The Wisdom Of Naval Ravikant | Eric Jorgenson | Modern Wisdom Podcast 225

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 #naval #ericjorgenson #chriswilliamson - Listen to all episodes online. Search "Modern Wisdom" on any Podcast App or click here: iTunes: https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn Stitcher: https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/modern-wisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: [email protected]

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 0:32Chris Williamson?

  Eric, welcome to the show.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me. I've been excited about this ever since I listened to you and George Mack fucking around on here. I was like, this is gonna be a good time. I'm gonna like this.

• 0:41Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's a, it's all a boys' club up here in here, isn't it? So today is Naval Fest 2020. Welcome to Naval Fest 2020. This, there's big dick energy. We're just marinating in it today and we're gonna see how much we can jerk off over Naval over the next 60 minutes.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  A couple hundred pages probably worth, and then edited material. So we got a lot to go on.

• 1:04Chris Williamson?

  DVD extras, pay-per-view, OnlyFans, like additional content.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  DVD commentary, bonus scenes, director's cut. We got it all.

• 1:12Chris Williamson?

  I love it. So why are you writing a book about Naval? Why did you, like, what makes him worthy of a book? Who is he?

• 1:19Speaker 00

  I've been following Naval for 10 years now, maybe. He was the first person I kind of got introduced to in the valley, not personally, but when I was, you know, just a wet behind the ears kid from Michigan who had never left Michigan and was like trying to get into the startup world. Somebody was like, go read all the venture hacks, follow Naval, do everything he says.

• 1:38Speaker 00

  Him and Paul Graham were kind of like, those are the lighthouses of the valley, like, go listen and follow. So that I've been kind of following for a long time and I've 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, you know, his podcasts, his tweets and to more and more people for more and more reasons. And I realized kind of how hard it is for people outside of like the Twitter verse 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 is it 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

• 2:20Speaker 00

  high value, you know, huge pieces of wisdom, just kind of slide into the like Twitter nothingness. And it broke my heart and I'm like, I need to turn this into something more evergreen, something more permanent. And, you know, there's no better package than a book. Everybody knows what to do with a book. Everybody, you know, it's easy to gift. It's easy to read through.

• 2:43Speaker 00

  It's people know kind of what to do with it and hopefully it'll live on, you know, and it's stay relevant for a really long time.

• 2:48Chris Williamson?

  What's unique about Naval?

• 2:51Speaker 00

  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. You know, he got into a good high school, uh, which is, which is a huge turning point for him early in his life. And he's undeniably just a brilliant guy. So, um, you know, he didn't scrap it together from nothing. You know, he's definitely got some like horsepower. We got into this great high school, got into Dartmouth, started at the bottom in the tech world, uh, you know, studied 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.

• 3:37Speaker 00

  And he 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 achieved what they did and kind of turning to philosophy and family and legacy and just looking at how they can, how they can give back and how they can learn, um, a little bit more about, you know, life instead of the rat race. And so it's kind of an interesting turning point where he knows a lot about wealth from his past. And, you know, he continues to work and invest.

• 4:18Speaker 00

  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.

• 4:27Chris Williamson?

  The particular interesting insight that I have about Navalny, 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. I'm like, all right, man, yeah, virtue and integrity and you overcome the obstacle. I'm like, okay, I get it. But there's, 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. But there was some, there was

• 5:10Chris Williamson?

  some that was born as 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 whose wisdom has really, really been not just designed for practicality, but forged in reality, like Naval's, is, 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, like, zero to hero journey, you know, as opposed to it just being someone

• 5:51Chris Williamson?

  armchair philosophizing this, like, Baroque fucking mansion somewhere that their dad has, you know, you get me?

• 5:59Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is very practical and it is definitely, I find it easier to listen to philosophies from somebody who has passed the tests of reality, who is an operator, who has founded companies, who has made investments. And Stoicism, I totally agree with you, like, It's it's easy to like kind of read it and be like, yeah, sure. I agree. And then passing the test of reality, like there's a lot of times where it is does is not practical, like it is almost incompatible with having like close intimate relationships or friendships. And like, I really want to hear people talk about like how they act, how they react stoically when like their partner is upset or when their child is upset and things like that, that are

• 6:41Speaker 00

  it's not like a guru on a mountain, like it's easy to be stoic and you're by yourself, like under a tree. And that's just not how we live and not, I think, how we want to live. And 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 balance between the ideal and the practical?

• 7:17Chris Williamson?

  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 Naval, but I think the reason that he has managed to resonate with people saying things that really should be far too highbrow for everyone to listen to. Is that he sacrificed maybe sort of 10 to 20% of the artsiness for an additional 80% of practical ability to apply almost immediately. You know, it reads like it's somewhere in between Stoic maxims

• 8:01Chris Williamson?

  and a how to put your life together guide, if it was done like by an Ikea instruction manual.

