Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse | Jan 2021 | Clubhouse Podcasts

But then the moment you hit puberty, you get this desire. It's really the mating function. You have puberty, you're capable of replicating, so now you have desire for the opposite sex and for having children. Your genes spur you into action. And then of course, the desire itself is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. And so now you're consumed by the desire to go get what you want. And so go get it. I mean, once you're an adolescent and up, you're fired up and you're ready to go. So that's the age at which you can go ahead and start compounding wealth and friendships and societal status. And you should go get all those things. And then once you've gotten your fill of those things, then you can sit down and say, well, actually, this is making me happier. Sure, I got what I wanted, but I'm not happy. And then you can tackle the happiness problem. So I think there's a sequence to it. Now, if you're very gifted, if you're genetically gifted, perhaps you can do both. It's difficult to do both, but it's hard enough to make money. Making money is somewhat creative, but it's also somewhat adversarial. Every simple way to make money has been arbitraged away. All these people who are running, you know, get-wealthy rooms in Clubhouse, they're just scammers. I don't know if they were rich, they wouldn't be telling you, they wouldn't be selling courses on how to get rich. That's not how to get rich, that's a get-rich-quick scheme that they're running, not a get-rich-quick scheme that's going to work for you. So nobody who's wealthy is going to give you actionable advice in a public forum on how to get wealthy. This is nonsense, it doesn't work. They can give you kind of vague generic principles, but not actionable advice. Anyway, so yeah, if it is your all-consuming desire, if it is your all-consuming desire and you can't wait, you can't sleep, you can't think, you can't do anything else to make money, you will make money. The universe is rigged that way. If you have one overwhelming desire, it will give you what you want, but it's got to be your one overwhelming desire. But the problem is that most of us are creatures of envy. We look around, we want everything. You want her looks, you want his money, you want their friends, you want her attitude, you want his car, you want that person's family relationships, you want everything. Well, you can't have everything, you got to choose. So I do recommend going for wealth creation relatively early because it does favor the young, believe it or not. And then when you're older, you'll have learned the systems and the principles. And then aging naturally has a way of reminding you that you're running out of time. And that will force you to focus on your happiness because you'll realize, actually, I'm making enough money, but I seem to be running out of time. And time is the one thing I can't get back. So yes, both of these things can be figured out. The myth in our society, there are two myths in our society. One of them didn't used to be a myth, we used to call it the American Dream. We used to say, hey, anyone can be wealthy, and I think that is still true. But the myth that is emerging now is that no, you're a victim of your circumstances and you can't make it, so don't even try. Or their equivalent myths like the get-rich-quick scheme myth, like I said, all these Clubhouse rooms or Twitter, you know, make-money people are selling you PDFs for $29.99 or giving you a thousand secrets or, you know, 'I will teach you how to be rich' kind of scammers. So that's a myth as well. But the bigger myth in our society is that you can't do anything about your happiness, that it's a set baseline point, or that it's determined entirely by your external circumstances, which is nonsense. Someone up here before, I think it was Leo, was talking about, you know, the hunt for a mate, which is fine, it's worthy, we all have to do it, I did it, you did it, everyone's going to do it. But that man that she finds is not going to make her happy. Absolutely not. It's not another person's job to make you happy, it's your own job to make yourself happy. And a happy relationship is a product of two happy people. If she meets someone who's happy but she's unhappy, that relationship is not going to be a happy relationship. Or vice versa, if she's happy and she meets an unhappy person, it's not going to be a happy relationship. The way to have a happy relationship is to find a happy person, and the way to find a happy person and hold on to them is to be a happy person. It's like Charlie Munger says, you know, we want to find a worthy mate, to be worthy of a worthy mate. So happiness is something you have to figure out for yourself, but the good news is it's completely doable, it's in your power, you just have to want it badly enough. But it's hard to want that and hard to want to make money at the same time, they do run somewhat against each other. So I suggest you make money first, and once you're done with that, then you get focused on happiness.

