Modern Wisdom - #225 - Eric Jorgenson - The Wisdom Of Naval Ravikant

Episode Date: September 28, 2020

Eric Jorgenson is a growth marketer and product strategist. Naval Ravikant has risen to wisdom-stardom over the last 10 years but is far more aloof than most of us would like. Eric has spent 3 years compiling the best of Naval's insights into a single book, and today we get to fanboy about it. Expect to learn the most impactful quotes from Eric's research on Naval, the fundamentals of how wealth is created, how to productise yourself, why happiness is a skill not a state, why desires are a weakness, how you can get more lucky and much more... Sponsor: Get Surfshark VPN at https://surfshark.deals/MODERNWISDOM (Enter promo code MODERNWISDOM for 83% off and 3 Months Free) Extra Stuff: Download the Almanack Of Naval Ravikant - https://www.navalmanack.com/ Follow Eric on Twitter - https://twitter.com/EricJorgenson  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back. I guess today is Eric Jorgensen and he has spent the last three years and over a million words putting together the Almanac of Naval Ravacant. Now if you don't know who Naval is, he's a thinker and founder from Silicon Valley, but more importantly he's risen to prominence I guess over the last few years with his Twitter feed, which is kind of like if Aristotle or Seneca or Marcus Aurelius was living in the 21st century and just constantly putting out absolute gold, that's kind of like what it's like to follow the wall online. And the problem is that all of his work is distributed

in tiny little 240 character tweets and three minute podcast episodes that he does. So Eric's goal was to compile all of that and then condense it down into a single easily digestible reference of all of Navaar's work. And today we get to go through exactly what he learned upon that mammoth task. I adore Navaar's work. I think he genuinely is one of the most unique thinkers that's alive today. And I couldn't be happier to help him promote this project. By the way, this book is free.

You can pay for a hardcover or a paperback on Amazon, but you can go to Naval Manac, which is linked in the show notes below. And you can pick up a PDF or an ebook copy of this absolutely for free. So please tweet Eric, tell him, thank you for dedicating three years of your life to a project, which is just so phenomenal that it should be easily £100 per download. Yeah, I really hope that you enjoyed today. We talk about wealth, happiness, desire, how we limit our

own ability to stay present. Some of the contradictions in Montenegro says and in modern philosophy as well, it's a really insightful discussion that I think could have a profound impact on your life if you're in the right place to hear it. But for now, it's time to talk about the wisdom of Naval Ravakan with Eric Jorgensen. Welcome to Naval Fest 2020. This is big dick energy. We're just marinating in it today and we're going to see how much we can jerk off over Navale over the next 60 minutes. A couple hundred pages probably worth. And then edited material. So we got a lot to go on.

DVD extras, paper view, only fans, like additional content. DVD commentary, bonus scenes, directors's cut, we got it all. I love it. So why are you writing a book about Naval? Why did you like what makes him worthy of a book? It was a... I've been following Naval for 10 years now maybe. He was the first person I kind of got introduced to in Navaly, not personally, but when I was, you know, just a web behind the years kid from Michigan who had never left Michigan, it was like trying to get in the years, kid from Michigan, who had never left Michigan, it was like trying to get into the startup world. Somebody's like, go read all of Venture Hacks,

following of all, do everything he says. Him and Paul Graham were kind of like, those are the lighthouses of the valley. Like, go listen and follow. So, I've been kind of following for a long time, and I learned a ton from him. And as he's kind of evolved over the years, and started sharing more and more stuff, I've learned more and more, and I found myself recommending his podcasts and tweets, and to more

and more people for more and more reasons. I realized how hard it is for people outside of the Twitter, and the podcast world to kind of pick up that and run with it and learn from it. But the stuff that he talks about can be so life-changing for so many people at many different stages, I think. And there's just so much value there that I really wanted like an easy on-ramp, and I wanted a tight package. And I'm watching these like high-value, you know, huge pieces of wisdom. Just kind of slide into the like Twitter nothingness. It broke my heart, and I'm like, I need to turn this into something more evergreen, something more permanent. And there's no better package than a book. Everybody

knows what to do with a book. Everybody, it's easy to gift, it's easy to read through. People know what to do with it and hopefully it'll live on and stay relevant for a really long time. What's unique about Naval? Naval, like came to the US as a poor immigrant at nine years old, I think Brooklyn, and just kind of had to start from nothing and build his way up. He got into a good high school, which is a huge turning point for him early in his life. He's undeniably just a brilliant guy. So he didn't scrap it together from nothing. He's definitely got some horse power.

We got into this great high school. We got into Dartmouth. Started at the bottom in the tech world, study computer science, and eventually kind of through a bunch of different missteps and adventures and companies and failures and lawsuits and investments kind of found his way into breaking out in the tech world and starting Angel List and is incredibly widely followed kind of in that tech world for what he's built there and

the investments that he's made in Twitter and Uber and he's in this kind of interesting chapter of life that you see kind of a lot of people go through where they have achieved all of the successes that they hope to achieve when they were younger. And they're now kind of both giving back those lessons of how they achieve what they did and kind of turning to philosophy and family and legacy and just looking at how they can give back and how they can learn a little bit more about life instead of the rat race. And so it's kind of an interesting turning point where he knows a lot about wealth from this past and he continues to work and invest. But he's learning a lot about happiness in the very recent present and is practicing it

currently and continuing to kind of develop that and share it. The particular interesting insight that I have about Nivala, the reason I think I'm drawn to him, is the fact that his wisdom is so practical. There's part of me, Ryan Holiday was recently on here, Massimo Piglucci has been on here, we've talked a lot about stoicism and it's like the hot new girl in school for 2020. But there's part of me when I read it that doesn't like how abstract it is. to read it that doesn't like how abstract it is. All right, man. Yeah, virtue and integrity and overcome the obstacle. I'm like, okay, I get it. But there's just a part of it that feels too like bourgeois and artsy. You know,

like let's not forget that the vast majority of the Stoics came from wealth. Like there was some that was the born of slaves and ended up in good situations, but oh bad situations. But the vast majority of them came from wealth. And I think that even two and a half thousand years later, that still kind of reflects and shows on. Whereas someone who's wisdom has really, really been not just designed for practicality, but forged in reality. Like Neval's is something that attracts me to it particularly. And I think as well, the vast majority of us are, you know, like middle class, working class, or aspiring underclass. And with that in mind, you feel a sense of affinity

to someone who's got that zero to hero journey, you know, as opposed to it just being someone I'm chair philosophizing, this, like Baroque fucking mansion somewhere that their dad has, you know, you get me? Yeah, it is very practical and it is definitely, I find it easier to listen to philosophies from some point who has passed the tests of reality,

who is an operator, who has founded companies, who has made investments, and Stoicism totally agree with you, it's easy to kind of read it and be like, yeah, sure, I agree. And then passing the test of reality, there's a lot of times where it is is not practical, it is almost incompatible with having close intimate relationships or friendships. And I really want to hear people talk about how they react stoically when their partner is upset or when their child is upset. And things like that that are, it's not like a guru on a mountain. It's easy to be stoic in your by yourself, like under a tree. And that's just not how we live. And I think how we want to live. So finding the kind of like, where do you put the dial between stoicism as an operating philosophy and maybe a business

practice and, you know, how you act with your family when you need to be empathetic and build deep relationships and deep friendships. I think that's something that's like really kind of interesting to dig into and a piece of curiosity that I'm left with even after this book is kind of like, where do you, where do you go to kind of find that I'm left with even after this book is kind of like where do you where do you go? To kind of find that balance between the ideal and the practical. I think that's a really important point the fact that you can write something which is 100% artsy and sounds beautiful in these abstract terms but there's a lot of work left to be done by the reader to then deploy that to their own lives and I think

that again, you know, this is just a full on jerk off around Neval, but I think the reason that he has managed to resonate with people, saying things that really should be far too high brow for everyone to listen to, is that he's sacrificed maybe sort of 10 to 20% of the art seen us for an additional 80% of practical ability to apply almost immediately. You know, it reads like somewhere in between stoic maxims and a how to put your life together guide if it was done by an IKEA instruction manual. Yeah, yeah, get into the principles. Precisely. So look, the book is split into two parts, wealth and happiness. Are there any sections that you could have added, but you didn't? Oh, many. Yeah. The first manuscript of this, the thing was like,

hundreds more pages. And it included, you know, his thoughts on blockchain and education and the future. There was kind of this whole futurism section and investing and how to operate startups. I did one section that was just the story of Angelist, you know, how the trials that he went through kind of as an early founder led to his views on venture capital, which led to venture hacks, the blog, which led to Angelist that platform.

