's in there. But like, I should go to work. I should, you know, follow my family's footsteps. I should pursue this opportunity. Like, we all have those and it just listening for them. Um, yes, it's either an obligation or an imposition from some version of yourself, uh, that you don't necessarily agree with or some external voice that is like speaking to you more loudly than your inner voice. Yeah, that's really good. I mean, he talks about he has like a pretty brutal, heuristic about if you're faced with a difficult choice, you should do need to think it can't even say the word. But if you're faced with a brutal, brutal, brutal choice and there's not an obvious one, then don't do either. Like what would he say about when to do something or when not to do something? There's one from his personal trainer, which is hard choices, easy life. Um, which like in the short term, if you take the hard path, you will sort of naturally bias, you'll come up with an excuse not to work out. You'll come up with an excuse not to have the hard conversation. And so if you find yourself in that position where there's something hard to do and there's something easy to do, if you just become good at making yourself do the hard thing, your life will become better as a result. There's probably something magical that's on the other side of something you're avoiding. And if you just build a habit of tackling that, a lot of problems will take care of themselves. Um, that's one. A U.P.O.G. has a similar thing, competitively, which is just like run upstairs. Um, you know, if you're fighting a big company, do something really hard that they're going to find it very difficult to imitate. Yeah, especially as the world gets less and less moated. Like it feels like every year, actually, there's more and more opportunity to do things in business, you know, you used to have to have a ton of capital to launch a media company and now you have to have none. You used to actually have to have a lot of money to invest in startups now because of Angelist, you could have a very small amount. Everything has gotten kind of progressively easier in society or I guess easier to access in society. And so if you don't do the hard thing, uh, there's hard today. Well, you know, you're definitely not going to make it next year because that thing that's hard today will probably be even easier next year. So it's a good way. We say here at our company, one of our slogans is choose your hard. And so like no matter what, anything in life is going to be hard. Being employed is hard. Being an owner is hard. Uh, choose your heart. If I'm going to have a better outcome than the other working out as hard being fat as hard. Yeah, you got to choose one. Yeah. And, um, you know, he also talks about, I love the way he talks about luck. And in particular, he talks about four types of luck, blind luck, luck through persistence, spotting luck and built luck. Can you break down some of those types of luck? What does it all mean by these different types? Yeah. And it ties in well with the sort of authenticity and specific knowledge because the ultimate form of luck is to like be the kind of person that luck is your destiny, right? Like opportunities just before you. Um, so the, the blind luck is, is the first, right? Which is what most people think of. Like, did you walk over a hundred dollar bill today or not? Did you pick it up? Did you notice it? Um, what was the second? The second is, uh, luck through persistence. Luck through persistence. Okay. So like if you happen to walk across a hundred dollar bill versus if you went out on the beach with like your, you know, your metal detector and like spent hours looking for something. That's, you know, your persistence. These are simple metaphors. But like, did you happen to run into somebody who wanted to, you to paint their house today or did you knock on 200 doors and find three people who wanted you to paint their house today? But that's also true because there's like a lot of studies now that show that you actually will not see lucky things if you think you are an unlucky person. Oh, yeah. If you've seen, I just was reading a study of the other day where they gave two groups of people, uh, you know, blind study, basically one group of people was told varying things to the degree of their lucky good things happen to them and they are the type of people that believe that the other group was the type of people who say things are good things don't really happen to me. I'm not super lucky. Then they were given a task and the task was to go and look through a booklet for how many times some word was said. So I don't know bad. And it's like go through and look for how many times bad is said and tell us at the end how many times bad is said and then you'll get a thousand bucks or something when you find the, you know, 217 variations or like whatever the number is. And so the first group that thought that they were not lucky, they went through diligently and they got to the 217 number, they told them okay, 217 and the other group goes through it and on like page five there's a little paragraph that says you can stop searching there's 217 instances of bad. And this other group can like finished it in like 60 seconds and this group took 10 minutes on