Naval Ravikant and Sahil Lavingia on Clubhouse | Gumroad | 23 Feb 2021

I was touring a construction site the other day. There was a house that was being built, and as I'm going through it, the workers are working on different parts of the house. You look at a house and it's so complicated to build that house, it is unbelievably complicated. And it's a lot of work, it's like heavy lifting. And it just kind of blew my mind that these people basically got paid less than someone who's sipping coffee and writing code a couple hours a day. But at the same time, you have to realize that what they're doing is permissioned leverage. It's a lot of labor involved, it's sort of well known how to do that, so the creative side of it is mostly gone. It's mostly just execution, and it's only a matter of time before they get replaced by machines and robots. Obviously some trades go sooner than others, and they don't really get replaced, they get augmented so they can build more houses, etc. But someone who has permissionless leverage, like someone who knows how to code, or someone who's fast on their feet and goes to podcasting or Clubhousing or Twitter or whatever social media, just has infinite permissionless leverage compared to one of these people, and they get to exercise creativity. So even though what they're doing seems more fun and less effort, they're actually going to be rewarded much more by the marketplace.

I think what's interesting, more so on Clubhouse than how quickly you can accrue followers, is the depth of affinity you accrue them at. So there's this notion of layers of multimedia. If I send a tweet, it's purely text, people kind of remember the tweet less associated with who said it. But if I'm now on Clubhouse, I'm associating my voice and my personality inseparably from the content of my words. And so the memory storage, when people remember this conversation right now, they can recall the conversation that I'm having right now much better in a year from now and half a year from now. And so I think the depth of affinity you get when people feel like they know you goes a really long way on Clubhouse, and so it's more than just a fractional follower in terms of their recall.

So like the human brain, you know, is a holographic memory machine. It serves memories through different trigger points and can retrieve roughly the same memory through one of several different triggers. And so if you're memorizing something, for example, you want to do it in multiple ways. For example, if you memorize some complicated number, one way to do it is you count it out on your fingers, then you write it down, you stare at the writing, then maybe you type it out and you share the typing, then maybe you say it out loud to yourself a bunch of times. And that sort of helps you build a memory around it. You can even build what's called a memory castle, which is like this mental construct where you walk around your fake little castle and putting the numbers or letters in different places and having a visual 3D representation. So the same way, if you are building a message, you're building media or messaging or a brand online, it's better if you approach it multimodally. If people get to see your short-form writing like on Twitter, they get to read a blog post from you once in a while, they get to hear a podcast, they get to hear your Clubhouse, they get to see you on YouTube, every single one of those things is going to reinforce your message in a slightly different way.

You know, one of the weird things about being a so-called public intellectual, and you know, I really don't want to be that thing, whatever that is, is that you can say the same thing over and over and over again. And if you say it just slightly differently, most people will be quite interested because it's helping them see it from different angles, helping them remember it. Of course, there's always a few people who'd be like, 'Oh, he's just repeating himself.' But then those cynics and critics are everywhere. But I do think that there's something to multimodal messaging if you really want to get a message out. The multimodal messaging also introduces a much tighter empathy feedback loop. So when people can in real time hear how you're reacting to their potential attack, it re-triggers that in-person notion of like, 'Oh wait, I'm actually being too aggressive, too confrontational.' So I think when you close that loop, it also just increases empathy and it's like a shortcut. This medium over text, it's a shortcut for building affinity and empathy and recall. And if you go one level higher, you have video, which I think is probably the long-form video is basically the pinnacle of, 'Okay, two hours listening to someone on Joe Rogan, I feel like I know this person much better than seeing Naval say purely via his tweets for two years.' And the highest form of that is just in person.

You know, the ultimate form of this is just in person, right? The ideal way to build an audience is one by one in person, like Jesus did. So I just think it's like all of technology, the path of technology is basically making it more and more permissionless. It's basically just increasing permissions. Leverage is just the idea that you should be able to do anything you want, whatever you want, whenever you want, right? That's just permissionless. Like when you're talking about building a house, you should be able to just like move your hands and like the house should just appear out of thin air. That would be ideal. That would be permissionless leverage, but you can't do that yet. And that's what, you know, it's just getting easier. It's sort of another way to predict the future. Why is Clubhouse a thing? It's like, well, eventually humans want higher fidelity ways to communicate with each other at scale. We want to have that in-person conversation. At some point, you know, it will be in VR, it'll feel like reality or whatever sci-fi sort of stuff, but that's sort of the eventual. It seems like, you know, we either blow ourselves up or that is an eventuality.