• 8:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, get into the principles.

• 8:10Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 8:18Speaker 00

  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 Angel List. You know, how, you know, the trials that he went through kind of as an early founder led to his views on venture capital, which led to, you know, Venture Hacks, 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 like broke my heart to cut it from the book. And I was like, duh, just put it on the website. People who want it can, after they read the book and go kind of get into that stuff.

• 9:03Speaker 00

  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 like a giant textbook of everything of all had ever said, even though it's interesting to me. So that's kind of self-serve on the website. But the, but the main two sections of the book are 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 Naval is maybe really interesting 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 that I didn't know until reading this was that Buddha was a prince, like he was very wealthy. And so when he, you know, he was able to kind of just leave his family and go off in

• 9:46Speaker 00

  the woods and meditate and study and just kind of learn and become peaceful and practice this philosophy. And so Naval 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. Like 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.

• 10:30Speaker 00

  And that, to your point about the stones, like many of the philosophers that we look to were either very, very wealthy or they had so little and had absolutely nothing and no responsibilities and, you know, they had so little that they could choose to, you know, basically become a monk. Renounce everything and find happiness. And so if you're only going to go one of those two directions, like you can go all the way to having nothing and wanting nothing and eliminate 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, but just know that, you know, you got to build that gap in, or you're just always going to be unhappy.

• 11:06Chris Williamson?

  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 locales, 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 Diogenes, the cynic,

• 11:48Chris Williamson?

  who lived out of a pot and was sort of the first of the minimalist movement, which we're now seeing a resurgence in, and like asceticism and minimalism, I guess, in the 20th century, 21st century. Yeah, Diogenes was like the grandfather of that. But I don't want to be Diogenes, you know, like, I want to have nice things. I want to, and again, another Navalism, which everyone will be familiar with. One of my favorites is, it is far easier to achieve your material desires than it is to renounce them. So I would much sooner say, I don't need a Ferrari when my last car was a Ferrari, than 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

• 12:32Chris Williamson?

  so much sort of self deception there in any case. So, okay, wealth, how is wealth created?

• 12:38Speaker 00

  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. And then your income is going to determine your wealth based on your savings rate and your return on income. But Naval 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

• 13:21Speaker 00

  whatever it is, do something that can work that is not a linear input and output. You know, if you're working, even if you're a very high paid doctor, you're working an hour, you're getting paid even a thousand, $10,000 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.

• 13:57Chris Williamson?

  That particular insight, which comes from the E-Myth 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, especially if you've grown up working class, you know, 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 Naval-y. Can you just break those down for people who haven't gone down the rabbit hole already?

• 14:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, sorry, 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. The 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, right? 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.

• 15:24Speaker 00

  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 in quite as good of alignment with who they are as a person and what they've spent their whole lives studying and becoming. And 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, you know, we're always changing and our understanding of ourselves are always changing and growing. And so, you know, relying on the people around you, they actually may be better at showing you kind of who you are and what your specific knowledge and skills are. One of the tests that, questions that Naval asked is like,

• 16:09Speaker 00

  what are the things that other people ask you to do? You know, 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, your parents and those around you, like, you know, the things that you've been doing since you were, if you were a gossip, you know, in third grade and, you know, run around tattling on people, like maybe you're a journalist now or something, you know?

• 16:33Speaker 00

  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 on 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, you know, replicable 10 times or 100 times or 1,000 times, whether that's through media or code or, you know, labor or capital.

• 17:03Chris Williamson?

  What are some examples of those four types of leverage just in real world?

• 17:09Speaker 00

  Yeah, so capital is maybe the easiest place to start because if you place a bet 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 the exact same decision. But if you made the decision leverage 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

• 17:54Speaker 00

  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, you know, there's an amazing design for, you know, an automobile at Tesla, but it takes hundreds, thousands of people to build that car to that spec. And that is, you know, every person who's working under that plan is a piece of that leveraged outcome, like labor is a form of leverage. There's, you know, 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 100 to the market. So there's leverage in that. And you want to be, you know, by owning the equity of that business, you are on the profiting side of that leverage instead of the like slightly less profiting side of that leverage. Not that

• 18:38Speaker 00

  it's not a, you know, a positive trade for both because people need jobs and employment and pick up skills and everything like that, you know, everybody's 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.

• 18:59Chris Williamson?

  So those are the first, I guess those are kind of the traditional two. And then we've got media and is it programming or code or product?

• 19:08Speaker 00

  He says it's a little bit of a mouthful, but the full kind of definition is products with no marginal cost of replication.

• 19:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, code.

• 19:17Speaker 00

  Yeah. Code and media. Jim O'Shaughnessy, actually, he 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 100 people listen to it or 100,000 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.