average. Like their vision was the same. Like they came from sort of the same socioe demographics, but one associated that's not lucky and one associated that's lucky. And so I thought that was fascinating. I love that. You know. And so explain to me spotted luck and then built luck. Spotted luck is just the ability to sort of position yourself at a place where luck happens to you, right? And so this is, you know, maybe the highest order decision is like where do you live? Like what's your exposure? What's your surface area to look? If you say you can't find anybody, like ask out on a date like okay, how often are you like going to parties? Have you left your house? Like where are your habits? How many companies have you started? How many companies have you met with? Like how many customers have you approached? Like these things are, you can control your surface area to luck essentially. And then the final form where like luck becomes your destiny is you just become so uniquely known for a thing. Like you reach such a final form of awareness and excellence and authenticity that luck finds its way to you. And like more and buffer is an example of is it lucky that he gets a phone call? So like by a bank and do a deal of financing that like nobody else has the capital or the reputation or the speed in order to do like he has become the only person on earth who can get that lucky. And that's a crazy example, right? But like there are many smaller forms of that. So your reputation, your mindset, your positioning essentially like that is a very long-term game. And so I feel like what I'm actually teaching a lot of us is that all these things that seem like unfair magic, a.k. leverage, luck are actually really curateable. And you can change your ability to have more of them as opposed to be a victim of the world around you. And so like luck can be manufactured. Yeah. In particular, if you're young and I feel like it's hard to appreciate that how lucky some people are getting is actually 20 years of like carefully grown seeds and reputation and relationships and effort. And like you shouldn't expect to get as lucky as somebody that has created that much surface area and covered that much ground. But you can sort of match their pace or outpace them by you know being thoughtful about your luck surface area. Well, wouldn't it all say about how to become luckier? Like how could you become luckier? I think that the path towards luck is you can follow those things up. You can sort of go from one level to another. You can do luck through persistence and efforts that then becomes a little bit more of luck through or I have a feel for the dynamics. And if you really if you gain enough information through the persistence and reputation through the persistent luck, you'll have better information on where the luck might be headed. And you can sort of meet it there and position yourself for it. And if you do that enough times over time, like you become the only person you can do it. So if we use the real estate example that it uses for leverage and just like take that is like, you know, if you're starting off as a general contractor or a handyman, like you don't just wait around for jobs, you go knock on doors. If you knock on doors and do a great job, you'll start working more and more and get higher and higher quality referrals. If you are doing a bunch of work in one particular neighborhood, you start to learn like maybe that neighborhood is up and coming and a new development is going to move in. And then you can you can by land ahead of the development or you can invest in the person who's coming in to like renovate this neighborhood. And if you do that a few times, then you become, you know, the person who builds the developments in the city, you've done the last five, they've all been successful. And so of course the sixth development is going to like pick up the phone and call you directly and you don't even have to pitch anybody, right? And I bet you if you go through like all of the a list of Hollywood right now, you can map their career phases to those different forms of luck. You know, there's people that like when you need a specific type of actor or character, you're like, well, Christopher Watkins, the only person who can do that role that's who everybody fills that gap with. If you need a certain kind of movie directed, like it's and you want it to be top tier, it's going to be one of 10 people and those people had all like grind and then iterate and position themselves and then they became like a singular person who is like gets the phone call. Like it's Christopher Nolan lucky when he gets the next is E-Lex, but as an entire career becoming the person. - That's true. And I feel like that's true in everything in life. It's like a mixture of data collection that you do, and then data collection that other people do on you. And like when those two things come together, you get luckier. And so in the beginning, all you can do is collect as much data and do as much action as possible, which would be like play a lot of poker hands in the beginning and really learn what the cards mean and what the percentage likelihood is. And oh, most people that tell right there that they don't on their faces actually a thing. And oh no, it's a