Well, sometimes it's good to look at an absurd endpoint of something as a thought exercise just to kind of understand what the point means. So like the absurd endpoint of leverage, and sorry if I'm repeating myself for those of you who hate it when I repeat myself, but it's omniscience is omnipotence. So if you know everything, then you are also all-powerful as a consequence. If you knew exactly what particle to push or what grain of sand to flick in which direction, you knew what the repercussions of that would be all the way down the line, you wouldn't need to do anything. You could literally just wave your hand and then the particles would collide in the right way and the right things would happen. The complexity theory is called the butterfly effect, but if you had knowledge over that, now that of course is impossible for any finite creature, so we don't have that level of omnipotence. But at some absurd level, knowledge is power, and pure knowledge is the ultimate form of leverage. So all leverage basically tends towards knowledge. So this is kind of why I also believe that success in anything is just a byproduct of learning, and learning is just a byproduct of curiosity. So ultimately, if you are curious about something, you will be successful at it, and the more curious you are about it, the more successful you'll be at it. So if your overwhelming desire is to figure out how to make money and how that works, then you'll make money. If your overwhelming desire is to figure out how or why people are happy and how to be happy, you'll be happy. But it's got to be kind of your overwhelming thing. So learning, knowledge literally is power, but the mechanism through which it achieves power is through leverage.

Yeah, I'm just waiting for the basic Clubhouse feature where you can tell if the audience is interested in what you're saying or not. In the real world, audiences, the equivalent is a boo or an applause, or maybe at a concert, you know, they light some candles or they cheer, what have you. But there's no equivalent on Clubhouse yet, and so there's no feedback loop. Now, you're also talking about taking it one level further, which is using technology to create a one-to-one mapping from the speaker to the listener, even when it's a mass audience. I think that's hard to do authentically. Like, yeah, you could probably code up, you know, Cyber Sahil or Cyber Julian, and then that Cyber Julian can sort of talk to people, but I think it's going to have the GPT-3 problem again, right? It's not truly sentient, it's not truly Sahil or Julian, so it's not going to be an authentic experience. And I think humans crave and understand authenticity, and when we get something that is trying to be authentic but failing, that's kind of the worst. I think we automatically reject fakers or poor attempts.

Exactly, it is. I want to use that phrase, but I want to confuse you, but you're right, it's exactly an uncanny valley. Uncanny valley is mostly using computer graphics where you have a 3D image of someone's face and it's almost that person but not quite, and it just gives you the heebie-jeebies. It's kind of creepy. So yeah, it's pretty important, I think, to be authentic, and I just don't see how you scale, how you convert one-to-many to one-to-one without losing the authenticity.

Let me just interrupt. I mean, going back to status games, the best, the highest form of status is to not care. So I just wanted to say like, I don't give a rat's ass what the audience is feeling. I'm talking for myself.

No, yeah, it's, I think that the goal is to just talk and be interesting in a way that you can't fake because you're performing live. You're sort of proving this fact. And then you can do whatever you want. Yeah, the rarest thing, everyone is trying to figure out what everybody else wants to hear. That's not rare, that's common. What's rare is speaking things that are, saying things that are true that either other people haven't thought through fully before, or things that other people don't dare to say.

That's right, yeah. Clubhouse is designed to make you and I think that we are having an intimate private conversation and then letting thousands of people eavesdrop in. That's literally the whole design of the system. That's why I think they don't allow recordings, or they say not to allow recording without everyone's permission, because they want to make it feel like it's a casual conversation when of course it's anything but that. So basically, say what you think is interesting for yourself, pursue novelty, and if it interests you, it'll interest a significant portion of the audience. So this kind of new, forget the audience, don't pay any attention to the audience, don't worry about followers. If you're speaking for the audience, the audience is worthless. If you're writing for followers, your followers are worthless. Think about any other sport, like think about a sport. Do they play for their audience? No, they play to win. That is literally the only reason that they're on the field is to win. And so like, if you want these people to play the best, you put them in a bubble with no audience. Yeah, like the audience is also inauthentic, and people, even though the people will deep down detect that, someone who's playing to the audience will eventually be boring to the audience.

