The argument in one line.
Wealth and happiness come from understanding leverage (code, media, capital), building specific knowledge through authenticity, managing desires carefully, and having the courage to act on your intuition rather than following external shoulds.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You're an employed professional or freelancer with 3-7 years of experience who feels trapped by trading time for money and wants to understand leverage-based alternatives.
- A content creator or founder building an audience who wants a philosophical framework for why some people compound wealth while others don't.
- You're philosophically inclined—interested in desire management, happiness, and wealth building as interconnected problems rather than separate pursuits.
SKIP IF…
- You're already operating a leverage-based business (code, media, or capital-driven) and looking for tactical execution strategies—this is worldview, not how-to.
- You're seeking actionable steps to get rich in the next 12 months; this is about understanding long-term principles and shifting your relationship to ambition.
The full version, fast.
Naval Ravikant's wealth playbook centers on modern leverage — code, media, and capital — because all three have zero marginal cost and access a global marketplace, creating returns impossible through selling time. 'Productize yourself' is the operating instruction: find the intersection of what you're uniquely good at and what the world values, then package it into something that scales without you. Four tiers of luck show that most successful outcomes aren't random — the highest tier is becoming the kind of person who creates luck through reputation, skill, and position. The quieter half of the framework is desire management: desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until satisfied, so fewer carefully chosen desires produce more consistent contentment than grinding toward an expanding list of targets.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostCodie Sanchez
00:27guestEric Jorgenson
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:13
01 · Cold open: the question that changed everything
Eric's cold-open quote about Naval studying happiness, plus Codie's stake-in-the-ground intro — leverage, the salary-as-heroin frame, and a promise to 'steal Naval's homework.'
01:13 – 02:43
02 · Leverage: the new class divide
Naval's reframe — 'forget rich vs. poor, white collar vs. blue — it's now leveraged vs. unleveraged.' Eric defines leverage as decoupling inputs from outputs; bitterness about unfairness is usually just misread leverage.
02:43 – 07:41
03 · Three forms of modern leverage: code, media, capital
The three levers most people now have for near-zero cost. Codie's tier-builder example (day laborer to general contractor to developer to Zillow) shows leverage as a ladder inside every industry, not a software-only phenomenon.
07:41 – 09:56
04 · Hard work is overrated, judgment is underrated
Archimedes-lever / one-domino framing — hard work caps at 2-3x; judgment unlocks 10-100x. Naval describes himself as 'lazy' because he refuses to waste effort.
09:56 – 11:06
05 · Live like a lion
Lions rest 30 hours, then attack with maximum violence. Naval applies that to opportunity: don't grind on small things — keep your space clear so you can leap when the right project shows up.
11:06 – 13:42
06 · The meeting trap
Codie's pet rant: people stay in meetings they don't belong in because of social-norm gravity. She and Eric reframe it as a leadership failure — leaders haven't given permission to leave.
13:42 – 15:40
07 · Productize yourself: escape competition through authenticity
Naval's two-word life summary. Eric walks the operating procedure: look at what you did at age 10-12; identify the 10% of your job you do more than you should; build outward from there.
15:40 – 22:55
08 · Specific knowledge as the unfair advantage
Why no one can beat you at being you. Codie ties it to Scott Adams' 'skill stack'; Eric grounds it in his own career — permissionless biographies that became Walter Isaacson's pattern.
22:55 – 27:55
09 · The four types of luck: blind, persistence, spotted, built
Naval's luck taxonomy, with the 'lucky-people-find-the-shortcut' study, and the elegant final tier — becoming so uniquely positioned that opportunities can only come to you.
27:55 – 35:07
10 · Manufacturing luck through reputation and surface area
Twenty years of permissionless work as the audition for the next twenty. Free work, asymmetric exposure, and the rules Codie uses to filter hires (creative projects, no pay — because she wants to read motivation).
35:07 – 41:28
11 · Desire is a contract to be unhappy
Naval's happiness arc — he had all the material wins and asked why he wasn't happy, then made a study of it. Eastern-Buddhism reframe in Silicon Valley language. Pick few desires, hold them loosely.
41:28 – 46:12
12 · Partnership, happiness, and the true test of intelligence
Buffett's energy + intelligence + integrity formula. Naval's line — 'the true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.' Munger as polymath model vs. Buffett the monomaniac.
46:12 – 51:10
13 · The salary trap (heroin, carbs, monthly paychecks)
Taleb's three most addictive substances. Are you exposed to your own upside, or a lamb in the paddock? Codie pushes back that Sheryl Sandberg got rich on salary — Eric counters with the equity-warrant nuance.
51:10 – 56:12
14 · Stepping out of the game entirely
The deepest Naval move — the realization that none of it matters, you don't have to wait until 80 to have the epiphany. Codie's add: the rational step-back is also a step-function decision upgrade.
56:12 – 1:01:12
15 · Desire management and the courage to act
Eric on triaging desires in real time — Instagram as a 'bottomless well of desire.' Trust the inner voice; courage is every virtue at its highest form (Churchill). Morning brain dump as the practical externalization tool.
1:01:12 – 1:01:59
16 · Bring your weird
Closing — ten years of friendship since early Twitter, mutual recognition that they each kept following the small desire until it became a career. 'If you're not weird, how do you know you're free?'
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want — having fewer, carefully chosen desires produces more time in contentment.
- The three most addictive substances: heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
- Forget rich versus poor — the real divide is leveraged versus unleveraged, and not understanding this makes the world feel unfair and confusing.
- The modern forms of leverage are code, media, and capital — each has zero marginal cost, uncapped scale, and access to a global marketplace.
- A salary is the most seductive trap because it reduces your risk exposure while simultaneously eliminating your upside — it makes you a lamb in a paddock.
- The epiphany you grind and suffer toward for decades is available to you right now — which makes a decade of brutal internal monologue a choice, not a requirement.
- Productizing yourself means packaging your specific knowledge into something that can be sold repeatedly without your time attached to each transaction.
- The four tiers of luck are not random — three of them are engineered through skill, positioning, and the density of attempts, and only the first is genuinely outside your control.
- Code and media are asymmetric leverage tools because one person with zero employees can reach millions and earn while sleeping — and this is genuinely new in human history.
- A salary feels safe because it is predictable — but Naval's framework shows that predictability is exactly what eliminates wealth accumulation, not just upside.
Steal the format.
Naval-explainer playbook
The whole episode is a one-format pattern repeated 15 times — and that pattern is a working template for 'X explained by Y.'
- Pick a single thinker with a dense canon (Naval, Munger, Buffett, Brunson, Hormozi). Pull one verbatim line per beat — quote it, then ask the guest 'what does that mean?'
- Recruit the one human who has spent a decade in that thinker's archive. The decade-of-study is the asset, not opinions about it.
- Add your own counter-frame in real time. Codie pushes back on 'you can't get rich on salary' with Sheryl Sandberg; she pairs every Naval principle with a Contrarian Thinking analogue. Don't be a passive interviewer — be the dialectic.
