Latest Full: Naval Ravikant Clubhouse Podcast | Q&A | 11 Oct 2021

Sort of check out of myself when I'm having fun winning the various games that I've played and I continue to play. And I don't think you're completely out of it either, frankly.

Yeah, you're open to those games.

So anyway, yeah, the way I see it is like, you're here, you might as well do something. So pick a game that seems like fun and play it.

Yeah, exactly. You may as well enjoy it. Yeah, the way I look at it is, you know, you get to a point where you're, say, you're perfectly at peace. Well, what are you gonna do? Are you gonna sit in a room and meditate for the rest of your life? Of course not. I mean, quite frankly, that sounds really boring. So eventually you have to get up and go do something. So you might as well do something that seems like fun.

It's interesting because that hasn't been my experience of it. I kind of, because I was never a big meditator...

Yeah, I don't meditate at all anymore. I, you know, I did it for maybe six months and then I stopped. And I kind of went the route of self-inquiry. And I'm very much at a point where if I want to, you know, sit and have a quiet mind, it's very easy for me to get there. But I don't actually, I think I've told you this before, I don't like walk around flexing that muscle so to speak. Like I don't walk around trying to have no thoughts whatsoever because it just seems like a waste of effort or a waste of time to try and do that.

Yeah, actually wealth creation in a modern technological society is the only thing on which I consider myself even a quasi-expert. Everything else I'm an amateur at, so I don't even know why people listen to me on the other stuff. And the fact that, you know, if you're successful at it, rich people will listen to you on anything. They seem to think you're good at everything, so that's fine, I'll take the credit. But it's the only topic on which I feel qualified to talk about. So when we end up in these situations, I hate talking about spirituality because I don't even know what the heck it is. It's hard for me to define it and it's hard to articulate it because I think it's a very personal thing. But I'm always happy to take questions on wealth creation. Should we bounce some people up here with questions about anything?

Okay, as long as they're not rude. People have their hands up, so let's see, who do you want to let up? I'm going through a list. I have to admit I don't love it when people don't have any bios. I mean, what kind of psychopath has no bio? So let's just invite somebody up, see what they have to say.

Davies Omale Odoo, did I say that right?

Good, good, good.

Firstly, I'm really disappointed that you aren't just trying to get rich. I was so ready to answer that. But sure, I'll take a stab at it. James, maybe if you want to go next. So the meditation style that I've tried and practiced that worked for me was the effortless meditation. I was never able to make the effort-based forms work because I didn't have the patience and I couldn't sustain the effort. From what I understand, the effortless meditations are the so-called direct paths. They can work really well. You can do them for long periods of time. They aren't full of suffering because it's actually pretty easy to just let go. And I think that they definitely do leave you quieter, more peace of mind, more happy, more in the moment, and sort of they automatically will lead you to moments where you're just observing or your mind is quiet. So it'll automatically take you to a witness state. That said, it's incredibly hard to articulate the benefits of meditation. It's one of those things that you just have to do and you just have to do it for long enough that then one day you wake up and you're like, oh, I have a clearer mind or I feel more peaceful. That said, I've done effortless meditation very regularly for years and years and years and it still didn't lead me to any sort of ending breakthrough, you know, where I was like, okay, now I'm done. Other than maybe I just got to a point where I was like, okay, well, I don't see the value in doing this all the time. And I'm much more interested nowadays into what I would say is just figuring things out at a certain level where they seem very, very true to me, and then naturally my demeanor and outlook and life changes, so it's more peaceful. What I think James would call self-inquiry. And I'm less interested in meditation, but I wouldn't take anything away from meditation. I think that it is incredibly useful. I think the so-called effortless path is a natural one. And in a way, if you think about it, there can't be any technique because, you know, what if you were born in the wrong place, the wrong time? What if someone taught you the wrong technique? What if you just did it the wrong way? That doesn't seem right. It seems to me that whatever we're trying to access through meditation is sort of the base layer of consciousness, which is every human's birthright and is always there at all times. It's almost like the base operating system for humanity and it shouldn't need a special magic code or password or root password to access it. It should always be accessible to anybody at any time. And what can anybody anywhere anytime do without instruction? And that is literally do nothing. It's the thing that is possible for everybody at all times. So I think if there is going to be a valid form of meditation, that certainly effortless meditation should be a valid form of meditation. Will meditation get you all the way there? Yeah, some people it does. For me, I'm a highly goal-oriented person, so I think at some point I just sort of realized that meditation, even though it's making me a little more calmer and a little more peaceful, it wasn't necessarily giving me the results that I wanted as quickly as I wanted. So I'm more these days on the path of self-inquiry, although maybe that's just an excuse for laziness. I'll turn it over to James.

All right, I'm going to send you back, Davies. I'm going to pick the next person. Also, thank you so much. James, if you see someone interesting out of the audience who has their hand raised, just pull them up. Otherwise, let's try... I don't understand how Clubhouse sorts people. I'm sure there's some method to it. Everything about this app is actually pretty well thought through, so not blaming it, but I'm just curious what the actual sorting algorithm is. But okay, I'll just take in the order that they're presenting it so that no judgment is expressed or implied. I'm literally just following Clubhouse here. Next... invited somebody, maybe they vanished. Oh, here we go. Edwin Mourinho. Hey, Edwin.

Can you hear me? Yes, go right ahead.

I got this one. This might be tough because... all right, so I'm 38, I'm not a coder, you know, I'm looking for ways to build wealth. Right now what I do for income is I have a small digital agency, but that's just providing kind of like enough money just to live and to save. And I do a lot of investing in cryptocurrencies now, but I'm looking for that thing that I can be uniquely good at. And I just wanted your opinion. What... I really don't know where to go because I'm not really into code. YouTubing I've been considering, but I just haven't developed a unique character for myself online. You know, I did move abroad. I was born in the U.S. and I'm living in Vietnam now. And I'm trying to, I'm considering starting a blog just to explore ideas because I know you've recommended to just get into the practice of writing for self-discovery. But I'm kind of, you know, creeping up there in age now and it's just, I'd love to get your take and maybe you can tell me something that'll comfort me a little bit in my pursuit.