It's a really, really incredible story. All of that is on the website, so it broke my heart to cut it, the blog, which led to angel list the platform. It's a really, really incredible story. All of that is on the website. So it broke my heart to cut it from the book. And I was like, duh, just put it on the website. People who want it, and after they read the book can go, kind of get into that stuff. Early readers, like everybody kind of loved one or two of those sections, but not all of them.

And I didn't want to publish a giant text book of everything of all that I've ever said, even though it's interesting to me. So that's kind of self-serve on the website. But the main two sections of the book are our wealth and happiness. And I really think it's, you know, there's a lot of books out there on wealth. And there's a lot of books out there on happiness. And of all is maybe really interesting in the fact that he sits at the corner of those two. And kind of you're seeing in the fact that he sits at the corner of those two and kind of very practically to your point, like looks at the trade-offs between the two. Something I didn't know until reading this was that Buddha was a prince, he was very wealthy.

And so when he was able to kind of just leave his family and go off in the woods and meditate and study and just kind of learn and become peaceful and practice this philosophy. And so Neval is very practical about like, there's actually like a lot of ways in which happiness is dependent on wealth. Building wealth isn't going to make you happy, but it will certainly give you the space to study and explore philosophy and to kind of not spend your whole life with your head down in the rat race. So he's like, by all means, like getting rich is a perfectly practical, reasonable goal on the way to becoming happy. You don't have to be happy to be rich, but also it definitely helps.

Like, your money solves your money problems and those are problems. So if you can solve that, it gives you time and it gives you space to kind of explore some of these other things. And to your point about the stories, like many of the philosophers that we looked to were either very, very wealthy, or they had so little and had absolutely nothing in their responsibilities.

And they had so little that they could choose to, basically become a monk, renounce everything and find happiness. And so if you're only gonna go one of those two directions, like you can go all the way to having nothing and wanting nothing and eliminating all your desires, or you can try to get really rich, store up a bunch of that goodwill and give yourself the space to kind of lower your desires below your means, but just know that, you know, you got to build that gap in or you're just always going to be unhappy.

It's like when you're on a diet, anyone who's had to do a hard cut before a holiday knows, if you're on low cows, everything, every single experience in your life is flavored with the fact that you're still a bit hungry. And it's like the same as being skin. If you've not got enough money, if you don't know where the next paycheck or the next bills are going to come from, you can be having the best time of your life. But there's this tarnish that's layered, this veneer that's sort of layered over the top of things that says, yeah, but, but money, yeah, but, but I don't

know where the next paycheck's coming from. And it's, being rich might not make you happy, but being poor can make you miserable. And Diogeny's the cynic who lived out of a pot and was sort of the first of the minimalist movement, which when I was seeing a resurgence in like a seticism and minimalism, I guess in the 20th century, the 21st century. Yeah, Diogeny's was like the grandfather of that, but I don't want to be Diogeny's, you know, like I want to have nice things, I want to, and again, another Nevalism, which everyone will be familiar with, one of my favorites is, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than it is to announce them. So I would much sooner say, I don't need a Ferrari when my last car was a Ferrari,

then try and battle through all of the different bizarre attachments that I've got to work out. Yeah, but I never wanted it in any case. And you get into so much sort of self deception there in any case. So, okay, wealth. How is wealth created? Yeah, wealth is created. There's a whole kind of set of formulas in the book

that kind of break this down, almost principle formulas. And so your income is determined by your accountability plus your specific knowledge, plus the degree of leverage that you're using. formulas. And so your income is determined by your accountability, plus your specific knowledge, plus the degree of leverage that you're using. And then your income is going to determine your wealth based on your savings rate and your return on income. But Navall really prioritizes building wealth as looking for assets that can earn money while you sleep. So building media, buying equity in a business, you have to get sort of, you know,

whether you're building software, whether you're building a podcast or a blog or a book or whatever it is, do something that can work that is not a linear input and output. And if you're working, even if you're a very high paid doctor, you're working an hour, you're going to pay it even a thousand, ten thousand dollars an hour It's going to be really, really tough to outwork the amount of time that you have and so you have to start using tools of leverage so labor, capital, or product in order to kind of build in that leverage and get that compounding going because it's going to take you a long time

And you're going to need the compounding relationship with a long period of time, probably, in order to actually get the space to build that wealth. That particular insight, which comes from the EMYTH revisited as well, that if you have any business where if you were to leave for more than six weeks and the whole thing was to fall apart, that's not a business, that's just a highly leveraged job. That insight to a lot of people, in especially if you've grown a working class, no, I own my own business,

I'm, or even what's a synonym for that, I'm my own boss. Okay, I'm my own boss and I own a business are two incredibly different things. You talked about accountability and some of the terms that are very like, navali. Can you just break those down for people who haven't gone down the rabbit hole already? Yes, I went through a lot kind of quickly there. And the book is really an attempt to unpack a lot of those terms. And so, you know, it's easy to kind of blow

through a few words, but really like accountability is a compression of pages and pages of ideas, same with specific knowledge. Specific knowledge is probably the right place to start. So specific knowledge is kind of finding a fit between what society needs, what the world is willing to pay for, and what you are uniquely capable of and happy to deliver as a work product. So you love talking about modern wisdom, philosophers, stoicism, talking with people on the internet and pulling out their lessons and

sharing it with people. You're really good at it, you're passionate about it, you love to do it. And that is going to let you outwork and outpace and outperform a lot of other people that might try to do it, but not be as not have it be quite as good of alignment with who they are as a person and what they've spent their whole life studying and becoming. So that specific knowledge is really, there's kind of two parts and one is understanding yourself well enough to know what your talents are and what you really want to be doing. And that is, that is not to be overlooked like that is a hard thing to do. And it's something that we are all kind of,

we're always changing and our understanding of ourselves are always changing and growing. And so relying on the people around you, they actually maybe better at showing you kind of who you are and what your specific knowledge and skills are. One of the tests that questions it, and of all else is like, what are the things that other people ask you to do? What are things that people come to you for help with? Or what are the things that

you found yourself doing at a very young age? Like your parents and those around you, the things that you've been doing since you were a gossip in third grade and you're running around tattling on people, maybe you're a journalist now or something. and run around tattling on people, like maybe you're a journalist now or something. You know, so that's one piece, the other piece of that specific knowledge is getting to understand what you can deliver to society that they are, society is not yet able to get for itself, or that you might be able to do better than anyone has ever done it before. And hopefully at scale, back to what we were talking about, I'm like, you don't want, inputs and outputs on an hourly basis. You want to be able to do something that is going to be

replicable 10 times or 100 times or a thousand times, whether that's through media or code or labor or capital. What are some examples of those four types of leverage just in real world? Yeah, so capital is maybe the easiest place to start because if you place about for $10 you buy a stock with $10 and you're right and it doubles it goes to 20 but if you do it with a million and it goes to 2 million and the rewards for that are the leverage comes from capital. It's this exact same decision but if you make the decisions

leveraged by capital that is a huge outcome differential. And so you can use your own capital. Certainly, like there's a lot of leverage that comes from that, but there is also capital from others. And for that, you need to be able to kind of build your reputation. And to do that, you're taking accountability in public. So that accountability for your bets and making publicly kind of observable things so that you can build that track record of having good judgment so that other people are willing to kind of lend you their leverage in the form of capital or in the form of labor.

So labor is another piece where there's an amazing design for an automobile at Tesla, but it takes hundreds, thousands of people to build that car to that spec. And that is every person who's working under that plan is a piece of that leveraged outcome. Like labor is a form of leverage. There's someone can perform a task for $100 an hour, and that company is going to pay them $50 an hour to do it, but it's worth a hundred to the market. So there's leverage in that. And you want to be by owning the equity of that business.

You are on the profiting side there's leverage in that. And you want to be, you know, by owning the equity of that business, you are on the, the profiting side of that leverage instead of the like, slightly less profiting side of that leverage, not that it's not a, you know, a positive trade for both because people need jobs and employment and think of skills and everything like that. You know, everybody starts there at some point, but hopefully by buying equity in that business. So that's a, that's a piece that he talks about as well. There's a lot of ways to get equity, but the people who get truly wealthy almost always do it through equity ownership. So those are the first, I guess,

those are the traditional two. And then we've got media and is it programming or code or product? He says it's a little bit of a mouthful, but the full definition is products with no marginal cost of replication. Yeah, code. Code. Code.