Yeah, I don't have a prescription for other people. The problem is that you have to live up to your own moral code, right? Because your life is just an internal single-player game. You're not competing against anybody else, you're competing against yourself. You set your own desires and your goals, you have your own perspective, you have your own morality, and you have to live up to it. So there's no standard meaning or purpose. If there was a single purpose or meaning for all of us, then we'd all be slaves to that single purpose, we'd all be robots, every one of us fighting each other in conflict to get that one purpose. So there's not even a single purpose for you necessarily other than the one that you create. So you get to create your own meaning and purpose. And you kind of crafted your own story here, right? Look at any situation, you could have a situation where there are two people walking down the street, right? And they're in the exact same situation, the weather is the same for them, they're walking the same way, they're roughly the same health, they're roughly the same height, they're roughly the same attractiveness, they have roughly the same bank account. It happens all the time, you have two friends who are peers, yet one is unhappy and the other is happy. Why? It's just because the lens through which they've chosen to view the world. One of them has meaning, the other one doesn't. Why? Because one has just chosen a meaning that they can live up to and they're full, they're moving along to that meaning. So it is a race, but you're just running against yourself. You pick the finish line, you pick the goal line, you pick the meaning, you pick the purpose. So you can pick a meaning or purpose that is antithetical to happiness, or you could pick one that aligns with it. Like there's a classic example where I was in Thailand once and I ran into this guy and he was just like absurdly happy, one of the happiest people I've ever met, and genuinely happy. Not pleasure-feel happy when he's doing drinks or shots or running around the beach talking about happiness, but just calm, content, beautiful smile, married, had a couple of kids, just sort of floating along in life. And I went up to him and I was pretty impressed by the guy, this is when I was really working on my own mental state, and I said, 'Hey, how come you just seem so happy all the time?' And he said, well, he said I used to work really hard, fly around, shuttle around, I used to work for Tony Robbins. He said I was setting up all these events for Tony and I would sit in the front row and I would take notes and listen to everything. And he said the thing that Tony helped me realize was just how malleable my own life is. You know, we grow up, you're 10 years old, you've already set your goals and your personality, you think that's who I am. Tony helped me realize, no, actually, that can be changed, you can revisit that. So he said I realize that everybody has a purpose, everybody has a goal, and you can set your own purpose. He said I realize that somebody out there in the world has to be the happiest person in the world. Somebody, it's their job just to be happy all the time, and they're an exemplar, they're a role model for everybody else. He said that's gonna be me, I'm gonna be that guy. And he took on that role. So that's his meaning and his purpose and his happiness. So they're not mutually exclusive. This idea that they're mutually exclusive is a myth. I'll say something that I think is pretty controversial, I think will annoy a lot of people, but to me the only true test of intelligence is if you get what you want out of life. If you're not getting what you want in life, how smart are you? Now a lot of people hate to hear this because they think being smart means that you can't be happy, that they run against each other. Not really, if you're really smart you figure out how to be happy also. Now you get what you want in life. Now you have to be careful what you want, right? If you want to have six arms and six legs, you're not gonna get that out of life. If you wanna be able to jump to the moon or fly, you're not gonna get that out of life. So part of intelligence is not just getting what you want in life, but also knowing what to want, what is rational and reasonable to want, and then only pursuing those desires as opposed to just wanting every little thing that gets thrown in your way. Anyway, I reject this idea that meaning and purpose run counter to happiness. You can absolutely align those, as many people do. This is the oldest wisdom in the book, right? Go to the Bhagavad Gita, right? What does the Bhagavad Gita say? It says you are entitled to your labor, but not to the fruits of your labor. What that means is you do your work, but you don't necessarily get attached to what the outcome is going to be. The value is the job that you did, the beauty is in the work that you put in, it is complete in and of itself. Whatever happens, happens, that's not up to you. The universe is a big complicated place. All you know is you did your best job, and that has meaning. In my world, that means that you're impatient with your actions at all times, but you're patient with your results. And you don't necessarily know how it's going to work out. You know, there's a beautiful saying in Arabic, 'Inshallah', God willing, right? Whether you're religious or not. Sorry if I mangled it, I don't speak the language natively, but it was beautiful, I'm sorry for that. No, not at all, thank you for helping. But to me, that is a lot of just how the world works. Look, you didn't choose where you were born, you didn't choose when you were born, to your parents, you didn't choose what age you live in, you didn't choose your height, your weight, your genetics, your environment, your conditioning, your actions. You chose almost nothing on this planet. So you do your best work that you can according to your own moral code, and what's going to happen is going to happen. It's kind of like a movie, it's playing out, how much of it did you really pick? Don't get too stressed out or attached to the outcome. One very helpful exercise that I like is just, and you have to do this for yourself, this will help you only if you genuinely do it for yourself, so I'm not going to do it for you, no one else should do this for you. But you know, when you have a lazy afternoon sometime and you're sort of journaling or you're kind of self-reflecting or even going for a walk, sit down and just think back to your life five years ago. And really try to envision what your life was like five years ago. Think about where you were, how you dressed, who your friends were, who your lover was, what you were into, what you were working on, what your emotional state was. And write down the best advice that you possibly can to yourself from five years ago. Then do the same thing to yourself from 10 years ago, and the same thing from 15 years ago, and 20 years ago, however long it makes sense to go back. And I think you will find that you are your own best therapist and advisor. You're the person who does yourself the best. And I think what you'll find is that there will be a consistent pattern in the advice that you give your previous self. And I think that that will actually, in a weird way, answer the question that you asked, but I don't want to do it for you because that loses all meaning. True knowledge only comes from doing the work. If you can't embody it, it's not real.

Yeah, but I don't want to monopolize this conversation, so if other people want to speak, please do speak up. Don't feel like... yeah, I'm just here talking, I just have the right to leave at any moment, it's okay.