Well, okay, so it's the nature of truth and it's really comforting. So bad news for you there. If you're coming for comfort, you came to the wrong place. But that said, there is at least one or two things you're doing, I think, well. You know, three things stuck out. You said digital agency, you said crypto, and you said Vietnam. Well, that's kind of interesting. By the way, would you mind muting? I'm getting some feedback from you as well. Okay. There you go. So, you know, digital agency, I think that implies that you have some creative talents or you're surrounded by people who have creative talents, which is good because creativity is the last frontier for humans. Vietnam means that you have access to cheap labor or relatively cheap labor that can then be applied globally. And then crypto, of course, is the current frontier. And if you look at where the great fortunes are made in human history, they're always made on the frontier. So the time we needed to be conquested, or in your mount, you got in a boat or you're a Marco Polo and you went to the Orient, or you went to the Wild West, you know, and you were panning for gold, or you went into software back when it was all hardware, or you went to internet when it was all software, or you went to crypto when it's all internet. And so the frontier is the place where you make money. And why is that? Because that's where the cops, the regulators, and the normies aren't quite there yet and people haven't figured it out. And you know you're in the right place because it's full of brilliant people and full of scammers. It's full of completely genius ideas as well as one of the worst ideas you've ever seen. It's full of incredible hyperbole and it's full of incredible value. So crypto is that place today and it is a frontier. So if you're operating in crypto and you have access to cheap labor and if you have access to high quality... I don't think, I think you may just need to dig a little bit deeper and stick it out. So I think you're kind of in a good area but you need to navigate deeply into it until you find something, tease where you're like, wow, we can create our own batches of NFTs and do drops. It could be something around maybe farming NFTs for games. Like there's a big community in the Philippines, for example, that does work in Axie Infinity. There might be new games emerging. I can't predict for you, I can't tell you exactly what will be the right application for you, but I feel like if you kind of, what I wouldn't do is I wouldn't leave crypto because it is a frontier space. And the fact that you have a digital agency, I think, is a big asset and the fact that you can apply those assets now across the world is a big deal. So I don't feel like you're in a bad place. I think you just need to dig a little bit deeper. And you don't necessarily need to put yourself out there through writing or through YouTube videos. One of the places where I feel like the self-help porn goes wrong, and I call it self-help porn because you can just read it all day long, is that it sort of says you should, there are people on the internet who will say you should be a writer, or even I'm guilty of this, you should be a coder. Well, you should be a writer or coder if that is your natural inclination, if that's what you're natural at. If you're not, don't do that. If you're good at talking to people, then go on Clubhouse. If you're good at sales, then go do sales. If you're good at organizing people, then go build a small company or recruit people or build a community. So you have to find the thing that feels effortless to you but is not effortless to everybody else. So it, like I've said before, it feels like play to you but it looks like work to others. And I think you're kind of already on those vectors. So I don't think you're poorly positioned. By the way, 38 is not old. I'm 47. You know, so I kind of envy you at 38. I would give a lot to have those nine years back and hopefully I would use them even more wisely. But you've still got a ways to go as long as you have your health, which is the most important thing in this world. As long as you have your health, you can still work on all the rest. So I wouldn't stress about it. And especially in crypto, fortunes get made in short time frames. You know, two, three, four, five years for the right place. Don't stress over it. It's more important to find the right thing to do and to make it take advantage of the assets you already have. And just by the nature of the space that you've already decided to operate in, I feel like you're probably 60% of the way there. And you know, you might just be going through the darkest before the dawn kind of situation. So that's my high-level assessment on it.

Absolutely. All right, we'll go find the next one.

All right, we got Ruscho.

Yeah, would you mind muting just so we don't get that feedback issue we always seem to get? Thank you. So Web3 is kind of a catch-all term for things having to do with decentralization and tokens and crypto and NFTs and so on. And I don't think anybody really knows what they mean. All the Patrick McCormick and Chris Dixon threw up a pretty good definition where, I'm paraphrasing now, but it's something like Web3 is where it's owned by the user and controlled by tokens. Or as I used to say in my old speak when I talk about blockchains replacing networks with markets, that these are systems and protocols and companies that are actually run by markets underneath. So it's not a true democracy where every user is equal, but user influence is weighted based on how much value they've contributed to the network. And they could have contributed that value either by putting in money, which is tokens, or putting in time or code or security like mining for Bitcoin and so on. So Web3 is sort of this decentralized, user-owned, token-voted, token-controlled web. And I don't think it's necessarily going to replace everything in Web2 wholesale. Like, is it going to just replace Twitter and Uber and Amazon and Facebook? That's too simplistic of an extrapolation. That's just not how the internet tends to work. Those old things tend to stay the old way, but the new things come along that are completely different, that are unimaginable, that can only be enabled by the new paradigm, and then eventually they completely obsolete the thing that came before. We never think about using it. For example, eBay was like a Web 1.0 product, so is Craigslist. eBay and Craigslist haven't been replaced at all. They still do the things that eBay did and Craigslist still does the things that Craigslist did. But Airbnb came along, there's one tiny little category in eBay that is now just a whole different app that was enabled by mobile. Or Uber came along and just replaced taxis completely. Or Facebook came along and social networking was unimaginable, it replaced bulletin boards, but bulletin boards still continued to exist. It's just Facebook took over all the mind share. So I think that Web3, the same way, is going to create its own brand new apps that are not going to directly substitute for the Web 2.0 apps, but they will be so different because once we break down this idea that, you know, economy and markets and money and games and ownership and social networks are silos that are supposed to operate separately from each other, once they sort of start munging together into one thing, we're just going to enable a whole new class of applications that are just unimaginable today. And those will take our mind share and our time and our money to such a level that the old apps will still continue to exist, but they're just going to be much smaller in scope and they're just going to capture much less of our attention. So I can't necessarily predict what those applications are going to be, although you can see, you know, Web3 started out in finance because when you decentralize, if you can decentralize money, you can decentralize anything because money is the hardest thing to protect. So if you can say I can have a distributed group of anonymous users allocate money and govern money, then they can actually govern anything. And so we started with money and you can already see for users who have been using decentralized finance, aka DeFi, on top of crypto, all their mind share is there. Like they're not going to go back to playing with their bank or on Wall Street or trading stocks or even GameStop or WallStreetBets seems amateurish to them because they're just a much more advanced financial marketplace. So I think we've already seen it happen in DeFi for a certain class of users and I think we may see it with something like whatever NFTs are headed towards and whatever the online crypto games are headed towards. But it's very, very hard to figure out exactly what that extrapolation will be. So when we say Web3, it's a little glib. It implies that it's a direct successor to Web2. But I don't think it so much replaces Web2 apps with Web3 apps, but I think it just creates a whole new set of apps that then end up taking all of our time and energy and resources. I'm not sure if that answers your question at all, but I was just kind of reacting to the terminology of Web3 to 2.5 to 2.0.