really bad probability if I play that hand. So I probably shouldn't play that hand over time. And I need to put more chips in because if I don't, it turns out over time I should take him to a little risk. Isn't good. And so I think most people in life don't think about life as like a series of hands or a series of like data collection points, but that is all that it is. So like if whatever your life is today is really a reflection of like how many hands have you played, paid attention to, looked at the data on, and then iterated on. And like that's it. Yeah, I'm not, I was a little impatient early in my career. And I'm not advocating for patience or slowness or anything. But my perspective now in my 30s is that, you know, the first 20 years of your career is an audition for the second 20 years of your career. And like, if you look at Walter Isaacson, right? Like did he get lucky when Steve Jobs called him? It was like, hey, I'm, I've got a few good years left. Like I want you to write my biography. It's because Isaacson spent the first 20 years of his career writing permissionlessly, writing biographies of Da Vinci and Einstein. Like great figures, but they were historical. Anybody could have written those. He didn't have unique special access necessarily. But by doing that work, he became the person who got that call and by doing Steve Jobs's biography, he got the Elon Musk biography. And so like, you know, these are permissionless books. I've spent the first 20 years of my career, like building permissionless curations of public material. And like, I don't know what's gonna happen in the second half of my career, but I imagine that it will look like luck. And it's only because people have been reading my books for 20 years and have a respect for what they have done that I will get opportunities that, you know, no other author will have had. - Such a good point. What does Navale say about, or, and I don't know if he does, but I have a recency bias. Lately, I've noticed a lot of creative people saying they don't do creative free work. Meaning like they'll wanna apply for a job and not wanna do a project. And our company, one of the rules is like, we have to see your work because resumes and history has so little correlation to good and a fit. There's almost no correlation. And that used to be that if you worked at some of these big companies, you were like, there's a pretty high indicator that you might continue to have like a certain output or level. And since then, we've realized in fact, that sometimes those are the worst people to hire. And now you almost have to talk me out of if you went to Harvard and worked at Google why you should work here. And so now we make everybody do a creative project. And I don't like to pay people for it. Not because of the expense. I don't like to pay people because I want to know how they feel about doing work with us. Are they really interested? Or are they merely kind of curious? Because if they're kind of curious, there are many companies that go be curious at, but it's not this one. And so I'm curious, like you've done so much free work throughout your career, both like writing and collating things and doing lots of stuff on the internet. What, how do you feel about doing free work in order to get eventual super-highly paid work? And two, is there anything Neval says about that? I'm very happy to do free work that I assign myself. I don't know if I have this same relationship to like free work that somebody else wants me to do for them. If it's along my natural curiosity maybe, but kind of a natural independence is like when you're doing things for their own sake, you do them at a different level. But if I really want to job at a company, absolutely, I feel like I would do a project to get a job. Sure. I mean, Neval is a fan of doing things for their own sake. And he has an interesting story he tells that I think about all the time. Where he's like the most lucrative year of my career, where I created the most value, I didn't think I was working. I told everybody I was retired. And I just kind of like cleared my calendar and did what I wanted and followed my curiosity. And like in retrospect, that was outrageously productive. And I didn't know it and I didn't intend it. I didn't trick myself into it. I just followed my curiosity and it all worked out. So I think like many things, sometimes awards are best pursued indirectly. And so like this book is excellent. If people see excellence in it is not because like somebody told me to make it great, it's because I cared about it enough to invest a lot in making it great of my own choice and volition. Like I'm not a perfectionist in any other area of my life, but like when it comes to putting out a book with my name on it that I think might be different in people's lives, I'm like utterly meticulous. - And of all has a line I loved, which is desires a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. - Yeah. - What a line. - What does that mean? And how do you integrate that into your life? Or how did you see him do it? - Yeah, he's, his happiness arc is so interesting, right? So he had like achieved all this incredible material success, he built successful companies, he'd been an incredible investor, he was well known in Silicon