Naval Ravikant on Clubhouse (Gumroad club) — 23 02 2021

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

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

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

One of the weird things about being a so-called public intellectual — and I really don't want to be that thing, whatever that is — is that you can say the same thing over and over again, and if you say it just slightly differently, most people will be quite interested because it's helping them see it from different angles, helping them remember it. There's always a few people who will say, 'Oh, he's just repeating himself,' but those cynics and critics are everywhere. But I do think there's something to multimodal messaging if you really want to get a message out.

The multimodal messaging also introduces a much tighter empathy feedback loop. When people can, in real time, hear how you're reacting to their potential attack, it re-triggers that in-person idea — 'Oh wait, I'm actually being too aggressive, too confrontational.' I think when you close that loop, it also just increases empathy. It's a shortcut, this medium over text. It's a shortcut for building affinity, empathy, and recall. If you go one level higher, you have video, which I think is probably the pinnacle. Long form video — two hours listening to someone on Joe Rogan — I feel like I know this person much better than seeing Naval say purely via his tweets for two years.

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

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

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

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

Let me just interrupt. Going back to status games: the highest form of status is to not care. I don't give a rat's ass what the audience is feeling. I'm talking for myself.

In a way that you can't fake because you're performing live, you're sort of proving this fact. And then you can do whatever you want.

The rarest thing — everyone is trying to figure out what everybody else wants to hear. That's not rare, that's common. What's rare is speaking things that are true, either things that other people haven't thought through fully before or things that other people don't dare to say.

That's right. Clubhouse is designed to make you think we're having an intimate private conversation, and then it lets thousands of people eavesdrop. That's literally the whole design of the system. That's why I think they don't allow recordings without everyone's permission, because they want to make it feel like a casual conversation when it's anything but.

So basically, say what you think is interesting for yourself. Pursue novelty. And if it interests you, it will interest a significant portion of the audience.

Don't pay attention to the audience.

If you're speaking for the audience, the audience is worthless. If you're writing for followers, your followers are worthless. Think about any other sport. Do they play for their audience? No, they play to win. That is literally the only reason they're on the field is to win. If you want these people to play the best, you put them in a bubble with no audience.

Yeah. I really enjoy that. I really like that framework. It resonates.

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

This format is hilarious because the moment I come in, my followers get notified. My followers show up, some of them stick to you, so of course you want me in your room because I bring a whole host of followers that you then leech off. 'What have you done for me lately?' style. I'm working on an AngelList roll-up, everybody. But I show up because Sahil is interesting to talk to. He's one of the few people that I can riff with for long periods of time, and he'll say something interesting. I might learn something that I get a kick out of. Here I am. It's bait. You set the bait, here I am.

Even Joe Rogan is a stand-up comedian, a really funny guy, a really interesting guy with lots of opinions. But even Joe doesn't make the Joe Rogan podcast about Joe Rogan. He's interviewing people because at some point you just run out of things to talk about, so you need somebody else to riff with. I think the Clubhouse phenomenon is going to be interesting. There are a few people in human history who can just talk and talk on their own about whatever their favorite topic is and inspire lots of people. There aren't many of those people, but those are the people that create movements. Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Hitler, strong people. Trump. These are people who can riff extemporaneously for long periods of time, and their audience who is aligned with them will forgive the foibles, understand the broader message, and get really unified behind this person. So I think those kinds of leaders, for better or for worse, will emerge in Clubhouse and sort of be the dominant personalities over time. They will literally have individual cults of personality.

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

They all go together. If you're... well, truth is the ultimate. If you care what the audience thinks, then you're pandering to them, which means you're saying things you don't necessarily believe to get a certain reaction from the audience, and that's falsehood.

I don't think that's true. I know that's your perception of why you think you have credibility, but I don't think that's true at all.

Your tweets stand on their own. They're good tweets. Some of them are derivative of mine, so I forgive that. You did come after me on Twitter, so I grabbed all this stuff earlier.

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

Sorry, what's that?

Oh yeah, no, I mean yes. I mean, it's difficult because the answer is simple. We know what we need to do to be successful in all the different fields. We know how to be a good writer, we know how to be a good startup person: find customers, understand them, solve a problem, build a product. These things are just hard, and so we look for other things that might matter, but we all kind of know what matters. We know what's necessary to succeed in many different pursuits. Everyone knows how to get a six-pack; everyone knows how to get ripped. That information has been out there for a long time. So what we really want is people to just show that they've actually done it, put in the work and the time, taken the risk, gotten to the truth of what makes someone healthy, and then their output is evidence that they got to the truth.

You don't want a sick doctor or a fat trainer. My favorite is these life coaches whose own lives are in shambles, or these executive coaches who never built a business. The unfortunate part is that a truly great executive coach should have built a successful business, and those people are generally unhireable or extremely expensive.