Right. So I will give you my best advice on that in a moment. First let me just say thanks for recommending me to all your hot girlfriends. Unfortunately my wife treats our relationship as a zero-sum game, so it is a hot woman who's also a fan. So Nicole, don't forget to include yourself in that group. Of course. Anyway, so yeah, getting wealthy. Look, I use the provocative title 'How to Get Rich' because it grabs people's attention, but we're really talking about wealth. Wealth is assets, right? And the goal here is to get out of nine-to-five. Nine-to-five is just modern slavery. Now obviously it's not the real horrific slavery that people's ancestors experienced, but it is a modern trimmed-down form of slavery. It's wage slavery, right? You basically don't choose when you wake up, you have to go to your job, you have to punch in the clock, punch in the hours, as if we're living in factory times, as if input has anything to do with output. Well, we live in the age of infinite leverage with your mind. You can move mountains if you knew the right things to do. Elon Musk doesn't have more hours in the week than anybody else, he just spends it better, or he has the knowledge to apply it better. Omniscience at some level implies omnipotence. If you were a god and if you had infinite knowledge, you wouldn't actually need to do anything, but if you wanted to do something, you would literally just flick one particle of sand and you just knew that the way it was going to hit all the other particles, that whatever you wanted to have happen would happen, because you just knew how everything connected to everything. So knowledge is literally power. So the way to earn in the modern world is through knowledge and leverage, it's not through work. And so you want to be a knowledge athlete if you want to earn, not a physical athlete. Physical athletes, you know, we put them in showrooms like the Olympics so they can show off, or we do it for fun or for health, but it's not the way that you actually create and gain wealth. So to create wealth requires a couple of principles. Many of these are obvious and it sort of helps to kind of put them together. The place where I kind of create a framework around it, I say there are three things that you really need to do. The first is you need to have some specific knowledge. The second is you need to take on accountability. And the third is you need to have leverage. Those are the three key components. Specific knowledge is knowing something, knowing how to do something that other people don't know how to do, and you can't be trained to do it. So then it begs the question, how do you learn it? What is specific knowledge? Examples of specific knowledge could be the artificial intelligence field is just coming up and I'm really deep into it, or I have a really deep understanding of crypto, or I know how to do sales of very difficult large objects, like I know how to sell houses that are broken down in need of repair. Specific knowledge could be, you know, I'm the most entertaining gamer on the planet, I can play games on Twitch in such a way that people just love talking to me. It could even just be I'm a great Clubhouse speaker, but on a certain kind of topic that other people just don't understand. So how do you gain specific knowledge? I say it's almost a catch-22. Specific knowledge is built up by you through your passions. So when they say 'follow your passion', that's kind of what they mean. It doesn't always lead to money, but it can, because if you're obsessive about something and you're learning it for your own genuine intellectual curiosity, not to get a degree, not to make money, not to impress your friends, you're going to end up being better than anybody else. So I really believe that you should only read and engage in activities that you genuinely enjoy, and you should cultivate your intellectual obsessions without any goal. But you may be surprised when you look back and connect the dots later that one of them developed into a goal. And one of the hallmarks of specific knowledge is that it will feel like play to you, but it will look like work to others. So that is, anything that fits that model, you should develop. So that is specific knowledge. Second, I would say you develop accountability. Accountability means taking on risks, branding with your own name, eponymous companies, like the Oprah company or whatever. Whatever you may think of him, like before he became president, Trump was all about this, he would stamp his name on everything. Kanye West, right, Jay-Z, Elon Musk, these people use their names everywhere they go. But that means the accountability comes at downsides, that means that when you do something stupid or horrible, you're tagged forever. If you screw up, you screw up in public. So use your name, use accountability. And I know we live in an age of teamwork and obviously a lot of great work is done by teams, but even within a company like a startup, founders and managers are always looking for people who will take on accountability. So accountability is a big piece of it. You're never going to get paid what you're worth if you don't take on accountability. And then finally, leverage. Leverage is the most important because leverage is increasing without bound in our society. And there's basically three forms of leverage. There's labor, which is people working for you, that's been around forever. And your parents know it, which is why when you tell them I got a job, they ask for how many people are working for you or how big is the company. It sounds impressive. In reality, labor is the shittiest form of leverage. It takes too much effort to manage people, you're basically playing psychiatrists or babysitting, there's a lot of politics and emotions involved, it's just very hard to do. That said, if you want to build the biggest fortunes or the most wealth, it has to be in your repertoire. There's a lot of misconceptions that go on with labor leverage. One example is people say, well, there's no such thing as a 10x engineer. Of course there is, there's 100x engineers, there's 1000x engineers. In intellectual disciplines, there's massive variance, it's Pareto distributed, not normally distributed, for those of you who know the distribution curves. But another one is hire people who are smarter than you, that's another piece of nonsense. Why are people who are smarter than you going to work for you? Nobody has a good answer to that one. So there is an answer, it's not a great one, which is you hire them when they're really young and you exploit them for a year or two before they figure out they're smarter than you and move on. So you can do some short-term opportunities, or you can invest in people who are smarter than you, but you also have to be really good at what you do, otherwise good people aren't going to work for you. Anyway, that's labor. Then next is capital. You can use capital. You make a trade, let's say make a good trade on the stock market, whether it's a trade you make with $100 or a million dollars makes a huge difference, even though it took the same brain power to come up with the trade. Now you're magnifying the latter case by a factor of 10,000. How did you do that? That's leverage, right? That's capital leverage. The problem with capital leverage and labor leverage is that they're permissioned. Somebody has to give you the money, somebody has to agree to work with you. They take time to get, they take effort to get. With the capital leverage, there's often risk involved, especially with your own capital. So that brings us to the last form of leverage, and this is the most powerful form of leverage and is behind all the newly rich, and that is product leverage. Product leverage comes from building a product, and if the product has no marginal cost of replication, in other words, you can stamp out more copies without having to incur cost, that is the best form of leverage. Product leverage ranges from code, where you create applications like Clubhouse. We're all on Paul Davison's piece of code here and he's massively leveraged. Paul's not here right now, he's not running this conversation, we're all working for him. It also comes from media, like creating content, like Joe Rogan creates a podcast and gets stamped out. It can come from a book. It can come from even products like, you know, someone sells you a pill, like it could be a happy pill, a sugar pill, whatever, a pill is 98% intellectual property, the actual physical cost of what went in there is very low. So fundamentally what you want to do is you want to put yourself in a situation where you take your specific knowledge that you've developed over the years without even trying, the things that you're good at that other people are naturally bad at, that you got to by following your own intellectual obsessions, you add that to accountability, put your name on it, take some risks, you employ every form of leverage possible, capital, labor, and products and code, preferably the permissionless ones because those you can get access to when you're younger. And the net result is you productize yourself. What you end up doing is you end up selling a product that is simply an extension of who you uniquely are, and nobody can beat you at that because it's just you being you. And this can take a while to set up, but once you set this thing up, it will be a flood, a tsunami of money that will keep you flush for the rest of your life, and then you can figure out how to be happy.