- Build the episode around 6-8 named two-word frameworks ('productize yourself,' 'choose your hard,' 'live like a lion'). Two-word frameworks become titles, thumbnails, and TikTok hooks.
- Lean into the visual constraint. Their first 12 minutes of video were broken and they shipped anyway, using B-roll + word-pop captions. Audio-first means audio is enough.
- Treat the description as a deliverable. 13 chapter timestamps + a 5-bullet 'what you'll learn' list — every BigDeal episode reads like a sales page for the listen.
- Mine the episode for 15-20 shorts. This 62-min cut yielded ~18 standalone quotables without effort. That's the real distribution play, not the long episode itself.
Terms worth knowing.
- Leverage
- The ability to multiply the impact of your effort using tools whose output scales independently of your time. Modern forms include code, media, and capital, where one unit of work can produce vastly different returns.
- Specific knowledge
- Skills and expertise that can't be easily taught in a classroom because they're unique to who you are, what you've experienced, and what genuinely interests you. It's typically discovered, not chosen, and forms the basis of work no one else can replicate.
- Productize yourself
- Turning your unique combination of skills, interests, and authentic personality into a product or service that the market can buy. The premise is that no one can compete with you at being you.
- Four kinds of luck
- A framework distinguishing blind luck (random fortune), luck through persistence (effort creating opportunities), spotted luck (positioning yourself where opportunities tend to land), and built luck (becoming so uniquely known that opportunities seek you out).
- Skill stack
- A concept popularized by Scott Adams describing how stacking moderate competence across several unrelated skills can create a rare and valuable combination, often more achievable than world-class mastery of one skill.
- Live like a lion
- A working rhythm of long stretches of rest and observation punctuated by intense bursts of focused action when a high-value opportunity appears, rather than steady constant effort on lower-priority work.
- Mimetic desire
- Wanting something primarily because other people want it or have it, rather than from genuine personal interest. Social media is often cited as a powerful generator of these borrowed desires.
- Inner scorecard
- A Warren Buffett concept of judging yourself by your own internal standards rather than other people's perceptions. It's described as a winnable game because you control the goalposts.
- Asymmetric upside
- A position where potential gains are far larger than potential losses, typically gained through equity, ownership stakes, or commission structures rather than fixed salary.
- FIRE movement
- Financial Independence, Retire Early — a strategy of living well below your means, saving aggressively, and investing the difference in index funds to reach a portfolio large enough to live off passively.
- AngelList
- A platform co-founded by Naval Ravikant that lets individuals invest small amounts in early-stage startups, lowering the capital barrier to angel investing that once required significant wealth.
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- A cognitive bias where people with limited knowledge in an area overestimate their competence, while experts often underestimate theirs. Often summarized as small information paired with high conviction.
- Adrenal fatigue
- A colloquial term for the exhaustion that comes from sustained stress and constant fight-or-flight activation, draining decision-making capacity and long-term energy.
- Permissionless work
- Projects you take on without anyone's approval, assignment, or guarantee of payment — like writing public material or building public artifacts — that can compound into reputation and opportunities over time.
- Elon algorithm
- A problem-solving sequence popularized by Elon Musk that begins with aggressively questioning every requirement before optimizing, deleting, or accelerating any part of a process.
Things they pointed at.
09:00personElon Musk (referenced as max-leverage)
10:00personDavid Goggins (referenced as effort-max counterexample)
21:05conceptPaul Graham — 'run upstairs' competitive strategy
22:58conceptScott Adams — skill stack
31:40bookWalter Isaacson — Steve Jobs / Elon Musk / Da Vinci / Einstein biographies
31:40personBill Gurley
41:35conceptWarren Buffett — energy + intelligence + integrity hiring formula
42:20personCharlie Munger — polymath model
46:20conceptNassim Nicholas Taleb — 'three most addictive substances'
1:00:01conceptWinston Churchill — courage as every virtue at its highest form
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“Somebody said to him, you're so smart, why aren't you happy?”
00:08
“Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.”
01:20
“Forget rich versus poor, white collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus unleveraged.”
02:42
“If you don't understand leverage, a lot of things about the world are not gonna make sense, and you're gonna get bitter and confused.”
07:41
“Hard work is overrated and judgment is underrated.”
08:55
“Hard work can only get you a two or three x improvement... where one hour of work can have a 100x impact.”
22:37
“Find what feels like play to you but looks like work to others. You're going to outcompete them because you're gonna do it effortlessly. To you, it's art, it's joy, it's flow. You escape competition through authenticity.”
23:24
“If I had to summarize how to be successful in life, I would just say two words: productize yourself.”
21:04
“Choose your hard. No matter what, anything in life is gonna be hard. Being employed is hard. Being an owner is hard.”
27:26
“Warren Buffett — is it lucky that he gets a phone call to buy a bank and do a deal of financing that nobody else has the capital, the reputation, or the speed to do? He has become the only person on earth who can get that lucky.”
32:04
“The first twenty years of your career is an audition for the second twenty years of your career.”
41:35
“The true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life.”
46:20
“The three most addictive substances are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.”
53:05
“None of it matters. It's all made up. You don't even exist. We're all in this hilarious absurd dream state, so don't take it all so fucking seriously.”
57:30
“Instagram in particular seems like this bottomless well of desire creation.”
1:00:01
“Courage is every virtue at its highest form. You can understand all the virtues, but if you don't have the courage to act on them when it's difficult, they have no form.”
1:00:25
“Externalize the desires in your head onto paper... as soon as you write it down, you're like, that's stupid.”
1:01:40
“If you're not weird, how do you know you're free?”
Where the conversation goes.
01:13 – 07:41denseLeverage and the modern class divide
07:41 – 13:42denseJudgment, lion-mindset, and meetings
13:42 – 22:55denseProductize yourself / specific knowledge
22:55 – 35:07denseThe four types of luck
35:07 – 46:12steadyDesire, happiness, and partnership
46:12 – 51:10steadySalary trap and asymmetric upside
51:10 – 56:12denseRising above the game
56:12 – 1:01:59denseDesire management + courage
Word for word.
metaphoranalogy
00:00Somebody said to him, you're so smart, why aren't you happy? And it's like, oh, I can apply my intelligence to this problem and I can break it down. until you get what you want.
00:08If 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.
00:27We're bringing on my friend Eric Jorgensen, one of the best writers of our time on brilliant billionaires and philosophers like Naval Ravikan. He spent the last ten years studying him. Now we're gonna steal his homework.
00:38Naval has a line that's very jarring about how a . The three most addictive substances. He's heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
00:49Like, that push to get you out of the comfort zone. Are you a risk taker? Are you exposed?
00:53Or are you kind of like a ? Can you get really rich on a nine to five? What I took from Naval building this 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.
01:06You have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that, like, none of it matters.
01:13One of my favorite quotes from Naval is forget rich versus poor, white collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus unleveraged.
