Naval Ravikant @ Clubhouse – 29 01 2021

As someone who achieved young, relatively speaking, and then often for folks, for entrepreneurs, for people who are motivated in that way, that's their source of meaning and purpose in the world, right? When you achieve wildly successfully in this sort of common definition, and then you look over the precipice to the next phase of life, how do you balance on the one hand happiness and joy, and on the other meaning and purpose? And how do you see the two living together at that phase in your life? I'm curious because what you said is fascinating to me.

Oh, no, not at all. Thank you for helping. But to me, that is a lot of just how the world works. Look, you didn't choose where you were born. You didn't choose when you were born to your parents. You didn't choose what age you live in. You didn't choose your height, your weight, your genetics, your environment, your conditioning, your actions. You chose almost nothing on this planet. So you do your best work that you can according to your own moral code, and what's going to happen is going to happen. It's kind of like a movie. It's playing out. How much of it did you really pick? Don't get too stressed out or attached to the outcome. One very helpful exercise that I like, and you have to do this for yourself, this will help you only if you genuinely do it for yourself, so I'm not going to do it for you. No one else should do this for you. But when you have a lazy afternoon sometime and you're sort of journaling or self-reflecting or even going for a walk, sit down and just think back to your life five years ago. Really try to envision what your life was like five years ago. Think about where you were, how you dressed, who your friends were, who your lover was, what you were into, what you were working on, what your emotional state was. And write down the best advice that you possibly can to yourself from five years ago. Then do the same thing to yourself from 10 years ago, and the same thing from 15 years ago, and 20 years ago, and however long it makes sense to go back. And I think you will find that you are your own best therapist and advisor. You're the person who does yourself the best. And I think what you'll find is that there will be a consistent pattern in the advice that you give your previous self. And I think that will actually, in a weird way, answer the question that you asked. But I don't want to do it for you because that loses all meaning. True knowledge only comes from doing the work. If you can't embody it, it's not real.