Yeah, right. I didn't even realize I liked tsunamis until I knew they came in the form of money. Oh my god. And now, here we are. Here's another thing, advanced move. Here's another thing.

Real happiness is unconditional. The moment you have a condition, then you're basically saying I'm not going to be happy until that condition is met. So if you meet somebody who's really free and happy, that's unconditional. But you know, most of us aren't monks or sages or Buddhas or plan to get there anytime soon. You know, we're on this earth for some kind of fight, you know, so we want to do something interesting with our lives. So it's not going to be unconditional for most of us. But you're right in that the real happiness is unconditional, because otherwise there's always something screwing up the moment, there's always some sense of something missing at the moment that messes up your happiness. I think the question was about owning a piece of a business. Yes, what I described about accountability, leverage, and specific knowledge, eventually you productize it into a business. Equity is the upside. So when you look at a business, the way a business runs is a business essentially has, let's call it, let's go, okay, let me make it a little simple, four sets of people who have claims upon the business. A business has a bunch of assets, right? Has a bunch of value. And there are four sets of people who have value claims in that business. One is customers, right? And customers, they paid for some product and they're owed some of the product, very simple, straightforward, limited, easy. Then there are creditors, these are the people who have lent money to the business and they got to get paid back their coupon, their interest rate every month, otherwise the business goes under. But notice that they're always just going to get their interest rate, they're not going to get more, they're not going to get less, and if the company can't repay, the company's bankrupt and they try to recover what they can. The employees are actually very much like the creditors, they and the customers, they work, but they're going to get a set amount, they're getting security, they're getting insurance, they're getting fixed employment. And then finally, they're the owners of the business. And one of the beautiful things about Silicon Valley is that people give equity to the employees, so they create a larger class of owners. But the owners actually don't get anything guaranteed. The owners do not get anything in front of insurance or in the form of predictability, but they get all the upside. And in the modern world, it's all upside, you're only playing for upside because the upside can be so non-linear. These businesses that were worth $10 million when they started out can suddenly be worth $10 billion a few years later, and all that upside goes to the equity holders. So you must own a piece of a business if you want a path to financial freedom, there's literally no other way. Even the people who make a lot of money by supposedly renting their time, like when you see doctors or lawyers who get very rich, if you squint, what you see is that they actually own a private practice that has some kind of a brand, and there are a bunch of other doctors and lawyers working for them. And yeah, there are bankers who kind of sit at the top end of the wage slave spectrum, but even there, the best ones are hedge fund managers running their own business called the hedge fund, as opposed to the ones who are working as brokers on Wall Street and still getting paid a salary. As long as the hallmark of having a business is an asset that will earn while you sleep, it will earn while you're on vacation in Tahiti. You know, if you want to be in a position where you don't have to wake up at a specific time, you don't want to have to be in a specific place at a specific time, you don't have to answer to a specific person at a specific time, and you don't have to do anything that you don't want to, which doesn't mean you won't do things, you'll actually then be at your most creative and productive. But to get there, you have to own a piece of a business, that business has to have succeeded. So you basically want to grind in your career until you can hit escape velocity with a business, and once you're done with that, don't go back to wage slavery.

Most of coaching and mentorship and all those is procrastination. Everything interesting that anyone accomplishes in their life is done because of will, the power at some point they decide, I just have to do it, and they do it. There are unlimited gurus, there are unlimited motivational speakers, there are unlimited guides, there are unlimited training routines out there. If you're obsessing over, you know, just think about this, like the amount of time that I've spent reading nutrition books, if I had just adopted the nutrition policies out of any one of them, it literally almost doesn't matter which one, I would be in better health, right? I don't need to keep reading, so it's a form of procrastination, it's like intellectual accumulation keeping me busy from doing the actual thing. You again, you get what you want out of life, you just have to want it badly enough. If it's your all-consuming desire, you will get it, you will create the path to the destination no matter what it takes. So I think a lot of the right answer here is just not fooling yourself about whether you want or don't want something. Like for example, I kind of adopted this internal deal with myself which I said, hey, I'm not going to break my own word to myself. If I make myself a promise, I will not break my word to myself. Okay, great. Now, I get to say that it's only good once, it's only good until the first time I break my word with myself, then that technique, that whole system of techniques no longer works. So now if I want to drop a bad habit, let's say if I want to drop caffeine, I can't lie to myself and go through this whole rigmarole where I pretend to drop caffeine and I struggle to drop caffeine and I try to drop caffeine. Like no, if I give myself my word to drop caffeine, then I have to drop caffeine, otherwise I'm never going to trust myself ever again. And boy, wouldn't that be terrible. So that really puts things into stark focus, right? It makes it clear that most of what we think we're doing when we're asking for help, when we're going to seminars, when we're watching YouTube videos, which is procrastinating, we're not really serious. When you're serious, you just do it. So a lot of this is really not about struggling or trying, it's about figuring out what you are serious about. Like, you know, there's a common belief now that it's impossible to drop habits, like you can only replace them or you have to go through this massive 12-step process of changing. Yeah, it's not easy to drop a habit, it's not easy at all, but I'll tell you, everyone in this room has at some point in their life gone through a situation where they've struggled with something, they have a hard time with something, could even be a relationship, like you're in love with somebody, you then you see something about that person in one brief moment that you cannot unsee, or someone betrays you or backstabs you, you see them for who they are and you can't unsee it, and that's it, you're changed at that moment, they're gone. Or if you are addicted to some substance or some kind of food that you know is bad for you, or just a general habit, and then you see the damage that is causing, like for example if you're smoking and then you got lung cancer, right? And if you saw very clearly that that was causing you the lung cancer, you would drop the smoking. So a lot of times we're just in this conflict avoidance mode where we're pretending to work on things that we don't really want. So I don't believe in struggling anymore, I just think it's much more about just being very, very clear with yourself. Do I really want to drop this? And if I really want to drop this, then I give myself my word that I have dropped this and I will never waver from that, because if I do, then I can never trust myself again. So it's a lot about just focusing on what you absolutely genuinely want and then following through with it, and ignoring all the noise, because otherwise the world is just full of too much noise.