Code, Amelia. Jim O'Shawness actually refers to it as symbol manipulation, which I think is kind of interesting, like broad classification, but like includes podcasts, like what we're doing right now is we record it once you know We spend two hours on it, but it lives on forever You know whether a hundred people listen to it or a hundred thousand people listen to it like that value is still there and it can

Be available and served up even when we are not there to you know talk to people So like we have to have this conversation over and over again on demand every time that someone decides to do it Yeah, they pull open their podcast app and say, I want to listen to Chris and Eric. Eric mates, someone's done it again. We're going to have to wake up. What does that care? I remember how he started. So it's that and then it's talking about the code.

So how would code work? What would be an example of that? Yeah, that's, you know, someone writes a software program that one person could buy or 100 people could buy or a thousand people could buy, and there's, you know, server farms all over the world that can dish out to people, and that program may need to be updated and kept relevant, but once it runs, a thousand people can buy, and that's why we're seeing like enormous margins in software and SAS, which is really a thing that didn't exist in the industrial era.

So the marginal cost of replicating some of these solutions is just lower than it has ever been, and it completely changes the economics of some of these businesses in ways that are really, really interesting. I think we're still kind of seeing what the impact of that is, and it's going to be really interesting how this, it's still evolving. It's going to be really interesting. I think I think how it looks in a historical context and how we're going to feel about it, but it accounts for this abundance of media and software

and things that we see around us. And the other thing I would say about the productized piece that is important is that they are permissionless, right? So the internet is this giant meritocracy where anyone can record a podcast and push it out into the world, and only the best ones are going to get listened to you and surfaced, and the audience is going to kind of let that continue to snowball, but no one can stop you from recording a podcast. There's no editor, there's not a huge capital requirement. No one can stop you from submitting open source code on GitHub and getting it out there. No one can stop you from getting a gum-road account and, you know, starting to kind of sell things on the internet.

So there's a key element here where the cost of starting something, we're getting something out and putting your entry into this meritocracy has never been lower. And the rewards for doing it are basically uncapped if you do it well enough. That particular section there is something that everyone listening probably should go back and listen to, especially if you're new to this concept. I appreciate that for guys like yourself who's sort of just bathing in Silicon Valley and the sort of wisdom of the highly leveraged

that it might just now be taken as for granted. But the vast, vast, vast majority of people, even in the Western world don't see work or finances or the root to wealth in that sort of a way. It's a lot more linear than exponential like that. It's I work at a business, I become better at a business, I get paid more per hour. You know, if you were to say to someone, hey man, you can have a job that pays you 500 pounds an hour, $1,000 an hour or whatever it,

like unbelievable. But then if you were to say you can create a course that teaches everyone on the planet how to do that thing that can earn them 500 pounds or a thousand pounds an hour, you could make 10 grand every couple of hours. Well, I don't understand. I'm just doing the same job. No, no, no, no, it's about abstraction. It's about being able to do stuff at scale. It's about being able to leverage yourself. And that's something that Nava says. He says, is it productize yourself? Yeah, that's like the summary of the entire

tweet storm is productize yourself. And for me, it took a few passes through to kind of understand and be able to unpack or repack all of those concepts back into just the two words productize yourself. But I think there's a few people that kind of are living this in a way that is even teaching, you know, I've spent a lot of time with this material like I like to think I get the concepts. But watching guys like Jack Butcher, I don't know if you you follow him at all. Is it really coming? Yes, yes they are. And he, so he contributed the illustrations for the book.

So if you love the illustrations, you love Jack Butcher, whether you know it or not. And he's done an absolutely masterful job of productizing himself and creating assets and courses and products and teaching people how to visualize ideas. This incredible skill that he's developed over years of working with Fortune 500 companies and top tier agencies and things like that. He's incredibly skilled at it and he is turning that into an incredible business and an incredible kind of way to give back to the audience and help other people accumulate this skill that has been so valuable.

I mean, for me, just to help kind of inculcate these ideas into my head, like being able to visualize them simply really cares a lot of weight when you're working with things that are like a little bit abstract like this. Can you use Jack just briefly as an example between what he was doing is the agency with the one problem, one solution to what he's doing now? I think that would be really wonderful way to sort of just book end and illustrate what

we've gone through so far. Yeah, I'll do my best. I don't know the story incredibly well. And if you haven't had a amount again, I'm sure he'd be an amazing guest at some point to tell his own story, but I'll butcher the butcher story the best I can. Nice. So he was working for some high class agency

that was building him out at thousands of dollars an hour and he's a very talented designer. And so he was working, building logos, websites, and things for Fortune 500 companies and high-end, fancy car companies and stuff like that. And it was just getting his ass kicked, I think regularly at work and looking around, it's like, I'm creating a ton of value

and a ton of people are kind of taking their scrape along the way. And so he started his own agency to kind of try to recapture some of that. And that was like going well, but he was in that kind of linear trap we were talking about where he was building out, he was working his face off,

and he was just like, man, I don't know how I'm gonna like get ahead with this. And so he started kind of stealing time away from himself to kind of start working on products. And so he started with the visualized value. I think the daily digest or the daily manifest was the first product that he came out with. It was really this kind of set of questions and resources for you to kind of go over your goals and work through this little worksheet every morning to kind of keep you focused and keep you

focused on the high leverage things and did well with that and kind of layered that up into selling a bit more of a community kind of product to get people together. And that now I think is kind of layered that up into selling a bit more of a community kind of product to get people together. And that now I think is kind of flagship piece is build twice, build once sell twice, which is this like productization playbook. And so he sold courses on how to visualize your ideas and courses on how to productize yourself basically. And the business is going gangbusters, you know, follow him on Twitter.

And he's very open about his numbers. It's really been an incredible thing to watch. Just in the time of, you know, the last two years, while I was writing this book, he was busy applying the lessons from it. And he made a better use of the last two years. I think I'm a financial person, but yeah, just give him a follow, check it out. He's a great guy. So that little story that hopefully really drills home the point that we're talking about here that you have, even someone who's highly talented and highly remunerated already working within a business, but there's a glass ceiling on firstly how much you can earn plus the freedom that you have, etc, etc.

And that is because, as you said, that scraping off the top that happens, you get build out with five grand for a day, but your boss is take 50% of that and then there's that and the did it and then you walk away with the ground and half, which is still a lot, but is nowhere near as much as you could have got. Plus, you're still constrained by working for someone and not being able to take time off whenever you want. And then there's a kind of a diagonal, upward and sideways move, which is to owning your own company. Then you could start to leverage a little bit with regards to the labor. You could get, you could perhaps be the face of it. You could be the ambassador, the one who has the gravitas

and is well known, and then put designers in underneath you so you don't necessarily have to do as much grunt work. But even that, you can only onboard as many clients as you have time to fly, to meet them to the Fortune 500, the Tesla company, whatever it might be. Here's what we're going to do for your design right now. I pass it back down, endless meetings back and forth. As opposed to saying, right, okay, I can conceptualize and wrap up into a course, all of the stuff that I know on how to be the person who can do all of the things

that are up to this point, and even this point, I will teach you how to make a course that's exactly like this course using whatever specific knowledge you have, and that will continue to sell. And once you've written that, that is exactly his build one sell twice or build one sell fucking 200,000 times or whatever is going on at the moment. If I could buy stocks in Jack butcher, I would do it. So that's, I think, a really, really interesting insight into wealth. And there will be a lot of people who hopefully will go and read the book and it'll make a little bit more sense. But that's such a huge red pilter swallow. Like, to actually be able to understand exactly how you start to move away from just time for money at that one for one and then start to really, really leverage

to really big, really big sort of orthogonal shift for a lot of people. It is. And it's very, it's very counterintuitive. It's very like difficult for humans to kind of get in their head in the same way that it's difficult for us to intuitively do the math on compounding and understand like how things compound and how the actual returns work. Let me put let me jump in there and I'll let you continue. 95% of Warren Buffett's wealth was created after his 65th birthday. You know that one?

Yeah, it's incredible. What the fuck? There's so many people who do basically two full careers in their lifetime, right? That guy, it's wild. And it's one of those things that doesn't sound right and it can't possibly be true. You look at the graphs and it doesn't even make sense. But that's the power of compounding, right? And so that compounding kind of works in all of these areas.