All right, thank you so much. Man, everyone's so polite. When are we getting some trolls?

Okay. Let's see, we got... gonna just pop up the next person who's got a bio. Sorry, I'm skipping people who don't have a bio. No offense, just to know who you are. Hello.

Let me make sure I understand your question. Are you basically saying that you want to expand but it's hard to hire skillful people because they're so expensive? Is that the question?

Yeah, so this is a very deep topic that's worth exploring for a moment, but it's probably the single biggest driver of economics in our society today. I'm going to mute you for a second if you don't mind, or I'm going to move you to the audience so we don't have feedback. Thank you. So yeah, so there's a very important thing going on today which is that most of wealth creation, most of earning, is becoming digital. If you look at the top companies in the stock market today, they're all tech companies. And if you look at the tech companies, almost all of them are selling purely digital products, with maybe the exception of Amazon, and even Amazon, a lot of their market cap and a lot of their market power comes from things like AWS and from controlling the user wallet, which are actually digital elements. So money is now being made by ideas and ideas have tremendous leverage. So the people who are creative and have good ideas and can implement and execute them online, they know how to sell them and market them and how to code them, just have absurd earning power compared to people still operating in the physical domain. So we're going through a transition that is just as big as a transition to literacy in society or the transition to numeracy, and probably even larger, where a small percentage of people who are intelligent and know how to project themselves to the internet can command large amounts of money and power and influence. And this is an example of it. There's one of me up here talking to a thousand of you. Am I smarter than the average person? Yeah, maybe by a little bit. Am I a hundred times smarter than the average person? I don't even know how to measure that, but the answer is no. Like my IQ is not like 100x. So there's something here going on where even small advantages in the digital domain give you all the leverage and the power. As an example, if I pick the right thing to work on as opposed to the wrong thing to work on, if I pick the right software to build or the right idea to put out there, then that's almost infinitely more valuable than the wrong idea. So you have to throw the idea of hard work out the window. It's right work that matters. It's truth-seeking that matters, tying into what James and I talk about a lot, which is like if you're finding the correct answer, the true answer, then you're just going to get paid a lot more. So now let's get back to the original questioner's question, Sergey's question, which is you have a small set of people out there who can do a lot. And let's take software engineers by name. Software engineers, a term gets thrown around, developer gets thrown around as a term, but it's as broad of a field as a painter. You know, there's a painter who'll come and paint your house and there's another painter who'll paint a Picasso. And which one's more valuable? Well, the Picasso painter is far, far, far more valuable in the right context. And so the same way when we say developer, there's a developer who'll come in and just write like basic code according to instructions of what you told that person. And there's another developer who's the Einstein of developers, who's like a John Carmack who built id Software and Doom and Quake and Oculus, or it's Notch who built Minecraft, or it's Guido van Rossum who wrote Python, or it's just one of these super, super developers, or Satoshi Nakamoto or Vitalik Buterin who created Bitcoin and Ethereum. So these people are incredibly more valuable and it's not even 10x engineers. And I know in our current equity-based society it's hard to talk about 10x engineers, but these people are 100x or a thousand x or 10,000x or a million x engineers where they can just create huge amounts of value. So the best people out there are actually extremely creative and extremely powerful and they have the ability to create things that are just hundreds of thousands of times or millions of times more valuable than the average person. And some of it is luck for sure, but a lot of it is just having honed their craft over a long period of time, being obsessive about what they do, and also being naturals at it. And so to recruit a person like this can have a huge non-linear effect on your business and it almost doesn't matter what your business is as long as it has a software component. So recruiting these people is not something about how much you pay them, although sure, okay, if you pay a little bit more you have a slightly higher chance, but it's really about getting them to partner with you in the first place. And so there's this old trope that goes around like, oh, I only want to hire people to work for me who are better than me. Well, if they're better than you, why would they work for you? Why don't they just work for themselves, especially in this digital domain where it's so easy to create and spread your ideas? And the answer that they did work for you is either because they're too young and they just need their seed corn, or they don't know any better, which would be weird, they're very intelligent in one domain but they're like completely stupid in another, or they're really down in their luck, which happens but it's rare. But more likely they'll partner with you, or maybe you should be one of them in the first place. You want to attract those kinds of people and be able to work with them. So partnership may be a better model. I mean, what you may need to do in this specific case is you may need to find a developer partner who is really good and maybe you split equity in the business with them and you start an enterprise together. And then that person, a single developer can change the course of a company if they create the right thing. So maybe that person will create the right thing, or at the very least they'll know how to recruit the right people. Now, in terms of recruiting the right people, you're gonna have to look for arbitrages. They might be really young, they might not speak English, they might be in parts of the world where, you know, it's hard for them to even get their hands on a computer let alone do amazing work and code. But finding these talented software developers is the number one problem for any company today. They will, I believe that there will always be a shortage of software developers. There's a lot of people who think that coding will be automated. These people have never written serious code. There is no automaton that will create the next Bitcoin. There's no automaton that will create the next Quake. There is no automaton that will create the next Minecraft. It just does not exist. Those are creative efforts. Creativity cannot be programmed. We do not know how to program creativity. So finding creative individuals who are highly leveraged, it's not just a problem, it is the problem for any major business because these people can build entire businesses. So it's sort of like someone saying, hey, I want to write a great novel, I have a great idea for a great novel, do you know anyone who could write it for me? Or you know, saying, hey, I want to launch a new company, you have a great idea for a new company, do you know anyone who wants to build that company for me? No, that's impossible. Your best chance is partnering with those people, or in a rare case you can arbitrage something and find them when they're very young or down in their luck. The other thing is you just hire 10 or 20 really young people, really smart people who can execute on code and ideas, and you just see which one overperforms and you see which one is super creative. And maybe like, you know, nine out of ten are sort of just plotting along and doing their basic work and one out of the ten turns out to be brilliant and that's the person you reward big time. Because when you figure it out, it's not a long period of time until they figure it out. When they figure out, they're going to leave and they can start their own company or create their own effort. So you need to reward them in some very meaningful way, probably by making them a partner in the business before they leave. So this is the challenge. I don't have a simple solution for you, but you've identified the right challenge because if you can crack that challenge and with your own little hack in your own little part of the world, then you can do great things.