I don't believe in New Year's, I don't believe in holidays, I don't believe in resolutions.

So you think people waste their time, you know, saying like I'm going to wait till January to do this hit list of things and it's going to take me, you know, X amount of months to achieve those things? Right. So making a list actually sets you back. Yeah, look, I'm not perfect here, I struggle with my own things, so this is aspirational, right? When you see me tweeting or writing about this stuff, it's like, who are the best people to talk to about heartbreak? The people who've been heartbroken a lot, right? Who are the people who are good at making money? The ones who grew up poor, right? So the same way, who are the people who are good at breaking habits or cultivating good habits? It's people who've struggled with bad habits and addictions their entire life. I have an obsessive personality, I drop into bad habits very quickly, it's very difficult for me to break them. So I don't fall for the New Year's resolution trap anymore, I've seen through that one. But I do struggle with things, but now I've realized, at least now I've started to see within myself that, huh, the few times I was able to break a bad habit or change something, it's because it was just my overwhelming number one priority. And it was because I saw something about it that I could no longer unsee, I saw a breaking moment. There's another perspective is like suffering is a moment when you can no longer deny the reality of something, right? Like let's say in a relationship, and you've kind of been overlooking the other person's negative traits or what's not working for you in the relationship. Everyone's on good behavior, they want to make it work, so you're walking on eggshells, you're trying to make it work. Maybe the person dumps you, and it's not like you didn't see that coming, all these signs were there, all the evidence was there, but you were just avoiding it, you were kind of brushing it under the rug. And the suffering comes because you see it all at one instant, and you can no longer live in this fantasy land or this fantasy relationship that you had constructed. So it is that sight that is so important. In fact, I would say that if you live your life with complete and total and utter honesty, it becomes much easier, you become much closer to peace, much closer to happiness, much closer to effectiveness. Most of the problems that we encounter within ourselves is because we're not being honest with ourselves. And why are we not being honest with ourselves? Because we have some image of ourselves that we can't live up to, and so we're trying to pretend like we're someone that we're not. And it might also be to impress other people, that's the modern disease, right? You jump on Clubhouse, Instagram, Twitter, everyone's showing their best lives to everybody else, their fake best lives. And so of course...

Look, I'll say there's a threshold you get past where you're not fearful anymore. I can only speak for myself, right? I can't, like, if you were born rich, maybe you have a different outlook, maybe your numbers are different. I'll just say that there was a point in life where I got to a point where I was like, okay, I could breathe a sigh of relief, right? Where I don't have to work anymore in a job that I don't want to do anymore. That was like a tremendous sigh of relief. So you know, the people who say money can't buy you happiness, my retort to them is, it can if you earned it. You know, like if you know what it's like to be poor, if you start there, and if you know what it's like to struggle, and if you earn it, you have some satisfaction around it, you don't have imposter syndrome or guilt around it, gets you to a level where you don't have to worry about it, then yeah, it'll get you to a baseline. And it's not going to buy you happiness, use your imagination, people, right? It's not so bad. So maybe people say it can't buy you happiness because they're just afraid that then they'll, you know, or maybe they want to make poor people feel better, I don't know what the reasoning is. But anyway, I think yes, it can get you a certain baseline level of relief which everyone should frankly experience. That said, it's not going to make you genuinely actually happy. I know far more rich miserable people than I know miserable normal middle-class people. Poverty below which, yeah, I would say below about poverty, misery reintroduces itself. But there are things that matter a lot more for quote-unquote happiness, which is probably the most poorly defined word in the English language, right up there with love. There's a lot of different things that go into the so-called happiness, like community, friendships, values, self-esteem, peace, ambition, your level of ambition or desire, perspective, religion frankly. You know, religion is something we threw out the window because we rejected it once we found science and we saw the excesses of religion, we threw religious values out the window. But I think we're poorer for it, and now we're creating religions where we go, there's new fashionable religions popping up everywhere under different names, and we're suffering for it. It was a really deep, deep part of being human that spirituality fills, and you have to fill that somehow. In fact, what is the most important question in life? The most important questions in life are not how do I make money or how do I be happy or who do I marry or where do I date. The most important questions are like, what the hell am I doing here right now? What am I here for? What am I here for?

I don't want to quite say what my purpose is. My purpose is ludicrous, it's absurd, it's not worth talking about. You know, can I suggest this for you? On Sunday, please, sure. So 5 p.m. Pacific on Sunday, Nicole and I are hosting the next stand-up show on Clubhouse, and we'd love for you to drop in if you'd like to laugh with us.

I know you don't. If I didn't tell you, then it wouldn't even be planting a seed in your mind. So now it should pull me in. But one of the things that I get away from is the slavery of calendars.