And I think leverage is another, like, I'm not very mathematically inclined, so I might need to, like, enlist some help from somebody to get this, but there is probably, in the same way that you can, like, look at a compounding chart and be like, that is fucking mind-blowing. Like, there's no way that should work, but it's how it works when you just give it the time. I think there's something similar with leverage that is just so difficult to intuit that you have to kind of see it in action. In the same way, it takes time to work and build, and these things build on each other. It's probably the thing I'm most interested in digging into more after having finished this book. It's a thing that once you got labeled as leverage and

of all categorize it into those kind of three broad classes of leverage, I started to think about it completely differently. And I think it's a huge, it's a hugely improved label on whatever, like now that I know that there's a thing there, I want to go dig into it and I want to study it. And there's probably books and like courses and things to do, like a leverage checklist on my how are you being leveraged and how are you not and where are you doing $5 an hour tasks where you should be outsourcing that and doing $10,000 an hour tasks. I think there's a lot to explore there

and I'm kind of excited to kind of go down that rabbit hole. I agree and I think that having as many practical examples as we can guys like Jack Butcher, I've taken inspiration from him myself and I've been quite transparent with the reach and the plays of the show. It's not often that you have an objective measure of anything, like success or impact or happiness or, you know, money's like one of the few things in body weight, like that's it.

Like money and money, you know how fat you are and how rich you are and that's it. But yeah, it's good to have that thinking. I was just gonna say that I feel like your former athlete responds to like, give me a scoreboard and I'm gonna fucking win. Yes, yes. Show me how to do it. I mean, gamifying stuff is such a hack as well.

The fact that we struggle with these abstractions we're not very good at tracking things. Not anyone that's tried to lose weight without using my fitness pal. Like you know the pain of like, how many curls was that? Oh, it was probably this. And you get, you're supposed to be on a hard cut,

you feel like you've been on a hard cut and you've gained weight. You know, what happened? That you need to try. Which you didn't measure it. Yes. Absolutely everything. Exactly, exactly, exactly.

How can we prioritize and focus? Prioritize and focus is kind of the capstone on the building wealth section. And it really does its best to kind of push aside all the things that are not specifically about building wealth. And so one of the things he kind of looks at is that there's a lot of people who are out there

trying to kind of build status. And they are, they build status by attacking people playing wealth games. And there's like the social hierarchy game that we are all kind of playing in this how we're perceived game that we're all kind of playing. But that is not, for most people, how wealth is created, you know, maybe if you're a media media person or an actor, there's an exception to that. But for the most part, getting rid of all of the things that are distractions from that and understanding where wealth truly comes from, leverage accountability, specific knowledge,

building or buying equity in a business and just letting that compound, getting the, you're making sure that you are making incremental progress and making sure that it's being reinvested appropriately. And then just giving it time and patience to compound, like focusing on the right stuff. You know, there's always a kind of debate about hard work and hard work is important. But the thing that comes before hard work is making sure you are prioritizing the high leverage work that's going to give you results over the long term and focusing on it. And if you're working hard on the wrong thing, you're not going to get anywhere. And so getting that, getting your priorities straight, which is really, you know, by the time

your 50 pages into the book, you should understand what your priorities are, you know, for you today, maybe it's recording this podcast, maybe it's, you know, publishing something that you did a week ago, there's probably, if you write your whole to-do list, there's probably two things that are the most critical, you know, you're either building leverage or pushing it out and kind of pulling money in so that you can reinvest that. And everything else is kind of like either a low-value task or if it got pushed it tomorrow, it's fine or somebody else can pick it up for you. You know, one of the things that Navol uses as a test for this is putting a really,

really high hourly value on your time. So I think he said today on Twitter that it's somebody asked him, like, so how do you value your time? He said $100 a minute, six, a year and an hour, if I can outsource it or not do it and it costs me less than $100 a minute, I don't do it. And the pushback for that is people are like, yeah, sure, but like you're already rich. And he's like, I started that well before. I started that when people would say I should have taken a $20 an hour job or something, right? But having that mindset that like your time is really valuable and you have to invest it in those high leverage tasks, those key priorities, and you've got to focus on those. That's kind of a mental tool that you can use to keep focused on that and be sure you're

working on the right stuff that's going to keep that compounding engine going. That's another thing as well. People, especially if you're working class, working class background like myself, you know, mum and dad always cleaning the house consistently or washing the cars, mowing the grass outside, all that sort of stuff. It took my first ever boss, actually the first ever franchise that I got for nightlife, was the guy who owned Carnage, and he was a megalomaniac, but had some really great insights, and one of them was precisely this, that if you can outsource something for less than you

charge your time out, it wasn't quite as insightful as Naval's setting yourself this very, very high price. But if you can, at the very least, pay someone to do a thing for less than you charge your time out for, what are you doing? Like just go to work.

But unless you particularly have one of these guys who absolutely adores washing the car, which I am, I don't get, I just, for some people, maybe even not for me, not for me, and we're cutting the grass is the same thing. What are the other stumbling blocks that you think people fall over on the way to this end goal of achieving well? So we've talked about the fact that people get kind of tied up doing low-value tasks. They trip over that. And if you do sufficient low-value tasks today is a, I've just been absolutely submerged in low-value tasks today.

But I haven't made the pivot to get a VA or a PA. So it was either like, don't do them or that everything comes crumbling down because it's little bits, admin tasks that are necessary, but could be done by someone else. What are some of the other places that people stumble over? Yeah, I mean, I think that death by a thousand cuts of you feel like it's one decision at a time of like, I'll just do this. It'll be easier to just do this than get get somebody else to do it, because it is intimidating thing to go hire somebody, even like a VA or PA for relatively low amount of money.

It's still like a big, gnarly task when a clear, simple task is in front of you, you can just do it and be done. I think people underestimate maybe how valuable their specific knowledge is, or how unique they are. That's something that is kind of, we all have self doubts and insecurities and we are like, you know, we're used to walking on the street and feeling not too dissimilar from 10,000 other people that we saw these success stories and it feels so maybe far away and like those people were so different

than us. But it's not like I think everyone has something really valuable to bring and can productize themselves in an interesting way and everyone's story can be valuable to someone. And the syndrome is a hell of a drug. Yeah. It's a hell of a drug and I I would say like, no matter how small you start, like Jack again has an amazing cure for this. His goal is just like make one dollar on the internet. Just go sell one thing to one person for one dollar and you will feel different and it will start that snowball

and you kind of slowly build up the confidence. You know, you gotta start at the tutorial level maybe, but you're gonna keep building that confidence and you're gonna slowly kind of grow your way into finding your audience and find your way through that maze. And just taking that first step will give you the confidence to take the second to take the third. But you, you know, whoever is listening to this, you are more unique and valuable than you

think you are. And everyone is kind of an incredible combination of their genetics and their experience and their perspectives and their beliefs. And everyone is unique and everyone has some sort of skill or insight that they can bring to other people. If you can learn it and package it the right way and just see what people respond to that you want to bring to them. So that's, you know, that's probably even before the kind of logistical

stumbling blocks is just the belief that there's something there for you to do and for you to add value. We're all an expert in something, man. Like, let's say that you're a mother of, you've been a full-time mother since you were 23, and you've had, you've got this huge family, maybe you've even adopted a couple of children as well and you've got now taken

eight infants either your genetics or someone else is and got them to adulthood without anything catastrophic happening you are an absolute Expert in rearing children. This is how you can manage getting them ready for school This is how you can manage doing food prep on a morning. Like, I know that these, especially the unsexy things, like the domestic side, the relationship side of stuff that's more to do with not just finding a new partner, but actually further entrenching and improving

your existing relationship, then that's not that sexy. No one thinks that I'm going to get rich on dealing with the practicalities of having a big family and making a SaaS course about it. But there is a huge, huge, huge market for it. And what you're seeing now, here's something that I've got a little bit of a fear about, which is that the disparity in work required to produce an online course versus to produce a book and the remuneration that you get from

producing an online course versus producing a book. And now bifurcating so aggressively that we are going to be swimming in courses, the fact that James Clea didn't just do atomic habits on Teachable is, you know, beyond me. But he decided, oh, let's use this archaic old, like stupid form of communicating something and printed on paper and maybe you can get it on Kindle. I'll speak it in a, but I'm, you know, I hope that something happens to at least even the balance out because I know for a fact that I have tons and tons of people that I've seen on the internet, who couldn't write a book if their life depended on it, but killing it in making online courses or teaching people to do stuff.

And everyone knows the same with the Instagram influencer who managed to get clout online and is now monetizing off the back of $1,000 a post per day. But if you ask them to sit down and try and string forwards together, they wouldn't be able to do it. So I think that there is a little bit of a... We're vacillating between different extremes at the moment, and perhaps we're seeing this counter to the... sort of enlightenment period where you had people where...

intellect and academics were very, very tightly confined and now it's been completely emancipated and everyone can get access to it. And, okay, now everyone that's like remotely clever can be super rich, right? Okay, now let's find somewhere that's a happy medium between the two. Yeah, I wonder how much looking back this will look like a gold rush.