Involved. That was amazing advice. I also heard you say once that all your fans are nerdy guys. But that may be true, but I've recommended you to so many of my hot girlfriends because women are often told that life is a zero-sum game. Not told, but taught implicitly. And you talk a lot about how everyone can get rich. And you've also said you're never going to get rich renting out your time, and 40-hour work weeks are a relic of the industrial age. Knowledge workers function like athletes: train and sprint, then rest and reassess. So can we talk first, a little bit, if you have time, of course, if you're not tired, a little bit first about how everyone can get rich and life is not a zero-sum game, and we can all make it. Maybe people need to read your pinned tweet if they haven't seen it already. And then about renting out time, because that's okay. Yeah, but I don't want to monopolize this conversation, so if other people want to speak, please do speak up. Don't feel like... Yeah, I'm just talking. I have the right to leave at any moment. It's okay. It's quiet because... You were the first to actually give advice on Clubhouse. I feel so thankful because I feel like I couldn't get this in an e-book for some reason. I don't know. All right, look at colleges. So I will give you my best advice on that in a moment. First, let me just say thanks for recommending me to all your hot girlfriends. Unfortunately, my wife treats our relationship as a zero-sum game, so it is incredible. And also, Nicole is a hot woman who's also a fan, so Nicole, don't forget to include yourself in that group. Of course. Anyway, so getting wealthy. Look, I use the provocative title 'How to Get Rich' because it grabs people's attention, but we're really talking about wealth. Wealth is assets, right? And the goal here is to get out of nine-to-five. Nine-to-five is just modern slavery now. Obviously, it's not the real horrific slavery that people's ancestors experienced, but it is a modern, trimmed-down form of slavery. It's wage slavery. You basically have to, you don't choose when you wake up. You have to go to your drudgery job. You have to punch in the clock, punch in the hours, as if we're living in factory times, as if input has anything to do with output. Well, we live in the age of infinite leverage with your mind. You can move mountains if you knew the right things to do. Elon Musk doesn't have more hours in the week than anybody else. He just spends it better, or he has the knowledge to apply it better. Omniscience at some level implies omnipotence. If you were a god, and if you had infinite knowledge, you wouldn't actually need to do anything. But if you wanted to do something, you would literally just flick one particle of sand, and you just knew that the wave was going to hit all the other particles, that whatever you wanted to have happen would happen, because you just knew how everything connected to everything. So knowledge is literally power. So the way to earn in the modern world is through knowledge and leverage. It's not through work. And so you want to be a knowledge athlete if you want to earn, not a physical athlete. Physical athletes, we put them in showrooms like the Olympics so they can show off, or we do it for fun or for health, but it's not the way that you actually create and gain wealth. So to create wealth requires a couple of principles. Many of these are obvious, and it sort of helps to put them together. The place where I kind of create the framework around it, I say there are three things that you really need to do. The first is you need to have some specific knowledge. The second is you need to take on accountability. And the third is you need to have leverage. Those are the three key components. Specific knowledge is knowing something, knowing how to do something that other people don't know how to do, and you can't be trained to do it. So then it begs the question, how do you learn it? What is specific knowledge? Examples of specific knowledge could be the artificial intelligence field is just coming up and I'm really deep into it, or I have a really deep understanding of crypto, or I know how to do sales of very difficult large objects, like I know how to sell houses that are broken down and in need of repair. Specific knowledge could be, I'm the most entertaining gamer on the planet. I can play games on Twitch in such a way that people just love talking to me. It could even just be, I'm a great Clubhouse speaker on a certain kind of topic that other people just don't understand. So how do you gain specific knowledge? It's almost a catch-22. Specific knowledge is built up by you through your passions. So when they say 'follow your passion,' that's kind of what they mean. It doesn't always lead to money, but it can. Because if you're obsessive about something and you're learning it for your own genuine intellectual curiosity, not to get a degree, not to make money, not to impress your friends, you're going to end up being better than anybody else. So I really believe that you should only read and engage in activities that you genuinely enjoy, and you should cultivate your intellectual obsessions without any goal. But you may be surprised when you look back and connect the dots later that one of them developed into a goal. And one of the hallmarks of specific knowledge is that it will feel like play to you, but it will look like work to others. So anything that fits that model, you should develop. So that is specific knowledge. Second, I would say you develop accountability. Accountability means taking on risks, branding it with your own name. Eponymous companies like the Oprah company, or whatever you may think of him, before he became president, Trump was all about this. He would stamp his name on everything. Kanye West, Jay-Z, Elon Musk. These people use their names everywhere they go. But that means the accountability comes with downsides. That means that when you do something stupid or horrible, you're tagged forever. If you screw up, you screw up in public. So use your name, use accountability. And I know we live in an age of teamwork, and obviously a lot of great work is done by teams. But even within a company like a startup, founders and managers are always looking for people who will take on accountability. So accountability is a big piece of it. You're never going to get paid what you're worth if you don't take on accountability. And then finally, leverage. Leverage is the most important because leverage is increasing without bound in our society. And there are basically three forms of leverage. There's labor, which is people working for you. That's been around forever, and your parents know it, which is why when you tell them you got a job, they ask, 'How many people are working for you?' or 'How big is the company?' It sounds impressive. In reality, labor is the shittiest form of leverage. It takes too much effort to manage people. You're basically playing psychiatrist or babysitting. There's a lot of politics and emotions involved. It's just very hard to do. That said, if you want to build the biggest fortunes or the most wealth, it has to be in your repertoire. There are a lot of misconceptions that go on with labor leverage. One example is people say, 'Well, there's no such thing as a 10x engineer.' Of course there is. There are 100x engineers. There are 1000x engineers. In intellectual disciplines, there's massive variance. It's Pareto distributed, not normal distributed, for those of you who know the distribution curves. But another one is, 'Hire people who are smarter than you.' That's another piece of nonsense. Why are people who are smarter than you going to work for you? Nobody has a good answer to that one. So there is an answer. It's not a great one, which is you hire them when they're really young and you exploit them for a year or two before they figure out they're smarter than you and move on. So you can do some short-term opportunities, or you can invest in people who are smarter than you. But you also have to be really good at what you do, otherwise good people aren't going to work for you anyway. That's labor. Then next is capital. You can use capital. You make a trade. Let's say you could trade on the stock market. Whether it's a trade you make with a hundred dollars or a million dollars makes a huge difference, even though it took the same brainpower to come up with the trade. Now you're magnified in the latter case by a factor of ten thousand. How did you do that? That's leverage. That's capital leverage. The problem with capital leverage and labor leverage is that they require permission. Somebody has to give you the money. Somebody has to agree to work with you. They take time to get. They take effort to get. With capital leverage, there's often risk involved, especially with zero capital. So that brings us to the last form of leverage, and this is the most powerful form of leverage and is behind all the newly rich, and that is product leverage. Product leverage comes from building a product. And if the product has no marginal cost of replication, in other words, you can stamp out more copies without having to incur cost, that is the best form of leverage. Product leverage ranges from code, where you create applications like Clubhouse. We're all on Paul Davison's piece of code here, and he's massively leveraged. Paul's not here right now. He's not running this conversation. We're all working for him. It also comes from media, like creating content. Joe Rogan creates a podcast and it gets stamped out. It can come from a book. It can come from even products like, someone sells you a pill. It could be a happy pill, a sugar pill, whatever. A pill is 98% intellectual property. The actual physical cost of what went in there is very low. So fundamentally, what you want to do is you want to put yourself in a situation where you take your specific knowledge that you've developed over the years without even trying, the things that you're good at that other people are naturally bad at, that you got by following your own intellectual obsessions. You add that to accountability. Put your name on it. Take some risks. You employ every form of leverage possible: capital, labor, and products and code, preferably the permissionless ones because those you can get access to when you're younger. And the net result is you productize yourself. What you end up doing is you end up selling a product that is simply an extension of who you uniquely are. And nobody can beat you at that because it's just you being you. And this can take a while to set up, but once you set this thing up, it will be a flood, a tsunami of money that will keep you flush for the rest of your life. And then you can figure out how to be happy.