You sound like you've been healed, but has your father been healed as a result of your tolerance, or at least your patience with him?

I'm happy for you, man.

Naval, I mean, bro, no, no, no, I don't interrupt. It was a beautiful story. I mean, if I could add to it just on a little bit of the edges, a couple of things about what you said. You know, I've had my own experiences. I would say my father gave me the gift of not being around in my life, and that allowed me to become stronger and resilient and capable and to figure everything out for myself. And so I'm grateful to him for that. But it took me a while to get to that perspective because the easy narrative would have been like, 'Damn it, my dad wasn't around, so I got screwed over in so many ways.' But it made me the person that I am. And whatever your father's treatment of you might have been, it doesn't sound good at all. You know, it made you into you, and you look great. I feel like you turned that well. I don't see how it could have been a different story. If your father had been like super loving and great to you, you'd be kind of a wimp, right?

The first is exactly, warriors get built in wartime, not in peacetime. And so you're a warrior, you had to go through your wars. I think the second part of it is that there are things that happen, and then there's stories that we tell ourselves as to what happened, and those stories are very powerful. And if you can change the story of what happened to you, it's sometimes just as good as changing what happened to you. And for example, forgiveness. You don't forgive because you're a good person. You don't forgive because you're doing the other person a favor. You forgive so you can finally have peace, so you can move on, so you can clear your own mind, so you can be fresh and powerful and strong going forward. Because the only person I'm hurting is myself by holding on.

I think clarity comes from a combination of three things. It comes from honesty, a commitment to honesty, which I developed when I was very young. Because I grew up in the rough and tumble streets of Queens, and I used to hang out with some really rough characters. I used to hang out with some Russian monsters when I was a kid, there were other kid monsters, you know, junior Russian mobsters. But they sort of had this weird code of ethics amongst them where they were brutally honest with each other all the time. And if you told even the slightest white lie, they would beat the living daylights out of you or out of each other. But if you literally told them the truth, they would believe you even if their life was on the line. So it was just something that drilled honesty as a core virtue into me early on. And I've always loved science and physics, and so those are also all about truth-seeking. So truth was sort of always my number one value, where it was to the point of I would rather be unpopular and disliked and be a loser in life and know what's real and what's true and speak the truth as opposed to the other way around. People don't always know the sound of truth, but they know the feel of truth. You know when someone's trying to snow you, you know when someone's bullshitting. Deep down you're hardwired for it. I think people are hardwired for it. So just speaking the truth, just having a deep, deep conviction for it, not just the simple one where it's like, 'Yeah, I'm not gonna lie.' No, I mean deeply convicted and always telling the truth, that was a really big piece of it.

Second is I had to figure everything out for myself. Part of it is because my dad wasn't around, part of it is just because I just don't believe anybody. Because if you're truth-seeking, then you're also very skeptical. Because everyone's always trying to persuade you. The world is full of propaganda. Every major institution is spewing propaganda. Every book is being propagated at you. Everyone's got a point of view they're trying to convince you. Almost nothing is clean. So you have to figure everything out for yourself from the ground up. So I'm still not good at the advanced stuff. You know, I'm not gonna be good at calculus or advanced physics or even like, you know, you could throw any advanced philosophy concept at me, I'll give you a blank look. But I just know the basics and I know them rock solid. I would rather just read an arithmetic textbook a hundred times until I understand it, then move to geometry, if there's even a single thing in the arithmetic textbook that I don't know cold. So no memorization, just understand the basics over and over until you have clarity.

And the third thing is self-awareness. And self-awareness for me is cultivated originally through solitude. Every exceptional person is built in solitude because society is over-socialized. We're just, there's too many voices in our head from TVs, from social media, from the Clubhouse here, from me talking to you. There's just too much noise. Even all the stuff that I'm saying to you is noise, because you're gonna go back and you're gonna be like, 'Man, that guy had 20 great ideas, how do I become like him?' And that's completely the wrong answer. You're never going to be me, but you can be an amazing version of you. You can be the best you that the world can possibly have ever seen. And the way to do that is to spend time by yourself. It's to really just embrace who you are 100%. I don't mean this in some cheesy like, 'Oh, you know, you go girl, you're so powerful,' blah blah. I don't mean it that way. I mean it in the sense that you have to love yourself because you are correct. You are right. There is absolutely nothing wrong with you. There is not a hair on your head that is out of place. You are never going to be as beautiful as you are now. You have everything you need to succeed. It's just you need to fully accept yourself and you just need to go for whatever it is that you want. And you're not going to figure that out until you become comfortable spending time with just yourself. So whatever that takes, whether it's journaling, whether it's meditation, whether it's long walks, self-isolation, I don't think anyone is capable of greatness without solitude. And conversely, I would say with solitude, it's impossible for you to fail. But it's hard. Society now is rigged to give us all these escapes to run away into.

I don't really know about the word vulnerable. Language is difficult, right? I say one thing, there's like a vision in my head, you hear the same word, you have a different idea in your head. So vulnerable is not a word that I love to use because I also grew up partially in Indian society. You know, you're not even supposed to share your need, let alone your emotions.

Yeah, I'm the same way. I don't expect my private life, I don't talk about, like, you're not going to catch me writing long bios about my childhood or anything like that. That's not what I mean by honesty.