And I actually have the same. So I have a huge admiration for online courses. And I think I have definitely spent some days thinking about exactly how you feel and how what you just articulated. And I also think that it is at the same time, there is so much value in them. And they can be so much more transformative for people because they kind of, they layer in accountability and social mechanisms, and they add some kind of visual and audio learning that, you know, people who don't get as much like out of a book might resonate with, and the time that it takes,

it actually like makes you more invested, money you invest, makes you more invested. So if you want to change who you are as a person, unless you really have the discipline to bring your full self to take a book and transform it into your reality, then I absolutely believe in online course can be incredibly value-ed and worth every penny that you're paying for it. I think there is definitely. The key insight there is the fact that people are paying for the end result, they're paying for the outcome that they get at the end.

If you were to be able to say, right, you can buy James Clears atomic habits for 10 pounds or you can pay a thousand pounds, but you'll implement 90% of the book. A lot of people would more than happen because they're paying for the end goal and the more frictionless that you can make that and the higher completion, the higher success rate that you can make that as well, you're going to have justifiably more revenue. I think we're, I think we just maybe crusted the hill of some innovation in those online courses that gets, that actually makes it deliver the results to people. I think, you know, I went through this at Reforge, which is like a Silicon Valley kind of growth consulting or growth, practicing sort of course, it's an expensive

course, but it is incredible. It's taught by some of the most brilliant kind of growth people in the Valley. You see it with Thiago Forte and David Perrello's courses, like they are very focused on delivering the outcome with Jack Butchers. And that is very different than like, that hey, we recorded some college lectures and put them online and sort of deal. And these like artisanal, like almost kind of innovators in courses are really doing some awesome stuff and transforming lives.

But there's also a whole bunch of shysters out there to your point that are like, that people pay $200 for anything, like if I make some, you know, vast promises, and then I can just blame them for not actually following through and make a ton of money on it. Everyone knows, so I had Mike win it on. Have you seen the contrapener on YouTube? No. Oh dude, you will absolutely adore this. So most of the people that are listening will be familiar with him. British guy, he looked at the naughty psychological tricks that are being used by what he deems

contrapreneurs online. So it's your Dan Peniers of this world. It's the Grant Cardones and it's high ticket value, heavily discounted down. It's the limited time, heavily discounted down. It's the limited time, limited amount of offers. Like imagine saying that there is a limited number of an infinite product and genuinely considering yourself to be a legitimate businessman.

Like fuck off. And the only people that make money from those courses, the only people who he's ever found who've made money from Grant Cardon's courses are resellers. So the only people who make money from the course are people reselling the course, which is a fucking pyramid scheme. That is a pyramid scheme. I'm aware that it's not, it's managed to subvert the expectations of it being a pyramid scheme because it delivers something. But when that something is so shit that the only thing you can make money on is reselling more shit, like that is what it is. So yeah, I think, you know, to kind of bookend the, I have concerns over the online course world. Like, don't get me wrong. The plan, my main plan to assist monetization for the podcast is to create a partner academy,

which is the guys from podcast notes doing summaries of every episode, community similar to Jack's where we can discuss about stuff. It's basically like a Patreon on steroids with a ton of stuff that will really help people. But I'm like, right, what's the lowest entry ticket? Can I do it for nine pounds a month? Can I give all of this value for that much and will it work? Okay, yeah, great. As opposed to it being something that costs, that literally doesn't add any value and costs $10,000 or, you know, $5,997 or whatever it might be. So I think, yeah, hopefully we will see the resurgence in people becoming more savvy to the Dick Funnels approach, which is being... I don't know what you point that, but I like it a lot.

That's another Mike Winnitus, and yeah, he is next episode is on... is a guy behind ClickFunnels. Anyway, the guy that behind ClickFunnels. Anyway, the guy that created ClickFunnels, there'll be people screaming down there, their air pods to me at the moment. The guy that made Dick Funnels. That's actually, so I really wanna do, it's only a toddler right now, it's like a baby, baby business,

but I wanna get it going and where I think there's so much, I think there's a wave of courses coming, and especially as like actual real school is now pretty much online now, that this like the meritocracy that we talked about is going to move into online courses. And something that I'm getting going is basically wire cutter for online courses. It's called course correctly. Oh, wire cutters like this very high-end review site. It's for electronics mostly. It got acquired by the New York Times. I think you're so trust pilot or trip advisor or whatever. Yeah, more like staff written highly curated reviews. Okay, okay, okay, yeah, yeah. Working out ways for people to basically like get the course for free and then write a very,

very detailed review of like, did it change your life? What kind of people is it good for? What is it not? What is the course promise but not deliver on? I've got a few reviews up on there already, but if anybody wants to write a review of a course that they have been on, I'm going to start hosting independent, unbiased, verified reviews for online courses. I think it's so hard to find anything written about things that is not pushed out by the

course creator themselves. So separating some of this stuff and being like, can you imagine being a 24-year-old kid and you're sitting there with your life savings about to buy one course or the other and you're like, I don't know, Grand Cardone. Not Grand Cardone. Here's my advice 24-year-old. Do not spend your know, Grand Cardone, like, Grasado. Grasado, here's my advice 24-year-old, do not spend your money on Grand Cardone's cause. Yeah, Eric, man, I'll link you in with Mike,

because what he's doing in this space specifically, he's doing it in a very British way, which is very kind of dour and quite satirical and sort of dulce, but really vicious as well, and incredibly effective. Yeah, I'll link you two guys in, because you'd absolutely love him and he's a great guy. How does Navale suggest that we get lucky?

Navale categorizes four kinds of luck. There's just blind luck where you just trip over it. There's hustle luck where you're having every coffee you can find. This is, I think of Gary Vee is hustle luck. That guy. That guy, man. But it works, right? If you work hard enough, you will increase your surface area to luck and you will find

some tailwinds. The third is increasing your sensitivity. So just getting deep enough into things and looking for opportunities and believing that they're there is a huge piece of it. And the fourth, which is beautiful and I love it, is it becomes so unique that luck becomes your destiny. Like when you are the only person who can unlock an opportunity or you are so well known for a certain thing that people just come to you for it

That is that is when luck becomes your destiny That's the fourth type of luck that is that the most ideal the most Saw it after it takes the long it takes a long time. It's the hardest to get But understanding that it's there and it's at the end of that road Can really kind of draw you along and help you separate even as you're looking at other people You know what kind of luck did that person get versus the other, right? How does Warren Buffett get lucky versus how does Mark Cuban get lucky? Like who just kind of sold at the top and who has the sort of reputation and kind of uniqueness that there's just only one person to call and like it feels like luck when you get to call,

but it's also the result of 50 years of hard work. When it's consistently you that's getting the call as well, that's when I've been trying, I've been playing around with this concept for a little while to do with, there's a lot of people I know who are still very successful. James Smith is a good example. British guy who's like the Gordon Ramsay of the PT world,

so he calls out bullshit diets and ineffective training regimes and he has a best selling book and he's just about to release another one. They'll almost certainly be a best selling book and he makes retarded money through his online academy as well. And yeah, he has a very unique view because his ascendance into cloud, like global cloud, has been so quick that he's still got a lot of latent imposter syndrome in him. He doesn't say it, but I know that it's there. And he's got a best selling book written by him, not ghost written, written by him on an industry that he worked in for 10 years. And he's still waking up every morning, waiting for people to rumble the fact that

he doesn't know what the fuck he's doing. And there has to be a point for all of us. And this is like a, this is a siren song to the grafter who's talented, but still doesn't believe in themselves and maybe it's a word to me myself as well. There's only so many times that your imposter syndrome can clash up against reality and your reality annihilates your imposter syndrome before continuing to have imposter syndrome is more an addiction than it is a survival mechanism. I think a healthy amount of imposter syndrome actually can come across as humbleness, which is really useful. And it helps to wrangle our ego and stop it from getting out of control.

But there's an area where you'd like, Naval is humble because he chooses to be humble where he needs to be, as opposed to having this false sense of a lack of enoughness in particular areas. And that's a very big distinction between that. So yeah, if you're doing stuff, try and look with as much rationality and logic as you can at the things that you've done, and think like, look, am I continually beating the odds of what my own imposter syndrome expected me to do? And if that's the case, then that, the, um,

what do you say, like the window of what imposter so to where it should be, needs to shift to one way or another. And hopefully, hopefully people will see that. And if the same thing goes for the look, if it's constantly you getting the call over and over and over and over again then fair play. Do you think, it's something that's in my head, do you think that the line from accountability, which is skin in the game, high visibility, to this

one key, one lock solution, you are the person that can fix the problem, therefore you get look. On the route between those two things, avoiding the state of seeking, avoiding the cloud for cloud sake, avoiding the hierarchy games, like there's a lot of left and right turns between that, do you think? Yeah, I think so. And I think it's a very good line to draw between accountability and that fourth type of luck. That is the uniqueness luck and the sort of reputational luck. I think you get that by having demonstrably good judgment and good outcomes over a very long period of time. It's the compounding outcome of accountability.