01:22What does that mean?
01:24Leverage 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 and feel like it's unfair.
01:36But it's actually just the normal workings of leverage. And so as Nawal explains it, there are many forms of leverage. The modern forms of leverage are code, media, and capital.
01:44Capital. Zero marginal cost and uncapped and accesses this sort of global marketplace. And it's really unintuitive.
01:53Like, we're not
01:54programmed 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 at the core of them.
02:09It's so funny you say that. 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.
02:17Mhmm. And he did something with, like, the Discovery Channel or another science channel. And so the, you know, CEO of YouTube was joking with them, and he was like, yeah.
02:26You know, uh, it was really nice of you to do that thing with Discovery Channel. It's incredible to collab with a smaller channel because their viewership's, like, 10 x smaller than Mark Rober's on on YouTube. Yeah.
02:37And so it 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?
02:47Ideally, you want your earnings, your inputs, your outputs
02:50to be separate from each other. Right? You don't wanna have to work an hour to earn, you know, $10 or a $100 or a thousand bucks.
02:57You wanna earn independent of your input. If you're in a normal job, you're linear inputs and outputs.
03:05Um, if you are working on a podcast, like, you record the same podcast, you publish it whether a 100 people listen to it or a 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.
03:18If you're investing in a company, like, whether you invest a $100,000 or a million dollars, it's the same decision, but the rewards for doing it are an order of magnitude higher. So you wanna look for these places where your inputs and your outputs are uncorrelated, and the more levered you are, the bigger that difference is gonna be.
03:37And the way you get leverage is by winning a smaller leverage game. So start small and just let those things accrue incrementally. Like, we talked about Elon Musk.
03:47He's, like, the most leveraged person alive, and it's because people choose to give him capital. People choose to go work for him.
03:53People choose to support his companies and invest in him. And they do that because they trust his judgment. They trust that he's gonna use that well and give them good rewards for doing so.
04:02Yeah. It's so interesting because in today's age, it's even more normal.
04:06Like, it used to be maybe even, like, thirty years ago, I would say, most people had none of these. Right? You had no money, capital.
04:14You 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.
04:25But now everybody could actually have all three really easily. So you could literally just ask yourself, am I making money and thus, am I taking my money and investing in other things?
04:36That's leverage. Can I code? No.
04:38But now I've got all these AI tools, so I can now use code. That's leverage. And media, do I own CNN?
04:44No. 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.
04:52And then it's degrees of them, but it's it's a wild time to be alive because for the first time ever, any human, really, at least in in, you know, most established worlds can have all three of them for almost a $0
05:04cost except capital. Yeah. If you can get a device that can get on the Internet, like, can enter the global meritocracy, essentially.
05:11And, like, most people aren't even trying. Most people are just on the consumption side.
05:16Um, 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 uncorrelated inputs versus outputs and try to build a business, that's where you're gonna get those exponential returns. And this is true in every industry.
05:32Right? 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.
05:50And Naval has a great it's a it's a long there. I won't 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.
06:01You could be a general contractor. You could be a real estate investor. You could be a a developer of big properties, or you could take the final leap into, like, maximum leverage of external investors and technologists and everything and build Zillow.
06:16Right? And so all 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.
06:24I actually haven't thought of that before. It'd be interesting to put names on the tiers, you know, because every industry actually has that. Everyone has the day labor,
06:33the all the way to the CEO, to the, like, 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 it's actually an interesting way to think about the world.
06:45I think a lot of times people just think, am I entry level? How much do I make? What but they don't think about what is the game the company that they're in is playing too.
06:54Yeah. And I feel like Naval's the king of contextual awareness,
06:58like, you know, understanding the game that you're playing. There will 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. Uh, because you 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.
07:18Um, and those people those are people who just sort of figured out, you know, what does the person above me know that I don't know? What tool do they know how to use? What are were they able to access?
07:27Like, 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 Naval talks about something that is kinda controversial these days.
07:34He says hard work is overrated and judgment is underrated.
07:38What do you think he means by that?
07:41I think the, like, you know, the Archimedes quote, like, . Like, one totally correct decision can dominate everything. And Naval is really, um, he's an elegant thinker.
07:53I think he's, like, really enamored with the idea of, like, ? Mhmm. Which is, like, this incredibly kind of, like, zen business thing.
08:04What's the smallest action I can take to create the biggest result? Um, 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. Um, but I think that's a really interesting approach.
08:16It's a good tool for thought to just be like, yeah. How easy could this be? Um, he describes himself as lazy, which I don't think he is, but he's like, you know, I I just want I want the greatest reward for my effort, and I I don't wanna
08:30expend effort wastefully. Yeah. There is something to this idea of how you become incredibly ambitious while also being lazy.
08:40Mhmm. And, uh, and lazy and, like, the things that you will allow to take up your time Because if you are 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 gonna live free in my mind, actually.
08:54Like, you could spend a lot of time in the middle, and you will never actually have the full effect than if you spent the time to find the beginning. And the the real thing is, like,
09:05hard work has a limit eventually. Like, you can't work hundred 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.
09:18And 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, know, where one hour of work or ten hours of work can have a 10 x or a 100 x impact. Like, you're gonna be kind of stuck in that two to three x improvement
09:35Yeah. Window no matter what you do. I think the part that then becomes hard.
09:39So then you're like, okay. That makes sense. Of course, I'd wanna find, you know, the fulcrum, or of course, I'd wish to find the first place to flick the domino.
09:46But then the question becomes, how do you know? And, like, Naval has great, um, sort of critical thinking frameworks.
09:53But what does he mean by live like a lion? Like, if you go see a lion on safari, like, they're just chilling most of the time, like, thirty, forty five hours at a time.
10:02They're just laying there and sleeping and kinda whatever. And then when they are both hungry and see, uh, prey, 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, thirty hours.
10:20And I think Naval sort of learned wisdom is that this is how he now approaches projects.
10:26Like, he'll see an opportunity, see an investment. He'll just kinda be, like, reading and casually working, learning, going about his life, and then an opportunity will arise or a person will make themselves known.
10:39It's kind of like, alright. We all leap in action. We gotta have a sprint.
10:41We gotta start a company. We gotta make an investment. We gotta get up to speed on this really, really quickly.
10:45Um, 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, like, that's the live like a lion kind of mindset is, like, you wanna have the space
11:03to evaluate and attack the most important thing at any time. You know, it's interesting you you talk about that because one of the things I've been obsessed with lately is, um, people sitting in meetings that they shouldn't be in.
11:14Yeah. 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.
11:23Why are you still in here? But what I haven't gotten to yet is where they self select to leave the meeting Mhmm. Because there's so much social normative behavior of just, no.
11:31No. 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?
11:39Instead, 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.
11:52But somehow, we've all become, like, way too politically correct to say anything like that. And so we just sit in meetings that we know are a waste of time.