All right, let's see who's coming up next.

Hey, how you doing?

It's a super broad question. I mean, obviously I think cryptocurrencies are sort of the greatest invention of the web since probably the mobile era. And you know, when we look back on the internet, you know, 100 years from now, historians are writing about it, I'm not sure they'll be able to write about the internet as inseparable from cryptocurrencies. I do think they're very fundamental. I refer you to my 2017 tweet storm that said that, what is it, it said blockchains will replace networks with markets. And that's where I'll kind of lay out how fundamental they are. As for Bitcoin itself, you know, Bitcoin is the OG, it's the ultimate store of value. I don't want to take anything away from it. It'll trigger all the maxis, of course. But the value in a cryptocurrency derives from its decentralization. The more decentralized it is, the more value it has. And in that sense, Bitcoin is the most decentralized. It is the most resilient to attacks by big actors, by nation states. You can think of Bitcoin as having a one and a...

Half trillion dollar bounty on it. If someone can crack it, that's the maximum potential bounty for breaking Bitcoin. Reality is probably about a few hundred billion dollars, but that's still a very big bounty. So I do think it's very resilient, I think it's very powerful, it's quite a huge meme. That said, I do think that there are other things that have value. Like Ethereum is creating a global programmable computer for smart contracts and decentralized finance, which is really interesting. The whole NFT craze is really interesting because it's basically saying, hey, there are millions of objects that we might use to store value instead of just one, and that's kind of its own form of decentralization. That said, the whole crypto space is full of scams and it's basically what unregulated venture capital looks like. If you don't want to know what unregulated venture capital looks like, that's crypto for you. It's a 24/7, 365 global casino where everybody can participate, and so it ends up with all kinds of fraud. And I'm not in the business of telling people what's real and what's not because I get it wrong too. There's all kinds of cryptocurrencies that I bet on where I lost a lot of money. There's all kinds of stuff that I sold way too early, I'm embarrassed, and not done as well as I should have in crypto, you know, given everything I've talked about in the past. But it's a very difficult space to play in, so I don't second guess people and I don't say what's going to work and what's not. That's up to you to do your homework. But I would say, you know, look for very smart, high-quality, ethical, technological teams with good pedigrees that are not hogging all of the genesis block for themselves, are trying to spread it somewhat fairly, have built novel new technological breakthroughs or made good trade-offs in the parameters of setting the protocol, aren't just memeing and spamming you on Twitter. Basically, if someone's pushing you to buy it, it's probably a bad sign. They should be doing something interesting. Like, Bitcoin already does store of value really well, or as a digital gold of our generation. Ethereum kind of already does the programmable thing pretty well, although it definitely has scalability issues. So you kind of have to make sure that what you're buying into is not just a meme because someone posted a picture of a dog and is spamming you on Twitter with it, but that it actually has resilience and value in a real context. But I don't know what's going to work and what's not, so just like everybody else, I'm sort of blindly feeling my way through the dark and investing in a bunch of things and trying to figure out what's going to work and what's not. But I do think that crypto is the most interesting thing going on in tech today. It is the frontier. That said, the cops are here, you know, the regulators are showing up and we may have a showdown with the so-called final boss sooner than we had expected. So I think it's a very high-risk, high-reward situation. Crypto, along with other asset classes, also just got accelerated because of the huge amount of money printing that the Western governments, in particular the US, have gone through. And the US printed, I think, so like 40% of all dollars in circulation were printed in the last year. And that's going to have a huge inflationary effect. It already has. You can see asset prices floating up. Real estate has gone crazy, stocks have gone way above where they probably would have been otherwise given the COVID supply shock. And crypto's obviously done extremely well, but a lot of that is just flight from the dollar. This is the dollar doing poorly more than anything else. So we've got kind of this tailwind behind crypto that the government's not going to take lying down. They don't want you to run off. When they print money, they don't want you to have a safe haven from the money because it sort of defeats the purpose of their printing the money. So I think we're going to see an Empire Strikes Back kind of situation.

I don't have any original technical insight to add into blockchains. I'm not that deeply technical, and I think a lot of people are doing these things, it's just like marketing hype. Like, if they have a significant, real, new technical contribution to make, then by all means make it. But that's not what 99% of crypto projects do, and none of the ones you mentioned seem like they do that. And I certainly don't have any brilliant ideas on how to do that, so I feel like it would just be stealing from people.

Yeah, it's kind of a generic question. I'll try and get into it. I'm going to put you back in the audience for one sec though, just to make it faster. So you're talking about wealth and kind of status signaling and sort of money signaling. They're different things, but just because you can't see something doesn't mean that there's something wrong. I mean, you can't see people's character either, but it's a real thing and it takes time to figure that out. I don't think you should necessarily be trying to emulate other people, and you certainly shouldn't be trying to emulate wealthy people. Wealth doesn't make people better, it just kind of makes them more of who they are. So there are some people who are jerks and wealth makes them bigger jerks, and some people who are always kindly inclined and wealth gives them the ability to be kinder. So I actually never looked up to wealthy people and I never tried to emulate them. It didn't matter to me what somebody else had. In fact, emulating someone is almost a form of envy, or at least it's sort of in that same domain where you're being memetic, you're copying other people. Even if other people were richer than me, as long as I could obtain the things that I wanted, and what I want is freedom in my life, and the freedom comes from being able to afford the things that I want without having to worry about them, then I would be satisfied with that. So at least to some level, there's always a memetic portion, but I'm just saying don't fixate on that, don't try to make it worse than it already is. Humans are already memetic, status-seeking creatures by default, and then we can rise above that through rationality. I wouldn't double down on it. So don't idolize wealthy people, nor try to figure out how wealthy they are, nor try and imitate them. I think rather it boils down to just figuring out, okay, how do I become the best version of myself? And in wealth creation, the best version of yourself is one who is using your mind, you're using your natural-born talents, you are staying on the frontier and the edge, you're following your own curiosity, you're doing things that come easier to you than they come to other people, you're applying the principles of leverage and accountability and specific knowledge wherever possible, you're trying to do it in a long-term way where you're collaborating with the same people over and over that you trust, that you like working with, and you're taking a very long-term view so you can compound it. And then at the end of it, you're kind of going to get what you deserve, you're going to get what you can express. And I guarantee you that if you stick to these principles and you're patient, you'll get more than you need to spend to sustain the lifestyle that brings you freedom. So what somebody else has and how they got there just isn't relevant. You can't copy them. And there is a lot of this sort of hero worship, wealth worship, another form of pornography where you can just stare at it all day long and you get some titillation out of it. You think you're accomplishing something, but you actually aren't accomplishing anything. You can't copy anyone on their way to greatness in anything. It's really just about flowering in your own best way, and I hate to even use that word, I mean it shows that we hang around these spiritual types too long. But you know, it's just about self-expression at the end of the day. So I would say don't worry about how wealthy other people are or even how they got there. Just focus on how you yourself can be the most effective. I was always a very impatient individual because I was keenly aware of my goals and how quickly time was going away, how this was slipping away and me to get there while still young enough to enjoy my freedom. And so I was always very, very driven and I had no time to read books about other people getting wealthy. It's very hard to speak in the abstract about wealth creation. There's only a very few concrete principles you can put out there. Now in this modern day and age, the leverage that's available to any given human is far greater than it's ever been. You can go on Clubhouse, you can talk to thousands of people, you can put out a tweet that can reach millions of people, you can write a piece of code that can run on millions of machines. You can invest with crypto and with venture capital and all these other asset classes, you can invest in thousands or tens of thousands of businesses. You have millions of books at your disposal, you have a million podcasts at your disposal. Everything is available to you. Everything is out there both to consume and to produce. If you're sufficiently driven and impatient, you will figure out how to navigate your way through that ecosystem, and it is very dynamic and very evolving. If I sat you down in a class and taught you details, by the time I finished the last class, the first one would already be obsolete. It's a moving, slippery target. So you kind of have to just get out there, throw yourself in the fray, and just do your best. Don't worry about other people.