• 19:45Chris Williamson?

  It's not like we have to have this conversation over and over again on demand every time that someone decides to do it.

• 19:52Speaker 00

  Yeah, they pull open their podcast app and say, I want to listen to Chris and Eric.

• 19:55Chris Williamson?

  And we are like, Eric, mate, someone's done it again. We're gonna have to wake up.

• 19:59Speaker 00

  What did I say? I can't remember how we started.

• 20:01Chris Williamson?

  So it's that. And then it's talking about the code. So how would code work? What would be an example of that?

• 20:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's, you know, someone writes a software program that one person could buy or 100 people could buy or 1,000 people could buy. And there's, you know, server farms all over the world that can dish it out to people. And that program may need to be updated and kept relevant, but once it runs, 1,000 people can buy. And that's why we're seeing like enormous margins in in software and SaaS, which is really a thing that, you know, didn't exist in the industrial era. So the 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. And I think we're still kind of seeing what the impact of that is. And it's gonna be really interesting.

• 20:52Speaker 00

  How this, it's still evolving. It's gonna be really interesting, I think, how it looks in a historical context and how we're gonna 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 gonna get listened to and surfaced and the audience is gonna kind of let that continue to snowball. But no one can stop you from recording a podcast. There's no editor. There's no, there's not a huge capital requirement. No one can stop you from, you know, submitting open source code on GitHub and getting it out there. No one can stop you from getting a Gumroad account and, you know, starting to kind of sell things on the internet.

• 21:34Speaker 00

  So there's, there's a key element here where the cost of starting something or getting something out and putting your entry into this meritocracy has, has never been lower and the rewards for doing it are basically uncapped if you do it well enough.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  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 route 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.

• 22:27Chris Williamson?

  You know, if you were to say to someone, hey man, you can have a job that pays you £500 an hour, $1,000 an hour or whatever. 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 or £1,000 an hour. You could make 10 grand every, like every couple of hours.

• 22:53Chris Williamson?

  That they'll be like, well, I don't understand. Like, I'm just doing the same job. 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 Naval says. He says, is it productize yourself?

• 23:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's like the summary of the entire tweet storm is productize yourself. 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.

• 23:36Chris Williamson?

  The British becoming?

• 23:38Speaker 00

  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, you know, 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

• 24:10Speaker 00

  an incredible business and an incredible kind of way to give back to the audience and help other people like 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 carries a lot of weight when you're working with things that are like a little bit abstract like this.

• 24:29Chris Williamson?

  Can you use Jack just briefly as an example between what he was doing as 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 bookend and illustrate what we've gone through so far.

• 24:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, I'll do my best. I don't know the story incredibly well. And if you haven't had him on 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.

• 24:56Chris Williamson?

  Nice.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  So he was working for, you know, some high class agency that was billing him out at, you know, thousands of dollars an hour. And he's a very talented designer. And so he was working, you know, building logos, websites and things for, you know, Fortune 500 companies and Have high end fancy car companies and stuff like that and was just getting his ass kicked, I think regularly at work and looking around, I was like, man, 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 billing 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

• 25:42Speaker 00

  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 now I think his 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

• 26:24Speaker 00

  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 than I did.

• 26:46Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 26:47Speaker 00

  From a financial perspective, but yeah, give him a follow, check it out.

• 26:52Chris Williamson?

  He's a great guy. So that's 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, et cetera, et cetera. And that is because, as you said, that scraping off the top that happens, you get billed out of five grand for a day, but your bosses take 50% of That and then there's that and da da da da da da and then you walk away with a grand and a 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.

• 27:33Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 28:15Chris Williamson?

  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 once, sell twice. Or build once, 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'll 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 pill to swallow, like to actually be able to understand exactly how you start to

• 29:00Chris Williamson?

  move away from just time for money at that one for one. And then start to really, really leverage. It's a really big, a really big sort of orthogonal shift for a lot of people.

• 29:09Speaker 00

  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 exponential returns work.

• 29:24Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 29:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's incredible. And there's not many people who do basically two full careers in their lifetime, right? Like that guy.

• 29:42Speaker 00

  It's it's wild and it's it's one of those things that doesn't sound right and it can't possibly be true and you look at the graphs and it doesn't even make sense. But that's the power of compounding, right? And so that that compounding kind of works in all of these areas. And I think leverage is another like, I'm not very like mathematically inclined, so I might need to like enlist some help from somebody to get this. But I'm 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. And the same way, it takes time to to work and build and these things build on each

• 30:22Speaker 00

  other. It's a thing. It's probably the thing I'm most interested in digging into more after having finished this book. It's it's a thing that, once it got labeled as leverage and of all categorized 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. I'm like, 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.

• 31:04Chris Williamson?