Valley. And he sort of looked around and was like, I, all the things that I thought would make me happy, do not, I have them and they do not seem to have made me happy. So maybe I need to just make a study of happiness. And like somebody said to him, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? And it's like, oh, like I can apply my intelligence to this problem and I can break it down. And so we started reading, you know, the most of the happiness canon is kind of this Eastern Buddhism and things like that. So desires are contracts you make with yourself to be unhappy and to get what you want. It's a very, it's a modern phrasing of a Buddhist idea that like, you know, type A, business people like us sort of immediately identify with. And it identifies like if you set yourself a goal, which we are all doing constantly, unconsciously, probably hundreds of times a day, especially if you're on social media, Instagram in particular seems like this bottomless well of desire creation. Of course you're gonna be unhappy. And if you can learn the discipline of having few desires carefully chosen, his words, that you spend a lot more time being content, being happy, not being, not feeling lesser, not waiting for some future state where you have something that you don't yet have, which is like a very natural human tendency. But you can make just as much progress and maybe more, by just like not holding a strong burning desire that is like making you unhappy every minute until you've achieved something. - Neval also talks about getting a partnership and what it means to be in like partnership. What would Neval say is important in choosing your partner? - Neval sites the great Buffet as like using the energy, energy plus intelligence plus integrity as like the formula for a successful partner and somebody that you wanna work with or invest in. I mean, Munger and Buffet are like, the partnership that everybody aspires to, right? Like great friends, phone call every day, 60 year zero fight partnership. And Buffet is a track record is investing in CEOs and abdicating entirely to them. And so like you gotta be a really good people picker when that's your strategy. And so I think that's, you know, perfectly great formula to emulate. I can't remember if it's Munger or Buffet that says, when you get a dog, don't do the bark and for it. And so I like that in partnerships too. It's the same thing. You know, don't hire a CEO and then do the CEO and the forum. I think that makes a lot of sense. What about, it's interesting 'cause we've talked about happiness with Elon Musk. We've talked about happiness with Neval and sort of that neither of them really seemed to aspire much to draw happiness. Do you think that success and happiness go together when Neval say that they go together? Do you believe that they go together? - I think they go together for some people. I think some people, there's a balance of like, for some people it's easier to achieve your material desires and for some people it's easier to lower them or dismiss them. And Neval's got a great line. It's maybe like the ultimate Neval line, which is the true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. And if what Elon wants out of life is to be like the maximum contributor to the flourishing of humanity and human progress, no matter what the cost or risk, then he's getting what he wants out of life. And if somebody just wants like as much peace as possible, then they should go live in a monastery and yield any desires to affect the material world and or have deep relationships. And maybe they have an incredible subjective experience. And most people will end up somewhere in between. But as long as you're at peace with the trade-offs that you're making and you're not trying to fit five impossible things to coexist into one life, I think your formula for happiness and getting what you want out of life is gonna be uniquely yours. - What are the lessons that you keep going back to from the fall? Like you've studied him for years and now interacted with him for probably like a decade plus. Like what do you go back to? - I think that's that test of what you want out of life is a good one. I first felt drawn to know of all, in the same way I felt drawn to Munger because I such a high percentage of what they said was both surprising and just like immediately like felt correct to me. What I'm 99% what you hear somebody say is like, huh, nailed it. in a way that felt right to me. They're not gonna be everybody's heroes, but they spoke to me for some reason. And Neval takes all of Munger and sort of puts him in a progressive technological setting that's exciting and futuristic and more growth oriented. And I liked the combination of those very much. But Neval also lives quite a balanced and well-rounded life. I'm more of a Munger guy than a Buffet guy because Munger is kind of a polymath and Buffet is like maniacally focused on just ensuring compounding his capital. But Munger is many different interests and many different curiosities that has gone down many rabbit holes and lived many lives. And instead, Neval does. He's founder of Angel List and investor in a ton of companies and started many companies and is intellectually well-rounded and well-read and curious and plays around with