And you know, yeah, it's hard to be interesting for long periods of time. Most people cannot speak extemporaneously on many topics and synthesize them on the fly, as Robbie was saying and Julian was saying. These are difficult talents. So what ends up happening is most people, when they have to go live, they end up resorting to talking about politics, news, weather, sports, because these are things that are also live. So there's always something you can always say the old things again in a new way about new data. So talk radio tends to degenerate into those categories. But now if you get out of those categories, what remains? If you want someone to just talk extemporaneously live, there are very, very few people who can do that for long periods of time and stay interesting. Right? Most of the few remaining ones you'll find are in comedy, and even those are heavily rehearsed. Right? A good comedian rehearses their jokes over and over, but a good comedian is a good speaker. They're witty. What are they doing? They're telling the truth. The uncomfortable truth in a way that they can get away with it. Right? They're showing how to be brave in front of an audience and not get hit by the mob. It's a classic world adjuster. And so, you know, it's hard to be interesting for long periods of time and most people can't do it. So you end up with professional comedians being the very small class that can do it. Now, so if you look at talk radio, you know, there's the Howard Sterns of the world, which are basically comedians, and Joe Rogan. Right? There's the news people of the world are very often in extreme politics. Right? So they're always something you talk about. Rush Limbaugh, who just recently passed away, was one of these characters. Or you have sportscasters. But outside of that, talk radio is really tough. So Clubhouse is trying to tackle that. Well, one thing Clubhouse does is it throws multiple people in a room. Right? Second is it's unscheduled. Like, I don't have a Naval show, I don't have to show up at a specific time and always perform. I can leave when I'm bored or I can turn over the heavy lifting to Sahil or to somebody else. Sahil actually called me into this room, which is why I'm here. And so there are ways to kind of mitigate status.

This format is hilarious because the moment I come in, my followers get notified. My followers show up, some of them stick to you. So of course you want me in your room because I still gain a whole host of followers, right? That you then leech off of. So what have you done for me lately, Sahil?

Yeah, everybody. You know, I show up because Sahil is interesting to talk to, right? He's one of the few people that I can drift with for long periods of time and he'll say something interesting, I might learn something, that I get a kick out of. So here I am. It's a bait, right? You set the bait, here I am. But even Joe Rogan, Joe Rogan is a stand-up comedian. He's a really funny guy, he's a really interesting guy, he's got lots of opinions, everything. But even Joe doesn't make the Joe Rogan podcast about Joe Rogan. He's interviewing people because at some point you just run out of things to talk about. So you need somebody else to riff with. And so I just think the Clubhouse phenomenon is going to be interesting. Now, there are a few people in human history who can just talk and talk and talk on their own about whatever their favorite topic is and they will inspire lots of people. There aren't many of those people, but those are the people that create movements, right? Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Hitler, strong people who are, Trump. Yeah, these are people who can riff extemporaneously for long periods of time and their audience who is aligned with them will forgive the foibles, understand the broader message, and then get really, really unified behind this person. So I think those kinds of leaders, for better or for worse, will emerge in Clubhouse and sort of be the dominant personalities over time. They will literally have individual cults of personality.

Which is this truth. It's telling the truth. Either a truth that people didn't already know, or it's a truth they knew but couldn't articulate the right way, or it's a truth that they did know, could articulate, but were too afraid to say. It's all about truth. It is very difficult to speak truth in front of a large group of people, and it takes a lot of verbal skill and a lot of synthesis to do it. And yes, you can teach them something new, but eventually you run out of new things. So then a lot of it becomes about articulating old things in new ways. Like, what is wisdom? Right? Wisdom cannot be communicated. It's something that has to be learned on your own, has to be experienced, and you synthesize it for yourself. Knowledge, you know, we can collectively build knowledge. If you figure out how to build an airplane, then I can take your schematics and build the next airplane and improve upon it. But if I figure out how to have a good love life, and that comes after lots of bad relationships, I can't pass that on to you. You have to figure that out for yourself. So wisdom has to be rediscovered by people one at a time. That said, what I can do is I can remind you of things that you already know. And the best way to do that is to get past cliches, because cliches are things you've heard too often. And I can re-articulate something that I've learned in a new way, so it strikes at the core of yourself and reminds you that, 'Aha, yes, I should keep that in mind. Thank you for re-articulating that for me.' And so that is something you can get rewarded for, which is communicating truths. But these are truths that have to be learned individually, and you can only be reminded of, but can be re-articulated. So all the three points you made, I think, fall under the category of truth.

Well, they all go together. If you're not, if you care what the audience thinks, then you're pandering to them, which means you're saying things you don't necessarily believe to get a certain reaction to the audience, and that's falsehood.

Yeah. I don't think that's true. I know that's your perception of why you think you might have credibility, but I don't think that's true at all. I think, feel free to tell me why.

No, your tweets stand on their own. They're good tweets. You know, some of them are derivative of mine, so I forgive that. You did come after me on Twitter, so I dragged all this stuff early.