  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 this show. It's not often that you have an objective measure of anything, you know, like, success, or impact, or happiness, or, you know, money's like, one of the few things and body weight, like, that's it. Like, money and you know how fat you are and how rich you are, and that's it. But, um, yeah, it's, it's good to have that thinking.

• 31:34Speaker 00

  I was just gonna say that. I feel like your your former athlete responds to like, give me a scoreboard and I'm gonna fucking win. Like, show me.

• 31:41Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Well, I mean, gamifying gamifying stuff is such a hack as well. The fact that we, 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. But you know, that you know, the pain of like, how many cows was that? Oh, it was probably this. And you get you gain, you're supposed to be on a hard cut. You feel like you've been on a hard cut and you've you've gained weight. You know, what the what? What happened? Like, you need to track.

• 32:04Speaker 00

  You didn't measure absolutely everything.

• 32:06Chris Williamson?

  Exactly, exactly, exactly. Um, how can we prioritize and focus?

• 32:12Speaker 00

  Prioritize and focus is kind of the capstone on the building wealth section. And it really, it 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 this 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 even for most people how wealth is created. You know, maybe if you're a media person or like an actor, there's an exception to that. But for the most part, like getting rid of all of the things that are distractions from

• 32:56Speaker 00

  that and understanding like where wealth truly comes from. Leverage, accountability, specific knowledge, building or buying equity in a business and just letting that compound, you know, getting, getting the, you know, 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, 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

• 33:39Speaker 00

  time you're 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 to tomorrow was fine, or somebody else can pick it up for you. You know, one of the things that Naval uses as a test for this is putting a really, really high hourly value on your time. So I think he, he said today on Twitter that if somebody asked him like, so how do you value your time? He said a hundred dollars a minute, six grand an hour.

• 34:24Speaker 00

  If I can outsource it or not do it and it costs me less than a hundred dollars 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, no, no, 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 gonna, gonna keep that compounding engine going.

• 34:58Chris Williamson?

  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, 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 outsour 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

• 35:43Chris Williamson?

  time out for, what are you doing? Like just go, go to work. 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, but not for me, not for me. And like 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 wealth? 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,

• 36:29Chris Williamson?

  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?

• 36:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I think that like death by a thousand cuts of like 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 somebody else to do it because it is an intimidating thing to go hire somebody, even like, you know, a VA or PA for relatively low amount of money. It's still like a big, gnarly task when like a clear, simple task is in front of you, you can just do it and be done. I think, I think people underestimate maybe how valuable their specific knowledge is or how unique they are. That's something that is kind of,

• 37:17Speaker 00

  we all have, you know, self doubts and insecurities and we are like, you know, we're used to walking down the street and feeling not too dissimilar from 10,000 other people. And 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.

• 37:44Chris Williamson?

  And Costa syndrome is a hell of a drug.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's a hell of a drug. And I would say like, no matter how small you start, like Jack, Jack again, has an amazing cure for this. His goal is just like make $1 on the internet. Just go sell one thing to one person for $1 and you will feel different and it will start that snowball and you kind of slowly build up the confidence. You know, you got to start at the tutorial level, maybe. But you're going to keep building that confidence and you're going to 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, 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

• 38:29Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:50Speaker 00

  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.

• 38:59Chris Williamson?

  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's 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

• 39:42Chris Williamson?

  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. You know, no one, 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

• 40:22Chris Williamson?

  a book and now bifurcating so aggressively that we're going to be swimming in courses. The fact that James Clear 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 print it on paper and maybe you can get it on Kindle and I'll speak in it. 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 are killing it in in making online courses or you're teaching people to do stuff. And everyone knows the same with the Instagram influencer who managed to get clout

• 41:06Chris Williamson?

  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 four words 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

• 41:32Chris Williamson?

  intellect and academics were very, very tightly confined. And now it's been completely emancipated and everyone can get access to it. And right. Okay, now everyone that's that's like remotely clever can be super rich, right? Okay, now let's find somewhere that's that's a happy medium between the two.

• 41:49Speaker 00

  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 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, the money you invest makes you more invested. So if you want to change who

• 42:33Speaker 00

  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 an online course can be incredibly value add and worth every penny that you're paying for it.

• 42:46Chris Williamson?

  I think the

• 42:47Speaker 00

  There's definitely

• 42:48Chris Williamson?

  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 would be to be able to say, right, you can buy James Clear's Atomic Habits for £10, or you can pay £1,000, 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

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  Justifiably more revenue.

• 43:20Speaker 00

  I think we're, we just maybe crested the hill of some innovation in those online courses that gets, that actually makes it deliver the results to people. I think, um, you know, I went through this at Reforge, um, which is like a Silicon Valley kind of growth consulting. Or growth, practicing sort of course, um, it's expensive course, but it's 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 Perel's courses, like they are very focused on delivering the outcome with Jack Butchers.