ideas and applies them in many different ways. And it's found a way to find both peace and happiness and success, like material success, kind of all at the same time. And material success in a way that is meaningful to him not externally or image-driven, I think in my view, which is certainly what I aspire to because those are winnable games. Like the inner score card is a winnable game. You can set the goal post and achieve them and you can make sure that you're always happy with where you are that you're not trying to fill this bottomless bucket with someone else's perception that you have no hope of control. And Neval has a line that I love that's very jar-rated about how a salary is the most addictive form of heroin that to that degree. - It's a teleb quote. The three most addictive substances are, these heroin carbohydrates and monthly salary. - Yeah. - And that push to get you out of the comfort zone, right? Teleb's morality is all around. Are you exposed to the upside or downside of your own behavior? And you know, like many things Neval finds like a pithy kind of powerful way to phrase it. But it's a nice way to just kind of like give you a nudge towards your authentic self and to like feel the rush and the risk of being feeling your skin in the game and feeling exposed to the upside and like being a little more authentically you know, on life's adventure. - Yes, is, you know, I think a lot of people live life like they're watching the football game and they've never stepped foot on the turf. And that to me is sort of sad because the difference between feeling what a hit feels like and you know, smelling the grass and you know, having that actual adrenaline that comes up at the beginning of it versus the small percentage that you feel when you watch somebody else do it is, you know, it's a world away. - Yeah. - And so I do think a lot of what I've learned from Neval at least is how do you get a little closer to the action? Because like that, that is the only way one, you get leverage, but two, it's the only way that you can actually feel like the full human experience in many ways. And he talks about, I don't agree with him on all of it, but I do like that he pushes like there's, he talks about how, you know, you'll never get rich, renting your time. - Yep. And I actually don't agree with that. I mean, mathematically it's not true. Like Cheryl Sandberg, quite rich, always been an employee. - But also she was an employee at the level where she had massive equity upside, right? - Well, I think that is the part that gets way late in some of this. Like is a belief that you can't be an employee without massive upside and you can rent, I mean, she does, typically, she does actually, you know, like quantifiably rent her time. She has paid a salary, right? But her upside probably comes off from equity war and so options, et cetera. Well, so what maybe explain that? Like how would be an interesting question, which would be something like, can you get really rich on a nine to five? Can you get really rich, renting your time or on salary? - Maybe the nuances that you need asymmetric upside, right? And so what I'm going to all sort of, directions in one of the chapters of the book is like build or buy equity in a business. Like you need equity upside, you need asymmetric exposure. And there are many ways to get that. There are people who get reasonably rich who become millionaires who work nine to five as their whole life, but they're really diligent savers and investors and they max out their 401k and they live on half their salary and this is like the fire movement, right? Their way of getting equity is just like buying the index with half their salary and keeping living below their means. That's a way to get equity. You probably won't become a billionaire on a hundred thousand dollars a year and of 50% savings rate and equity, but you will almost certainly become a millionaire if you're diligent about it over a 50 year time period. If you ascend to, if you're climbing the corporate ladder, there are career paths where your salary will go up but you'll still never get equity exposure. I feel like doctors are the famous example of this, right? Like we all know cash poor doctors who are like making 700 grand a year, spending 700 grand a year, they never have equity, they never bother to figure out the game and they have no retirement plan or they have a, you know, they never build up a net worth because they're just like their lifestyle consumes everything that they earn and they have no equity. But, you know, in the case of CEO, CFO, C-Suite, VPN above, like you just want asymmetric exposure, you believe in the company that you're working at, you want part of your package to be equity so that you get, like even salespeople have asymmetric exposure. They have, they have non-linear earning potential. But if you ever want to be like sort of truly passive and live up the cabo, you need to start figuring out the equity game. - It's so true. We all have a quote where he says, "The real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely who don't even play the game, who rise above it. These are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else." Who's he mean by that? - I think that's the very ultimate inner