Yeah, thanks for the kind words and it's a tough dilemma. I'm sorry, I'm gonna put you back in the audience just so we don't have feedback and all that stuff. So it's a classic question of how do I bootstrap on the side with a product while I'm busy trying to make a living. Very, very hard problem. I don't have a glib answer for you. I'll tell you how different people have thought about it at different times. One model is, well, one person works the agency side, brings in the money, the other person builds a product. Another answer is, well, we do work at the agency side, but everything that we do, the way we do it is first we try to productize the solution and then we present the product-type solution to the customer and maybe we tweak it a little bit at the end to customize it for them. Another answer could be, if you especially if you're a winner-take-all tech business where if you don't get out there and do it then somebody else will and they'll win, then you go and raise money and you just drop the agency side, you compete. But I would only recommend that for a business that can be venture-scale. Venture-scale means that it's a winner-take-all, it could be a multi-billion dollar company if it works, and if you don't, there's some network effect or economies of scale that mean that if you don't win first place then there's no point in playing. So these are all kind of different ways to approach it. I would say that it is very hard to serve two masters. Historically I did it for brief periods of time, not for long periods of time. Eventually you are gonna have to choose. It's hard to be great at anything if you're split two ways about it. The problem is like a lot of the stuff you can do on the agency side is very hard to productize. So no easy solutions for you there. I think though overall that there is a class of company, and I don't know if yours falls into this, but there's a class of company where you can find a customer, a paying customer for your product very, very early, and you don't necessarily even need to have the product. You can just say that you can find a customer who's desperate enough and they're willing to pay you to basically develop the first version of the product for them. That may be the way out of your current trap. I don't know exactly enough about your part to say if it applies, but if I were you I would look for something like that. Where is there some customer out there that wants what you could be building for them so badly that they will give you enough money that you can survive for three or six months, that you can now just focus on building the product and customizing it for them. That does work under certain situations. It would be nice if you're in one of those situations.

Yeah, so I just want to understand the specific question. Would you mind rephrasing for me just as a clean, straight-up one-line question so I don't know... Yeah, yeah, yeah. I guess I'm wondering what your thoughts are on like affiliate marketing or sharing clients as opposed to pursuing new ones. Like the idea that your client base is already out there, they're already somebody else's tribe, and like more working through companies and relationships as opposed to trying to develop new ones and do the conventional sales model. Yeah, okay, fair enough. I'm going to put you back in the audience for a sec. So there's an old joke in Silicon Valley that will go something like, you know, business development is just sales without a quota. And at least in the early 1990s, it was rare to find someone in the business development role. It was usually just a failed founder who, you know, they were a founder of a company, they were a junior founder, it wasn't going well, so you stick him in a biz dev role. And an old-school company would tell you that there's really only two jobs: there's building the product and there's selling it. And sales is about finding new prospects. And yeah, you can dig into the existing prospects that you have and you can dig in deeper, and that used to be called account management. Maybe there's some business development there. But look, at the end of the day, if you want to be successful, if you want to be the top of your craft, if you want to be among the best at what you do, then it is best to stick to the basics and nail them really well. And the basics are building a product and selling it. And when you sell something, it doesn't matter whether you're selling it to an existing client or whether you're selling it to a new client. It's just you're taking responsibility for selling this product and making it as successful as possible and making it as widely distributed as possible. And the exact nature, whether it's sales or business development or community marketing, might change a lot. You might have the kind of company where you already have a lot of accounts and it's all about digging into those accounts, and then sure you can call it biz dev if you want. Or there's another one where you might have to go and get a lot of new accounts, and that's sales. Or you can do it all online, in which case it's all marketing. Or you may have to do it all in a social format, in which case it's community development. So there are many different ways in which you may be called upon to sell a product. But I would take it one level higher and just say be the kind of person that takes responsibility for distributing the product, whether it's through marketing hacks, whether it's for sales, whether it's through business development, whether it's a community. Just take responsibility for getting the product out there. Just the same way that if you're a builder, yeah, you could say I'm a designer, you can say I'm a developer, I'm a product manager, whatever, but who cares? Just take responsibility for making sure the product gets built, whatever the heck it takes, and making sure it's the best-in-class product. And even though we mythologize sales and marketing, community development, I actually still believe that especially in the technology business, most of the power, or maybe not most, but at least a big chunk of the power comes from building. If you've built the right thing, it sort of sells itself. The cost of sales, in fact, is almost an indicator. The higher the cost of sales, it's an indicator of a bad product, or at least a product, maybe it might be good, but it doesn't fit the market quite right. The better the product, the more it fits the market, the more the market will just beat a path to your door and they will take the product from you. Patrick Collison, you know, the founder of Stripe, I remember he told me one day, he said, I finally now understand what product-market fit is. And I was like, okay, what's product-market fit? And he said, it's when you can't stop the company from growing. Like you can't stop from selling the product. The product is just selling itself. It's just flying off the shelves and going out the window and the company's just growing a certain rate no matter what you do or don't do. And so that was to him the definition of product-market fit. Once you find it, sales, biz dev, marketing, and even community development, all these take a back seat. So I would say if you're going to be in sales or on the distribution side, then just take responsibility for distribution regardless of channel. But make sure you're working with a really good team that's built the right product in the first place, because even the best salespeople can't sell bad products for that long. Eventually the quality of the product catches up with you.