So we need to be rich first before we're happy? Or at least comfortable? At the very least, comfortable. For me, after all, I didn't even realize I liked tsunamis until I knew they came in the form of money. Oh my god. And now, here we are. Here's another thing, an advanced move. You said if you don't own a piece of a business, you don't have a path towards financial freedom. And why is owning equity in a business important to becoming rich versus wage work? Can I just address... It sounds like you had a very compelling case for conditional happiness, but not unconditional happiness. And I'm curious if you differentiate between the two.

I love it. Thank you. One more thing. I wanted to read another quote, and then I mean it doesn't need to be elaborated, but I feel like you can talk about it a little bit for people. You said, 'Doctors won't make you healthy. Nutritionists won't make you slim. Teachers won't make you smart. Gurus won't make you calm. Mentors won't make you rich. Trainers won't make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.'

No, Naval, is it fair to assume that you don't set New Year's resolutions for yourself then?

So you think people waste their time saying, 'I'm going to wait till January to do this hit list of things, and it's going to take me X amount of months to achieve those things,' right? So making a list actually sets you back?

Does that change when you have a million dollars?

This is a part of the conversation that I definitely am... I'm so thankful that... First of all, brother, I love everything that you're saying. So like-minded. I think that you, aside from... I know everyone in this room, you have given them great value in you being here. But for me, everything that you're saying is just like you were sent here for everything that's going on in my life right now, in terms of what my purpose is, what the next phase of my life is. I've been an actor for 36 years of my life, and I had to go against every norm in Hollywood. I grew up in Brooklyn where my father was in jail my entire life. And necessity is the mother of invention. So when you were talking about...

Hey, when you want it, you're gonna create it, and you're gonna get there. I didn't know anyone in the industry either. I had to bust my tail every single day. People thought I was crazy for desiring the things that I said I wanted out of this life, and every single thing that I said I wanted, I got from the way I live, where I live, having a wife, having two children. I'm talking about specifics. When I was a kid, I was like, I want a wife, I want two children, I want two dogs. All of those things, just being specific about those things, having that intention, and then working toward it.

The thing that I want to ask you, just in terms of purpose, because I often tell people that acting is my passion, but activation is my purpose. And so I wrote this book and created this platform based out of the pain that I experienced with my father, and him not giving me the messaging of manhood that I needed. It created a great deficit in my life, and it took a lot for me to get to the other side of it. I never want to see anyone else suffer the way I suffered. So everything that you were talking about in terms of doing the thing that feels like playing to you and maybe work to everyone else, what I do now is something that I could do for 24 hours straight, and all I need is a glass of water and I'm fine. Everybody else is knocked out after a specific period of time, and my battery is still full because I feel like this is my purpose. When God created me, He created me to be a servant. One of the things that I talk about in my book is how men are supposed to be servants, while males look to serve themselves. So I just want to ask you, what is it that you feel like in your life has become your purpose? And I've always told folks, if you're true to that, your money, your profits, all of those things will come as long as you submit to what you feel like your purpose of life is. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Can I suggest this for you on Sunday, please?

So 5 PM Pacific on Sunday, Nicole and I are hosting the next stand-up show on Clubhouse, and we'd love for you to drop in if you'd like to laugh with us.

I know you don't, but if I didn't tell you, then it wouldn't even be planted. Planting a seed in your mind, so now it should. If you catch me on Clubhouse, pull me in. But one of the things that I get away from is the slavery of calendars.

I actually have a question for Don Drake. Actually, I have two questions. Andre, is your father still alive?