scorecard, right? So much of what people are driven to do is driven by this like, memetic desire and they're always sort of moving the goalposts on themselves. You have to know why you're playing the game. This is like the enlightenment path, right? And there's all kinds of books that he recommends and conversations that he's had with people. But if you study those sort of enlightened people, they're just like removed from it. And some people feel compelled, they can't remove themselves from the game until they've won the game. And not everybody's like that. Some people can be like, "This is all a hallucination, I'm just gonna remove myself." But some people need to win the game and then look around and be like, "Oh, there's nothing else here, so I can escape the game." But there are so many games that you can spend your whole life playing them and just kind of leap from one to the other and always feel behind or pressured or driven. And if you know where the road ends, like what I took from the ball of reading this building is book when I was like 30 is like, "Oh, if you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue and ride all the way to winning the game, finally achieving all these things that you hope to the whole time, you have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that like, not if it matters." So all made up, you don't even exist. None of this exists. We're all in, this is like a hilarious absurd dream state. So don't take it all so fucking seriously. You can get the things that you want or you can choose not to want them or you can be almost, you can probably be equally effective by just like, by having emotional detachment rather than having like being all in all consumed emotionally like, ringing yourself out every day, feeling massive stress about everything that you're doing. And if you know that that's the eventual end state is like, do I need to wait until I'm 80 and I've lived a whole life of mistakes before like embodying that epiphany or can you just be like, I can keep playing the game 'cause it's a fun game and we're here and why not? Like, it's a fun dream. - And then it kind of doesn't even have to stop you from your speed. Like, I don't know about you, but when I was younger you said, I think, well, if I don't care the most and if I don't get emotional, if I don't get upset, then I'm not gonna win. 'Cause that's what winning takes. But I realized actually, having like a pretty big step back from like that pain in your stomach or that anxiety in your heart and something happens and being able to look at it rationally is a complete step function change in your decision making capability because you're not living in flight or fight. And your longevity in the game and your energy level within it and your ability to sort out like what is what matters and what doesn't. - Yeah, because otherwise you just, you get a adrenal fatigue. You're just, you get burnt out, you have decision fatigue. It's interesting, I had a member of my team and he was really good and in his words, he burnt himself out and so I was like, well, let's talk about that. And he said, well, I just don't know that I wanna keep doing this and I've got all these things and I go, well, do you need to hire somebody? Like do you think that that is a truth that you always have to stay and said, role, doing the exact same thing continuously? And then yeah, surely if you look down into the future and you're still on the road, you probably think that doesn't look like a very fun road to go on, so why would you? And what I found was a lot of people that job hop or can't figure out what to do. what to do next or when they jump around, you know, they have a great sprint for like two years and they're kind of not sure, is like wherever you go, there you are. And so, you know, you can change your location and even change your title. But if you are a people, please, or you stay while, and if you don't know how to delegate and you never figure it out, it's really problematic because you can, you build like this like constraint that isn't even there. And so some of the stuff, I think that he at least teaches me is, yeah, it's about what do you want or not want, but also, like even figuring out what is possible or not. And where do you have these fake constraints? You don't even realize that. So, as they look back to the Elon algorithm, it's like the question of requirements. And having like, how do you give your team members agency over their environment? It's like, I love this company, but like this role is now breaking me, you know, what do we need to change in order to unlock this and continue it and help the energy sort of proceed? And like, of course, there's many solutions to that. One question, do you ask yourself when you're in that position? Because I think part of, part of this is like self-realization with Naval, right? So, Naval would like, you would even have to first recognize in yourself. I feel this way. I need to name it. I need to figure out why. Like, how would you, if you were struggling right now at full trap to loss and not know what to do next? What have you learned? To me, the most universal thing and the most, the thing that I come back to most often here is like thoughtful desire management. I've now noticed when a