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

(Note: we had a technical issue that affected the first 12 minutes of Eric’s camera feed, so you’ll see a bit more wide cam than usual in the beginning. Our apologies!) My new book Own Or Be Owned is out now! I wrote Own or Be Owned to answer one question: How do you make more money, less miserably? I broke it into the 12 Profit Levers… The 12 levers I've seen determine whether you print cash or hate your life. Check it out: → https://contrarianthinking.biz/oobo_bigdeal Why is it that people with half your talent and twice your luck seem to be winning all the time? Because they understand leverage. And you're still trading hours for dollars. Eric Jorgenson spent a decade studying Naval Ravikant, one of the most influential entrepreneurs and thinkers in Silicon Valley, and distilled his wisdom into his classic book “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”. In this episode, we break down the exact frameworks Naval used to build wealth, happiness, and freedom without getting crushed by the game everyone else is playing. In this episode, you'll learn: Why leverage is the only game that matters now and how code, media, and capital separate the rich from everyone else "Productize yourself” — the two word formula that unlocks specific knowledge and makes competition irrelevant Why hard work is overrated and judgment is the real multiplier that creates 100X outcomes The four types of luck, from blind to built, and how to engineer serendipity into your destiny Why rising above status is the ultimate form of freedom If you're an owner and this conversation about leverage resonates with you, learn the profit levers to find hidden cash in your business in my free Masterclass → https://contrarianthinking.biz/4cEHuZI ___________ [FLIGHTCAST_CHAPTERS] ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Speaker 02

  Somebody said, "If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?" And it's like, "Oh, I can apply my intelligence to this problem and I can break it down." Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. If you can learn the discipline of having few desires carefully chosen, you spend a lot more time being content, being happy, not holding a strong burning desire that is like making you unhappy every minute until you've achieved something.

• 1:19Codie Sanchez?

  This episode is an important step back from a world that increasingly wants to tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We're bringing on my friend Eric Jorgenson, one of the best writers of our time on brilliant billionaires and philosophers like Naval Ravikant. He spent the last 10 years studying him. Now we're going to steal his homework. Naval has a line that's very jarring about how a salary is like the most addictive form of heroin.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  The three most addictive substances. He's heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. Like, that push to get you out of the comfort zone. Are you a risk taker? Are you exposed? Or are you kind of like a lamb in the paddock?

• 1:54Codie Sanchez?

  Can you get really rich on a nine to five?

• 1:57Speaker 02

  What I took from Naval building this book when I was like 30 is like, you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue all the way to like winning the game. You have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that like, none of it matters.

• 2:13Codie Sanchez?

  One of my favorite quotes from Naval is, "Forget rich versus poor, white collar versus blue, it's now leveraged versus unleveraged." What does that mean?

• 2:23Speaker 02

  Leverage is, to me, one of the most important things that Naval talks about. If you don't understand leverage, a lot of things about the world and the outcomes that you see are not going to make sense, and you're going to get bitter and confused and feel like it's unfair. But it's actually just the normal workings of leverage. And so, as Naval explains it, there are many forms of leverage. The modern forms of leverage are code, media, and capital. Zero marginal cost and uncapped and accesses this sort of global marketplace. And it's really unintuitive. Like, we're not programmed to think that way. And so, understanding that we're in the age of leverage, and it totally changes what businesses can be built and where your priorities are. And we're seeing unbelievable businesses get built that sort of have this understanding of leverage at the core of them.

• 3:08Codie Sanchez?

  It's so funny you say that. I was at this YouTube thing this week, and so I have top of mind. But one of the creators there, I think it was Mark Rober, who has like a huge science YouTube channel, and he did something with like the Discovery Channel or another science channel. And so, the CEO of YouTube was joking with them, and he was like, "Yeah, you know, it was really nice of you to do that thing with Discovery Channel. It's incredible to collab with a smaller channel, because their viewership's like 10x smaller than Mark Rober's on YouTube." And so, it's interesting, like, this idea of capital, code, and media, how do you judge whether you have those kinds of leverage, or you don't, if you're a normal person?

• 3:46Speaker 02

  Ideally, you want your earnings, your inputs and your outputs, to be separate from each other, right? You don't want to have to work an hour to earn 10 bucks, or 100 bucks, or 1,000 bucks. You want to earn independent of your input. If you're in a normal job, your linear inputs and outputs. If you are working on a podcast, like, you record the same podcast, you publish it, whether 100 people listen to it, or 1,000,000 people listen to it, you put the same amount in, but you get an unbelievably higher reward from doing the same amount of work. If you're investing in a company, like, whether you invest $100,000 or $1 million, it's the same decision, but the rewards for doing it are an order of magnitude higher. So, you want to look for these places where your inputs

• 4:30Speaker 02

  and your outputs are uncorrelated, and the more leveraged you are... The bigger that difference is going to be. And the way you get leverage is by winning a smaller leverage game. So start small and just let those things accrue incrementally. Like, we talked about Elon Musk. He's like the most leveraged person alive. And it's because people choose to give him capital. People choose to go work for him. People choose to support his companies and invest in him. And they do that because they trust his judgment. They trust that he's going to use that well and give them good rewards for doing so.

• 5:01Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's so interesting because in today's age, it's even more normal. Like, it used to be, maybe even like thirty years ago, I would say, most people had none of these. Right? You had no money, capital. You had no code. You weren't an engineer and you had no media because you weren't CNN. So it was like, unless you were a top ten percent or one percent in any of these three, you had zero. But now, everybody could actually have all three really easily. So you could literally just ask yourself, do, am I making money? And thus, am I taking my money and investing in other things? That's leverage. Can I code? No, but now I've got all these AI tools, so I can now use code. That's leverage. And media, do I own CNN?

• 5:44Codie Sanchez?

  No, but I actually have a podcast or I have an email newsletter or I have an Instagram account that I talk about. And so, yeah, I actually am leveraged with all three. And then it's degrees of them, but it's, it's a wild time to be alive because for the first time ever, any human, really, at least in, in, you know, uh, most established worlds, can have all three of them for almost a zero dollar cost, except capital.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. If you can get a device that can get on the internet, like you can enter the global meritocracy, essentially. And like, most people aren't even trying. And most people are just on the consumption side. Um, and so if you do, if you start creating, if you start coding, you start trying to build products like, and you think about it in terms of where do you get those dis- uncorrelated inputs versus outputs? And try to build a business, that's where you're going to get those exponential returns. And this is true in every industry, right? Like, I think people, you know, running a plumbing company would probably say like, yeah, that's all well and good for a podcaster or a hedge fund, but like, I run a plumbing company. Every business is just. Uh, their growth is determined by how levered they are and how elegant they are and how long those levers can get.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  And Naval has a great, it's a, it's a long thing. I won't take you all the way through it, but he has goes step by step all the way through the real estate industry where, you know, you could be a day laborer working on a house. You could be a general contractor. You could be a real estate investor. You could be a developer of big properties. Or you could take the final leap into like maximum leverage of external investors and technologists and everything and build Zillow. Right. And so the, all the difference between a day laborer and Zillow is just like, how leveraged are you and how comfortable are you using each of those different forms of leverage?