But yeah, so some of them are derivative, some of them are obvious, but you have some really good tweets. You have a lot of tweets that make me stop and think. And not a lot of people on Twitter do that. And you know, there's a lot of wisdom in your tweets. It comes from your pain. I knew you when you were young and insufferable. You didn't have much interesting to say. You had technical things to say, but you didn't have much wisdom to you. It's only when Gumroad almost died and you suffered over it, that you gained the wisdom, and then your tweets started getting really good because your internal thinking got really good. The Gumroad thing itself, I think that's a scar tissue that you have because Gumroad almost failed. So for you, you think it's important that Gumroad has to succeed for you to be taken credibly. Just like when Gumroad was failing, you thought that no one was taking you credibly. Neither of those were true. I think you were your own worst critic, which is fine. That's what it takes for successful entrepreneurs. A successful entrepreneur is their own worst critic. But you could stop tweeting the Gumroad financials tomorrow and I don't think anybody would care. Your credibility is not derived from how Gumroad is doing. There are a lot of people who are incredibly successful financially who put up tweets that are complete garbage.

Sorry, what's that?

Oh yeah, no, I mean, it's difficult because like, the answer is, it's simple. We know what we need to do to be successful in all of the different fields. We know how to be a good writer, right? A lot. We know how to be a good startup person. Like, find customers, understand them, solve a problem, build a product. We just, these things are just hard. And so we look for like, oh, maybe these other things matter. But like, we all kind of know what matters. Like, we kind of know what's necessary in order to succeed in many different pursuits. It's just like, everyone knows how to have a six-pack, everyone knows how to get ripped. That information has been out there for a long time. So what we really want is, we want people to just show that they've actually done it. They put in the work and the time, they've taken the risk, they've got to the truth. What makes someone healthy, what actually works. And then their output is just evidence that they got to the truth. And that's sort of the, yeah, you don't want a sick doctor or a fat trainer. Or my favorite is these life coaches whose own lives are in shambles, or these executive coaches who would never build a business. The unfortunate part is like, a truly great executive coach should have built a successful business, and those people are generally unhirable or they're extremely expensive. Of course, all the people selling get-rich-quick advice, you know, for twenty dollars, like that's all complete nonsense. All the people giving you stock tips or crypto tips on Twitter, complete nonsense. These are all fake signals. It's surprising to me actually how many people fall for them. It's kind of sad.

Well, there's some amount of unfakable knowledge or unbiasable knowledge. There's something that just cannot be purchased in the market, right? So what can't be purchased in the market? That, I would tweet about this, that I often refer back to myself, which is, you know, a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought, they must be earned. And so those three things are things that are unfakable signals. You have to go and get them yourself regardless of how much money you have. And we're used to kind of getting everything in our lives with money, even though we can't get those three things. There's actually a fourth one that's a little more subtle, which is important, which I would just call kind of, I don't have a good name for it, but it's sort of just knowledge about how to deal with situations. You can't initially buy that. Judgment. Let's call it judgment. Right? So let's say that for example, you are, you know, this happened, a friend of mine recently, he broke his ankle, okay? And he has to decide whether or not to get surgery. And of course, if he goes to the surgeons, they all say, 'Yeah, you need surgery.' And if he goes to non-surgeon doctors or, you know, people who are doing yoga or massages, they'll say, 'Well, massages are good for you, yoga will fix you.' So it's very, and he has a short period of time to figure out whether or not to get the surgery before his ankle could potentially heal in a way that's catastrophic in the long term. So no amount of money will help him make this decision because he's not an expert in ankles himself. So he has to figure out who to trust. And it's the who-to-trust problem that is the core problem. It's like, for example, if you're president of the United States and you're in the country and the NSA comes up to you and says, 'You know, Russia's about to attack us, we need to sneak attack them first,' and the CIA comes in and says, 'No, actually this is a fake signal, don't listen to the NSA,' like, how is the president going to know? Right? He doesn't, because he doesn't have his own core expertise in the topic. So it becomes a very difficult situation. So there's certain kinds of knowledge and judgment that just cannot be bought with the amount of money. You just have to figure it out. You can figure out who to trust. It's the picking experts problem. So anyway, those four things, which is knowledge that helps you make decisions, aka judgment, plus a healthy body, plus a calm mind, plus a loving household, these things you just have to work at them. And so the one remaining thing, which is money, is the universal adapter, right? That money can solve pretty much every other problem. So people know that, so they want the money. And there's a certain desperation and a certain hunger for money in our society, which I kind of feel bad about, which is why I did, you know, partially all the 'How to Get Rich' work to help people figure out the principles of making money, or creating wealth, I should say. It's that people are so desperate for how to figure that out that even when they know that this thing is probably scammy, it's probably a waste of time, this guy probably doesn't know what he's talking about, he might have a good tidbit in there, right? They're so desperate. And it's a little sad because making money, as I was saying, it's an inevitable byproduct of learning. And that's not the road people are able to go down a lot of times. They've already completed a university degree, might be a single mom, might not have any avenue to make money, might be a factory worker, might be a Starbucks, what have you. And they're like, 'Oh man, I really, really need to figure out how to break out of this. I need to figure out how to make real money.' And these people are desperate.