• 43:51Speaker 00

  And, and that's, that is very different than like, you know, that, hey, we recorded some college lectures and put them online and sort of deal. And these, these like artisanal, like almost kind of innovators in, 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.

• 44:20Chris Williamson?

  Everyone knows, so I had Mike Winnett on, have you seen the entrepreneur on YouTube?

• 44:25Speaker 00

  No.

• 44:26Chris Williamson?

  Oh dude, you will absolutely adore this. So, um, 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 entrepreneurs online. So it's your Dan Pena's of this world, it's the, um, Grant Cardone's and it's, um, high ticket value, heavily discounted down, it's the limited time, limited value, 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.

• 45:05Chris Williamson?

  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 Cardone'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, that is what it is. So yeah, I think, you know, to kind of bookend the, um, I have concerns over the online course world. Like, don't get me wrong.

• 45:47Chris Williamson?

  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, uh, 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'll 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, can I give all of this value for that much? And will it, will it work? Right. 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, 5997

• 46:26Chris Williamson?

  or whatever it might be. So I think, yeah, hopefully we will see the resurgence in, um, people becoming more savvy to the, the Dick Funnels approach, which is being used.

• 46:41Speaker 00

  I don't know if you find that, but I like it a lot.

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  That's another, that's another Mike Wintizism. Yeah. He is next, his next episode is on, uh, he's the guy behind ClickFunnels. Anyway, the guy that created ClickFunnels, there'll be people screaming down their, their AirPods to me at the moment. Um, the guy that made Dick Funnels.

• 47:01Speaker 00

  That's, that's actually, so this is, I really want to do, um, I, it's only a toddler right now. It's like a baby, baby business. Um, but I want to get it going. And we're, I think,

• 47:12Speaker 00

  There's so much to, 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 Wirecutter for online courses. It's called Course Correctly. Wirecutter is like this very high-end review site. It's for electronics mostly. It got acquired by the New York Times.

• 47:37Chris Williamson?

  So like Trust Pilot or TripAdvisor or whatever?

• 47:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, more, more like staff-written, highly curated reviews.

• 47:46Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 47:48Speaker 00

  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 does the course promise but not deliver on? I've got a few reviews up on there already, but if anybody wants to like, write a review of a course that they have been on, like, I'm going to start hosting independent, unbiased, like, verified reviews for online courses. Because I think it's so hard to find anything written about things that is not pushed out by the course creator themselves. And so separating some of this stuff and being like, you know, can you imagine being a 24-year-old kid and you're sitting there with your life savings about to buy like, one course or the other? And you're like, I don't know, Grant Cardone?

• 48:29Chris Williamson?

  Not Grant Cardone. Here's my advice, 24-year-old. Do not spend your money on Grant Cardone's course. Yeah, Eric, man, you need to, 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 dulcet, but really vicious as well and incredibly effective. Yeah, I'll link you two guys in because you would, you would absolutely love him and he's a great guy. How does Naval suggest that we get lucky?

• 49:03Speaker 00

  Naval 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. You know, this is, I think of like Gary Vee is hustle luck like that guy.

• 49:16Chris Williamson?

  Poor guy, man.

• 49:18Speaker 00

  But, but it works, right? Like if you work hard enough, you will increase your surface area to luck. And like you will kind of find some tailwinds. The third is increasing your sensitivity. And so just like 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 a certain 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, the fourth type of luck that is the, the most ideal, the most sought after. It takes the long, it takes a long time. It's the hardest to get.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  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? What, how does Warren Buffett get lucky versus how does Mark Cuban get lucky? Like who, who just kind of sold at the top and who has the sort of reputation and

• 50:26Speaker 00

  kind of uniqueness that there's just only one person to call. And like, it feels like luck when you get the call, but it's also the end result of 50 years of hard work.

• 50:36Chris Williamson?

  When it's consistently you that's getting the call as well. That's when I, I've been trying to, 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. He's like the Gordon Ramsay of the PT world. So he calls out bullshit diets and ineffective training regimes. And he has a bestselling book and he's just about to release another one. There'll almost certainly be a bestselling book and he makes retarded money through his, his online academy as well.

• 51:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, he, he has a very unique view because his ascendance into clout, like global clout, 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, I know that it's there. And he's got a bestselling book written by him, not ghostwritten, 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,

• 51:54Chris Williamson?

  that 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.

• 52:38Chris Williamson?

  And that's a very big distinction between that. So yeah, if, 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, 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, how would you say, like the, the window of what imposter syndrome, where it should be, needs to shift to one way or another. And hopefully, hopefully people will, will see that. And it's 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,

• 53:22Chris Williamson?