Of course, all the people selling get-rich-quick advice for $20 — that's all complete nonsense. All the people giving you stock tips or crypto tips on Twitter — complete nonsense. These are all fake signals. It's surprising to me how many people fall for them; it's kind of sad.

There's some amount of unfakable knowledge, something that just cannot be purchased in the market. I tweet about this and often refer back to it myself: a fit body, a calm mind, and a house full of love. These things cannot be bought; they must be earned. These three things are unfakable signals — you have to go and get them yourself regardless of how much money you have. We're used to getting everything in our lives with money, even though we can't get those three things. There's actually a fourth one that's a little more subtle, which I would call judgment. For example, a friend of mine recently broke his ankle, and he has to decide whether or not to get surgery. Of course, if he goes to surgeons, they all say he needs surgery. If he goes to non-surgeon doctors or yoga people, they'll say massages are good or yoga will fix you. He has a short period of time to figure out whether to get the surgery before his ankle could heal in a way that's catastrophic for the long term. No amount of money will help him make this decision because he's not an expert in ankles himself. So he has to figure out who to trust. The 'who to trust' problem is the core problem. For example, if you're President of the United States and the NSA comes to you and says 'Russia's about to attack us, we need to sneak attack them first,' and the CIA comes in and says 'No, this is a fake signal, don't listen to the NSA,' how is the president going to know? He doesn't have his own core expertise in the topic. So there's certain kinds of knowledge and judgment that cannot be bought with any amount of money. You just have to figure out who to trust; it's the 'picking experts' problem. Those four things — judgment, a healthy body, a calm mind, and a loving household — you just have to work at them. The one remaining thing, money, is the universal adapter. Money can solve pretty much every other problem, so people know that and they want money. There's a certain desperation and hunger for money in our society, which I feel bad about. That's why I did the 'How to Get Rich' work, to help people figure out the principles of making money or creating wealth. People are so desperate to figure that out that even when they know something is probably scammy, a waste of time, and this guy probably doesn't know what he's talking about — but maybe he has a good tidbit in there — they're so desperate. It's a little sad because making money, as I was saying, is an inevitable byproduct of learning. That's not a path people are able to go down a lot of times. They've already completed a university degree, they might be a single mom with no avenue to make money, a factory worker, a Starbucks worker. They think, 'I really need to figure out how to break out of this, how to make real money.' These people are desperate, so to them, spending $20 on a seminar that guy who dresses well and drives a sports car might have some clue, but they don't have a better option.

Even know where to start and I feel bad for those people. And thanks to Eric and the Almanac existence out there, hopefully people will read at least some principles of wealth creation and at least at a high level be able to make some good decisions and differentiate from charlatans and get rich quick schemes from having real judgment, real learning that can help them make money and learning leverage. Leverage is actually the biggest piece of it. Accountability, great, you can make it big without accountability. Even specific knowledge, very important, but you can actually make it without specific knowledge. But if you don't have leverage, you're never going to make real wealth. So leverage is actually probably the most important component of the principles I've discussed.

Yeah, I think we're still seeing the results of the permissionless leverage piece. That is just dominating the results of the world. The snowball, the cascading effect that new type of leverage is having is still... You want to be early too. Over time, leverage gets proliferated. It's kind of like profitability economics, it sort of reduces. So ultimately, people find out, word spreads. A simple way to find leverage is to just go where very few people are. A gold rush is literally this. You know, Naval went here with all his amazing tweets and now I'm stuck with the scraps. Clubhouse is a great example. Go to a new social platform, there's less people with residual followers. You can prove yourself as interesting earlier. Obviously you have to find the right platform for you. It's not just the newest ones. Sorry to tell you, Sahil, but I beat you to this one too.

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

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

One model that might be helpful for people to chew on is, and I didn't make this up, I read it somewhere, unfortunately I don't remember the original author: we're all born time billionaires and we just get poorer with time as we go on and on, as we spend our time. Warren Buffett probably is a time millionaire, and I bet he really wishes he could be a time billionaire, but the time billions are gone. What's left are the money billions, but he can't trade those back for time. Ask any rich person how much money they would give up to be 10 years younger. I think most of them would tell you all of it. Ultimately, that's the thing you can't leverage. It's the only thing you can't leverage: time.

Tactically, how do you protect your time and ensure that, especially being public figures, everybody up here has at least a few thousand followers here and many more on Twitter? How do you protect your time and work towards that 24 hours? Say no to everything. Delete emails without flinching, without responding. Walking meetings only. Keep meetings short. Ask them to do it by email and text instead. There are lots of techniques to factor off your calendar. If you agree to a meeting, don't actually agree. Wait 24 hours, make a note to yourself, go back and see if in 24 hours you still agree. Another rule I have is if you wouldn't take the meeting now, then you probably won't want to take it later. These are all just reminders. I still end up overscheduled with too many meetings, but you basically just have to keep meetings off your calendar. 30-minute meetings instead of hour meetings. No pleasantries. If you've ever done a meeting with me, you'll know I just don't bother with pleasantries, either introductory or goodbyes. Let's just cut to the meat of it. There are lots of techniques, but what it all boils down to is that the destination creates the avenue. If you are completely convinced that meetings are generally a plague and you want to do as few of them as possible and you hate them with a passion, then you will find ways to not do meetings.