11:59We tell nobody, and we think that's normal, and that a CEO might like it. I feel like there's there's probably two types of person in that meeting. One is, like,
12:07this looks like work, and it's easiest thing I can do today, so I'm just gonna sit in here and, like, I'm gonna 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 and their skin is crawling because they're like, I hate this.
12:19I'm useless. I feel like I can't leave. I've got more important work to do.
12:23Like, please let me out of here. Yeah.
12:25But both are caught in the like, if you make the first step of the 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.
12:43I wanna be somewhere else. Yeah. It seems like such a no brainer, but I think off even at our company where I'd say people say this to people a lot, I don't think we've done a good enough job giving them permission Yeah.
12:53Yeah. To beat it. You know?
12:54I 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, oh, yeah.
12:58Right. Right. Get out of here.
12:59Yeah. There's a dynamic where people, think, wanna be in the same room as, like, the the person, the the CEO, the leader, the whatever. Like, that that those those meetings are an opportunity for FaceTime probably in some ways that are, like, more about the political game than the output.
13:13I've actually never thought about that. That's a that's a very good point. I think it's another screen that happens.
13:17Like, the more successful you get, the more you forget that, you know, your presence can have negative or positive effects. Yeah. Like, when you give feedback, sometimes you have to be careful at which levels of the game because it can just ruin somebody.
13:28Or simultaneously, they wanna hang out with you more even though you're like, I would like you so much more if you didn't do that. So we have to sort of say that too.
13:36I actually it is kind of like an interesting idea because this goes back to authenticity, but there's a quote that I found originally from you. Find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. You're going to outcompete them because you're gonna do it effortlessly.
13:49To you, it's art, it's joy, it's flow. You escape competition through authenticity. If I had to summarize how to be successful in life, I would just say two words, productize yourself.
13:59Tell me more about that, and what does that even mean to ?
14:03Yeah. I mean, that that is the two word summary of half of the book, which is, like, very difficult to fully unpack. But the ability to really understand and observe in yourself what you wanna do naturally.
14:16You're icky guy or whatever. Mhmm. And one way to do that is to look at the things that you did as a kid.
14:22Like, when you were, like, 10, 12, ask your family, ask your friends. Um, what are the things that you were naturally drawn to? What are the things that you do in spare time?
14:30What 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, like, really, really love and find yourself doing it more than you should? Like, these are all maybe signs, uh, that you're sort of drawn to do a particular thing.
14:44And 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.
14:55This book. You didn't even make money on this, really. Right?
14:59Didn't you give away most of the money from this book? I give away we've given away, like, 5,000,000 copies of this book. Yeah.
15:04But we've also sold, like, millions. So I have made a lot of money, but when I when I wrote it, I fully expected, like, a thousand people to buy this thing. I thought it was gonna be a passion project for Nival nerds like me that, um, would never make any money, but I would have learned a lot by doing it.
15:20I did learn a lot by doing it, and I'm still, like, completely shocked that people of all ages and races and countries and languages are, like, reading this thing and finding, revisiting it and finding joy in it. And I'm like, I'm delighted by it.
15:35I think it's just a testament to, like, how far reaching some of the principles that Naval puts forward are. Yeah. What about this idea of
15:42he talks about in the book, um, 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.
15:54What does that mean? And if somebody is struggling to figure out what they should do, do they figure out if they have specific knowledge?
16:01I think I mean, the word should is a thing that he talks about of, like, there is no shoulds, um, but it's so hard to train yourself out of that. Right? Like, we spend the first twenty years of our lives sitting in classrooms all being taught the same thing and being assessed on the same thing.
16:14And so then we go out into the work world and we're sort of like, alright. What's the job? What am I told to do?
16:20And 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 they're rewarded to the degree that they're unique and excellent, and that is usually downstream of them being authentic.
16:33Right? 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.
16:44And I don't know how many of them work out, but it doesn't matter because it's all fun to watch. Right? Like, remember watching you, like, buy vacant land in Texas abandoned land in Texas at an auction or something.
16:54I was like, that's just cool, and you're clearly, like, just having fun doing it. And, like, I for whatever reason, I'm sure it'll be a nightmare for plenty of people, but I have fun spending thousands of hours, like, breaking down very specific useful ideas and articulating them and finding supporting arguments for them and, like, putting them all together in this thread that helps me remember it and helps other people identify with it.
17:15Like, these are examples of specific knowledge that are outcomes of just how we chose to live, and we just continued to do things that felt authentic and unique to us and people responded to it.
17:27And we sort of iterated through. Like, alright. I had fun doing that, and the world enjoyed it.
17:33So I'm gonna do it again, or 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.
17:44Um, 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. It's not like you said, I'd say, gonna build a real estate brokerage, and I'm gonna do it using all the best practices of real estate brokerage.
17:59Right? 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, be yourself, do it to the best degree you possibly can, and specific knowledge will sort of come downstream of that.
18:15I know you're Bill Gurley on, and he's, like, you know, become this incredible student of your your industry. And if you set 10 people down and said, like, alright. You are all gonna go study the history of venture capital.
18:26Those are great venture capitalists. Those 10 people are gonna study different things. They'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.
18:37Like, those people will all 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, will end up becoming a specialist.
18:49A sufficiently, like, advanced generalist becomes a unique specialist, and you should aspire to be a unique combination of authentic traits, um, performed to excellence.
19:02And, like, those are the careers that you are going to enjoy and
19:07products that are gonna end up being unique. That's good point. Mean, Scott Adams talks about the skill stack, right, which really is a lot of what Naval talks about too, I think, in different ways.
19:17He 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 ten thousand or really a hundred thousand 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.
19:34Yeah. And so I think that's that's super interesting. I wanna circle back to this idea on shoulds because you have very interesting takes on it.
19:41You've caught me twice on it. And Nivala is very aggressive on shoulds too. Like, do you believe in the word should?
19:49Does Naval Ravikov believe in the word should?
19:52And how should we speak to ourselves? So should is one of those, uh, words that just indicates to you that you might be feeling more of an obligation than an interest in something.
20:03And so you hear people talk about, like, I should go work out. Like, yeah. But also your relationship to that thing is now, like, I don't want to, and the voice in my head is telling me that I have to.
20:16And the the common thing is, like, I get to work out. So just, like, change your phrasing about, you know, you have the opportunity to go do this thing that you wanna 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 that's in there.
20:31But, like, I should go to work. I should, you know, follow in my family's footsteps. I should pursue this opportunity.
20:37Like, we all have those and it just listening for them. Yes. It's either an obligation or an imposition from from some version of yourself, uh, that you don't necessarily agree with or some external voice that is, like,
20:52speaking to you more loudly than your inner voice. Yeah. It's really good.
20:56I mean, he talks about he has, like, a pretty brutal heuristic about if you're faced with a difficult choice, you should do knee gosh. Dang it.
21:03Can't even say the word choice. But if you're faced with a brutal brutal choice and there's not an obvious one, then don't do either.