And so to them it's like, okay, well, you know, I'll spend the 20 bucks, I'll go to the seminar. This guy, he does seem to dress well, he does drive a sports car, maybe he has some clue. But they don't even know where to start, and I feel bad for those people. And you know, thanks to Eric and the Almanac's existence out there, and hopefully people will read at least some principles of wealth creation and at least at a high level be able to, you know, make some good decisions and differentiate from charlatans and get-rich-quick schemes from having real judgment, real learning that can help them make money. And learning leverage. Leverage is actually the biggest piece of it. Accountability, great, you can make it big without accountability. Even specific knowledge, like, very important, but you can actually make it without specific knowledge. But if you don't have leverage, you're never going to make real wealth. So leverage is actually probably the most important component of the principles I've discussed.

But I'll tell you, yeah, the idea of leverage is as old as the hills. I don't take any credit for sort of, you know, pushing that. But I think the pieces, let me tell you the two pieces that I at least I didn't read elsewhere that I thought I uniquely figured out for myself. One was specific knowledge, and then the whole thing around specific knowledge, you know, how do you build it? Well, it feels like you play to you, but it looks like work to others. And it's something that you probably intrinsically already possessed since you were a child or, you know, learned through intense curiosity. The second piece is permissionless leverage, which is obvious. I mean, it has no marginal cost of replication for these products, which is breaking it out as the newest form of leverage and using that, you know, whenever possible. I like to think that those were kind of at least somewhat unique improvements upon the leverage framework.

You want to be early too. Like, leverage, you know, over time, leverage gets proliferated. Like, leverage spreads. It's kind of like profitability economics, right? Like, it's just, yeah, so ultimately people find out, word spreads. And so a simple way to find leverage is to just go where very few people are. Like, a gold rush is literally this, right? Like, you know, Naval went here with all his amazing tweets and now I'm like stuck with like the scraps.

Third time, third time's a charm.

Yeah, well, the problem is that the desire to make money is very hard to turn off. It's not like you can turn it on at max and then you can turn it off with some preset number. And that desire to make money will keep you relatively unhappy and keep you from enjoying your money. There's nothing so common, and unfortunately, most of the people that I know who are in this category are like that. There's nothing so common as the unhappy billionaire. You know, you find these incredibly wealthy people, but their personal lives are underdeveloped and they themselves are sort of just repeating what they did that got them here, and they aren't necessarily becoming any happier. And they're not necessarily unhappy, or they wouldn't characterize it as such, but they fall into one of those traps of like, well, that's just the kind of person I am, I'm not meant to be happy, or, you know, happiness is for fools, or blah blah blah, or how do you define happiness anyway? Whenever you see any of those defensive postures, you know the person is basically not happy. It's like if you ask someone, like, you know, if you ask a child, like, are you happy? A young child, they'll usually just tell you yes, or they're just too busy being happy for you to even discuss it with them. But there's a certain kind of person who, when you ask them, you know, are you happy, they'll say, well, I don't believe in happiness, or what does happiness mean, or define happiness. Like, they might as well just say, yeah, I'm unhappy. Right? And it doesn't have to be an extreme thing. Happiness doesn't mean that you're running around with a smile on your face all the time. It just means that you're relatively content with your life, you know, your day-to-day experience of life is highly positive and you're happy to continue it and it's not too dependent upon external circumstances. Well, if you got there through an unrelenting desire for money, believe me, there's no number that that's going to turn off at. That's a scorecard that just doesn't stop. And so excessive greed, excessive, not being defined in societal metric but just being defined on a personal metric, it occupies your mind constantly. And I'm not speaking this as some holier-than-thou sage that has conquered this. I'm speaking this as a victim of this, which is no matter how much money I make, it's never enough. It always occupies my mind and it's always a constant source of anxiety. I can't turn it off. That's why I'm the wealth creation guy, because I obsessed over it. And that obsession is hard to get rid of. And all I can kind of do is acknowledge, like, okay, this is the mental disease that I have and I just kind of have to deal with it. And maybe eventually I'll realize that the cost of the disease is too high and I'll drop it, but until then I'm resigned to living with it.