Thank you. It's a really hard topic to talk about. I mean, my mind is a mess. It's kind of crazy and I have all kinds of crazy opinions and ideas and thoughts and conflicts. And most of them I don't need. Like I've realized like most of my opinions are worthless. That's probably true for all of us. Like we don't need to have opinions on everything. I was going for a run the other day and I hate running, so I was like huffing and puffing and kind of miserable. And every person I ran past, for some reason my mind had an opinion on them. And it was just worthless. It was a completely worthless opinion. And at some point I just kind of saw through it and I was like, okay, I don't need to have an opinion on everybody. And then I just sort of kept running. It was peaceful for a while and then it went back to filing opinions. And then at some point I just gave up on the mind. I was like, fine, you have your opinions, but at some level I'm not gonna let them bother me, I'm not gonna let them affect me. So I think that the mind is just going to do its thing. And at least for me, what helps is to just kind of have a certain level of understanding that there's never any peace. Like there's never a place to rest your head, there's never a place to slow down or stop. And if the mind's always going to be terminal, it's always going to be in turmoil, and that's fine. That's just kind of the way it is. But you don't need to stress about its turmoil, and that requires a certain level of detachment. But that detachment will naturally come just from having your self-interest in your mind. You made some comment, Paul, about how you don't love the quality of your thoughts, and I think that's actually kind of helpful. If you're objective with how you're behaving internally, then you stop taking as much of an interest in what you're doing and what you're thinking. And then you're still having the thoughts, but you're not as attached to them. In a weird way, it's sort of easier to kind of let go of them. And maybe then you end up like with James where there just aren't as many thoughts. But I would say that my mind has a lot of thoughts, is very busy, but at the same time I don't let it destroy my peace or happiness or just general demeanor.

You know, I actually recommend, the reason James is kind of up here is kind of funny. So James followed me on Twitter for a while, we had some back and forth, and then I sort of started looking up to him as sort of this really wise person. And I was like, wow, this guy's really smart and really interesting, he makes really good comments. And then I went in his blog and I read the whole blog and I was like, wow, I could learn from this guy. So I contacted him and asked him if he wanted to meet up. And then I met up with James and I asked him, so how did you get into kind of this truth-seeking business? And James said, oh, I was following you, I was reading your stuff. And that made me feel really bad because here's someone who got into this because he was following me, but now he's way ahead of me, now he's teaching me. So somewhere along the way I screwed up. But then I just kind of came to terms with it, like, okay, look, everybody figures it out on their own schedule, everybody has their own path. Obviously we're all different individuals with different strengths and weaknesses. So just kind of play the hand you're dealt and play it fine. As long as I don't stress about it, as long as it doesn't bother me, then I don't care if my mind's busy or not. In fact, I have a good fast mind, like other people have good fast bodies. So on some level I enjoy flexing it, I enjoy using it, and it's a superpower. By the way, Charlie Munger just joined. I'm going to embarrass Charlie because Charlie has my probably my all-time favorite tweet. I'll circle back to what that tweet is later.

All right, I'm gonna move you to the audience. Thank you for the question. So I'm not a technical expert on this, but my understanding is that no, it's not going to be really that possible to crack blockchain security. First of all, anything that breaks public key encryption will break all encryption on the internet. It will break all banking transactions, all security, all logins, all codes, all ownership, including things like DNS. So if you break public key encryption through some future innovation, it pretty much breaks the entire internet. It breaks HTTPS, and HTTPS now is the foundation of the internet, not HTTP. So if it happens, it's kind of a catastrophic disaster across the board. That said, I don't think it's likely to happen. The only real candidate on the horizon, short of some incredible mathematical breakthrough that we cannot even predict, would be quantum computing. And quantum computing would break kind of some conventional encryption algorithms, but you can create quantum-resistant encryption algorithms that I think would get rolled out in time. So of all the things I worry about, blockchains, that just isn't one of them. I feel like that's not a real thing that you should stay up at night worried about if you're investing in crypto or if you're working on blockchains.

Well, we're sort of living in the golden age of pseudonymity, right? A lot of the NFT collectors online are just identified by their CryptoPunk, like they're 6529, probably one of the best Twitter authors today, and it's just this anonymous CryptoPunk who's talking about NFTs. You know, I think Vincent Van Doe, who's an anonymous NFT collector, is now literally running a fund. So you have anonymous people who are raising funds to invest, the DAOs are run by anonymous people. So if anything, the crypto revolution and the internet allows for the emergence of pseudonymity. Of course it goes way back further, right? There's nom de plumes and authors writing under assumed names and so on. So I think you're in a better place to do that than has ever been true historically. Now the downside, of course, is that you have to start establishing a reputation from scratch. But because most people have no reputation to begin with, it's not that much of a barrier. Maybe it's a little restrictive in that you can't jump on Clubhouse or do YouTube as easily. But you also end up relatively insulated to cancel culture. So I don't view it as a barrier, honestly. If I could wave a magic wand and go back in time and start over, I might choose to do an anonymous Twitter account rather than have it tied to my name. That said, I like talking. You know, Twitter is actually not my best medium in a sense because now I see all these imitative accounts that tweet like me, and some of the tweets I look at them like, that's pretty good, this person's figured the formula out. And so it makes me reluctant to tweet some things these days because I'm like, well, that's kind of obvious or that's something that any one of the various imitator accounts could have tweeted. But I know that when I'm speaking in a Clubhouse format, I have more of an advantage because most people are not very good extemporaneous speakers. So the medium, for me, disfavors anonymity. But you may just have to find a medium to express yourself through that favors anonymity or pseudonymity. Twitter is one of those media, NFT is another one, coding is absolutely one of those. The Satoshi Nakamoto, whoever that is, demonstrated. So I don't view it as a hindrance. And in fact, I think in this age of the sovereign individual where you want to stay out of the reach of mobs and governments, pseudonymity can be a huge asset. If you start developing that gene, if you start flexing that muscle, then I think it will serve you well over time. So I don't really view it as a disadvantage. I would say it's a disadvantage at the very, very beginning, but it actually becomes an advantage later in the cycle.