new desire enters my mind and I have to like, triage it. And I've learned to like, you know, I used to, I used to like watch stand-up comedy and half of my experience of watching stand-up comedy would be like, I want to be a stand-up comedian. I fucking love stand-up comedy. There's a version of me that should be a famous stand-up comedian like, and I, I've just totally dispelled that desire in my life. I still love it. I still respect it as a medium. I think it's incredible. And I don't know if it's age or just awful desire management. But it's like very clear to me now that I do not want to pay the price to become. I don't want the lifestyle. I don't want all the things like, you know, the price tag is too big. It's a fun thing to fantasize about. And now that's kind of like, I've just completely dispelled that desire. And that's, there are a thousand examples like that. And I bet, you know, open in Suram or Twitter for five minutes and you will, you will feel a new desire welling up in you. You just walk outside and you a new desire will well up in you. And big or small learning to identify that and say like, do I really want that? Is that a meaningful desire? Is that a long-term desire? Is it worth changing, you know, the course that I'm on? What would I sacrifice? Do I want that thing enough to pay the price tag for it? There's like almost always the answer is no. The quicker you can close that loop and the fewer of those that exist in your head at any given time, the happier you are on a minute of minute basis. So how do you do that? Do you literally go, okay, I feel the desire. So like, I hear in my head, I want that. So I recognize that. And then I think what would be the prices that come with that? Like, what does that thought process look like for recognizing a desire and not immediately latching on to it? Well, I mean, an example, like a friend texted me today and is like, did you hit your targets for the book launch? And I was like, I don't have targets for the book launch. I don't have like that is an average. I'm not going to pick a number that I have like, may or may not work is if I picked 10,000 copies and I sell 9,000, I'm not supposed to be sad for how long? Like, is that a useful desire or not a useful desire? It was just arbitrary. So like, I don't know, I don't hold any desires, particularly closely and that the longer the term and the more vague they are, the more helpful it is, right? Like, I want to have a wonderful relationship with my life. I want my kids to have an incredible life. Am I stubborn about any of the specifics about how that needs to look? No, not really. And so the version of like, you know, do I have to go to one specific place at one specific time on a vacation? No, I don't know. It's just, there's like a loose grip over almost everything is like, maybe where you end up with after some practice of like triaging these desires. It's fascinating because it is very zen in many ways. But I guess you and your career have been like that. Like, you've done tough things, a turnaround, you know, of a company while writing books, books themselves are not easy to do in general. You've also had startups prior to that. And you felt what failures felt like. So I guess maybe the last thing would be are there quotes you turn to from, "Navall this book, this period in your life" that you think would be helpful to someone who's listening right now, who is a little lost maybe and doesn't know where to go next. I think the lesson that so many of us learn and have to learn many, many times is to trust yourself and your intuition. That seems to be the weird arcs and turns of my career, have all sort of come back to just trust that little voice, a little sooner. Sometimes is that also your experience? Yeah. I think we're wrong a lot less often than we think we are. You just talk yourself out of it. Yeah. That's not in every case, but especially once you've developed that. In the beginning, I would say I was a little bit of an idiot and I thought I knew a lot probably and through most of my 20s. They're kind of like done in Kruger. Yeah. Yeah. A hundred. Yeah. Yeah. Small information, high convictions. Exactly. And then at some point you start to see a lot of cycles and think, "Oh, I've seen this before. I should just listen to it." Yeah. Then when you figure out that little voice in your head is telling you something, I think then the question becomes like, "What do I do with that?" Because usually it'll tell you something, but it won't say you could go back. Like if you say, "I'm so mad at my wife, I'm going to leave her." Well, that might not be it. It might just be saying, "There's something really wrong in my relationship." Like, that's what the voice is saying. And so what does that mean? Well, maybe it means you actually lean in more and you do more things. But I think most often we just try to shove it down, ignore it. Yeah. Listening to the voice, allowing it to. Allowing it to go long enough to use you to patterns. Right? Like in that moment of anger, maybe you're not getting a clear signal. If you think that twice a day, every day for six months, maybe there is something really wrong with the relationship. But in a nut. Like, after you listen, you need courage. Like, a lot of people hear the