Yeah, I don't do a lot of conscious planning, or if I do, it sort of falls apart anyway. I just find life is a lot better if it's lived spontaneously. Obviously, I have that luxury now so I can do that. But I read some tweet today, someone was basically saying, like, if you had all the money in the world and if you would travel to all the places, you know, you would want to travel to, what would you do with your life? And I reflected on it for a second, it's like, yeah, it's basically what I'm already doing with my life. So by every possible definition, I have enough. And yet, and yet, and yet, you know, there was a day a couple of months back where I was sitting on a beach, and it was a beautiful beach, you know, Caribbean powder, Caribbean style, not actually in the Caribbean, but powder white sand and, you know, beautiful warm ocean. And I'm sitting there, there's a nice breeze and there's a sunset and I'm just kind of hanging out there and everything was perfect with the world, right? And this is the point where I, as the author, I'm supposed to have some epiphany about how great life is and how I should be grateful. But that's not what happened. Instead, I realized actually the thoughts that are going through my head, my mood, the quality of my life is exactly the same as when I'm sitting in my living room or when I'm sitting in my bedroom and on my iPad or I'm just meditating, I'm just walking around and I'm just looking out the window or I'm talking to somebody. It was no better and no worse being in this highly privileged position. Didn't really, in this situation, didn't actually change anything. So it really is true that your worldview is your world. It's just a single-player game going on inside your head. There can be, for example, five of us are here talking tonight and we're all having roughly the same experience. We're staring at our phone and we're engaging in a conversation in Clubhouse, and I assume that all of us are relatively warm and clothed and fed and comfortable. Yet the internal quality of our minds and lives is completely different. You can have two people walking down the street, one's really happy, one's really unhappy, but they're actually in the same physical environment having roughly the same experience. So it's really all about mindset and mind control. If your mind is out of whack, your life is out of whack. I don't know where I was going with this, but it's all an internal game. It's all single-player. And yeah, making more money beyond a very early point doesn't actually change anything in your mindset. You know, there's definitely a threshold where you need to get to where you're relatively comfortable. And there are multiple checkpoints. Like, obviously, if you don't have to show up to work anymore, if you're semi-retired, either because you're doing something you love or because you made enough money, or just because that's how you live your life and you just chose to live without money and, you know, even without doing work, which is perfectly valid, then you have a lot of flexibility and it gives you another improvement point in your life. I do think people underestimate how much misery schedules bring to your life. Like, I see a lot of very successful, wealthy people who just have busy calendars, and sometimes I get guilty of it too and I fill up my calendar. But there's nothing that brings me as much joy and happiness as an empty calendar where you can just be spontaneous with your day. Doesn't mean you don't do anything, but you just do the things that are important and that you want to do as opposed to be going through a day of obligation.

Yeah, one model that might be helpful, just to keep people awake on that, is, and I make this up, I read this somewhere, unfortunately I don't remember the original author, but we're all born time billionaires and we just get poorer with time as we go on and on and on as we spend our time. You know, Warren Buffett probably is a time millionaire and I'll bet you he really wishes he could be a time billionaire, but the time billions are gone and what's left are the money billions, but he can't trade those back for time. Ask any rich person, you know, how much money they would give up to be 10 years younger, and I think most of the same ones would tell you all of it.

Well, I guess that's, I mean, that's the question is like, do you, at what point do you stop focusing on it? Leverage is, I think the answer to like, are you trying to do more and more and more and more, or are you trying to stay steady with blessings? I think it's like, I think it's like being fit, you know? Like, I still, I think it is, you're just idling. Like, you're, unless you're like, you know, at above a certain weight that is probably more than most people weigh, like, you're not going to die early, you know? Like, your life is relatively what you want it to be. And the same, you know, you're just kind of like, I don't know, you're spending your time doing things that you hopefully enjoy doing. But like, you know, as long as you stay within that band.

Say no to everything. Delete emails without flinching and without responding without flinching. Walking meetings only. Keep them short. Ask them to do it by email and text instead. I mean, there's lots and lots of techniques to factor off for your calendar. Basically, if you agree to a meeting, then don't actually agree. Wait 24 hours, make a note to yourself, go back and see if in 24 hours you agree. Another rule I have is if you wouldn't take the meeting now, then you probably won't want to take it later. These are all just reminders. Obviously, I still end up overscheduled with too many meetings, but you basically just have to keep meetings off your calendar. You know, 30-minute meetings when instead of hour meetings. No pleasantries. If you've ever done a meeting with me, you'll know I just don't bother with pleasantries, either introductory or goodbyes, right? Let's just cut to the meat of it. So there's lots of techniques, but what all it boils down to is, you know, there's a line that the destination creates the avenue. So if you are completely convinced that meetings are generally a plague and you want to do as few of them as possible and you hate them with a passion, then you will find ways to not do meetings.