21:11Like, what would he say about when to do something or when not to do something? There's one from his, like, personal trainer, which is hard choices, easy life,
21:20which, like, in the short term, if you take the hard path, you will sort of naturally bias. You'll you'll come up with an excuse not to work out. You'll come up with an excuse not to have the hard conversation.
21:29And 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.
21:41There's probably something magical that's on the other side of something you're avoiding. And if you just build the habit of tackling that, a lot of problems will take care of themselves.
21:53That's one. Paul Graham has a similar thing competitively, which is just like run upstairs.
21:58Um, you know, if you're fighting a big company, do something really hard that they're gonna find it very difficult to imitate.
22:04Yeah. It's a great point. Especially as the world gets less and less moded.
22:07Like, it feels like every year, actually, there's more and more opportunity to do things in business. You know?
22:14You used to have to have a ton of capital to launch a media company, now you have to have none. You used to actually have to have a lot of money to invest in startups. Now because of AngelList, you could have a very small amount.
22:24Like, 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, that's hard today, well, you know, you're definitely not gonna make it next year because that thing that's hard today will probably be even easier next year.
22:39So it's 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 gonna be hard.
22:47Being employed is hard. Being an owner is hard. Choose your heart.
22:50One of them is going to have a better outcome than the other. Working out as hard, being fat is hard. Yeah.
22:54You gotta choose one. Yep. And, um, you know, he also talks about I I love the way he talks about luck.
22:59Mhmm. And in particular, he talks about four types of luck. Blind luck, luck through persistence, spotting luck, and built luck.
23:07Can you break down some of those types of luck? What does Naval mean by these different types? Yeah.
23:12And this 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 your destiny. Right?
23:23Like, opportunities just befall 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 $100 bill today or not?
23:32Did you pick it up? Did you notice it? What was the second?
23:35The second is, uh, luck through persistence. Luck through persistence. Okay.
23:39So, like, if you happen to walk across a $100 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 persist these are simple metaphors.
23:53But, like, did you happen to run into somebody who wanted to
23:58you 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.
24:13Like, have you seen I just was reading a study the other day where, um, they gave two groups of people, uh, you know, blind study, basically. One group, uh, of people was told varying things to the degree of they're lucky.
24:28Good 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.
24:36Then 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.
24:45And it's like, go through it and look for how many times bad is said and tell us at the end how many times bad is said, then you'll get a thousand bucks or something when you find the, you know, 217 variations or, like, whatever the number is. And, uh, so the first group that thought that they were not lucky, they went through diligently.
25:02No. They got to the 217 number. They told them, okay.
25:04217. And the other group goes through it. And on, like, page five, there's a a little paragraph that says, you can stop searching.
25:13There's 217, uh, instances of bad. And this other group can like, finished it in, like, sixty seconds, and this group took ten minutes on average.
25:22Like, their their vision was the same. Yeah. Like, they came from sort of the same socio demographics, but one associated that's not lucky and one associated as lucky.
25:30And so I thought that was fascinating.
25:32I love that. You know? And so so explain to me spotted luck and then built luck.
25:38Spotted luck is just the ability to sort of position yourself at a place where luck happens to you. Right? Um, and so this is, you know, the maybe the highest order decision is, like, where do you live?
25:47Like, are what's your exposure? What's your surface area to look? Um, if you say you can't find anybody to, like, ask out on a date, like, okay.
25:54Well, how often are you, like, going to parties? Have you left your house? Like, where are your habits?
25:59Um, how many companies have you started? How many companies have you met with?
26:03Like, how many customers have you approached? Like, these things are you can control your surface area to luck, essentially.
26:10Um, and then the final form where, like, luck becomes your destiny is just you just become so uniquely known for a thing. Like, you've reached such a final form of awareness and excellence and authenticity that, uh, luck finds its way to you.
26:25And, like like, Warren Buffett is an example of, um, is it lucky that he gets a phone call to, like, buy 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.
26:40Like, he has become the only person on earth who can get that lucky. And that's a crazy example. Right?
26:45But, like, there are many smaller forms of that. So your your reputation, your mindset, your positioning essentially, like, that is a is a very long term game.
26:57It's a really good point because I feel like what Naval
27:00actually teaches a lot of us is that all these things that seem like unfair magic, aka leverage, luck, are actually really curatable.
27:11And 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
27:19Yeah. In effect. In particular, if you're young, I feel like it's it's hard to, um, it's hard to appreciate that what how lucky some people are getting is actually twenty years of, like, carefully grown seeds and reputation and relationships and effort.
27:34And, like, you shouldn't expect to get as lucky as somebody that has created that much surface area and covered that much ground. Um, but you can sort of match their pace or outpace them by, you know, being thoughtful about your look surface area.
27:50What would Naval say about how to become luckier? Like, how could you become luckier? I think the the path towards luck is, you know, you can follow those things up.
27:58You can sort of go from one level to another. You can do luck through persistence and effort that then becomes a little bit more of luck through or I have a feel for the the dynamics.
28:12Um, 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 heading, and you can sort of meet it there and position yourself for it.
28:27And if you do that enough times over time, like, you become the only person who can do it. So if we use the real estate example that uses for leverage and just, like, take that as, you know, if you're if you're starting off as a general contractor or a handyman, like, you don't just wait around for jobs.
28:42You 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 gonna move in.
28:57And then you can you can buy 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.
29:11You've done the last five. They've all been successful. And so, of course, the sixth development is gonna, like, pick up the phone and call you directly, and you don't even have to pitch anybody.
29:18Right? Um, and I 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.
29:29You know, there's people that, like, when you need a specific type of actor or character, you're like, well, Christopher Walken's the the the only person who can do that role.
29:40That'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 gonna be one of 10 people. And those people had to all, like, grind and then iterate and position themselves,
29:53and then they became, like, as a singular person who is, like, gets the phone call. Like, is Christopher Nolan lucky when he gets the next phone call, or is he, like, spent his entire career becoming the person? That's so true.
30:04And I feel like that's true. It's everything in life. You you it's like a mixture of, like, data collection that you do and then data collection that other people do on you.
30:11And, like, when those two things come together, you get luckier. And so in the beginning, all you can do is, like, 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 it on their face is actually a thing.
30:29And, 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, actually taking too little risk isn't good.
30:41And 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 you 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?
30:57And, like, that's it. Yeah. I I'm not, uh, I was I was a little impatient early in my career, and I'm not advocating for patience or slowness or anything.
31:06But my perspective now in my thirties is that,
31:08you know, years of your career. And, like, if you look at Walter Isaacson, right, like, did he get lucky when Steve Jobs called him?
31:19He was like, hey. I'm I've got a few good years left.
31:23Like, I want you to write my biography. It's because Isaacson spent the first twenty years of his career writing permissionlessly writing biographies of of da Vinci and Einstein, like, great figures, but they were historical.
31:34Anybody could have written those. He didn't have unique special access necessarily. Um, but by doing that work, he became the person who got that call.