If I'm ever going to reply. But yes, I don't reply to most people most of the time. For years, I used to have an autoresponder set up on my email that just said indiscriminately to everybody, because Gmail unfortunately doesn't let you be too discriminating, 'I'm off the grid and not checking messages.' I think that was my email autoresponder for years.

One of the things I've realized is that in email, people are really good at creating work for you. A lot of inbound emails, somebody else had a whim and created a task for you and stuck it in your inbox. It's like, 'Here's a to-do for you.' You have no obligation to respond. You have no obligation to engage. A simple rule I really like is: do I have to do this? If the answer is no, don't do it ever. Because the things you have to do, you are already doing. So just don't respond to anything you don't need to respond to, which should be very, very few emails over time. Another tip: don't consume crap. Don't spend your time consuming a bunch of crap. So many people complain about how little free time they have and how busy they are, and then they tell me the intricate details of Game of Thrones. I'm not saying this to be holier than thou, I just happen to not care as much. Ultimately, there's time in lots of places. If you actually break down 24 hours a day, it can be a lot of time. 'I don't have time' is another way of saying it's just not a priority. You want to spend your time the way you want to spend it. If you want to be productive, then don't... I actually think watching movies, TV, news, sports is largely a waste of time. Video games largely a waste of time. Not to say I didn't do it. I spent large portions of my life watching all of those things and playing tons of video games. But at some point, I just started viewing them as a waste of time. Honestly, I've read a ton of fiction books and I now view most fiction books as a waste of time. It's very hard for me to engage in fiction because I'm just like, 'Alright, cut to the chase. Tell me the new interesting thing to learn.' Because I've read too many of them. I recognize the storyline, the archetype. I can kind of see where it's headed and I just have a hard time caring about these fictional characters because I myself am too conscious of my semi-fictional life where I'm dying one second at a time and I have no time left. I don't have time to read about this person who doesn't exist to learn some life lesson that I either already know or can learn more simply elsewhere. Time is literally everything. It's incredibly precious. There's nothing more precious than time.

Clubhouse? No. Whatever I feel like in that moment. It can be a waste of time according to somebody else's definition, but whatever I feel like in that moment is the right thing for me to do. That's what I aspire to. I'm not saying that's where I am most of the time, but that is what I aspire to. Most of my desires are fairly mundane. Play with the kids, go make an investment, brainstorm some startup, learn something new, read a book, go for a run. It's all the same stuff everybody else does. But I just want to be able to do what I want when I want. That's all. By most people's definition, I might just be wasting a lot of time. Right before I got into this Clubhouse, I was socializing and playing with my kids. That's not quote-unquote productive time, but it's what I wanted to do at that moment.

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

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

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

The first level was 100% free time, and the second level is 100% flow state.

I had a tweet today. It said, 'We often use this term at Gumroad: we want to help creators earn a living doing what they love.' I sort of joked that the easiest way to make a living doing what you love is to fall in love with making money. If you love the act of doing it, then inherently... It's kind of the same with all of these things. You just fall in love with it.

One of my favorite tweets of all time is by Charlie Knowles, who I followed on Twitter for a while. He tweeted that at the end of the day, you have to believe that either everything is a miracle or nothing is. That's a very deep statement. If you believe in a single miracle, that means there are miracles everywhere because you can't take anything for granted. Everything has to be a miracle. Or you're completely atheistic and you believe there are no miracles, it was all just random. But the answer to that one simple question will basically define your entire worldview. Unfortunately, we're mostly agnostic. It's so easy to find out if you're happy. At this moment, everyone can ask themselves: at this moment, do I have what I want? Would I change something about this moment? I personally would not right now. Then you're happy. If there is a change you want, you can either stop wanting it, which is the preferred and cheapest option, or you get what you want. Those are just the two outcomes. It's kind of like what you said: life is two questions: what do you want, and did you get it?

I was reading Jed McKenna recently and he had this great line: the concept of wrongness is wrong. There's no such thing as wrong. The universe just is. It's weird, but it just is.

But if you believe, which I think most of us do, that you're a single instance animal in a specific location at a specific time, then you do need to have a concept of right and wrong to function. Jed McKenna, for those of you who read him, doesn't believe that. He believes he's the entire universe, he's consciousness itself. So to him, it's clear there is no such thing as right or wrong because he's trying to be completely objective. It's a god's eye view upon humanity, which I don't think most of us have.

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

That is kind of flow state. Flow state is temporary ego suicide, ego death.

It really helps if you don't care about your own survival though. It's very hard to figure out how you would really accept such a state and still be functional. Whether you would be long-range planning functional is a different story.

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