Yeah, my father is alive. We reconciled after 20 years of being estranged from each other. My father kidnapped me at age six, basically taught me how to be a cheater at age 12. I witnessed my mother and my father being extremely volatile towards each other. At 46, after having a conversation with my daughter who simply asked, 'Do you know where your father is?' I realized that God was sending me a messenger telling me that it was time for me to heal those wounds that I had with my father. Instead of seeing my father as my father, I saw him as my spiritual brother whose development was arrested around the same time that my development was arrested. I really began to have a pathway forward and have empathy for my father. As I often say, it's always incumbent upon the one who has the gift of understanding to be more understanding. Because I was in this place in my life, I knew that I had to do something in order to reach out and help my father. That was my assignment.

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

Yeah, and I don't want to say tolerance because I know what you mean, but I don't want to use the word tolerance because that would put me in a space where I'm this higher being and my father isn't. I just had an understanding that my father was a byproduct of all the things that he got or didn't get. My father couldn't give me what he never had. So my assignment at that point, to Naval's point earlier about spirituality, while I don't consider myself to be a religious man, a lot of my spirituality comes from specific religion. I am a spiritual man. I had to see myself in the space of being a spiritual being. Under God, my father and I are both brothers because we are both God's sons. So for me, I had to see myself as my father's spiritual brother, and it was my assignment at that point to give him what society never gave him. They never gave him grace, they never gave him understanding, they never gave him awareness. So in me telling my father, 'Hey, I love you and I forgive you and I understand,' we went from seeing each other after 20 years. The last time I saw my father I was 26 years old, and I told him if I ever saw him again that I would kill him. So when we saw each other for the first time in 20 years, I got out of my car and he stood up off the steps of his place. We didn't say anything for five minutes. We just embraced each other and we were both in tears. We both turned out to be two men of faith, two men of different faith, but we recognized each other as two men of faith. So not only did it heal me of all the pain that I was carrying that was secretly making me angry and making me this person that could blow up at a moment's notice because I was carrying around this pain instead of casting it, but it healed my father as well.

I'm happy for you, man.

I thank you, my brother. I appreciate it.

I'm really happy. Thank you for sharing that, dude. Thank you for sharing that and being so vulnerable, Andre. It also reminded me of how Naval said we need religion but we've moved away from it. Yeah, that was dope because those are those... we keep running away from it, and we need the constructs of what it does for us in the spirituality space. Go up, brother Naval.

And for that, I know exactly what you're saying and agree on so many points. For me, and even for some of the folks that are out there listening to this, it was about eliminating some of the key points of trauma that may have been a little unnecessary. But then when you look at the other side, say at six years old, when a person who's responsible for your life takes you or steals you away from the other person that's responsible for you in your life, in that case my mother, and then waking up in his car in the middle of the night, 2:30, 3:00 in the morning, not knowing where your father is, and you're six years old and you have to navigate dangerous streets of Brooklyn in order to find your way back to your mother. Those points of trauma can sometimes feel like they're unnecessary, but at the same time, to your point, they're kind of like if you were trying to construct a great recipe, sometimes you add something bitter in order to accentuate what is sweet in the recipe. So sometimes we have to find the pathway forward through our traumas and understand how they actually shape us. If I didn't have those things, I may not have been activated enough to write my book. So to your point, sometimes some of those things are the actual key ingredients that go into making us the dynamic human beings that we become as a result of having to get through them.

The only person I'm hurting is myself.

We can just stop right there, because how many of us in our society are really truly willing to be honest? And then we wonder why we're not in honest relationships. The vast majority of us are so afraid to be honest with ourselves, and then we wonder why we can't be in honest relationships. Usually it's because we're not being honest with ourselves first. Naval, please, I have a question for you. I'm just in awe of everything I've heard you say in the past hours, which I've been taking notes. At one point, at what point in your life would you say you developed the level of clarity that you have in life? Was it a moment that triggered it, or was it a series of events that led you to this point in life?

Naval, when you're speaking about honesty, I want to be clear. You're not saying to be truthful, you're talking more about being vulnerable, correct?

Well, how about... yeah.

Exactly, that's exactly where I was going. Because I think Nicole can relate to this as well, because we come from traditional Middle Eastern families, and we've grown up in a society where privacy has been pushed on us. Keep your personal life private, don't expose it, don't be vulnerable.

So here's what I mean by honesty. What I mean by honesty... well, let me ask a follow-up.

One question really quickly, because this sounds a lot like when you kept using the word 'grudge,' all I could think of was resentment. And then when you're talking about everything you just said, it lined up with looking at your own part in a particular issue that you're having with another person. And it doesn't have to do with announcing to the world your wrongdoings or your character defects, rather just one other person. And I'm wondering if you think that there's value in 12-step, or if you think that it's more of a process you should always do by yourself.