• 7:22Codie Sanchez?

  It's a really good point. I actually even thought of that before. It'd be interesting to put names on the tiers, you know, because every industry actually has that. Everyone has the day laborer, the, all the way to the CEO, to the like level of CEO of what kind of company you are, to investor, to like, I don't know, capital allocator plus risk taker. So it's, it's actually an interesting way to think about the world. I think a lot of times people just think, am I entry level? How much do I make? What? But they don't think about what is the game the company that they're in is playing to. And I feel like Naval's the king of contextual awareness, like, you know, understanding the game that you're playing.

• 8:00Speaker 02

  It would be a fun game, like books to build of just like breaking down the business from the beginning, all the way up the whole ladder. Uh, cause we hear these incredible stories of people who like, entered as a dishwasher in the restaurant industry and over the course of their career built like a 50 restaurant chain. And those people, those are people who just sort of figured out, you know, what does the person above me know that I don't know? What tool do they know how to use? What were they able to access? Like, how can I figure it out? How can I take that next step, that next risk and climb all the way up the ladder?

• 8:31Codie Sanchez?

  Naval talks about something that is kind of controversial these days. He says, hard work is overrated and judgment is underrated. What do you think he means by that?

• 8:40Speaker 02

  I think the like, you know, the Archimedes quote, like, give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I can move the world. Like, one totally correct decision can dominate everything. And Naval is really, um, he's an elegant thinker. I think he's like, really enamored with the idea of like, where can you flick one domino? And everything takes care of itself, which is like this incredibly kind of like Zen business thing. What's the smallest action I can take to create the biggest result? It's very different than somebody like Elon or Goggins or whatever, who are just kind of like trying to get the most out of themselves possible. But I think that's a really interesting approach. It's a good tool for thought to just be like, yeah, how easy could this be?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  He describes himself as lazy, which I don't think he is, but he's like, you know, I just want, I want the greatest reward for my effort. And I, I don't want to expend effort wastefully.

• 9:31Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, there is something to this idea of how you become incredibly ambitious while also being lazy. And, uh, and lazy and like the things that you will allow to take up your time. Because if you are crazy particular about the things that take up your time, then you have time to figure out where to flick that domino. Like, that's gonna live red free in my mind, actually. Like, you could spend a lot of time in the middle and you will never actually have the full effect than if you spent the time to find the beginning.

• 10:02Speaker 02

  And the, the real thing is like, hard work has a limit eventually. Like, you can't work hundred hour weeks forever. Like, hard work is, you know, respectable and admired. And yes, we should work hard, but hard work can only get you a two or three X improvement in what you're doing. And if you don't learn to improve how you're working or the elegance or improve your leverage, like, learn where you can have those hundred X. You know, where one hour of work or 10 hours of work can have a 10 X or 100 X impact. Like you're gonna be kind of stuck in that two to three X improvement.

• 10:35Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Window, no matter what you do.

• 10:36Codie Sanchez?

  I think the part that then becomes hard is so then you're like, okay, that makes sense. Of course I'd want to find, you know, the fulcrum or of course I'd wish to find the first place to flick the domino. But then the question becomes, how do you know? And like Naval has great sort of critical thinking frameworks. But what does he mean by live like a lion?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  If you go see a lion on safari, like they're just chilling most of the time, like thirty, forty five hours at a time. They're just laying there and sleeping and kind of whatever. And then when they are both hungry and see prey, they leap into action like maximum adrenaline, full sprint, unbelievable violence and attack and take down this thing and have an incredible feast. And then just lay there and sleep again for like thirty hours. And I think Naval's sort of learned wisdom is that this is how he now approaches projects. Like he'll see an opportunity, see an investment, just kind of be like reading and casually working, learning, going about it in life. And then an opportunity will arise or a person will make themselves known. And it's kind of like, all right, we all leap into action.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  We got to have a sprint. We have to start a company. We got to make an investment. We got to get up to speed on this really, really quickly.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  But if you were mired in something else, just like plotting along on not the biggest opportunity, rather than having the space to jump on the best opportunity when it came about, then you might miss it. And like, that's the live like a lion kind of mindset is like you want to have the space to evaluate and attack the most important thing at any time.

• 12:06Codie Sanchez?

  You know, it's interesting you talk about that because one of the things I've been obsessed with lately is people sitting in meetings that they shouldn't be in.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:14Codie Sanchez?

  And it's a big phenomenon and you know, my team will all sort of chuckle about this because I will often say, like, you guys don't have anything to do in here. Why are you still in here? But what I haven't gotten to yet is where they self-select to leave the meeting because there's so much social normative behavior of just, no, no, I'm supposed to be here from this time to this time. And I'm paying attention and I'm sitting here and it's like, why are we being such good little girls and boys? Instead, you really should be saying, You pay me and we are here to do this mission. And if I am sitting here doing this thing that is not top priority, I'm actually wasting your time, our money, our mission, all of it. But somehow we've all become like way too politically correct to say anything like that. And so we just sit in meetings that we know are a waste of time.

• 12:58Codie Sanchez?

  We tell nobody and we think that's normal and that a CEO might like it.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  I feel like there's, there's probably two types of person in that meeting. One is like, this looks like work and it's the easiest thing I can do today. So I'm just going to sit in here and like, I'm going to be in a meeting. I'm doing my job with the lowest effort possible. And then there's somebody else who's like, sitting there and their skin is crawling because they're like, I hate this, I'm useless, I feel like I can't leave. I've got more important work to do, like, please let me out of here.

• 13:23Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 02

  But both are caught in the like, if you make the first step of the meeting, like, what is the point of this meeting and who belongs in it? Like, who has a hand in the solution that we're trying to arrive at? And spend the first five minutes of a meeting on that and make it a cultural norm to dismiss people from meetings that are not like, I don't have a good case for being here and great, I want to be somewhere else.

• 13:43Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it seems like such a no brainer, but I think off, even at our company where I'd say people, say this to people a lot, I don't think we've done a good enough job giving them permission.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:53Codie Sanchez?

  To beat it, you know, if they're like, Cody, I don't think this meeting is relevant to me. I don't think I've ever got mad at anybody for that. But like, oh yeah, right, right, get out of here.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a dynamic where people I think want to be in the same room as like the, the person, the CEO, the leader, the whatever, like that, that, those meetings are an opportunity for FaceTime probably in some ways that are like more about the political game than the output.

• 14:12Codie Sanchez?

  I've actually never thought about that. That's a, that's a very good point. I think it's another screen that happens, like the more successful you get, the more you forget that, you know, your presence can have negative or positive effects.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:22Codie Sanchez?

  Like when you give feedback, sometimes you have to be careful at which levels of the game because it can just ruin somebody. Uh, or simultaneously, they want to hang out with you more, even though you're like, I would like you so much more if you didn't do that. I have to sort of say that too. I actually, it's kind of like an interesting idea because this goes back to authenticity. But there's a quote that I found originally from you. Find what feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. You're going to out compete them because you're going to do it effortlessly. To you, it's art, it's joy, it's flow. You escape competition through authenticity. If I had to summarize how to be successful in life, I would just say two words, productize yourself. Tell me more about that and what does that even mean to productize yourself?