  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 luck. On the route between those two things, avoiding the status seeking, avoiding the clout for clout's sake, avoiding the hierarchy games, like, there's a lot of left and right turns between that. Do you think?

• 53:49Speaker 00

  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.

• 54:07Chris Williamson?

  It's the compounding outcome of accountability.

• 54:11Speaker 00

  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 Basecamp's marketing strategy, right? It's 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. 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 Berkshire Hathaway, it's Buffett. We are so much more adept at trusting people

• 54:55Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 55:16Chris Williamson?

  That's what, in its purest sense, influencer marketing was supposed to be, right? Like, the fact that Cristiano Ronaldo has 40 million followers, but Real Madrid only has 12. Or that Elon Musk has like tens of millions of followers and SpaceX and Tesla got their Facebooks deleted or whatever it was that he decided to do to them the other year. So like... Yeah, people follow people, they don't follow things. Moving on to happiness, second half of the book, Naval says that happiness is learned. Do you agree? Because most people would think that happiness is a state, not a skill.

• 55:52Speaker 00

  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's such a fucked up kind of concept. And almost all conversational relations to happiness are about external circumstances. Like, are you happy you got this thing? Will you be happy if you get this thing? Like, it's 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, we have to choose to learn the skills of happiness, and over and over and over again, to pound those skills into you, just

• 56:37Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 57:18Chris Williamson?

  How can we cultivate our happiness then?

• 57:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's a lot to, there's a lot of habits kind of listed out in the book, that is maybe the most tactical kind of level of it. And there's a few off the top of my head, that like, one that 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

• 58:03Speaker 00

  Those are external controls of your time that pull you out of the present moment. You know, if your 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 and appreciating, you know, the smallest thing. Um, this wasn't, I think I'm all retweeted this, but I don't know if it was an original Navalism, but like, I, I, 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, 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.

• 58:48Speaker 00

  And I know that if I can be happy with a cup of coffee, I can be happy with, with anything.

• 58:52Chris Williamson?

  That's awesome, man. Let's talk about desire. What's the key insight to do with desire to learn from Naval?

• 58:58Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll, we'll start with like the most dense aphorism, which is six desire is a contract you make to be unhappy until you get what you want.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  Which is an easy thing to hear and be like, oh, okay. Um, and a very difficult thing to remember to apply to everything that you desire. We so instinctively pick up new desires so quickly. Um, 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 know, you scroll through Instagram and in 20 minutes, I'm like, shit, I really want to be a genius stand-up 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've accomplished all of those goals that all those people spend their entire lives doing in completely different directions.

• 59:56Speaker 00

  And it takes 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 to ever get. So knowing that that you really should have a limited number of desires, like Naval says, just one at a time, you know, if you're gonna, if you're really focused on building your company, focus on building your company and like allow yourself that desire, but but be contented with everything else that you have and really work hard to accept every other circumstance and not pile on, you know, 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

• 1:00:38Speaker 00

  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 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, your energy, your mojo, your focus on that one thing that you actually most desire and prioritizing those is 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 you have a little less direction and track record of like what you know you want for sure. And so you're interested in all these different things and you pursue all these different things at once,

• 1:01:20Speaker 00

  and you have this huge multitude of desire. 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 are 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 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.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  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 renounce them. And I've been thinking about this for ages that

• 1:02:07Chris Williamson?

  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 grandma with the dog and stuff like that, the simple pleasures. And we, I think can over romanticize 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 Ferraris because you're like, do you know

• 1:02:49Chris Williamson?

  what it is? I've already done the Ferrari thing. That doesn't really matter. And this also unfortunately ties into one of the reasons that I think Naval'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 Naval, 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?

• 1:03:30Speaker 00

  It does. I don't know. I'm interested. I want to push back on it a little bit because I think, I think the like, it's easier to achieve your material successes than to eliminate them is 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, maybe 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

• 1:04:12Speaker 00

  path that you are on and that you are happy with, is not going to lead to enormous incredible wealth. Like, for plenty of people, I'm sure, you know, I'm a teacher, I love being a teacher, I'm going to make maybe at best, couple hundred, you know, tens of thousands of dollars a year, like.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Even if I start a business on the side, I'm just never gonna 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 Housel 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, as you're living below them. Like you're, you're gonna be happy as long as your desires are in line with, 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.

• 1:05:12Speaker 00

  Again, like if you're not happy with a cup of coffee, you're not gonna 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 wanna add the Lambo. Like, I don't know what to say. 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.

• 1:05:35Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:05:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I think that's, you know, that's a good, maybe motivational quote for you to, you know, be all you can be. But it also is the sort of mental trap that can leave you like deeply unhappy. If you imagine, you know, 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, that's a recipe for misery.

• 1:06:16Chris Williamson?

  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 Naval 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.