If you're ever going to reply, it's, if I'm ever going to reply, right? Yes, yeah, most people I don't reply to most of the time. I used to have, for years, I used to have an autoresponder set up on my email which just said indiscriminately to everybody, because Gmail unfortunately doesn't let you be too discriminating about it, but it just said, you know, I'm off the grid and not checking messages. Right? That's, I think that's my email autoresponder for years. Oh, is it? I thought I'd turned it off, but yeah, I mean, one of the things I've realized is that in email, people are really good at creating work for you, right? A lot of inbound emails, somebody else had a whim and created a task for you and then stuck it in your inbox and it's like, here's a to-do for you. And you have no obligation to respond. You have no obligation to engage. A simple rule that I really like is, do I have to do this? And if the answer is no, don't do it ever. Because the things you have to do, you are already doing. So just, yeah, basically don't respond to anything that you don't need to respond to, which should be very, very few emails over time. I think another tip is don't consume shit. Like, don't spend your time like consuming a bunch of crap. Like, so many people complain about how little free time they have and how busy they are, and then they tell me like the intricate details of Game of Thrones. And I'm not saying this to be holier-than-thou, like, I just happen to not care as much. But you just have, you know, ultimately, like, there's time in lots of places. Like, if you actually break down 24 hours a day, it can be a lot of time. Yeah, I don't think 'I don't have time' is another way of saying it's just not a priority, right? It's just you want to spend your time the way you want to spend it. And if you want to be productive, then yeah, don't, I actually think watching movies, TV, news, sports, it's largely a waste of time. Video games, largely a waste of time. Not to say I didn't do it. I spent large portions of my life watching all of those things and playing tons of video games. But at some point or another, I just started viewing them as a waste of time. Honestly, I've read a ton of fiction books and I now view most fiction books as a waste of time. It's very hard for me to engage in fiction because I'm just like, all right, cut the chase, tell me what the new interesting thing to learn is. Because I just read too many of them, I'll recognize the storyline, the archetype, I can kind of see where it's headed. And I just have a hard time caring about these fictional characters because I myself am too conscious of my semi-fictional life where I'm dying one second at a time and I have no time left. I don't have time to read about this person who doesn't exist to learn some life lesson that I either already know or I can learn more simply elsewhere. Time is literally everything. It's incredibly precious. There's nothing more precious than time, literally.

Clubhouse. Whatever I feel like in that moment. And it can be a waste of time according to somebody else's definition, but whatever I feel like in that moment is the right thing for me to do. And that's what I aspire to. I'm not saying that's where I am most of the time, but that is what I aspire to. And most of my desires are fairly mundane. You know, it's play with the kids, it might be go make an investment, it might be brainstorm some startup, it might be learn something new, it might be read a book, it might be go for a run. You know, it's all the same stuff everybody else does. But I just want to be able to do what I want when I want. That's all. And by the way, but by most people's definition, I might just be wasting a lot of time. Like, I just, right before I got in this Clubhouse, I was socializing and I was playing with my kids, right? That's not quote-unquote productive time, but it's what I wanted to do at that moment.

No, the past is a fiction. The past is a fiction. Don't spend any time thinking about the past. It doesn't exist. It's not real.

There's nothing there. You can't go back. Yeah, maybe if you have some less, some important lessons to learn, but you know, those lessons can be learned pretty fast. You can synthesize that data very quickly. There's no need to reminisce upon the past. I think people get trapped. A lot of people are sorting out their past when the past is just entirely contained in your head. It's not anywhere else. And so the easiest way is just to kind of get over any problems or reinterpret them in a way that it serves you and just move on, because the present is all that actually exists. You got, that's where you live, that's where you exist, that's what you got to spend time on and time within. And any moment where you're not present, you're literally squandering time. So one, so I had this thought today actually, coincidentally, which is what is a good use of time? How should time be spent, right? How do you know that you're getting the most out of every moment? And so then I was like, okay, well, I want the time to be useful and engaging and I don't want to be too mentally disturbed or anxious while I'm in that time. So what is that? Well, there's flow state. That could be in flow. But flow, the way that it was defined narrowly in that famous book, I forget the author's name, but it's like a difficult Russian or Polish name, but so forgive me for that, but the way flow was defined in that book was that you were engaged in a task at the edge of your capability, where you were good enough at it that you could actually pull it off, but not so good at it that it wasn't challenging to you. So you're doing challenging work at the edge of the capability, and that's flow. And that's a good use of time. Well, that's like a couple hours a day. That's not good enough. What about the rest of my day? And so I thought about it, like, really what you want out of your time is you want to be in flow every moment. And how are you getting to flow every moment, whether you're brushing your teeth or walking the dog or reading a book or speaking in Clubhouse? Well, you have to do it in such a way that you're completely engaged, you're fully aware, you're completely present. What does that mean? That means that your mind isn't running out of control. So ultimately, if you don't want to waste time, your mind has to be under control. And you can't control your mind, it's an uncontrollable monkey. Now we're in catch-22 land. So all you can do is be aware of your mind being out of control, because that gives you a level of detachment from your mind that then lets you be in flow. So the very, very subtle answer to the very difficult question of how you should spend your time, the answer is by being self-aware within every moment.