That's how you get people to want to out of accountability. That's how you get people to want to work for you. That's how you get people to want to invest in you. That's how you get people to want to use your products or listen to them or learn from them or buy the tools. That's in a way that's base camp's marketing strategy. When you start to see accountability as the very essence of brand building, you start to see how pervasive it is and how common it is and how even the big companies that we trust the most, we trust them because

we know the person behind them. You know, it's not just that it's Amazon, we know that that is Bezos, it's not just that it's Tesla, we know that it's Elon Musk, it's not just Brisha,athaway, it's Buffett. Like we are so much more adept at trusting people and holding people accountable

than we are just an entity, just a company that is a brand but not a person. And I'm sure that has like a deep kind of social roots like that is evolutionary baked into us that we know how we can hold a person accountable as a community, but not how we can hold this kind of corporation accountable. That's what it's pure sense influencer marketing

was supposed to be, right? Like the fact that Christiana Ronaldo has 40 million followers but Ray Al Madrid only has 12 or that Elon Musk has like tens of millions of followers and SpaceX and Tesla, got their Facebook's deleted or whatever it was that you decided to do to them the other year. So like, yeah, people follow people that don't follow things.

Moving on to happiness, second half of the book, Navarza says that happiness is learned. Do you agree? Because most people would think that happiness is a state, not a skill. Yeah, I think that's a misconception that leaves a lot of people unhappy. And you hear it in how people talk about happiness. You know, they say like, did that make you happy? Or I just want to make you happy.

And like make you happy when you look at those words and think about it, it was such a fucked up kind of concept. And almost all conversational relations to happiness are about external circumstances. Like, are you happy you've got this thing? Will you be happy if you get this thing? Like, it is not looking at it as not just a choice. Like a choice is the beginning of it, but a skill, right?

You have to choose to be happy not just once, but you have to choose to learn the skills of happiness and over and over and over again to pound those skills into you, just like you train like an athlete, just like you build a business. Like you have to put reps into building these habits and these perspectives of happiness and almost making it a reflex to look at things positively

to remember that happiness is an internal, you know, is derived from appreciating what you have, from not adding new desires, from not postponing your happiness until some accomplishment or some, you know, new thing you get. It is giving yourself permission to be happy in this moment with what you have and doing it constantly and it's hard, it's really hard. And so it is not just a choice in each moment, but it is a skill to develop the ability to keep making that choice over and over again. How can we cultivate a happiness then? Yeah, there's a lot of habits listed out in the book that is maybe the most tactical

level of it. And there's a few off the top of my head that like one that's stuck with me is whenever you see the sun, feel the sun on your skin, like look up and smile. Right. It's such a small tiny thing, but like you will find a beautiful perfect moment. If you just take a second to like feel how good the sun feels and look up at it and just like have this moment of connection with like our energy source. You know, on a like more tech level, like don't set an alarm clock, minimize your use of calendar, and those are things, those are ways that like, those are external controls of your time

that pull you out of the present moment. You know, if you're body needs to keep sleeping, if you don't want to get out of bed yet, like, if you don't have an alarm clock pushing you out of bed, maybe you'll be a little happier in that moment. You'll appreciate like how the sheets feel. You'll appreciate the temperature of the room. You'll take a deep breath, like, keeping your mind where you are is maybe an appreciating, you know, the smallest thing. This wasn't, I think I'm all retweeted this, but I don't know if it was an original lovelism, but like, I love it because it's got a perfect trigger with a thing that I look at every day. If you can't be happy with a cup of coffee, you won't be happy with a yacht.

And so I have this thought every time I like pour a cup of coffee and hold this kind of warm thing and smell it, and I'm like, this is making me happy in this moment. And I know that if I can be happy with a cup of coffee, I can be happy with anything. That's awesome, man. Let's talk about desire. What's the key insight to do with desire to learn from Navarre? Yeah. We'll start with the most dense aphorism, which is desire is a contract you make to be

unhappy until you get what you want, which is an easy thing to hear and be like, oh, okay, and a very difficult thing to remember to apply to everything that you desire. We so instinctively pick up new desires so quickly. It's just really easy to look around us and walk through a store. Like, I want that, I want that, I want that. You know, to look at other people, especially on social, you scroll through Instagram and in 20 minutes, I'm like, shit, I really wanna be a genius standup comedian who looks like the rock and cooks like Anthony Bourdain

and there's no reason that I shouldn't be able to have all three. And I just decide to be unhappy until I have accomplished all of those goals that all those rules have been their entire lives doing in completely different directions. And you take like going back to that idea that you don't want to make a contract with yourself to be unhappy until you get something, especially if it is a wildly fucking unrealistic thing to ever get. So knowing that you really should have a limited number of desires, like Naval says just one at a time. If you're really focused on building your company, focus on building your company and allow yourself that desire,

but be contented with everything else that you have and really work hard to accept every other circumstance and not pile on your credible fitness goals your incredible, you know, fitness goals or goals to travel and goals to, like, just take one desire at a time and work to minimize the rest, you know, it's so much easier, it should be easier. It is definitely cheaper to eliminate a desire

than it is to, you know, overspend, to go into debt, to try to like run in too many directions at once. And those other desires are likely to kind of cost you more of your energy, your mojo, your focus on that one thing that you actually most desire and prioritize in those is really hard. And I think, you know, the younger you are, the easier it is to take on more desires.

You have more possibilities in front of you. You have a little less direction and track record of what you know you want for sure. And so you're interested in all these different things and you pursue all these different things that want. And you have this huge multitude of desires. And I think one of my hypotheses for this interesting fact

that like 70-year-olds are usually the most happy cohort of people. And I wonder how much of that is like they really have learned to appreciate what they have they really feel comfortable with with who they are and they don't have a ton of desires, you know, they they. I have learned the skill of contentedness and appreciation for the for the things that they have and they're not constantly looking forward to the next thing the next next thing, the next thing, they're just living in the moment and enjoying, you know, what, who they're with and what they're doing. The problem that we come up against here is what I brought up earlier on. It is easier to achieve your material desires than it is to announce them. And I've been thinking about this for ages that the trajectory of your particular modus operandi within life has already been laid out by your elders. Look to your granddad. Look to the things that your granddad enjoys doing. You

know, a nice glass of wine while he watches the football on a Saturday afternoon and going to the pub with his friends and a walk with your grandmire with the dog and stuff like that. The simple pleasures and we, we, I think can over-remantise that, but it is impossible to pass those away from is that only able to be achieved when you've already gone and done the things. It's significantly easier for your next car to be something that some banged up family mobile after five forarees because you're like, you know, it is, I've already done the the Ferrari thing. That doesn't really matter. And this also unfortunately ties into one of the reasons that I think Navale's so seductive to a lot of us that his real world success is something

that we all want to try and emulate and achieve. And the problem with that is that a unsuccessful version of Navale, who would be able to use the desire contract, aphorism more accurately, because we couldn't call him out for only saying that's easy, because you've achieved all the things you want to achieve materially, we wouldn't respect, because he hadn't actually managed to make stuff manifest in the real world. Does that make sense? It does. I don't know, I'm interested. I want to push back on it a little bit because I think they like it's easier to achieve your material successes than to eliminate them. It's maybe it's probably true for some things, but it also kind of, it doesn't take into account the trap of the like hedonic treadmill. And so, you know,

it maybe it's easier to achieve, you know, it may be it's easier to achieve, you know, getting a really nice getting a BMW. But then if I have a BMW, I'm going to want a Ferrari and if I have a Ferrari, I'm going to want a private jet and if I have a private jet, I want a sports team. If I have a sports team, I want a fucking country. Like, there's no reason for that to stop. And if you just let it keep snowballing, like at some point, it is easier to learn how to, especially if you realize that the path that you are on and that you are happy with is not going to lead to enormous, incredible wealth.

For plenty of people, I'm sure I'm a teacher, I love being a teacher, I'm going to make maybe a couple hundred, tens of thousands of dollars a year, even if I start a business on the side, I'm just never going to buy a sports team. And that's perfectly okay. And so now I have to learn to control my desires. And I think that's what's so important about this book is that it has the two halves of happiness are how much you have and how much you want. And combining those, I think like Morgan Howeslow on your podcast, actually did an incredible job with this. He's like, it's not about how much you make, it's not about how much you want, it's about the relationship between the two and understanding that those levers are connected.