• 1:06:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think that's separating materialism from your accomplishments and your contentedness, you know, your inner state from your outer state. Because it's difficult to imagine a maximized version of both of those kind of as coexisting, I think. Naval's nuance here, which I think is interesting, is that he doesn't want to be the most successful version of himself. He wants to be the one that is statistically likely to become the most successful. And so it's a little like if there's, you know, if there's a thousand Naval's in a thousand different universes, he wants to live his life and build his businesses in such a way that 999 of those thousand eventually become successful.

• 1:07:32Speaker 00

  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 is, 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.

• 1:08:17Speaker 00

  I don't want to spend my life working, is what he would say. He loves what he does now. He loves starting businesses and investing and does it, continues 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, you know, 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, extreme outside.

• 1:08:59Chris Williamson?

  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 of, and we all do as well. It's sad and unfortunate that the thing which often sets us apart in our twenties and thirties is the thing that we need to try and cast away and loses an attachment in our forties and fifties. Like, you, there's, 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 clout 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

• 1:09:44Chris Williamson?

  presentness, you can't get around the fact that it's a function of intensity times time, the Carl 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's the way that it works. But yeah, I, 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, 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

• 1:10:26Chris Williamson?

  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 other tools to free yourself,

• 1:11:10Chris Williamson?

  liberate yourself from sort of 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.

• 1:11:20Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:11:29Chris Williamson?

  No, I've seen it, I've seen it online.

• 1:11:32Speaker 00

  It's a really interesting, you know, if people are asking the question now of 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 in things that don't, 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, and he was a software engineer for like 10 years,

• 1:12:17Speaker 00

  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 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 net worth through his savings and his investments that he retired. So he retired at thirty or thirty one and he's like, I can live for the rest of my

• 1:13:02Speaker 00

  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 it's 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 could 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 is really well explored, I think, in this kind of financial independence, early retirement 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.

• 1:13:38Chris Williamson?

  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, I want to see the man, the man, money man mustache. That's what I want to see.

• 1:13:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, he has great fun with it. He's just ruthlessly mocking people with expensive cars and, you know, unnecessary possessions and things that people think are going to lead to happiness, but aren't. And he made a hilarious character out of it. And of course, because he was, you know, 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 off that and.

• 1:14:12Chris Williamson?

  Far richer than he ever wanted to be, desperately trying to give his money away.

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  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, you know, with, with no intention really whatsoever.

• 1:14:33Chris Williamson?

  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 rundown of the, the, the three most insightful quotes are the ones that have had the biggest impact on you?

• 1:14:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, I can't promise I'll do these word for word, but I'll try. I think the one that's been sitting on top of my head the most is, 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, this thing built into us that we feel like we are not supposed to feel happy.

• 1:15:31Speaker 00

  We're not supposed to allow ourselves to feel happiness until we've accomplished something, until we've delivered some result, whether it's for ourselves or for someone else, for our employer, for our partner, for our family.

• 1:15:44Speaker 00

  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 gotta like put your eyebrows down and put your back into it. And like strength comes from that and like that will push you harder.

• 1:16:07Speaker 00

  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, 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? You know, 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, you know, the Jack Bogle playbook. And that is a way to build equity in a business. Like when you buy into the stock market, you're, that is a, you know, you're buying equity in a ton of different businesses and allowing that to compound and pay dividends for you.

• 1:16:53Speaker 00

  There is also the small business world where we are all basically a small business of one. We own a hundred percent of the shares. And whether or not you're going to go do something with that to make that more valuable.

• 1:17:05Speaker 00

  In the Silicon Valley world, you've got, you know, take a job with stock options and you try to kind of 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 or buy equity in a company. You know, there's a lot of ways to accomplish that when you see that as the goal. But but understanding that that is a goal, not necessarily just a higher hourly income or something like that. Those are kind of, you know, maybe one from each world that are that are sitting with me right now.

• 1:17:32Chris Williamson?

  Have you got a third one? Have you got anything else that you've come across from him recently that you think is a is maybe a little bit different?

• 1:17:39Speaker 00

  This one isn't talked about very much. I don't think I don't think Naval is necessarily thought of as as like funny and charismatic as as I think he is. You know, he's introverted. He doesn't do a ton of talks or anything like that. But there is one that charisma is the ability to be both positive and to project love and positivity kind of 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.

• 1:18:24Speaker 00

  And I think that is somewhat in vogue, right? There's always the character who's like delivering harsh truths. You know, and like thought of as smart and competent because they are 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 it's maybe like funny to watch. But if you take that character, take 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.

• 1:18:55Speaker 00

  And positivity at the same time is something that certainly I'm working on and it's 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.

• 1:19:11Chris Williamson?