31:41And by doing Steve Jobs' biography, he got the Elon Musk biography. And so, like, you know, these are permissionless books.
31:48I've spent the first twenty 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 twenty years and have a respect for what they have done that I will get opportunities that, you know, no other author will have had.
32:08Such a good point. What what does Naval say about or and I don't know if he does, but this I have a recency bias. Lately, I've noticed a lot of creative people saying they don't do creative free work.
32:19Meaning, like, they'll wanna apply for a job and not wanna do a project. And at 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.
32:32There's almost no correlation. And that used to be that if you worked at some of these big companies, you're 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, 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.
32:51Um, and so now we make everybody do a creative project. And, uh, 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.
33:04Mhmm. Are they really interested or are they merely kind of curious? Because if they're kind of curious, there are many companies to go be curious at, but it's not this one.
33:12And so I'm curious, like, you've done so much free work throughout your career, both, like, writing and, um, you know, collating things and and doing lots of stuff on the Internet.
33:24One, how do you feel about doing free work in order to get eventual super highly paid work? And two, is there anything Nipal says about that?
33:32I'm very happy to do free work that I assign myself. Um, I don't know if I have the same relationship to, like, free work that somebody else wants me to do for them. Yeah.
33:39Uh, if it's a lot of my natural curiosity, maybe, but, really getting kind of a natural independence is, when you're doing things for their own sake, you do them at a different level. Yeah.
33:48Um, but if I wanna really wanted a job at a company, absolutely, I feel like I would do a project to get a job. Sure.
33:56Well, it's I mean, Naval is a fan of, like, doing things for their own sake. And he has an interesting story he tells that I 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.
34:12I told everybody I was retired, 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.
34:23I just followed my curiosity, and it all worked out. So I think, you know, like many things, uh, sometimes rewards our best pursuit indirectly.
34:33And so, like, this book is excellent. If people see excellence in it, it's not because, like, somebody told me to make it great.
34:41It's because I cared about it enough to invest a lot in making it great, um, 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, you know, might make a difference in people's lives, I'm, like, utterly meticulous.
35:00Nabal has a line I loved, which is desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Yeah. What a line.
35:08Painful. What does that mean, and how do you integrate that into your life, or how did you see him do it? Yeah.
35:15He, uh, he's
35:16his happiness arc is so interesting. Right? So he had, like, achieved all this incredible material success.
35:22He built successful companies. He'd been an incredible investor. He was well known in Silicon Valley.
35:27And 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.
35:37And, like, um, 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.
35:44And so we started reading, you know, like, the the most of the happiness canon is kind of this Eastern Buddhism and things like that.
35:52And so desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you 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.
36:14Instagram in particular seems like this 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 be 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.
36:42But 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. Naval also talks about getting a partnership and what it means to be in, like, partnership.
36:56What would Naval say is important in choosing your partner? Naval's
37:01cites the great buffet as, like, using the energy, uh, 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 Buffett are, like, the partnership that everybody aspires to.
37:17Right? Like, great friends, phone call every day, you know, sixty year zero fight partnership. And Buffett's track record is investing in CEOs and abdicating entirely to them.
37:28And so, like, you gotta be a really good people picker when that's your strategy. And so I think that's, you know,
37:37a perfectly great formula to to emulate. Can't remember if it's Munger or Buffett that says, um, when you get a dog, uh, don't do the barking for it.
37:45And, uh, and so I like that. In partnerships too, it's the same thing. You know?
37:50Don't hire a CEO and then do the CEO and inform. Yeah. Um, I think that makes a lot of sense.
37:55What about, um, and it's interesting because we've talked about happiness with Elon Musk. We've talked about happiness with Naval and sort of that neither of them really seem to aspire much to raw happiness.
38:08Do you think that success and happiness go together? When Naval say that they go together, do you believe that they go together?
38:16I think they go together for some people. I think some people, um, there's a balance of, like, for some some people, it's easier to achieve your material desires, and for some people, it's easier to lower them or dismiss them.
38:29And Naval's got a great line. It's it's maybe, like, the ultimate Naval line, which is the true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. And, you know, 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, like, he's getting what he wants out of life.
38:48And if somebody just wants, like, as much peace as possible, then, like, they should go live in a monastery and, like, yield any desires, uh, to affect the material world and or have deep relationships. And and maybe they have an incredible subjective experience. And most people will end up somewhere in between.
39:04Right? But as long as you're at peace with the trade offs that you're making and you're not trying to, you know, fit five impossible things to coexist into one life, I think, you know, your formula for happiness, uh, and getting what you want out of life is gonna be uniquely yours.
39:23What's the lessons that you keep going back to from Nival? Like, you've studied him for years Mhmm. And now interacted with him for probably, like, a decade plus.
39:33Like, what do you go back to?
39:35I think that's that test of what you want out of life is a good one. Um, I I I first felt drawn to Naval 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.
39:53What, like, 99% of what you hear somebody say is like, Nailed it.
40:00In a way that felt right to me. Like, they're not gonna be everybody's heroes, but they they spoke to me for some reason. Um, and Naval takes all of Munger and sort of puts him in a, like, progressive technological setting that's, like, exciting and futuristic and, um, more growth oriented.
40:17And I I like the combination of those very much. Um, but I the Nabal also lives, like, a quite a balanced and well rounded life. Like, I'm more of a Munger guy than a Buffett guy because Munger is, like, kind of a polymath, and Buffett is, like, maniacally focused on just, Berkshire and compounding his capital.
40:31But Munger has many different interests and many different curiosities and has gone down many rabbit holes and lived many lives in the same way that Naval does. He's founder of AngelList 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, you know, has found a way to find, like, both peace and happiness and success, uh, like material success kind of all at the same time.
41:00And material success in a way that is, like, meaningful to him, not externally or image driven, I think, in my my view, which is, like, certainly what I aspire to do because those are, um, those are winnable games. Like, the inner scorecard is a winnable game.
41:15You can set the goalpost and achieve them, and you can make sure that, like, you're always happy with where you are, that you're not trying to, like, fill this bottomless bucket with, like, something someone else's perception that you have no hope of controlling.
41:28Naval has a line that I love that's very jarring about how a salary is, like, the most addictive form of heroin, something to that degree. It's a Taleb quote.
41:40Uh, the three most addictive substances are,
41:43uh, these heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.
41:48Yeah. And that, like, uh, that push to get you out of the out of the comfort zone. Right?
41:53Like, Taleb's morality is all around. Like, are you a risk taker? Are you exposed to the upside or downside of your own behavior?
42:01Or are you kind of like a lamb in the paddock? And, you know, like many things, Naval finds, like, a pithy kind of powerful way to phrase it, but it's a it's a nice way to just kind of, like, give you a nudge towards your authentic self and to, like, feel the 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 and on life's adventure.
42:27Yes. It's, 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.
42:55Yeah. And so I do think a lot of what I've learned from Naval, at least, is how do you get a little closer to the action?