I don't care what your means are, is you're living below them. Like, you're gonna be happy as long as your desires are in line with your lifestyle. And so controlling those two things and kind of moving them around so that you can find yourself in a state of happiness again Like if you're not happy with a cup of coffee or not going to be happy with a yacht If you're not happy in a Toyota you won't be happy in a Ferrari You're just gonna want to add the Lambo like I don't know what to say and so like if you don't see that if you don't see that Desire as the source of an unhappiness

It's it's gonna be tough to kind of get over that hump Whether you get what you want or not, because you'll just leap to the next desire. They say that true hell is when the person that you are meets the person that you could have been. But it seems like in this situation, it's more like true hell is when the person who you are imagines all of the stuff that the person who you could have been could have had. Yeah, I think that's a good, maybe motivational quote, free to be all you can be, but it also is the sort of mental trap that can leave you like deeply unhappy if you imagine what would have gone, how your life would have been, if everything would have worked out perfectly,

and you had gotten lucky at every turn and worked your face off at every single thing. Like that's a recipe for misery. I agree. But is that not just due to most people having a misaligned idea of what their full potential could be? If you were to fully imbibe the Navale philosophy, then your full potential would be someone who is as actualized and present and happy with as little as possible.

So convert in a bizarre way, you would almost be upset at your own level of materialism. So the materialism itself would be the thing that you say, my potential is to have less materialism than this, not more stuff. Yeah, I think that's separating materialism from your accomplishments and your contentiveness, you know, your interstate from your outer state. Because it's difficult to imagine a maximized version of both of those kind of as coexisting, I think. No, no, all is like a no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, businesses in such a way that $999 of those thousand eventually become successful. You know, if you go to the casino and put it all on double zero over and over and over and over again,

and 10 million people are able to do it, one of those guys is going to get incredibly successful, you know, just to use a very simplified metaphor, but most of those people and those people on average are going to get decimated and be unhappy. And so his kind of MO around how he makes his decisions and how he kind of architects his life. I don't want to work as hard as possible.

I don't want to be as successful, the most successful version of myself. I want to do the things that allow me to get kind of the most successful with the least risk, the least variance, and the least, actually the least input. Like, I want the highest ratio of input to output that I can get. I don't wanna spend my life working is what he would say.

Like, he loves what he does now. He loves starting businesses and investing and does it continue to do it as an art form. I don't want to, you know, spend 20 hours a day working, doing things that I don't necessarily want to do in order to achieve some outcome, but finding a thing that he loves to do and doing it in a way that statistically,

across a wide set of his lives, if you were to play them out on a Monte Carlo simulation, would very often or most often lead to some level, some outlier level of success, but not an extreme outlier. He's not willing to take huge huge downside risk in order to get that extreme out of that side. I think that's a lovely antithesis to the hustle and grind mentality that I think a lot of people can fall down the trap oven. We all do as well. It's sad and unfortunate that the

thing which often sets us apart in our 20s and 30s is the thing that we need to try and cast away and lose as an attachment in our 40s and 50s. There's a period where you've got to get your nose and stick it on the grindstone for a long time. You need to grind away on your craft, whether that be learning the skills that you can leverage later in life, building up the authenticity and the amount of cloud and notoriety that you have within an industry, even if that's as fully and beautifully aligned and actualized as we've been talking about here, with all of the requisite amounts of presentness, you can't get around the fact that it's a function of intensity times time.

The Cal Newport work done equation. If you do more work, if you outwork everyone at a higher intensity, then you piss all over them, and that's the way that it works. But yeah, I really do think that that antithesis to the hustle and grind mentality is super important. I think it's really, really nice for people

to understand. And as well, this is coming from someone that we both believe is incredibly wise, that he enjoys As does Buffett, As does Munger, a life that is driven by ridiculous amounts of freedom. And the only reason that they look like they're working all the time is that that's what they choose to do. Morgan Housel's definition of what wealth gets you is wealth allows you to do what you want,

when you want, with who you want, for as long as you want, and no one gets to tell you otherwise. That is what wealth allows you to do, and that level of freedom is something that I think maximally we can all aspire to, and you can get there in multiple different ways, you can get there by reducing down the material desire, because if you reduce down the threshold at which materially you will be happy, then you can afford to work less to get there, which means that you have more time to spend on stuff, not just stuff that you have to do, but stuff that you get to do. And then if you can use the leverage and all of the tools to free yourself, liberate yourself from the typical rat race,

then you also get to be able to do what you want to do all the time because work is the thing that you get to choose because you've defined it yourself. Yeah, and I think this is sort of a kind of, to take the side road here, I don't know if you have studied the kind of financial independent early retirement movement at all. No, I've seen it online. It's a really interesting, you know, if people are asking the question now, I've kind

of like, okay, how do you work on that skill of living below your means and understanding, like, getting a big gap between what you're earning and what you're spending and finding fulfillment and things that aren't hugely costly, reducing your material desires. That is kind of a, I don't know, there's reddits on it. There are the book that's kind of the forefather of this is Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Fisker. It's a nutcase book, but it is like so extreme that when you dial that back to like a normal person,

you still end up way, way ahead of most people. The blog that kind of pulled me down this is Mr. Money Mustache. It's a great blog. He's a hilarious guy. He was a software engineer for like 10 years. Got his personal savings rate, I think, to like 60 or 70%. And it's this idea that like, you're living on, you know, if you're making $80,000 a year, you're living on $30,000 a year. So I have a family. So, you know, taking walks, you just either only have one car and barely use it. You mostly ride bikes, you know, you play board games,

brew your own beer if you want to, have picnics instead of going out to $100 dinners. You know, like, there are ways to live a very happy and fulfilling life on not that much money that is not correlated at all with increased material possessions. And he worked for 10 years as a software engineer and built up enough nutworth through his savings and his investments that he retired. So he retired at 30 or 31, and he's like, I can live for the rest of my life very happily on what I have saved up.

And he continues to work, he continues to kind of do things that he wants to do, but is that perfect freedom? There's a lot of paths to that freedom. It's kind of like the point of bringing up this other movement. You can try to work really hard and earn a ton of money so that like no matter what your desires are, you can never outspend them. You can go, you know, be a monk or and that kind of like, you know, middle ground for middle class with normal jobs is really well explored, I think, in this kind of financial independence early retirement uh... movement so i encourage people to go like

check that out and go down that rabbit hole if that's something that they're interested in that's really cool i've heard of him before but i've never read never read any of his stuff just the name i want to see the man the man no money man must i should i want to see yeah he has great fun with it is just ruthlessly mocking people with expensive cars and unnecessary possessions and things that people think are gonna lead to happiness, but aren't. And he made a hilarious character out of it.

And of course, because he was using his specific knowledge and accountability and leverage, he built this incredible blog that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. And so he could have retired on that. And and far richer than he ever wanted to be. That's really trying to give his money away. Yeah, because he was doing something that was fun to him and totally authentic. And he did it with a lot of energy and a lot of people kind of got excited about it and fell in with him. I think it's another incredible example

of productizing yourself. And he did that accidentally, with no intention, really whatsoever. What are three insights or quotes from Naval, which have had the biggest impact on how you operate in the world? If you do a top of the pops, run down of the three most insightful quotes are the ones that have had the biggest impact on you. Yeah, I can't promise I'll do these word for a word, but I'll try. I think the one that's been sitting on top of my head the most is just this idea that we are here for such a short amount of time in the grand scheme of the universe. And we are entirely in control of our perception of the things that are happening to us.

And here's the key piece is that any moment that you are not happy, that you're not choosing to interpret what's happening to you positively, you're not doing anyone any favors. You are not better off for being unhappy. The people around you aren't better off for you being unhappy. I think I don't exactly know where it comes from, but we certainly have this thing built into us that we feel like we are not supposed to feel happy. We're not supposed to feel happy.

We're not supposed to allow ourselves to feel happiness until we've accomplished something until we've delivered some results, whether it's for ourselves or for someone else or our employer, for our partner, for our family, and that it is possible to kind of allow yourself happiness and to make progress at the same time. Like, I don't know if that is as hard for other people as it is for me. And maybe that's like the athlete in me that came from, you know, like, you just got to like put your eyebrows down and put your back into it and like, strength comes from that and like that will push you harder.