• 15:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that is the two word summary of half of the book, which is like very difficult to fully unpack. But the ability to really understand and observe in yourself what you want to do naturally. Your ikigai or whatever. And one way to do that is to look at the things that you did as a kid, like when you were like ten, twelve, ask your family, ask your friends. What are the things that you were naturally drawn to? What are the things that you do in spare time? What are the things that you do even though nobody's paying you to do it? Or what's the 10% of your job that you like really, really love and find yourself doing it more than you should? Like, these are all maybe signs that you're sort of drawn to do a particular thing.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  And I've experienced this in my life is like the stuff that you do for fun or without expectation of reward is sometimes turns out to be the most rewarding thing.

• 15:55Codie Sanchez?

  This book, you didn't even make money on this really, right? Didn't you give away most of the money from this book?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I give away, we've given away like five million copies of this book, but we've also sold like millions. So I have made a lot of money, but when I, when I wrote it, I fully expected like a thousand people to buy this thing. I thought it was going to be a passion project for Naval nerds like me that would never make any money, but I would have learned a lot by doing it. And I did learn a lot by doing it and I'm still like completely shocked that people of all ages and races and countries and languages are like reading this thing and finding revisiting it and finding joy in it. And I'm like, I'm delighted by it. I think it's just a testament to like how far reaching some of the principles that Naval puts forward are.

• 16:39Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah. What about this idea of, he talks about in the book, no one is going to beat you at being you?

• 16:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:47Codie Sanchez?

  And specific knowledge and how important it is that you have specific knowledge in what you're doing. What does that mean? And if somebody is struggling to figure out what they should do, how do they figure out if they have specific knowledge?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  I think, I mean, the word should is the thing that he talks about of like, there is no shoulds. But it's so hard to train yourself out of that, right? Like, we spend the first 20 years of our lives sitting in classrooms, all being taught the same thing and being assessed on the same thing. And so then we go out into the work world and we're sort of like, all right. What's the job? What am I told to do? And what you find in successful people is that they're rewarded to the degree that they are unique and authentic and excellent. Actually, they're rewarded to the degree that they're unique and excellent, and that is usually downstream of them being authentic, right? Like, your business works because you have fun being you and you're authentically interested in all these concepts and building businesses and buying businesses. You buy crazy stuff all the time and you have so much fun telling everybody about it.

• 17:44Speaker 02

  And I don't know how many of them work out, but it doesn't matter because it's all fun to watch, right? Like, I remember watching you like buy vacant land in Texas, abandoned land in Texas at an auction or something. I was like, that's just cool. And you're clearly like just having fun doing it. And like, I, for whatever reason, I'm sure it would be a nightmare for plenty of people, but I have fun spending thousands of hours like breaking down very specific useful ideas and articulating them and finding supporting arguments for them. And like, putting them all together in this thread that helps me remember it and helps other people identify with it. Like, these are examples of specific knowledge that are outcomes of just how we chose to live. And we just continued to do things that felt authentic and unique to us and people responded to it.

• 18:27Speaker 02

  And we sort of iterated through like, all right, I had fun doing that and the world enjoyed it, so I'm gonna do it again. And I'm gonna do it in a new way and I'm gonna continue it. Like, and we both ended up in unique careers that would have been very difficult to predict or define ahead of time. There were no blueprints for, you know, this is not a existing genre, like your particular combination of businesses is not one that there's a ton of historical precedent for. It's not like you said, I'd say, I'm gonna build a real estate brokerage and I'm gonna do it using all the best practices of real estate brokerage, right? Like, this combination of media and capital is like new and emerging and dynamic and everybody's kind of doing it in a new way. So I think that mixture of like authenticity and excellence, like be yourself, do it to the best degree you possibly can.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  And specific knowledge will sort of come downstream of that. I know you build early on and he's like, you know, become this incredible student of your, your industry. And if you set 10 people down and said like, all right, you are all gonna go study the history of venture capital, build the earliest great venture capitals. Those 10 people are all gonna study different things. They're gonna make different branching decisions all the way down. And one might become an expert in the history of biotech or green tech or fintech. Like, those people will all make authentic human decisions that makes them ever more unique. And one of my, like, the degree that you specialize, even if you set out to be a generalist, you will end up becoming a specialist. A sufficiently like advanced generalist becomes

• 19:51Speaker 02

  a unique specialist. And you should aspire to be a unique combination of authentic traits performed to excellence. And like, those are the careers that you are going to enjoy, and products that are going to end up being unique.

• 20:10Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 20:40Speaker 04

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• 21:09Codie Sanchez?

  To a point, Scott Adams talks about the skill stack, right? Which really is a lot of what Naval talks about too, I think in different ways. He would say specific knowledge, and Scott Adams would say skill stack. And then he would talk about how you could either go become Michael Phelps and do 10,000 or really 100,000 hours in order to become Michael Phelps, or just do hundreds of hours at totally disparate tasks that when you stack them together, create an unfair advantage. And so I think that's, that's super interesting. I want to circle back to this idea on shoulds, because you have very interesting takes on it. And you've caught me twice on it. And Naval is very aggressive on shoulds too. Like, do you believe in the word should? Does Naval Ravikant believe in the word should? And how should we speak to ourselves?

• 21:53Speaker 02

  So should is one of those words that just indicates to you that you might be feeling more of an obligation than an interest in something. And so you hear people talk about like, I should go work out. Like, yeah, but also your relationship to that thing is now like, I don't want to. And the voice in my head is telling me that I have to. And the, the, the common thing is like, I get to work out. So just like change your phrasing about, you know, you have the opportunity to go do this thing that you want to do. There's a bunch of funny like little reveals in language that like, when you're paying attention to people's relationships with things. That's in there, but like, I should go to work. I should, you know, follow in my family's footsteps. I should pursue this opportunity.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Like, we all have those and it, just listening for them.

• 22:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, it's either an obligation or an imposition from, from some version of yourself. That you don't necessarily agree with, or some external voice that is like, speaking to you more loudly than your inner voice.

• 22:54Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's really good. I mean, he talks about, he has like a pretty brutal heuristic about if you're faced with a difficult choice, you should do. Dang it, can't even say the word. But if you're faced with a brutal, brutal, brutal choice, and there's not an obvious one, then don't do either. Like, what would he say about when to do something or when not to do something?

• 23:15Speaker 02

  There's one from his like personal trainer, which is hard choices, easy life. Which like i- in the short term, if you take the hard path, you will sort of naturally bias. You'll, you'll come up with an excuse not to work out. You'll come up with an excuse not to have the hard conversation. And so if you find yourself in that position where there's something hard to do and there's something easy to do. If you just become good at making yourself do the hard thing, your life will become better as a result. There's probably something magical that's on the other side of something you're avoiding. And if you just build the habit of tackling that, a lot of problems will take care of themselves. That's one, Paul Graham has a similar thing competitively, which is just like, run upstairs.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  You know, if you're fighting a big company, do something really hard that they're going to find it very difficult to imitate.