God, everyone's so well-behaved. Funny because I've been in other people's Q&A sessions and there's always a troll in there somewhere. Maybe it's just because it's a Sunday night, no one's drunk.

I don't know, sorry, I understand the question, you have to rephrase that for me.

All right, I'm gonna move you to the audience. Thanks for the question. I think I understand the question. I don't think that's how you actually spread products. I think the way products spread is you build something and there's someone in the potential customer base who just really can't live without it, so they adopt it and then they tell their friends. I don't think you change the customer or you convince the customer. I think you find your customer. And sometimes, you know, everyone can be your customer, you create an iPhone, everybody wants it. Or sometimes it's a point solution where you build it and one person out of 100 raises their hand and says, I've been waiting for this forever, I can't believe you did it. But this idea that you're changing the audience or changing the customer, bringing them along, I just don't think that's real. There are a lot of companies in the early days of the web that were built for bringing along people who were not yet ready to adopt their product, and they kind of universally failed. As an example, there was one called WebTV, and the idea was...

That old people, you know, aren't going to use a computer, the screens are too small, and so we have to put the web on their TV because they're just watching TV all day. And so let's put the web on their TV. It was a spectacular failure, spent a lot of money, built some cool product, but nobody used it because it turns out that it was easier just to let those older people sort of just live their current lives and instead focus on the new kids who are coming up. And so, you know, just serve the early adopters, and that's generally been true on the web. Even with AngelList, when we started building products for VCs, we had to create our own general partners, to create our own investors, unlimited partners. We didn't go back to the older ones and try and convince them to adopt our products. So I would get out of this mindset of you're going to change the customer and convince them to adopt a product. I think rather it's on you to create a product the customers out there, or that the potential users out there, already want.

Oh, we have a celebrity up here. Paul Davison is here. Woohoo, get a real celebrity in the house. What's up? How you doing? Good to see you. How's it going? Yeah, it's been a while. Six million followers. You cheated somehow. I was probably on the initial recommended user list. Yeah, so that won this app earlier. I was an early user, that's right. The state of the Clubhouse, I've been gone for a while. What's that? Give us a state of the Clubhouse. I've been gone for a while.

Yeah, it's still a, I mean, it's a very easy to use, very simple product despite the large number of features in here. You know, one thing I've always been... okay, I'll tell you a funny thing about Clubhouse. When I first started using Clubhouse, which was pretty early on, I remember I looked at the UI and I was like, wow, this is like this really homegrown, scribbled, hacked together, you know, UI. It's obvious that there's no professional UI designer here, but I'm sure they'll fix that later, they're just experimenting. And then here we are like a year and a half later, it's still the same UI, but now I've actually grown to like it a lot. I'm like, it's actually a really good UI and it feels like the right UI. But it's not like the UI for any other app. I can't point to any other app that I know in the entire iOS App Store that has a similar UI that at least predates Clubhouse. So who, who dreamt up this crazy UI? Where did this come from?

Yeah, I mean, it still looks like the original UI, so I don't know what the hell Aaron has been doing. You can reduce your team from 80 to 70 right there.

I will say this, this little paper airplane is floating on the bottom right of my screen. Is that a DM? Is that what that is?

Yeah, see, that just shouldn't be there. It's just like, it's so in my face, it wants me to touch it. I feel like something violent and kinetic is going to happen when I press it. I'm in the middle of giving a big talk, you know, it just, it just feels completely inappropriate there.

That's interesting. Yeah, I know, I get it. Okay, so it's like, it's truly a back channel. Got it.

Okay. All right, it still feels weird. It feels like crazy. It feels like I'm gonna press that and the paper airplane is going to literally take off. Yeah, something horrible while I have a thousand listeners in here. We broke a thousand.

Cool. I'm gonna pull up Bram Cohen. Bram Cohen just showed up. Bram's a genius, people. So whenever Bram's around, you gotta pull him up. Let's see if he joins. Oh, there he is. He's not shy. Hey Bram.

Bram, uh, creator of BitTorrent. So if any of you have heard of this piece of software that's used for all kinds of downloading, I'm sure none of you have actually ever used it because you're all good people. Um, in my mind it was like the first functioning peer-to-peer protocol, uh, you know, for sharing files on the internet. Very impressive piece of software. Now he's building Chia, which is his take on cryptocurrency. And, and Bram is a master, master puzzler. Every time I run into him, Bram gives me some puzzle to do which I can never do and I feel really stupid afterwards. So thanks, Bram.

This, this is fair, but you're talking to a man who can't even solve a Rubik's cube because I don't know...

Oh, really?

How did it become so popular then?

I was gonna say, is it not the type of thing where if you, if you like learn how to do it and you practice it enough, anyone can basically do it?

That's amazing because it's not that, actually, it's not actually that many moves that I would imagine you need to do.

Ah, interesting. Yeah, it is a pretty reasonable size.

It's interesting with the hour and a half solve. I mean, it's not like you can do trial and error, right? So it's not like you're learning along the way. So I was wondering, do they just use an approach that, that is, you know, easier but takes longer or...?

And they just... I just don't understand the point of becoming good at something that a computer can do better.

Also, yeah, I don't understand sports either.

What do you think? Do you feel the same way about photorealistic art?

What about Smash Brothers?

But people are working on, you know, people, right? Like when you do these activities, you're bettering yourself.

Um, is it really reasoning ability? It feels like a very specific form of memorization. I agree that when you're solving original puzzles, then you're exploring like your mental map space and you're increasing that. But if you're just memorizing Rubik's cube loops and then figuring out how to do them blindfolded, that just seems like the work of an automaton. So like, I'm, I'm a juggler. Uh, so I, I'm a five-ball juggler. And, uh, for me, I, I got into juggling because, well, I was bored in college and, and then I eventually dropped out. But, um, I, I juggled a lot then and I'm still, uh, pretty good at juggling. But, um, uh, my, my best prop by far was always devil stick. And I, I don't do devil stick anymore and a lot of that is because I just didn't enjoy doing it as much as regular juggling because I'm actually really just doing it as exercise and trying to... it's also meditative, right? Because you're getting out of your own mind, you're focusing on something. If you start, if your mind starts wandering, then you're going to drop, drop something.