  I think this is one of the problems I have with the like menanism, men's rights, red pill movement overall, that the vast, vast, vast majority of the guys that fly that flag super hard just sound like bitter old men. And like, bro, like, I don't want to be you. I don't want to be you. There's a part of every guy 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 got to be positive to scam people out of $20 million for a CBD company or whatever it is that he's been doing.

• 1:19:55Chris Williamson?

  I am not like, I'm gonna have to get some lawyers or something to protect me. So if you can, if you have, if you can help me at the end of this podcast, that would be wonderful.

• 1:20:05Chris Williamson?

  I've been thinking about something that you just brought up there, which is that Naval doesn't do a ton of talks. I've had his brother Kamal on. 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 Naval 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?

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  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, and, you know, he's not building 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. And, um, yeah, I, I'm, you know, we're lucky he does as much as he does, I think. Um, there's, there's, I think, plenty of people who are equally or more successful that don't do nearly as much kind of teaching and giving and sharing of their perspectives as he does.

• 1:21:30Speaker 00

  Um, and as, you know, I've benefited a lot from, from what he shared and I wish more people would kind of take the time to do it. Ray Dalio, you know, I know there's, there's a chapter of careers where people kind of turn to that, that piece.

• 1:21:44Speaker 00

  But it's hard work, you know, it's, it's a lot of effort to distill what you've done. And, you know, I know Ray Dalio put many, many hours of effort into, into principles, both for his business and, and for the book. You know, I know Naval certainly put work into the podcast and the tweet storm and things like that.

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  But then 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, he probably ever would and that he was fine with it. So this is, this is fulfilling to kind of see this come to life. I really wanted a, the principles of Naval and, and this is kind of what it turned into.

• 1:22:26Chris Williamson?

  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 that 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, you are a, a common denominator for the rest of us. So before we finish up, man, final question, what do you disagree most with Navalon?

• 1:23:00Speaker 00

  Hmm. Yeah, that's a good question.

• 1:23:04Speaker 00

  I don't.

• 1:23:06Speaker 00

  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, with super close, kind of intimate, like, family relationships. And, and there's a little bit of kind of breadcrumbs 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, when the relationships matter most, these people close to you who, you know,

• 1:23:51Speaker 00

  their emotions matter to you and their, their pain hurts you and their happiness, you know, affects your happiness, like, how do you, how strict of a prescription is the Stoicism in, in those sorts of things? Um, 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, I'm interested in the practicalities of, of that piece, for sure.

• 1:24:15Chris Williamson?

  There's all different areas. We said right at the very beginning that one of the reasons both of us are drawn to Naval is that he's not armchair philosophizing about this stuff. It's 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 were a child, the source code of like who you think you are, that's one of them.

• 1:24:59Chris Williamson?

  You know, your, 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, for six months? You know, in a relationship where blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, like add on a bunch more stress. Like that's, that's real for, because we can sit here and talk about the business does this thing and 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 your inner 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,

• 1:25:41Chris Williamson?

  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, Naval will come out of his hiding hole and decide that he's going to unleash a whole more stuff on us. Cause I mean, God, that, 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 go and listen to Naval on Joe Rogan.

• 1:26:22Chris Williamson?

  It'll be linked in the show notes below, as will the Almanack of Naval Ravikant. Why should people go? They want to check it out and read all the extra materials and, and get the full Eric Jorgenson experience. Where do they go?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, navalmanack.com is the, the site up for the book. So we've got.

• 1:26:39Chris Williamson?

  A C K, right?

• 1:26:41Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:42Speaker 00

  N A V A L, I can't spell it.

• 1:26:45Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 00

  You'll figure it out.

• 1:26:46Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. It's linked below. Just press the link, press the link.

• 1:26:49Speaker 00

  It's linked from my Twitter, which is at Eric Jorgenson. 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, we'll keep having kind of new material, new explorations. I'll update things as, as Naval 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, 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, and like with the community.

• 1:27:32Speaker 00

  There's, there's a chapter of the book that's the whole section of Naval's recommended reading. And I thought it would be super interesting to do like a, 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, 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.

• 1:27:58Chris Williamson?

  I love it, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Everything that we've spoken about, including the almanac of the Valravn account, Eric's Twitter, his website, everything will be linked in the show notes below. I hope that Naval's ears haven't melted his AirPods as we've said his name about 45,000 times. Or if you want to party and you're in lockdown, listen to this podcast again and take a shot every time that we say the word Naval.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  Because that would be. We are not liable for your death.

• 1:28:25Chris Williamson?

  Death. Yeah, yeah. A hundred percent. Eric, man, this has been awesome. Thank you so much for coming on.

• 1:28:30Speaker 00

  Yeah, super fun. Thanks, Chris.

• 1:28:44Speaker 02

  Mr. President, my company informed me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all keep the blame on me.

• 1:28:54Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:29:01Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:29:08Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17 not a middle without parent.