• 24:04Codie Sanchez?

  Especially as the world gets less and less moted, like it feels like every year, actually, there's more and more opportunity to do things in business. You know, you used to have to have a ton of capital to launch a media company. And now you have to have none. You used to actually have to have a lot of money to invest in startups. Now, because of Angel List, you could have a very small amount. Like, everything has gotten kind of progressively easier in society, or I guess easier to access in society. And so if you don't do the hard thing, uh, that's hard today, well, you know, you're definitely not going to make it next year because that thing that's hard today will probably be even easier next year. So it's a good way. We say here at our company, one of our slogans is choose your hard. And so like, no matter what, anything in life is going to be hard. Being employed is hard, being an owner is hard. Choose your hard.

• 24:50Codie Sanchez?

  One of them's going to have a better outcome than the other.

• 24:51Speaker 02

  Working out is hard, being fat is hard.

• 24:53Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, you gotta choose one.

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 24:55Codie Sanchez?

  And, um, you know, he also talks about, I love the way he talks about luck. And in particular, he talks about four types of luck. Blind luck, luck through persistence, spotting luck, and built luck. Can you break down some of those types of luck? What does Naval mean by these different types?

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this ties in well with the sort of authenticity and specific knowledge because the ultimate form of luck is to like be the kind of person that luck is your destiny, right? Like opportunities just befall you. So the, the blind luck is, is the first, right? Which is what most people think of, like, did you walk over a hundred dollar bill today or not? Did you pick it up? Did you notice it? What was the second?

• 25:34Codie Sanchez?

  The second is, uh, luck through persistence.

• 25:37Speaker 02

  Luck through persistence. Okay, so like if you happen to walk across a hundred dollar bill versus if you went out on the beach with like your, you know, your metal detector and like spent hours looking for something. That's, you know, you're persistent. These are simple metaphors, but like, did you happen to run into somebody who wanted to? You to paint their house today, or did you knock on two hundred doors and find three people who wanted you to paint their house today?

• 26:03Codie Sanchez?

  But that's also true, because there's like a lot of studies now that show that you actually will not see lucky things if you think you are an unlucky person.

• 26:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 26:12Codie Sanchez?

  Like, have you seen, I just was reading a study the other day where um they gave two groups of people. Uh, you know, blind study, basically. One group uh of people was told varying things to the degree of they're lucky, good things happen to them, and they are the type of people that believe that. The other group was the type of people who say things are good, things don't really happen to me. I'm not super lucky. Then they were given a task and the task was to go and look through a booklet for how many times some word was said. So I don't know, bad. And it's like, go through it and look for how many times bad is said and tell us at the end how many times bad is said, and then you'll get a thousand bucks or something when you find the you know, two hundred and seventeen variations or like whatever the number is. And uh so the first group

• 26:57Codie Sanchez?

  um that thought that they were not lucky, they went through diligently, you know, they got to the two hundred and seventeen number, they told them, okay, two hundred and seventeen. And the other group goes through it and on like page five, there's uh a little paragraph that says um you can stop searching, there's two hundred and seventeen uh instances of bad. And thi- this other group can like finished it in like sixty seconds and this group took ten minutes on average. Like their their vision was the same, like they came from sort of the same socio demographics. But one associated that's not lucky and one associated as lucky. And so I thought that was fascinating.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  I love that.

• 27:32Codie Sanchez?

  You know? And so, so explain to me spotted luck and then built luck.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Spotted luck is just the ability to sort of position yourself at a place where luck happens to you, right? Um, and so this is, you know, the maybe the highest order decision is like, where do you live? Like, are you, what's your exposure? What's your surface area to luck? Um, if you say you can't find anybody, it's like ask out on a date, like, okay, well, how often are you like going to parties? Have you left your house? Like? Where are your habits? Um, how many companies have you started? How many companies have you met with? Like, how many customers have you approached? Like, these things are You can control your surface area to luck, essentially. And in the final form, where like luck becomes your destiny is you just become so uniquely known for a thing.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  Like you've reached such a final form of awareness and excellence and authenticity that uh luck finds its way to you. And like Warren Buffett is an example of, um, is it lucky that he gets a phone call? To like buy a bank and do a deal of financing that like nobody else has the capital or the reputation or the speed in order to do like. He has become the only person on earth who can get that lucky. Um, and that's a crazy example, right? But like, there are many smaller forms of that. Um, so your, your reputation, your mindset, um, your positioning essentially like that is a, is a very long-term game.

• 28:56Codie Sanchez?

  It's a really good point because I feel like what Naval actually teaches a lot of us is that. All these things that seem like unfair magic, AKA leverage, luck are actually really curatable. And you can change your ability to have more of them as opposed to be a victim of the world around you. And so like luck can be manufactured in effect.

• 29:19Speaker 02

  In particular, if you're young, I feel like it's, it's hard to, um, it's hard to appreciate that what, how lucky some people are getting is actually 20 years of like. Carefully grown seeds and reputation and relationships and effort and like. You shouldn't expect to get as lucky as somebody that has created that much surface area and covered that much ground. But you can sort of match their pace or outpace them by, you know, being thoughtful about your luck, surface area.

• 29:49Codie Sanchez?

  What would Naval say about how to become luckier? Like, how could you become luckier?

• 29:53Speaker 02

  I think the, the path towards luck is, you know, you can follow those things up. You can. Sort of go from one level to another. You can do luck through persistence and effort. That then becomes a little bit more of luck through, or I have a feel for the, the dynamics. And if you really, if you gain enough information through the persistence and reputation through the persistent luck, you'll have better information on where the luck might be heading and you can sort of meet it there and position yourself for it. And if you do that enough times over time, like you become the only person who can do it. So i- if we use the real estate example that he uses for leverage and just like take that is like,

• 30:35Speaker 02

  you know, if you're a, if you're starting off as a general contractor or handyman, like you don't just wait around for jobs, you go knock on doors. If you knock on doors and do a great job, you'll start working more and more and get higher and higher quality referrals. If you are doing a bunch of work in one particular neighborhood, you start to learn like maybe that neighborhood is up and coming and a new development is going to move in and then you can, you can buy land ahead of the development or you can invest in the person who's coming in to like renovate this neighborhood. And if you do that a few times, then you become, you know, the person who builds the developments in the city. You've done the last five, they've all been successful. And so of course the sixth development is going to like, pick up the phone and call you directly and you don't even have to pitch anybody, right?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Um, and I bet you, if you go through like all of the A-list of Hollywood right now, you can map their career phases to those different forms of luck. You know, there's people that like, when you need a specific type of actor or character, you're like, well, Christopher Walken's the, the, the only person who can do that role. That's who everybody fills that gap with. If you need a certain kind of movie directed, like it's, and you want it to be top tier, it's going to be one of 10 people and those people had to all like, grind and then iterate and position themselves. And then they became like this singular person who is like, gets the phone call. Like is Christopher Nolan lucky when he gets the next phone call or is he like spent his entire career becoming the person?