43:03Because, 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 I like that he pushes. Like, there's he talks about how, um, you know, you'll never get rich renting your time.
43:21Yep. And I actually don't agree with that. The I mean, mathematically, it's not true.
43:25Like, Sheryl Sandberg, quite rich, always been an employee.
43:29But, also, she was an employee at the level where she had massive equity upside. Right? Well, I think that is the part that gets
43:37waylaid 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.
43:47She does actually, you know, like, quantifiably rent her time. She has paid a salary.
43:52Right? But her upside probably comes all from equity warrants options, etcetera. Well, so what maybe explain that.
43:58Like, that'll be an interesting question, which would be something like, can you get really rich on a nine to five?
44:06Can you get really rich
44:08renting your time or on salary? Maybe the nuance is that you need asymmetric upside. Right?
44:13And so one of Nawal's 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.
44:22You need asymmetric exposure. And there are many job there's many ways to get that. There are people who get reasonably rich, who become millionaires, who work nine to fives their whole lives, but they're really diligent savers and investors.
44:34And they max out their four zero one k, and they live on half their salary, and that this is like the fire movement. Right? They their way of getting equity is just like buying the index with half their salary and keeping living below their means.
44:46Um, that's a way to get equity. You probably won't become a billionaire on a $100,000 a year and have, you know, 50% savings rate in equity, but you will almost certainly become a millionaire if you're diligent about it over a fifty year time period.
44:59Um, if you ascend to you know, 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?
45:11Like, we all know cash poor doctors who are, like, making $700 a year, spending $700 a year. They never have equity. They never bother to figure out the game, and they have no retirement plan.
45:21Or 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. Um, but, you know, in the case of CEO, CFO, c suite, VP and above, like, you just want asymmetric exposure.
45:39If you believe in a 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 a nonlinear earning potential.
45:50Um, but if you ever wanna be, like, sort of truly passive and live up the capital, you need to start figuring out the,
45:56uh, the equity game. It's so true. Has 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.
46:05These are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self awareness. They need nothing from anybody else. What does he mean by that?
46:14I think this is the very ultimate inner scorecard. Right? So much of what people are driven to do is driven by this, like, mimetic desire, and they're always sort of moving the goalpost on themselves.
46:31You have to know why you're playing the game. Like, this is a this is, like, the enlightenment path. Right?
46:38And there's there's all kinds of books that he recommends and conversations that he's had with with people. But if you, like, study those sort of enlightened people, they're just, like, removed from it.
46:49Um, 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.
46:57Some people could be like, this this is all a hallucination. I'm just gonna remove myself.
47:02Um, but some people need to win the game and then look around and be like, oh, there's nothing else here, um, so I can escape the game.
47:10But 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, you know, behind or pressured or, like, driven.
47:20And if you know where the road ends, like, I took from Naval reading this you know, building this book when I was, like, 30 is like, oh, if you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue and, like, right all the way to, like, winning the game, finally achieving all these things that you hope to the whole time.
47:41You have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that, like, none of it matters. It's all made up.
47:47You don't even exist. None of this exists. We're all in this, like, a hilarious absurd dream state, so don't take it all so fucking seriously.
47:55You can get the things that you want or you can choose not to want them or you can 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.
48:15And 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 because it's a fun game and we're here and why not?
48:31Like
48:32Yeah. It's a fun dream. And then it kinda doesn't even have to stop you from your speed.
48:38Like, I don't know about you, but when I was younger, used to 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. Mhmm. Because that's what winning takes.
48:46Mhmm. But I realized, well, actually, having, like, a pretty big step back from, like, pain in your stomach or that anxiety in your heart when 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.
49:05And 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 adrenal fatigue.
49:15You're just you you get burnt out. You have decision fatigue.
49:19Um, you know, it's interesting. We I I had a member of my team and, you know, he was really good. And, you know, in his words, he burnt himself out.
49:27And so I was like, well, let's talk about that. And, um, and he said, well, you know, I just don't know that I wanna keep doing this, and I've got all these things.
49:35And I go, well, do you need to hire somebody? Like, do you think that that is a truth that you always have to stay in said role doing the exact same thing continuously?
49:46And then, yeah, surely, if you look down into the future, ten years down the road, you probably think that doesn't look like a very fun road to go on. So why would you? And, uh, and what I found was a lot of people that job hop or, you know, can't figure out what to do next or when they jump around that, you know, they they have a great sprint for, like, two years and they're kind of not sure.
50:06It's 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 pleaser and you stay one, if you don't know how to delegate and you never figure it out, it's really problematic because you you can you build like this, like, constraint that isn't even there.
50:21And 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, uh, like, even figuring out what is possible or not Yeah. And where do you have these fake constraints
50:34Yeah. That you don't even realize. That's what was saying.
50:35Like, back to the Elon algorithm is, like, the, uh, question of requirements. And and having like, how do you give your team members agency over their environment?
50:44It's like, I I I love this company, but, like, this role is 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.
50:57What questions 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?
51:03So Naval would, like you would even have to first recognize in yourself, I feel this way. Yeah. I need to name it.
51:09I need to figure out why.
51:11Like, how would you if you were struggling right now and felt trapped or lost and not know what to do next,
51:16what have you learned? To me, the most universal thing, um, and the most the thing that I I come back to most often here is, like, thoughtful desire management.
51:25I've I've now noticed when a new desire enters my mind, and I have to, like, triage it. Uh, and I 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 wanna be a stand up comedian.
51:42I 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.
51:51I still respect it as a medium. I think it's incredible. And I don't know if it's age or just thoughtful desire management or whatever, but it's just, like, very clear to me now that I do not wanna pay the price to become I don't want the lifestyle.
52:02I don't want all the things like, uh, you know, the 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.
52:11And that's there are a thousand examples like that, and I bet, you know, open Instagram 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.
52:26And big or small, learning to identify that and say, like, do I really want that? Is that a meaningful desire?
52:33Is that a long term desire? Is it worth changing, you know, the the course that I'm on?
52:39What would I sacrifice? Do I want that thing enough to pay the price tag for it? Mhmm.
52:42It's like almost always the answer is no. And 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 to minute basis.
52:52So how do you do that? Do you literally go, okay. I feel the desire.
52:55So, 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?
53:03Like, what does that thought process look like for recognizing a desire and not immediately latching onto it? Well, I mean, an example, like, a friend texted me today and is like, did you hit your targets for the book launch?
53:14And I was like, I don't have targets for the book launch. I don't have like, that is an arbitrary I'm not gonna pick a number that I have, like, may or may not work is if I pick 10,000 copies and I sell 9,000, am I supposed to be sad? For how long?
53:27Like, is that a useful desire or not a useful desire? It was just arbitrary. So, like, I don't know.
53:35I I don't hold any desires, um, particularly closely.
53:40And the the longer the term and the more vague they are, the more helpful it is. Right? Like, um, I wanna have a wonderful relationship with my wife.