That's a good point. So there's, okay, so there's two kinds of, uh, you know, physical focus. There's one which might put you in flow, let's say you're sailing or you're surfing or snowboarding, where you're completely focused on the physical activity and so it takes you out of your mind. It can give you some peace. But on the flip side, there are things like you're going for a walk or you're juggling, you're taking a shower, you're driving a car, where you're doing something physical and you're a certain part of your brain is occupied, but the other part of your brain suddenly gets very creative and can wander and you can have your shower thoughts or your walking thoughts.

It almost seems to me like conscious thinking is overrated. It's how we communicate as humans because we have to articulate to each other to give reasons and planning to each other. But for our own maximum creativity and productivity, it seems like conscious thought takes a back seat. For example, when you're juggling, you're saying you can't think consciously. Okay, that's in the physical domain. But even when you're trying to be creative, when you're trying to have a breakthrough, uh, you know, a lot of that comes subconsciously. When you're trying to make a decision, a lot of that comes subconsciously from gut feel. Conscious to me seems is mostly about ex-post-facto reasoning to explain to somebody why you did something or to come up with some plan that you can then, you know, communicate and implement. But it seems like it's just a very small portion of our planning.

Yeah, and but the weird thing is they're not aware that they're making up [__] when they give answers. They think they're giving like, right, the legit reason.

What? How would you describe how you think?

Like, yeah, Richard Feynman used to talk about how he did all of his math problems visually. Like he would always imagine like, oh, it's an orange and the orange is on the surface and it's bending, you know, on a table or something. So he would always turn it very visual. And I would say even for myself, like if I don't have a visual feel for something, then I'll just start making it up. I'll start assigning colors and shapes to things even while I'm putting words around it. And images. It's very hard to think purely verbally.

You know, leads to unusual outcomes and, you know, the modern world, you just have to be right once. So it's good to play in non-linear intellectual domains. You don't have much risk of downside and if you hit on the upside, well, there's benefit to just having a different brain from everybody else in any direction. It just has to be different from other people.

Yeah. But yes, if you had to live in the woods and start a fire by yourself, well, all of us would die, but you know, you probably a little earlier.

Yeah. You can be taught how to do it and it's not that bad, but it's like, like days of training to, to get, get, get the hang of it.

I have my own that I've hacked, but I don't know if they're well-established. So a lot of my process often is, it's very rare for me to have like a thought where I'm like, oh, I have to go write this down right now because it's kind of like my thoughts are often very half-chewed and it's kind of like, well, there's this process of like kind of forgetting it and then re-remembering slash reconstructing it and having a better sense of it when I do it that time. Uh, as well. Um, and I think a lot of my ideas, like, I don't remember the moment when I came up with them. And a fair, uh, a fair number of them actually I remember, uh, coming up with the thought while I was asleep. It literally came to me in a dream. Uh, although my dreams are like semi-lucid and really strong.

And, and I assume that a lot of the ideas that I have that I just don't remember when I came up with them, I literally just came up with them while I was asleep. But it was like while I was deep in, I didn't wake up immediately afterwards, so I just, that the idea remained in my memory but the process didn't.

Well, conscious thinking can be good when you're trying to be methodical.

Yeah, well, and kind of the, the trick that I used to use was to focus, you know, spend some time looking at whatever problem it was that I was trying to, to solve. And then, you know, if you can't get there analytically, obviously you need the sort of shower thoughts approach. So you basically spend time looking at the problem and then you just drop it and do some mindless activity, like you said, when you're juggling.

Like, oh yeah, it's like over the last year, for example, I was obsessing over, um, you know, where to live. Because one of the things that COVID has done for many of us has given us our geographic independence. And so I was obsessing, and I, you know, where to live is one of the biggest decisions you ever make because you're choosing like who your neighbors are, who your friends are, you know, where kids go to school, all those kinds of things. And I was obsessing over all these different factors and then it finally popped up to me that actually I should optimize for quality of life at this point because I'll just live longer and healthier and everything else is irrelevant. And that's what it gave me the answer. But it took quite a bit of obsession, you know, going through taxes and earning power and where's friends and where's family. Before all that immersion, please don't give away my location, but you know, you understand the process that I went through.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure my subconscious processed it while I was sleeping, not while I was necessarily awake.

Yeah, I, there have been a number of good ideas that I've had where I literally remember coming up with the idea in a dream and I woke up and I still remember the idea. Now, most of the time when that happens, it's incoherent gibberish, but sometimes it's actually a really good idea.

Well, actually, my, my famous tweet storm on how to get rich without getting lucky was a late night thing. I woke up at three in the morning, I wrote it. And it was because I'd been turning it over and over in my head for days and days and days. Obviously I had the ideas for a long time, but I've been figuring out, trying to figure out how to articulate them for a long time. And I'd taken a few rough notes here and there, but I couldn't quite get both the inspiration and the wording just right. And then I woke up at three in the morning and I pulled out my iPad, it was all typed out on an iPad, not even a computer, in bed. And then I tweeted it off at 3:40 or something like that and I went back to sleep. And then I woke up in the morning and somebody was saying, wow, I've never seen anyone time his tweets, he's got it perfectly down to exactly the right time. I was like, no, that was probably the worst possible time I could have posted it. It was just like, came to me in the middle of the night.

Yeah, I mean, I think for the good stuff it doesn't matter. I mean, you're trying to, hopefully it's timeless anyway. But yeah, there is definitely a time element to Twitter. Um, but I kind of feel like it shouldn't matter. If you've got something good to say, say it while you can.

Are they good enough coders?

Well, well, okay, yeah, yeah, then you're well leveraged.

Well, it's like, you know, Satoshi, I don't, uh, most of the Bitcoin core client himself, but he was sufficiently obsessed with the design to get the design parameters to where he thought were correct. So I assume you're still obsessing over the design of your system.

All right, well, I'm probably gonna bounce out. It's getting a little late over here. So, um, you guys can continue on, of course. Thanks everyone for joining. I'm gonna take a hiatus. Good to see you, Paul. Keeping the engine going. Love the UI. Don't change it too much. I still don't get the paper airplane, but sure, take your word for it. Thanks everybody.