• 32:02Codie Sanchez?

  That's so true. And I feel that's true in everything in life. It's like a mixture of like data collection that you do, and then data collection that other people do on you. And like, when those two things come together, you get luckier. And so in the beginning, all you can do is like, collect as much data and do as much action as possible, which would be like, play a lot of poker hands in the beginning, and really learn what the cards mean and what the percentage likelihood is. And, oh, most people that tell right there they did on their face is actually a thing. And, oh, no, it's a really bad probability if I play that hand. So I probably shouldn't play that hand over time. And I need to put more chips in, because if I don't, it turns out over time, actually taking too little risk, isn't good. And so I think most people in life don't think about life as like, a series of hands, or a series

• 32:45Codie Sanchez?

  of like, data collection points. But that is all that it is. So like, if you, whatever your life is today, is really a reflection of like, how many hands have you played, paid attention to, looked at the data on, and then iterated on. And like, that's it.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm not, I was, I was a little impatient early in my career, and I'm not advocating for patience or slowness or anything. But my perspective now in my 30s is that, you know, the first 20 years of your career is an audition for the second 20 years of your career. And like, if you look at Walter Isaacson, right, like, did he get lucky when Steve Jobs called him, was like, hey, I'm, I've got a few good years left, like, I want you to write my biography. It's because Isaacson spent the first 20 years of his career writing, permissionlessly writing biographies of Da Vinci and Einstein, like, great figures, but they were historical. Anybody could have written those. He didn't have unique special access necessarily. But by doing that work, he became the person who got that call. And

• 33:40Speaker 02

  by doing Steve Jobs biography, he got the Elon Musk biography. And so like, you know, these are permissionless books. I've spent the first 20 years of my career, like, building permissionless curation of public material. And like, I don't know what's going to happen in the second half of my career, but I imagine that it will look like luck. And it's only because people have been reading my books for 20 years and have a respect for what they have done, that I will get opportunities that, you know, no other author will have had.

• 34:07Codie Sanchez?

  Such a good point. What does Naval say about, or and I don't know if he does, but this I have a recency bias. Lately, I've noticed a lot of creative people saying they don't do creative free work. Meaning, like, they'll want to apply for a job and not want to do a project. And at our company, one of the rules is like, we have to see your work because resumes and history has so little correlation to good and a fit. There's almost no correlation. And that used to be that if you worked at some of these big companies, you're like, there's a pretty high indicator that you might continue to have like a certain output or level. And since then, we've realized, in fact, sometimes those are the worst people to hire. And now you almost have to talk me out of if you went to Harvard and worked at Google, why you should work here.

• 34:50Codie Sanchez?

  Um, and so now we make everybody do a creative project. And, uh, and I don't like to pay people for it, not because of the expense. I don't like to pay people because I want to know how they feel about doing work with us. Are they really interested? Or are they merely kind of curious? Because if they're kind of curious, there are many companies to go be curious at, but it's not this one. And so I'm curious, like, you've done so much free work throughout your career, both like writing and, um, you know, collating things and, and doing lots of stuff on the internet. One, how do you feel about doing free work in order to get eventual super highly paid work? And two, is there anything Naval says about that?

• 35:31Speaker 02

  I'm very happy to do free work that I assign myself. Um, I don't know if I have the same relationship to like free work that somebody else wants me to do for them. Uh, if it's along my natural curiosity, maybe, but, um, well, kind of a natural independence is like when you're doing things for their own sake, you do them at a different level.

• 35:47Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  But if I want to really wanted a job at a company, absolutely. I feel like I would do a project to get a job. Sure.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  I don't know. It's, I mean, Naval is a fan of like doing things for their own sake. Um, and he has an interesting story he tells that I, I think about all the time where he's like, the most lucrative year of my career, where I created the most value, I didn't think I was working. I told everybody I was retired and I just kind of like cleared my calendar and did what I wanted and followed my curiosity and like, in retrospect, that was outrageously productive and I didn't know it and I didn't intend it. I didn't trick myself into it. I just. Follow my curiosity and it all worked out. So I think, you know, like many things, sometimes rewards are best pursued indirectly. And so like, this book is excellent. If people see excellence in it is not because like,

• 36:38Speaker 02

  somebody told me to make it great. It's because I cared about it enough to invest a lot in making it great. Of my own choice and volition. Like, I'm not a perfectionist in any other area of my life, but like, when it comes to putting out a book with my name on it, that I think, you know, might make a difference in people's lives. I'm like utterly meticulous.

• 37:00Codie Sanchez?

  Naval has a line I loved, which is, desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:07Codie Sanchez?

  What a line. What does that mean? And how do you integrate that into your life? Or how did you see him do it?

• 37:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, he, uh, he's, his happiness arc is so interesting, right? So he had like achieved all this incredible material success. He built successful companies. He'd been an incredible investor. He was well known in Silicon Valley. And he sort of looked around and was like, I, all the things that I thought would make me happy. Do not, I have them and they do not seem to have made me happy. So maybe I need to just make a study of happiness and like, somebody said to him, if you're so smart, why aren't you happy? And it's like, oh, like I can apply my intelligence to this problem and I can break it down. And so he started reading, you know, like the, the most of the happiness canon is kind of this Eastern Buddhism and things like that. And so desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. It's a very, it's a modern phrasing of a Buddhist idea.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  That like, you know, type A business people like us sort of immediately identify with. And it identifies like, if you set yourself a goal, which we are all doing constantly unconsciously, probably hundreds of times a day. Especially if you're on social media, Instagram in particular, seems like this bottomless well of desire creation. Of course you're gonna be unhappy. And if you can learn the discipline of having few desires carefully chosen, his words.

• 38:29Speaker 02

  That you spend a lot more time being content, being happy, not be not feeling lesser, not waiting for some future state where you have something that you don't yet have, which is like a very natural human tendency. But you can make just as much progress and maybe more by just like not holding a strong burning desire that is like making you unhappy every minute until you've achieved something.

• 38:50Codie Sanchez?

  Naval also talks about getting a partnership and what it means to be in like partnership. What would Naval say is important in choosing your partner?

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Naval cites the great Buffett as like using the energy, uh, energy plus intelligence plus integrity as like the formula for a successful partner and somebody that you want to work with or invest in. I mean, Munger and Buffett are like the partnership that everybody aspires to, right? Like great friends, phone call every day, you know, sixty year, zero fight partnership. And Buffett's track record is investing in CEOs and abdicating entirely to them. And so like, you gotta be a really good people picker when that's your strategy.

• 39:33Speaker 02

  And so I think that's, you know,

• 39:36Speaker 02

  a perfectly great formula to emulate.

• 39:38Codie Sanchez?

  Can't remember if it's Munger or Buffett that says, um, when you get a dog, uh, don't do the barking for it. And, uh, and so I like that in partnerships too. It's the same thing, you know, don't hire a CEO and then do the CEO and forum.