Yeah, yeah. So here's what I mean by honesty. What I mean by honesty... well, let me ask a follow-up with that to take this song. Honesty is, someone screws me over in a deal, I lose lots of money, I was screwed over, I am angry, I am livid. Man, how could this guy screw me over? I trusted him. Honesty is sitting down and saying, 'Okay, maybe he didn't screw me over. Maybe I messed up. Maybe I should have shown up to that meeting when I said I was going to show up. Maybe I should have delivered what I said I was going to deliver. Maybe he took a look at the cards and decided I wasn't the right partner for him, and he realized that there were other people out there who are better because I hadn't hustled hard enough. Maybe I'm getting worked up over nothing, or maybe it's at least 60% my fault.' It's really easy to be honest about other people's flaws. It's incredibly difficult to be honest about your own. So this addresses the vulnerability point. It's not about being vulnerable to the outside world. The outside world doesn't need to know your eternal business. It's about being vulnerable to yourself. It's about challenging your own ideas about yourself. It's about challenging the voice in your head that's always telling you exactly how the world works.

Oh, you know, look, I'm never going to say do this technique or don't do that technique because different things work for different people. If 12-step works for you, fantastic, do it. I've just never tried it. I don't, I just like, for example, there are people in my life who use therapists and they get huge value out of it. I use meditation, that's self-therapy. I just sit there and listen to myself, and who knows me better than me? And it's cheaper, it's free, I can do it everywhere. So whichever technique works for you, do it. Just do something that helps raise your level of self-awareness. Some people need to have their words echoed back to them slightly reconfigured, so they get value of talking to friends or a therapist or a psychic hotline. A psychic hotline is, you pay 20 bucks an hour, 30 bucks an hour for some stranger to sit there and talk to you, preferably a mother-like character who's going to kind of console you and has some sort of authority through astrology or whatever psychic powers. Even though it's not real, it doesn't have to be real, just someone's willing to talk to you and listen to you. Whichever method works is fine. These are all ways of exploring yourself, and so in that sense I think they're all valid. Now they can become games too, they can become traps. If you're the 12-step person who's always going to 12 steps and then 24 steps and then 36 steps, you know, at some point you got to get off that wagon. Again, I can't prescribe for you. I'll tell you what worked well for me. I find it's easier to just drop the past completely than it is to try and fix it. You know, the past is like this giant messy hairball of narratives, and you can spend your entire life trying to untangle your past. And in some ways the more you dive into it, the more it kind of traps you in there. And it can actually become weirdly comforting because that can become your purpose or meaning. You're kind of on that inner journey, and if you enjoy that, then fine, do it. But if you're suffering through it and you're antagonized slowly, I hope that at some point you'll just get sick of it and drop the whole thing. It's sort of like if you're ever trying to go through old emails and there's just too many of them piled up, at some point you're just like, 'Okay, screw it, select all, delete.' And if you can get to that point, I highly recommend it.

Well, I think this is also a Jewish thing, but also Nicole, I think this is a generational thing as well, because I feel like a lot of people's parents and previous generations were all taught similar values, and that our generation is leaning towards meditation and therapy and self-help. But Naval, sorry, I'm in a mirror. Shame is a part of social conditioning, as is guilt. Right? Guilt is society's voice speaking in your head, and shame is society warning you like, 'Hey, you should feel bad about this because if we catch you, we're going to make you feel even worse.' So it's social conditioning. Now, some social conditioning can be good. You know, I don't know if any of you ever had the experience where you take your clothes off in public, like let's say you're in a situation where it's acceptable to do that, like you go to some hot springs or a bath where everyone's nude. It's an incredibly uncomfortable feeling to take your clothes off in public if you've never done it. Like literally your hands will resist you. You're conditioned like an animal. It's like a dog who's worn a collar too long being told to take his collar off, it's hard to do. So society conditions you like an animal, and it uses guilt and shame as sort of these drivers to remind you of what to do and what not to do. Is this always terrible? No. I mean, there's some good advice that comes with it. Right? So for example, it might be designed from a time when there was no contraception and it was to keep women from getting pregnant through kind of an early encounter with some guy that they barely knew, and then next thing you know their life is over because they're having someone's kid or they barely know. Or it could have been to avoid spreading or getting some kind of a disease, or breaking a law and ending up in jail, or killing somebody. Right? So social conditioning is not always bad, you need it to function. But a lot of it is obsolete. Right? The problem is our parents' generation is not the generation that we live in, so we have to figure it out for ourselves. And that's the beauty of life, we're not just here to repeat what our parents told us. But they give us kind of a good default operating system. Now you have a Persian Jewish cultural operating system installed in you, and maybe that doesn't apply to the world that you're living in. But I don't know, I mean, the problem is the word shame is so broad it can be applied to many different contexts. But overall I would say this comes back to self-awareness. If you were sitting there and journaling or meditating and realizing every time the shame emotion came up and you unpacked it and you understood why you were having it, and you could kind of say, 'Oh well, that's why I'm feeling ashamed, and does that really apply anymore or does it not apply anymore?' It's that instead, when you have these emotions, instead of getting caught up in them and swept away with them and identifying with them, if you were to kind of analyze them a little dispassionately, and that's one thing therapy is good for, right? Someone else is analyzing that emotion for you, or meditation where you're just watching it play out, or journaling where you're writing about it is cathartic, then you can sort of decide which of these you want to keep and which of these you don't. Because when you have kids, you'll be doing it to your kids too, right? You'll tell your kids, 'Hey, put your underwear on.' Why? Right? My kid is always asking why anything I tell him to do, he needs an explanation, which is good. And so I think we should all have explanations for why we feel ashamed or why we feel guilty. But it doesn't mean that it's always wrong to feel ashamed or guilty. These can be very practical. It's just some of these may be obsolete.