And artists may be better at kind of feeling flow and creativity in the moment and feeling like they have to be happy in order to work instead of being unhappy in order to prevail. But I think that's a really interesting idea. On the wealth side, just the fact that you have to build or buy equity in a business, that really, I realize when you put that at the forefront, there's a lot of ways to do it, right? I was kind of raised with the like, work hard, get a good job,

put it all in a retirement account, a 401k, index it, the jack bogal playbook, and that is a way to build equity in a business. Like when you buy into the stock market, that is a, you're buying equity in a ton of different businesses and allowing that to compound and pay dividends for you. There is also the small business world where we are all basically a small business of one. We own 100% of the shares and whether or not you're going to go do something with that to make that more valuable. In the Silicon Valley world, you've got,

take a job with stock options and you try to work your way into companies that are going to be valuable and positions that are higher up so you get more stock options. And that is a way to build it by equity in a company. There's a lot of ways to accomplish that when you see that as the goal, but understanding that that is a goal not necessarily just a higher hourly income or something like that. Those are maybe one from each world that are, they're sitting with me right now. Have you got a third one? Have you got anything else that you've come across from your recently that you think is,

is maybe a little bit different? This one isn't talked about very much. I don't think, I don't think Neval is necessarily thought of as, as like funny and charismatic as, as I think he is. You know, he's an introverted. He doesn't do a ton of talks or anything like that, but there's one that charisma is the ability to be both positive and to project love and positivity at the same time, or honesty. The charisma is the ability to project honesty and positivity at the same time or honesty. Sorry, the charisma is the ability to project honesty and positivity at the same time. And that is almost always possible, right? So you don't have to tell someone

harsh truths about themselves. You don't have to present the truth in a negative contradictory harsh fashion. And I think that is somewhat invoked, right? There's always the character who's like delivering harsh truths, you know, and like thought of as smart and competent because they're able to like pop people's bubble. And that just people don't like that. You know, it plays well on TV and it's maybe like funny to watch. But if you take that character, I think that as your character into real life, like, it's going to be really hard to build positive relationships and to kind of work smoothly with other people. So projecting honesty and positivity at the same time is something that certainly I'm working

on and it is certainly tied with the like, there's no reason not to be happy with each individual moment. You're not doing anyone any favors by being negative and you can be positive and honest at the same time. I think this is one of the problems I have with the, like, men and is men's rights, red pill movement overall, that the vast, vast majority of the guys that fly that flag super hard just sound like bitter old men. And I bro, like, I don't want to be you.

I don't want to be you. There's a part of every eye that, even if it would do your head in, wants to know what it would be like to be Dan Bilzerian for a day. But like, Dan is, I think, probably fairly, not in his business dealings, actually, because he's about to go bust,

but at least with the way that he puts himself across, he's fairly honest, and he's positive. You know, like, it's, gotta be positive to scam people out of 20 million dollars for a CVT company or whatever it is that he's been doing. I am not like I'm gonna have to get some lawyers or something to protect me So if you can if you can help me at the end of this podcast that will be wonderful I'm I've been thinking about

There was something that you just brought up there, which is that Navale doesn't do a ton of talks. Avale's brother, Kamalon, I've tweeted him incessantly, that's a lie, I've tweeted him a couple of times about it. But I know that he's basically on, apart from his own stuff, he's basically on a sabbatical from doing sort of press, ever since the Rogan episode. And I wonder whether he realizes how smart of a tactic that is to reduce the supply of Navarre so that the demand continues to skyrocket and that the amount of the value per minute

of the stuff that he does choose to put out continues to go up? Yeah, I don't know how deliberate it is, but I mean, you can see in everything that he does is a very high quality bar. And as, you know, he's not built in a media company. He's doing this for us, I think, you know, more than himself. All he's doing really here is kind of like learning in public and giving back a little bit. Yeah, I'm, you know, we're lucky he does as much as he does, I think. There's I think plenty of people who are equally or more successful that don't do nearly as much teaching and giving and sharing of their perspectives as he does. And as, you know, I've benefited a lot from what you shared, and I wish more people would kind of take the time to do

it. Radalio, you know, there's a chapter of careers where people kind of turn to that piece. But it's hard work, you know, it's a lot of effort to still what you've done. And, you know, I know Radalio put many, many hours of effort into principles, both for his business and for the book. I know Naval certainly put work into the podcast and the tweet storm and things like that. But that's what was kind of fulfilling about this project is that I got to manifest a thing

that I wanted. Like I wanted Naval to write a book and just realizing that all of the raw material was out there and that I could do the work for him knowing that I didn't think he probably ever was and that he was fine with it. So this is fulfilling to kind of see this come to life. I really wanted the principles of Neval and this is kind of what it turned into. I bet it was, man. Like create the podcast that you wanted to listen to, write the book that you wanted to read, build the product that you would have bought.

It's such an easy way to ensure that you continue to build things that are aligned with your interests and other people. Like if you think that it's a good idea, other people probably think it's a good idea. You've got, you know, two arms and two legs and a brain and a set of eyes and stuff. You know, you are a common denominator for the rest of us. So before we finish up, man, final question, what do you disagree most with Nevalon? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know that we talked about this a little bit, I think, earlier on. I don't know how compatible the kind of like iron prescription stoic philosophy is with super close kind of intimate, like, family relationships.

And there's a little bit of kind of red crumbs around that, but he never really speaks directly to like how How he practices these principles kind of with his wife or with you know children or anything like that and I'm really That is that is one of the like toughest tests I think of a philosophy is is when the relationships matter most these people close to you who you know relationships matter most, these people close to you who, you know, their emotions matter to you and their pain hurts you and their happiness, you know, affects your happiness. Like how do you, how restrictive a prescription is the stoicism in those sorts of things? Is something that I'm really, I don't know if I disagree with it because I don't know what he thinks about it, but I'm interested in the practicalities of that piece for sure.

There's all different areas. We said right at the very beginning that one of the reasons both of us are drawn to Navales that he's not armchair philosophizing about this stuff. Even beyond philosophy designed for practicality, it's philosophy forged in reality. And I think the fact that we have that is something that's so great, but there are a few very hot forges that challenge people in ways beyond the normal comfort zone, you know, like when you talk about deeply embedded self beliefs from when you are a child, the source code of like who you think you are, that's one of them. You know, your family relationships, how are you and your significant other and any children

that you may have? How are you managing four hours of sleep a night with a newborn baby for six months, you know, in a relationship where blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like add on a bunch more stress. Like that's real for, because we can sit here and talk about the business does it this thing in blah, blah, but you don't go home to the business. You know, the business, the business isn't lying in bed scowling at you at night. It might not, it might feel like that from the way that you're in a monologue talks to you, but there's always a particular level of detachment and I think the way that the narrative always is and also the way that we feel it should be is that there is a particular safety around certain things in life. There's a home base

that is insulated from the chaos of the outside world, family being one of them, and even further internally than that, the inner monologue and the way that you see yourself. So yeah, I think hopefully, after his little sabbatical, Navarro will come out of his hiding hole and decide that he's going to unleash a whole more stuff on us, because I mean, God, that Joe Rogan podcast, if you want the best overview, I think that you can get before you decide to read the Navalmanak. I think going to listen to Naval and Joe Rogan, it'll be linked in the show notes below, as will the Almanak of Naval Rava count.

Where should people go? They want to check out and read all the extra materials and get the full Eric Jorgensen experience. Where do they go? Yeah, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no It's linked below. It's linked just press the link. Press the link. It's linked from my Twitter, which is at Eric Jorgensen. I do a little bit of writing on eJorgensen.com, but I've got open DMs and emails. I'm easy to find. I'm definitely going to keep updating things on the email list for the book website, so we'll keep having kind of new material, new explorations, all update things as no one comes out with more stuff. I'm really interested to kind of dive deeper into exploring leverage and seeing kind of more of those applications. And I'm thinking about doing some like case

studies of applying the principles from the book into how different people have built their businesses. So I feel like, you know, the book is out, but we are still like, there's a lot more to explore and a lot of interesting stuff to do, like around the book and like with the community. There's a chapter of the book that's the whole section of Neville's recommended reading. And I thought it would be super interesting to do like a reading group around it, like a study group for some of those materials for people who want to kind of get into the influences and the sources. Yeah, I think it'll be really fun. There's a lot of good ideas floating around. If you got ideas, like I said, DM me, email me. I'm open, I'd love to hear them.

I love it, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Everything that we've spoken about, including the Almanac and the Val Rava can, Eric's Twitter, his website, everything will be linked in the show notes below. I hope that Neval's ears haven't melted his AirPods as we've said his name about 45,000 times. Or if you want a party and you're in lockdown, listen to this podcast again

and take a shot every time that we say the word Navar. We are not liable for your definite vision. Yeah, yeah, 100%. Eric, man, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. That was super fun. Thanks, Chris.