• 39:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:52Codie Sanchez?

  Um, I think that makes a lot of sense. What about, um, I know it's interesting because we've talked about happiness with Elon Musk. We've talked about happiness with Naval and sort of that neither of them really seem to aspire much to raw happiness.

• 40:07Codie Sanchez?

  Do you think that success and happiness go together? Would Naval say that they go together? Do you believe that they go together?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  I think they go together for some people. I think some people, um, there's a balance of like for some time, some people, it's easier to achieve your material desires and for some people it's easier to lower them or dismiss them. And Naval's got a great line. It's, it's maybe like the ultimate Naval line, which is the true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. And, you know, if what Elon wants out of life is to be like, The maximum contributor to the flourishing of humanity and human progress, no matter what the cost or risk, then like he's getting what he wants out of life. And if somebody just wants like as much peace as possible, then like they should go live in a monastery and like yield any desires to affect the material world and or have

• 40:57Speaker 02

  deep relationships and and maybe they have an incredible subjective experience. And most people end up somewhere in between, right? But as long as you're at peace with the trade offs that you're making and you're not trying to, you know, fit five impossible things to coexist into one life, I think, you know, your formula for happiness and getting what you want out of life is going to be uniquely yours.

• 41:22Codie Sanchez?

  What are the lessons that you keep going back to from Naval? Like you've studied him for years and now interacted with him for probably like a decade plus. Like, what do you go back to?

• 41:34Speaker 02

  I think that's a that test of what you want out of life is a good one. I I first felt drawn to Naval in the same way I felt drawn to Munger because I such a high percentage of what they said was both surprising and just like immediately like felt correct to me. What like ninety ninety nine percent of what you hear somebody say is like, huh, nailed it, in a way that felt right to me. Like, they're not going to be everybody's heroes, but they they spoke to me for some reason. And Naval takes all of Munger and sort of puts him in a like progressive technological setting that's like exciting and futuristic and more growth oriented. And I liked the combination of those very much.

• 42:19Speaker 02

  But Naval also lives like a quite a balanced and well rounded life. Like, I'm more of a Munger guy than a Buffett guy because Munger is like kind of a polymath and Buffett is like maniacally focused on just like Berkshire and compounding his capital. But Munger is many different interests and many different curiosities and has gone down many rabbit holes and lived many lives in the same way that Naval does. He's founder of Angel List and investor in a ton of companies and started many companies and is intellectually well rounded and well read and curious and plays around with ideas and applies them in many different ways and, you know, has found a way to find like.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Both peace and happiness and success, like material success, kind of all at the same time and material success in a way that is like meaningful to him, not externally or image driven, I think, in my, my view, which is like certainly what I aspire to because those are, uh, those are winnable games. Like the inner scorecard is a winnable game. You can set the goalpost and achieve them and you can make sure that like you're always happy with where you are. Um, that you're not trying to like fill this bottomless bucket with like something, someone else's perception that you have no hope of control.

• 43:27Codie Sanchez?

  Naval has a line that I love. It's very jarring about how, um, a salary is like the most addictive form of heroin, something to that degree.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  It's a Taleb quote. Uh, the three most addictive substances are, uh, these heroin, carbohydrates and a monthly salary.

• 43:47Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  And that like, uh, that push to get you out of the, out of the comfort zone, right? Like Taleb's morality is all around. Like, are you a risk taker? Are you exposed to the upside or downside of your own behavior? Um, or are you kind of like a lamb in the paddock? And, you know, like many things Naval finds like a pithy, kind of powerful way to phrase it, but it's a, it's a nice way to just kind of like give you a nudge, um, towards your authentic self and to like feel the, the rush and the risk of being, feeling your skin in a game and feeling exposed to the upside and like being a little more authentically you and on, on life's adventure.

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• 45:25Codie Sanchez?

  Yes, it's, you know, I think a lot of people live life like they're watching the football game and they've never stepped foot on the turf. And that to me is sort of sad because the difference between feeling what a hit feels like and, you know, smelling the grass and, you know, having that actual adrenaline that comes up at the beginning of it versus the small percentage that you feel when you watch somebody else do it is, you know, it's a world away.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:55Codie Sanchez?

  And so I do think a lot of what I've learned from Naval, at least, is how do you get a little closer to the action? Because like that, that is the only way, one, you get leverage, but two, it's the only way that you can actually feel like the full human experience in many ways. And he talks about, I don't agree with him on all of it, but I do like, I like that he pushes, like there's, he talks about how, um, you know, he'll never get rich renting your time.

• 46:20Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:21Codie Sanchez?

  And I actually don't agree with that. I mean, mathematically, it's not true. Like Sheryl Sandberg, quite rich, always been an employee.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  But also she was an employee at the level where she had massive equity upside, right?

• 46:33Codie Sanchez?

  Well, I think that is the part that gets, hmm, waylaid in some of this, like is a belief that you can't be an employee without massive upside and you can rent, I mean, she does typically, she does actually, you know, like quantifiably rent her time. She has paid a salary, right? But her upside probably comes all from equity warrants, options, et cetera. Well, so what, maybe explain that, like, that would be an interesting question, which would be something like.

• 47:02Codie Sanchez?

  Can you get really rich on a nine to five? Can you get really rich renting your time or on salary?

• 47:09Speaker 02

  Maybe the nuance is that you need asymmetric upside, right? And so one of Naval's sort of

• 47:15Speaker 02

  directions in one of the chapters of the book is like build or buy equity in a business. Like you need equity upside, you need asymmetric exposure. And there are many jobs, there's many ways to get that. There are people who get reasonably rich, who become millionaires, who work nine to fives their whole lives, but they're really diligent savers and investors and they max out their 401k and they live on half their salary. And this is like the fire movement, right? They their way of getting equity is just like buying the index with half their salary and keeping, living below their means. That's a way to get equity. You probably won't become a billionaire on a hundred thousand dollars a year and of, you know, 50% savings rate and equity, but you will almost certainly become a millionaire if you're diligent about it over a 50 year time period.

• 47:58Speaker 02

  If you ascend to, you know, if you're climbing the corporate ladder, there are career paths where your salary will go up, but you'll still never get equity exposure. I feel like doctors are the famous example of this, right? Like we all know cash poor doctors who are like making 700 grand a year, spending 700 grand a year, they never have equity, they never bother to figure out the game and they have no retirement plan or they have a, you know, they never build up a net worth because they're just like their lifestyle consumes everything that they earn and they have no equity. But, you know, in the case of CEOs, CFO, C-suite, VP and above, like

• 48:36Speaker 02

  you just want asymmetric exposure. If you believe in the company that you're working at, you want part of your package to be equity so that you get, even salespeople have asymmetric exposure. They have, they have nonlinear earning potential. But if you ever want to be like sort of truly passive and live off the capital, you need to start figuring out the, uh, the equity game.

• 48:56Codie Sanchez?

  It's so true. Naval has a quote where he says, "The real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely, who don't even play the game, who rise above it. These are the people who have such internal mental and self-control and self-awareness, they need nothing from anybody else." Who's he mean by that?