53:47I want my kids to have an incredible life. Am I stubborn about any of the specifics about how that needs to look? No.
53:53Not 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?
54:01No. Oh, yeah. I don't know.
54:02There's just, um, there's, like, a loose grip over almost everything. It's like maybe where you end up after
54:10some 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 have been like that.
54:18Like, you've done tough things, a turnaround, you know, of a company while writing books. Books themselves are not easy to do in general.
54:27You've also had startups prior to that, um, and you felt what failures felt like. Um, so I guess maybe the last thing would be, are there quotes you turn to from Naval, 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.
54:48I think the lesson that so many of us learn
54:51and have to learn many, many times is to trust yourself and your intuition. Right?
54:57Like, um, that seems to be, like, the weird arcs and turns of my career, like, have all sort of come back to, like, just trust trust that little voice a little sooner,
55:09um, sometimes. I is that, like, also your experience? Yeah.
55:13I think we're wrong a lot less often than we think we are. Mhmm.
55:18You just talk yourself out of it. Yep. Um, that's not in every case, but especially once you've developed that.
55:25In 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 twenties. They're kinda like Dunning Kruger, like Yeah.
55:33Under yeah. Exactly. Small information, high conviction.
55:36And then at some point, you start to see a lot of cycles and think, oh, I I've I've seen this before. I should just listen to it. Yeah.
55:43Then when 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 bad.
55:54Like, if you say, like, I'm so mad at my wife. I'm gonna leave her. Well, that might not be.
55:58It might just be saying there's something really wrong in my relation. Like, that's what the voice is saying. And so what does that mean?
56:04Well, maybe it means you actually lean in more and you do more things. But I think most often, we just try to, like, shove it down, ignore it.
56:10Yeah. I mean, listening to the voice, um, allowing it to allowing it to go long enough, you see the patterns.
56:18Right? Like, in that moment of of anger, um, maybe you're not getting a clear signal.
56:23If if you think that twice a day every day for six months, maybe there is something really, you know, really wrong with the relationship. But in a like, after you listen, you need courage.
56:33Like, a lot of people hear the voice, and the the choice is either to repress it or to act on it over a certain amount of time.
56:41And I think the people that end up the most unhappy, have have repressed so much because they never summoned the courage.
56:48And so they're, like, deeply aware of what it is, um, that they they truly wanna be doing or feel like they could be doing and just never took that next leap.
56:58Um, you know, there's I think it's a Winston Churchill quote. Like, courage is every virtue at its highest form. And so, like, you can understand all the virtues, but if you don't have the courage to to act on them when it's difficult, when everything else is sort of going against them, like, they have no they have no form.
57:14If we were gonna get really tactical with it and somebody wanted to hone their desire
57:19plus 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?
57:30This is not a novolism, but I I know people who swear by this, which is just like a morning brain dump on paper. The process of externalizing these thoughts, um, somehow helps you evaluate them, and and it forces you to be honest.
57:45And 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.
57:56As soon as you write it down, you're like, that's stupid. Yeah.
58:02But if you just live with it in your head the whole time, you're like, you could feel your body responding to it. And and that that practice of externalizing it just helps you observe it ration rationally.
58:13And it's it's a much 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.
58:24But writing it is is a shortcut to doing it, and that's, um, a helpful method. And and by the same token, like, doing that over time, like, you can only write, I hate this job.
58:33I wanna quit so many times before you're like, oh my god.
58:39You know? You will respond to observing that over time.
58:45You know, whatever it is, like,
58:48if you stay present with it, uh, the courage, I think, will eventually sort of culminate, you will manifest that in some ways. That's so true. That's so true.
58:57Um, I love this book. It was one it was my, obviously, my first book I read of yours. I read it years ago.
59:02I come back to it often.
59:04Thank you for writing this and so many others so we get to learn it from the great. Thank you for having me. It's been, uh, it's been really fun to sort of coevolve with you and see, like, you are living some of the principles in this book at an extremely high level, and it's really, um, it's really awesome.
59:20Like, if you don't for people that don't understand sort of the journey that you've gone on, I think, like, principles here that are making you successful are above, like, leverage and equity and compounding are, like,
59:35you took this blueprint and ran with it and built something for it. I definitely did. We've known each other a long time now now that I think about it.
59:41How many years do you think?
59:43Should we get this book? This came out in 2020. So Yeah.
59:47Well, definitely before that. So eight, ten years maybe. Ten years, which also means we're old.
59:51It was, like, early Twitter ex. You know, I would like we were in a, like, Twitter, like, support group together where we were like God.
59:58You're funny. You assembled this, like, team of people to help each other. Like, it was like support group.
1:00:04Dude, it was like a sprint to a 100 k. Yeah. And, like, you made it in three months, and now you're at what?
1:00:10I think 700 k. 700 k. Yeah.
1:00:12Unbelievable.
1:00:13Oh, yeah. It's true. Well, that is another thing that I think, you know, both the leaders we've talked about do a really good job of and I've tried to learn from is, like, not just like, it's a big world.
1:00:25Pull 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 because I just find that, like, it's so much more beneficial to, like, celebrate friends, celebrate wins, you know, try to win more myself, and then get in other groups where other winners already are.
1:00:43Yep. You know? And I learned I think that group, most of those people in there probably besides you and I were bigger than us on the Internet Yep.
1:00:49And now probably aren't, um, because, like, I think we were connectors, and you're like a a super connector, you know, with lots of companies and people on the Internet.
1:00:59So that's another lesson I've learned here. Sit at home and write. And, like, you're you're out there running a media empire.
1:01:05Well, we love that. But that's what I like to do. I like to run companies.
1:01:08Yeah. I like to sit at home and write where it sounds right. No.
1:01:11And you definitely know who you are. Like, think I it's a good it's it's a very good point that, like, this makes me incredibly happy what I do. Yeah.
1:01:17So I consider myself a happy builder even though it's really hard. And and it my happy looks totally different than yours, but we both, like, kept listening to that little desire and playing into it more and more and more and sort of obsessing on it.
1:01:29Yeah. So, like, people are gonna have a hard time beating you at writing this. Yeah.
1:01:32People are gonna have a hard time beating me at building media companies because it's just what I do for fun. People are incredibly unique. And, like, the the further you go in life, the more unique you should become.
1:01:42You know? Like, I I like, uh, if you're not weird, how do you know you're free? Oh, yeah.
1:01:45Like, one of our main 13 principles is, uh, bring your weird. It's better than boring. Yeah.
1:01:50So, like, that is so true. Alright. You're the male.
1:01:53Thank you. You.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Codie Sanchez opens not with a question but with a Naval line — 'desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want' — and a flat declaration that this episode is a step back from a world that wants to tell you what to do. Then she names her guest's edge: Eric Jorgenson spent ten years studying Naval Ravikant. 'Now we're gonna steal his homework.' The 47 seconds before the show even starts already contain the whole frame.