I've heard you say before that it's best to be rich and anonymous and never famous. I agree. And I do want to go back to Sam's point because we are Persian Jews, and we were taught to be very private, but also I feel like I was taught to feel a lot of shame about everything, like sex, mental health, everything. Do you have any kind of relationship with shame or advice about shame? Because I know there's a lot of people from different cultures in the audience who are taught the same thing.

Well, I think this is also a button of all... sorry, a Jewish thing. But also, Nicole, I think this is a generational thing as well, because I feel like a lot of people's parents and previous generations were all taught similar values, and our generation is leaning towards meditation and therapy and self-help. But Naval, sorry, I'm in a mirror.

There's a part of me, and by the way, I love much of what you're saying. I really find it very compelling. You're a very charismatic speaker. I love your motto: don't take anyone's words for it essentially, and test it out yourself. I get that. There are a couple things I want to pin you down on though, because I don't know whether I believe or disbelieve you because I don't know whether you're saying this or you're saying that. One of the pieces is this idea of radical individuality, radical agency. There's something very deep and compelling there, and I'm with you on it to a very large extent. There's a big 'but' for me though. That is, I think there's strong and compelling evidence that we humans know ourselves, gain self-awareness by introspection, but also through other people. If I want to see my face, a mirror is useful. If I want to see the back of my head, a couple of mirrors are essential. So seeing our blind spots are often seen through the mirrors of other people, which enhances our self-awareness. So I'm trying to understand if you are advocating, on the final sum of it, that this is a radically individual enterprise, or is this a radically individual and interpersonal communal enterprise? Because my sense is you're strongly vectored in one direction, which I respect, and like I said, I go with you further down that road probably the most. But I cannot go down a road that doesn't also say there's a fundamental role in the relational and communal aspects, and that there are limits. You even said it yourself, these are aspirational points of view, and I totally get it. We talked about conditional versus unconditional happiness. I think there's a relation here in the deep structure of what we're talking about. But there are some real limits. One of the things that I find in the Valley, what tech calls thinking, Dan's book I think is fantastic at pointing this out over and over again. We in Silicon Valley are obsessed with the infinitude, the possibility, the horizon points, but we are so damn bad at accepting that there are real limitations to our free will, real limitations to our ability to be self-aware, and that we need to see ourselves through other people and through communities to be whole. So I want to understand more deeply what you mean when you talk about the pathway to happiness and the role of the individual relative to the role of the relational communal. Because I think I agree with you on a number of points, but I think I might fundamentally disagree with you on some others. And obviously you give room for us to all test it ourselves with your creed, which I respect and agree with. But I want to get a sense of where you stand.

Oh no, the group is just... I fundamentally disagree.

Well, I mean, I have a perspective. I'd love to hear your perspective in the ball. I mean, I'm a social scientist by nature, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you, Naval, was: do you believe that this is necessarily idiographic? It's necessarily a path of one, and that there are no generalizable truths across humans? That's a question I had for you.

I wouldn't agree with you that all of us are selfish.

It's fair, but I'm more interested less in rhetoric and more in the truth of it though.

So yes, I think you and I agree there, which is there are some things that are more generalizable or less so. And I think we also agree that then you have to, whether or not it's a generalizable principle, you have to live into it yourself and your own experience and test it out. I think we have alignment and agreement there. Where I think we have perhaps a different point of view is the utility in the relational aspect and the limitations around self, and how I as a self, how deeply self-aware I can be, how deeply self-agency I can be. I think I have a perspective and an experience that we are individual selves and relational selves, perhaps more than I'm hearing you do. And I'm just testing that out. But my sense is that we have a difference there. My belief is that the utility of relation, this goes back to Leah's 12-step example, I think in some of these cases it's actually fundamentally necessary to have an interpersonal or communal experience, at least to bootstrap our way through a healing process of a certain sort, or a developmental process at a certain stage. Or we just may need to have that period for the rest of our lives in order to be the best version of ourselves in a cultural relational matrix as I define myself and my values and my morality. So I think that's where you and I depart. I respect your point of view, I hope you feel that way and see that, but I respectfully disagree in terms of the utility and necessity of the relational piece and the communal piece.

Of course, of course. Okay.

Well, I think how we got here is Naval, you've been sharing a lot of knowledge this evening, or this morning, geez. But we're talking about how knowledge and leverage are ways to create wealth, and the idea you're trying to express, and kind of charming back in here, is that there is a level of individuality or self-determination that is kind of inherent in being accountable and making decisions and taking actions. I'm not sure if that anchors in on what you're expressing about.

What does the meaning of your name mean?

Do you know the meaning of 'Naval' in Hebrew?

You're definitely the trickster, the villain.

Thank you for sharing that. What a flex. What a plan. I want...