• 49:13Speaker 02

  I think this is the very ultimate inner scorecard, right? So much of what people are driven to do is driven by this like memetic desire and they're always sort of moving the goalposts on themselves.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  You have to know why you're playing the game.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  Like, this is a, this is like the enlightenment path, right? And there's, there's all kinds of books that he recommends and conversations that he's had with, with people. But if you like, um, study those sort of enlightened people, they're just like, removed from it. And some people feel compelled, they can't remove themselves from the game until they've won the game. And not everybody's like that. Some people can be like, this, this is all a hallucination. I'm just gonna remove myself. But some people need to win the game and then look around and be like, oh, there's nothing else here. So I can escape the game. But there are so many games that you can spend your whole life playing them and just kind of leap from one to the other.

• 50:14Speaker 02

  And always feel, you know, behind or pressured or like driven. And, uh, if you know where the road ends, like what I took from Naval, reading this, you know, building this book when I was like 30 is like, oh, if you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue and like ride all the way to like winning the game, finally achieving all these things that you hope to the whole time, you have the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that like, none of it matters. It's all made up. You don't even exist. None of this exists. We're all in this like a hilarious, absurd dream state. So don't take it all so fucking seriously.

• 50:54Speaker 02

  You can get the things that you want, or you can choose not to want them, or you can, um, you can be almost, you can probably be equally effective by just like, uh, by having emotional detachment rather than having like being all in, all consumed emotionally, like ringing yourself out every day, feeling massive stress about everything that you're doing. And if you know that that's the eventual end state is like, do I need to wait until I'm 80? And I've lived a whole life of mistakes before like embodying that epiphany? Or can you just be like? I can keep playing the game because it's a fun game and we're here and why not like?

• 51:31Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 51:32Speaker 02

  It's a fun dream.

• 51:33Codie Sanchez?

  And that it kind of doesn't even have to stop you from your speed. Like, I don't know about you, but when I was younger, I used to think, well, if I don't care the most and if I don't get emotional, if I don't get upset, then I'm not going to win. Because that's what winning takes. But I realized, well, actually, having like a pretty big step back from like that pain in your stomach or that anxiety in your heart when something happens and being able to look at it rationally is a complete step function change in your decision making capability because you're not living in flight or fight.

• 52:04Speaker 02

  And your longevity in the game and your energy level within it and your ability to sort out like what is what matters and what doesn't.

• 52:12Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, because otherwise you just you get adrenal fatigue. You're just you you get burnt out. You have decision fatigue. Um, you know, it's interesting. We I I had a member of my team and, you know, he was really good and, um, you know, in his words, he burnt himself out. And so I was like, well, let's talk about that. And, um, and he said, well, you know, I just don't know that I want to keep doing this and I've got all these things. And I go, well, do you need to hire somebody? Like, do you think that that is a truth that you always have to stay in said role doing the exact same thing continuously? And then, yeah, surely, if you look down into the future, ten years down the road, you probably think that doesn't look like a very fun road to go on. So why would you? And, uh, and what I found with a lot of people that job hop or, um,

• 52:57Codie Sanchez?

  you know, can't figure out what to do next or when they jump around, you know, they they have a great sprint for like two years and they're kind of not sure. It's like wherever you go, there you are. And so, you know, you can change your location and even change your title. But if you are a people pleaser and you stay well, and if you don't know how to delegate and you never figure it out, it's really problematic because you you again, you build like this like constraint that isn't even there. And so some of the stuff I think that he at least teaches me is, yeah, it's about what do you want or not want? But also, uh, like even figuring out what is possible or not.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:30Codie Sanchez?

  And where do you have these fake constraints?

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:33Codie Sanchez?

  You don't even realize.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  That's what I was saying. They look back to the Elon algorithm is like the, uh, Question and requirements and and having like, how do you give your team members agency over their environment is like, I I love this company, but like this role is is now breaking me. You know, what do we need to change in order to unlock this and continue it and help the energy sort of proceed and like, of course, there's many solutions to that.

• 53:55Codie Sanchez?

  What questions do you ask yourself when you're in that position? Cause I think part of part of this is like self-realization with Naval, right? So Naval would like, you would even have to first recognize in yourself, I feel this way.

• 54:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:07Codie Sanchez?

  I need to name it. I need to figure out why. Like, how would you, if you were struggling right now and felt trapped or lost and not know what to do next? What have you learned?

• 54:15Speaker 02

  To me, the most universal thing um and the most, the thing that I I come back to most often here is like thoughtful desire management. I've I've now noticed when a new desire enters my mind and I have to like, triage it. Uh, and I I've learned to like, you know, I used to, I used to like watch stand up comedy. And half of my experience of watching stand up comedy would be like, I want to be a stand up comedian. I fucking love stand up comedy. There's a version of me that should be a famous stand up comedian like, and I I've just totally dispelled that desire in my life. I still love it. I still respect it as a medium. I think it's incredible. And I don't know if it's age or just thoughtful desire management or whatever, but it's just like very clear to me now that I do not want to pay the price to become.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  I don't want the lifestyle. I don't want all the things like, you know, the the price tag is too big. It's a fun thing to fantasize about. And now that's kind of like, I've just completely dispelled that desire. And that's, there are a thousand examples like that. And I bet, you know, open Instagram or Twitter for five minutes and you will, you will feel a new desire welling up in you. You just walk outside and you, a new desire will well up in you. And big or small, learning to identify that and say like, do I really want that? Is it a meaningful desire? Is that a long term desire? Is it worth changing? You know, the the course that I'm on? What would I sacrifice? Do I want that thing enough to pay the price tag for it? Is like, almost always the answer is no.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  The quicker you can close that loop and the fewer of those that exist in your head at any given time, the happier you are on a minute to minute basis.

• 55:50Codie Sanchez?

  So how do you do that? Do you literally go, okay, I feel a desire. So like, I hear in my head, I want that. So I recognize that. And then I think. What would be the prices that come with that? Like, what does that thought process look like for recognizing a desire and not immediately latching on to it?

• 56:07Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, an example, like, a friend texted me today and is like, did you hit your targets for the book launch? And I was like, I don't have targets for the book launch. I don't have, like, that is an arbitrage. I'm not going to pick a number that I have, like, may or may not work. Is, if I pick 10,000 copies and I sell 9,000, am I supposed to be sad? For how long? Like, is that a useful desire or not a useful desire?

• 56:31Speaker 02

  Which is arbitrary. So, like, I don't know, I don't hold any desires particularly closely. And the longer the term and the more vague they are, the more helpful it is, right? Like, I want to have a wonderful relationship with my wife. I want my kids to have an incredible life. Am I stubborn about any of the specifics about how that needs to look? No, not really. And so the version of like, you know, do I have to go to one specific place at one specific time on a vacation? No, I don't know. It's just, there's like a loose grip over almost everything is like, maybe where you end up after some practice of like triaging these desires.

• 57:11Codie Sanchez?