I don't prescribe anything. I advocate nothing. I recommend nothing. I tell you what worked for me. I reject community, I reject groups, I reject consensus, I reject others. I love others, I take care of them, I embrace them, I help them, but it's because I myself am strong and individual and whole as I am. My own responsibility, everything I feel, everything I think, everything that happens to me, I take agency for, I take responsibility for. So this is essentially a radical... I reject everything from the group because the group is always there to convince you of what's right for the group, not what's right for the individual.

No, no, I don't know that. I know you do, and I'm being radical here. I'm actually being extreme. I'm overstating my position. I'm actually a lot more middle of the road, but I'm overstating my position because the group is always ready to jump on you and turn you into one of the group. Always. And it's very difficult in society to stand alone.

That latter statement strikes me as too extreme, there are no generalizable truths across humans. I mean, I think that there are definitely things that are more likely to work and less likely to work. Obviously each human's life is unique and everything is contextual. But at the same time, reality is a thing, right? Gravity is a thing. Objects held up on the earth fall down at 9.8 meters per second squared. Right? Same way like, laughter is good medicine. Sunlight releases dopamine or serotonin on the skin. So there are generalizable truths that do apply. But the set of things that are generally true is actually fairly narrow, right? It's limited probably to hard sciences and maybe to some epistemology, aka the theory of knowledge, maybe some philosophy. And after that you're pretty much done. Right? When certainly when it comes down to questions of like, how should you live your life, there are some truths, right? But again, it depends what you want. Like to me, I don't like to talk philosophy. Right? A lot of people talk philosophy and say, 'Oh, you're a philosopher.' I almost consider that an insult. I think it's much more practical, it's very utilitarian. If you have a point of view on something that will get you what you want out of life, then it is useful. Like let me give you an example. People talk a lot about relationships, right? It's probably one of the most common topics, everybody loves to talk about relationships all the time. And usually they're talking about romantic relationships. Right? So one truth that I heard in relationships that over time I realized this is a deep truth, again it doesn't 100% always apply, but it does apply most of the time to most people and is utilitarian because it helps you get what you want. And that truth was, when you first enter into a relationship, you should be selfish. Okay, what does that mean? I don't mean being inordinately selfish. I don't mean being like incredibly selfish. I just mean being like your normal selfish self. We're all selfish, right? All of us, you have to be that way, you wouldn't survive. So this level of ourselves is selfish.

I think most people understand when I say you're selfish, I'm speaking the truth. If you think I'm lying, if you think, then sure. But I think deep down we do things for ourselves. Right? We do, like all of us are trying at every moment in time to live up to our own self-image and to make ourselves happier, etc. And what happens is, yes, getting back to my relationship point, when you first get into a relationship, when you're first in that kind of honeymoon period, the first six months, the first 12 months, you're on your best behavior trying to make the other person happy, and they're on their best behavior trying to make you happy. Right? The guy is opening doors and buying dinners and cleaning up after himself and putting the toilet seat down. And the woman is being very demure and charming and fun and all this, dressing well and doing her makeup and trying to be responsive and laugh even when jokes aren't funny and have sex even when she doesn't want to, like all those things. Right? You're just doing all these things to make the other person happy. And then eventually it wears off. You just can't keep it up anymore. You can't live a lie for your entire life. So eventually you start squaring off, and then we get the discussions of like, 'You've changed, how come it's not working? It's not like it used to be. Why do we fight so much now?' And one of the truths that I realized is that when you're in a relationship, you actually want to be... this is why I say I use words like selfish to be provocative so it sticks in your head. Yes, it may offend people just slightly, but that's how you get them to remember. This is a little secret, right? So it's fair, but I'm more interested less in rhetoric, more in the truth of it though, right? Yeah, people feel good and more in just making the point. So anyway, my point is that if you behaved like your normal everyday selfish self at the beginning of a relationship, then you wouldn't have false starts in relationships. You wouldn't waste two years at a time figuring out that it's not going to work. You'd figure it out in the first 30 days. And then when you do find the right person, the right person by definition will make you happy by just being themselves, and you will make them happy by being just yourself, and you can sustain that for a lot longer. And it's a much easier, smoother relationship. So that is an example of, I think, a... it's not generalizable in the sense of E=mc squared, it's not that solid, but it's generalizable in the sense of it does apply to most relationships. It is an insight and it can improve the quality of your relationships. So it's sort of a practical philosophy about relationships.

Oh dude, this is one, it's no skin off my back, I don't care.

This is, you know, one of the things that I love about life is that I am a weird character. I am a lonely character. I have very extreme points of view that are way out in left field, and that allows me to be exceptional. I don't want a world full of clones like me running around, thinking pretty boring.

Well, look, the DNA, the combinatorics of human DNA are staggering. If you take the genetic structure of any human being, you scramble it up, and you keep rolling those dice over and over and over, and you do it trillions and trillions of times, you're never going to find any two human beings who are even vaguely similar. I'll bet in your entire life you've never met two different unrelated human beings where you're like, 'Yeah, this one's a substitute for that one.' They're nothing alike. Humans are so individualistic, we are so different and so unique from each other, that that inner world that you have of your internal mind and your mindset, and that outer expression you have of your capabilities is so unbelievably unique to you, that all I'm arguing is that there's tremendous benefit in embracing your uniqueness to the core, to the max, way more than society wants you to, way more than society makes you feel comfortable doing.

It means the new one, like the new man.

Sanskrit.

Yeah, it means the thief, the trickster, the Jew.