voice and the choice is either to repress it or to act over a certain amount of time. And I think the people that end up the most unhappy have repressed so much because they never summon courage. And so they're like deeply aware of what it is that they truly want to be doing or feel like they could be doing. And just never took that next leap. I think it's a Winston Churchill quote. Courage is every virtue at its highest form. And so you can understand all the virtues, but if you don't have the courage to act on them when it's difficult, when everything else is sort of going against them, they have no form. If we were going to get really tactical with it and somebody wanted to hone their desire plus their courage, what would you tell somebody listening right now? How do you. How do you get more courage? And how do you listen to that little voice inside of your head more often? This is not a novelism, but I know people who swear by this, which is just like a morning brain dump on paper. The process of externalizing these thoughts somehow helps you evaluate them and it forces you to be honest. And so if you see what sounds like absolute certain reality in your head of like I have to be this or become this or get this or I will never be happy, this is you write it down. You're like, that's stupid. But if you just live with it in your head all the time, you're like, you could feel your body responding to it and that practice of externalizing it just helps you observe it rationally. And it's a shortcut to doing that. Meditation is the same way. It helps you separate sort of the evaluator, like the observed from the observant, like see your own thoughts from above, but writing it is a shortcut to doing it. And that's a helpful method. And by the same token like doing that over time, like you can only write, I hate this job I want to quit so many times before you're like, oh my god, you know, you will respond to observing that over time. You know, whatever it is, like if you stay present with it, the courage I think will eventually sort of culminate and you will manifest that in some ways. It's so true. It's so true. I love this book. It was my obviously my first book I read of years. I read it years ago. I come back to it often. Thank you for writing this and so many others so we get to learn from the great. Thank you for having me. It's been really fun to sort of co-evolve with you and see like you are living some of the principles in this book at an extremely high level and it's really, it's really awesome. Like if you don't, for people that don't understand sort of the journey that you've gone on, I think like the principles here that are making you successful are of like leverage and equity and compounding are like you took this blueprint and ran with it and built something broke. Definitely. But then we have a long time now. Now I think about it. How many years do you think? Probably the least book. This came out in 2020. So yeah, well definitely before that. So eight, ten years maybe. It was like early Twitter X. You know I would like we were in a like Twitter like support groups together when we were like you assemble. this team of people that were together. - It was like a sprint 100K. And you made it in three months, and now you're at what? - I think it was 700K. - 700K, yeah, unbelievable. - It's true. Well, that is another thing that I think, both the leaders we've talked about, do a really good job of, and I've tried to learn from. It's not just like it's a big world, pull along other people. Like why do we have to shove other people down? I mean, I pretty much never ever talk shit on the internet to an individual, 'cause I just find that it's so much more beneficial to celebrate friends, celebrate wins, try to win more myself, and then get another group's where other winners already are. And I learned, I think that group, most of those people, and they're probably besides you, and I were bigger than us on the internet. And now probably aren't, because I think we were connectors, and you're like a super connector, with lots of companies and people on the internet. So that's another lesson I've learned here. - So you gotta just sit at home and write, and like you're out there running a media empire. - Well, we were like, but that's what I'd like to do. I like to write companies. - Yeah, I like to sit at home and write. Where's that right? - Yeah, no, and you definitely know who you are. I think it's a good point, that this makes me incredibly happy what I do. So I would consider myself a happy builder, even though it's really hard. And my happy looks totally different than yours, but we both kept listening to that little desire and playing into it more and more and more, and sort of obsessing on it. So people are gonna have a hard time beating you at writing this. People are gonna have a hard time beating me at building media companies, 'cause it's just what I do for fun. - People are incredibly unique, and the further you go in life, the more unique you should become. Like if you're not weird, how do you know you're free? - Oh yeah, one of our main 13 principles is bring your weird, it's better than boring. - Yeah. - So that is so true. - I like it. - All right, you're the male. Thank you. - Thank you. (upbeat music)