  It's fascinating because it is very zen in many ways. But I guess you and your career have been like that. Like, you've done tough things, a turnaround, you know, of a company while writing books. Books themselves are not easy to do in general. You've also had startups prior to that.

• 57:29Codie Sanchez?

  And you felt what failures felt like. So I guess, maybe the last thing would be, are there quotes you turn to from Naval, this book, this period in your life? That you think would be helpful to someone who's listening right now, who is a little lost, maybe, and doesn't know where to go next?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  I think the lesson that so many of us learn and have to learn many, many times is to trust yourself and your intuition. Right, like, that seems to be like, The weird arcs and turns of my career like have all sort of come back to like just trust, trust that little voice a little sooner. Um, sometimes I, is that like also your experience?

• 58:11Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I think we're wrong a lot less often than we think we are.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  Hmm.

• 58:16Codie Sanchez?

  You just talk yourself out of it.

• 58:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:18Codie Sanchez?

  Um, that's not in every case, but especially once you've developed that. I, in the beginning, I would say I was a little bit of an idiot and I thought I knew a lot, probably and through most of my twenties.

• 58:29Speaker 02

  They're kind of like Dunning Kruger, like, yeah.

• 58:31Codie Sanchez?

  A hundred, yeah, exactly.

• 58:32Speaker 02

  Small information, high convictions.

• 58:34Codie Sanchez?

  Exactly. And then at some point you start to see a lot of cycles and think, oh, I, I've, I've seen this before. I should just listen to it.

• 58:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:41Codie Sanchez?

  Then when, when you figure out that little voice in your head is telling you something, I think then the question becomes like, what do I do with that? Because usually it'll tell you something, but it won't say, um, you could go bad. Like if you say like, I'm so mad at my wife, I'm going to leave her. Well, that might not be, it might just be saying, there's something really wrong in my relationship. Like that's what the voice is saying. And so what does that mean? Well, maybe it means you actually lean in more, you do more things. But I think most often we just try to like shove it down, ignore it.

• 59:09Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, listening to the voice, um, allowing it to, allowing it to go long enough that you see the patterns, right? Like in that moment of, of anger, um, maybe you're not getting a clear signal. If, if you think that twice a day, every day for six months, maybe there is something really, you know, really wrong with the relationship. But in another, like, after you listen, you need courage. Like a lot of people hear the voice. And the, the choice is either to repress, repress it or to act on it over a certain amount of time. And I think the people that end up the most unhappy, um, have, have repressed so much because they never summoned the courage. And so they're like deeply aware of what it is, um, that they, they truly want to be doing or feel like they could be doing and.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  Just never took that next leap. Um, you know, there's, I think it's a Winston Churchill quote like, courage is every virtue at its highest form. And so like, you can understand all the virtues, but if you don't have the courage to, to act on them when it's difficult, when everything else is sort of going against them, like they have no, they have no form.

• 1:00:12Codie Sanchez?

  If we were going to get really tactical with it and somebody wanted to hone their desire, plus their courage, what would you tell somebody listening right now? How do you, how do you get more courage? And how do you listen to that little voice inside of your head more often?

• 1:00:29Speaker 02

  This is not a nevalism, but I, I know people who swear by this, which is just like a morning, brain dump on paper. Um, it, it, the process of externalizing these thoughts, somehow helps you evaluate them and, and it forces you to be honest. And so if you see what sounds like absolute, certain reality in your head of like, I have to be this or become this or get this, or I will never be happy. As soon as you write it down, you're like, haha, that's stupid.

• 1:01:01Speaker 02

  But if you just live with it in your head the whole time, you're like, you could feel your body responding to it. Um, and, and that, that practice of externalizing it just helps you observe it, uh, ration, rationally. And it's, it's a what's, it's a shortcut to doing that. Meditation is the same way. It helps you separate sort of, the evaluator, like the observed from the observant, like see your own thoughts from above. But writing it is, is a shortcut to doing it. And that's, um, a helpful method. And, and by the same token, like doing that over time, like you can only write, I hate this job. I want to quit so many times before you're like, oh my God, you know, you will respond to observing that over time.

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  You know, whatever it is, like, if you stay present with it, eh, the courage, I think will eventually sort of culminate and you will manifest that in some ways.

• 1:01:54Codie Sanchez?

  It's so true. It's so true. Um, I loved this book. It was one, it was my, obviously my first book I read of yours. I read it years ago. I come back to it often. Thank you for writing this and so many others. So we get to learn from the great.

• 1:02:06Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me. It's been, uh, it's been really fun to sort of co-evolve with you and see like, you, you are living some of the principles in this book at an extremely high level and it's really, it's really awesome. Like if you don't, for people that don't understand sort of the journey that you've gone on, I think like, The principles here that are making you successful are of like leverage and equity and compounding are like.

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  You took this blueprint and ran with it and built something.

• 1:02:36Codie Sanchez?

  I definitely did. We've known each other a long time now, now that I think about it. How many years do you think?

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  This came out in twenty twenty, so.

• 1:02:45Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, well, definitely before that.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  So eight, ten years, maybe.

• 1:02:50Speaker 02

  It was like early Twitter X. You know, I like, we were in a like Twitter. Like support group together where we were like, you you assembled this like team of people to help each other like. Dude, it was like a sprint a hundred K and like you made it in three months and now you're at what?

• 1:03:08Codie Sanchez?

  I think seven hundred K.

• 1:03:10Speaker 02

  Seven hundred K, yeah, unbelievable.

• 1:03:13Codie Sanchez?

  It's true. Well, that is another thing that I think, you know, both the leaders we've talked about do a really good job of. And I've tried to learn from is like not just. Like it's a big world, pull along other people. Like, why do we have to shove other people down? I mean, I pretty much never ever. Talk shit on the internet to an individual because I just find that like it's so much more beneficial to like celebrate friends, celebrate wins. You know, try to win more myself and then get in other groups where other winners already are. You know, and I learned, I think that group, most of those people in there probably besides you and I were bigger than us on the internet. Um, and now probably aren't, um, because like I think we were connectors and you're like a a super connector, you know, with.

• 1:03:56Codie Sanchez?

  Lots of companies and people on the internet. So that's another lesson I've learned.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Sit at home and write and like you're you're out there running a media empire.

• 1:04:07Speaker 02

  I like to sit at home and write.

• 1:04:09Codie Sanchez?

  No, and you definitely know who you are. Like, I think it's a good, it's it's a very good point that like this makes me incredibly happy when I do. So I would consider myself a happy builder, even though it's really hard and. And it my happy looks totally different than yours, but we both like kept listening to that little desire and playing into it more and more and more and sort of obsessing on it. So like if people are gonna have a hard time beating you at writing this, people are gonna have a hard time beating me at building media companies because it's just what I do for fun.

• 1:04:35Speaker 02

  People are incredibly unique and like the the further you go in life, the more unique you should become, you know, like I like if you're not weird, how do you know you're free?

• 1:04:44Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, yeah. One of our main 13 principles is bring your weird. It's better than boring.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Codie Sanchez?

  So like, that is so true. All right. You're the bill.

• 1:04:51Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:04:58Speaker 05

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