Well, you are a play of a set of infinite forces launched from the Big Bang, intersecting at this precise moment. Your inputs into that and your ability to control that are incredibly limited, if they exist at all. So the best thing to do is, of course, function to the best of your capability, but just be as aware as possible, as self-aware as possible. Because you're always aware of the environment around you, right? So your awareness always extends in the environment. The problem is it extends too far out into the environment, you lose your self-awareness. Then your mind starts running crazy, you're constantly reacting to things, the moment slips away from you because you're lost in the past or the future, which don't really exist, and your time is wasted. But if you are immersed in the activity because your mind is quiet, or generally it's quiet because you're self-aware of it when it's running around, then there's a certain level of flow state that you can enter into your everyday life. And that is time well spent.

Well, it's like the first level was, you know, 100% free time, and then the second level is 100% flow.

Well, yeah, and it doesn't, the beauty is if you get 100% flow state, it doesn't even have to be free time. So free time, in a sense, it's a crutch. It's a crutch because you don't know how to be immersed in whatever it is that you're doing. And a truly present person, you know, almost like an enlightened Buddha-like being, would be perfectly happy whether he or she was busting rocks in a chain gang or, you know, playing video games or sitting there and staring out into space.

Yeah, I mean, so what you're basically saying there then is fall in love with life itself, which is hard for most people to do. It's not easy. So you either make life better so that you fall in love with it, or you become okay with falling in love with what you currently have. Like, but I think sort of, and I think life is like basically both of those things for everybody to some degree. Well, one of my favorite tweets of all time is by Charlie Knowles, who I followed on Twitter for a while, and he tweeted that at the end of the day, you have to believe that either everything is a miracle or nothing is. And that's a very deep statement. Basically, if you believe in a single miracle, like, for example, if, like, I don't know, if the Holy Spirit just popped up and performed one miracle in front of you, that means then there are miracles everywhere because you can't take anything for granted. Everything has to be a miracle. Or you're completely atheistic and you believe that there are no miracles, it was all just kind of random. But that one simple, that the answer to that one simple question will basically define your entire worldview. But it has to be an authentic answer. Unfortunately, we're mostly agnostic.

Then you're happy. And if there is a change that you want, if you want it, you can either stop wanting it, that's sort of maybe preferred and the cheapest option, or you get what you want and then maybe you, you know, you'd like those are just the two outcomes. It's kind of like what you said, you know, life is, what is it, two questions, right? What do you want and did you get it?

Yeah, I was reading McKenna recently and he had this great line, which is like, there's no, like, the concept of wrongness is wrong. There's no, like, there's nothing is wrong. The universe just is. It's fucking weird, but it just is.

But is that something like worth attaining or...

It's not the question whether it's worth attaining or not. It's a question of is it true or not. Are you awareness itself or are you a single instance of that awareness in a simian body? So it's a question of truth. If wanting it is sort of silly, because Jed himself doesn't believe he exists. Now we're getting pretty existential here, but you have to read this character to know what we're talking about. But Jed doesn't believe that there is a person named Jed McKenna who's like a real being. And so there's no one there to go get that, to go attain that, right? Enlightenment is a booby prize. It's realizing you don't exist and that you are just raw awareness and nothing else. So there's no way to want it, because the thing that wants it, the you that wants it, disappears upon getting there, or disappears upon the realization, I should say.

Not for everybody.

That's right. Yeah, your mind goes away for a bit. It really helps if you don't care about your own survival, though, because it's very hard to figure out how you would really accept such a state and still be...

You can't get rid of suffering until you get rid of joy either, right? They're just opposite sides of the same coin. If you didn't define one event as joyous, then you wouldn't define another event as suffering, right? It's like, every time you create a friend, you create the basis for an enemy. So it's just the game that we're all playing. I mean, that's the life you got to live, ups and downs, lefts and rights, you know, that's what makes it interesting. Otherwise, as Jed McKenna says, it's just, you know, he also says enlightenment is a booby prize. It's nothing forever. That doesn't sound that compelling to me. But if it's a truth, it's the truth, right? He got there because he was obsessed with truth-seeking and not necessarily what was better for him or worse for him.