How to Get Rich (Without Getting Lucky) | Eric Jorgenson on Naval Ravikant

25:22Like their, their vision was the same. Like they came from sort of the same socio demographics, but one associated that's not lucky and one associated that's lucky. And so I thought that was fascinating. I love that. You know? And so, so explain to me spotted luck and then built luck. Spotted luck is just the ability to sort of position yourself at a place where luck happens to you. Right. Um, and so this is, you know, the, maybe the highest order decision is like, where do you live? Like, what's your exposure? What's your surface area to look? um if you say you can't find anybody it's like ask out on a date like okay how often are you like going to parties have you left your house like where are your habits um how many companies have you started how many companies have you met with like how many customers have you approached like these things are you can control your surface area to luck essentially um and in the final form where like luck becomes your destiny is just you just become so uniquely known for a thing like you've reached such a final form of awareness and excellence and authenticity that uh luck finds its way to you and like warren buffett is an example of um is it lucky that he gets a phone call to like buy a bank and do a deal of financing that like nobody else has the capital or the reputation or the speed in order to do like he has become the only person on earth who can get that lucky.

26:43And that's a crazy example, right? But there are many smaller forms of that. So your reputation, your mindset, your positioning, essentially, that is a very long-term game. It's a really good point because I feel like what Naval actually teaches a lot of us is that all these things that seem like unfair magic, aka leverage, luck, are actually really curatable. and you can change your ability to have more of them as opposed to be a victim of the world around you and so like luck can be manufactured in effect in particular if you're young and i feel like it's it's hard to um it's hard to appreciate that what how lucky some people are getting is actually 20 years of like carefully grown seeds and reputation and relationships and effort and like you shouldn't expect to get as lucky as somebody that has created that much surface area and covered that much ground.

27:42But you can sort of match their pace or outpace them by being thoughtful about your surface area. What would Naval say about how to become luckier? How could you become luckier? I think the path towards luck is you can follow those things up. You can sort of go from one level to another, you can do luck through persistence and effort that then becomes a little bit more of luck through, or I have a feel for the dynamics. And if you really, if you gain enough information through the persistence and reputation through the persistent luck, you'll have better information on where the luck might be heading and you can sort of meet it there and position yourself for it.

28:27And if you do that enough times over time, like you become the only person who can do it. So if we use the real estate example that he uses for leverage and just like take that as like, you know, if you're a, if you're starting off as a general contractor or handyman, like you don't just wait around for jobs, you go knock on doors. If you knock on doors and do a great job, you'll start working more and more and get higher and higher quality referrals. If you are doing a bunch of work in one particular neighborhood, you start to learn like maybe that neighborhood is up and coming and a new development is going to move in and then you can you can buy land ahead of the development or you can invest in the person who's coming in to like renovate this neighborhood and if you do that a few times then you become you know the person who builds the developments in the city you've done the last five they've all been successful and so of course the sixth development is going to like pick up the phone and call you directly and you don't even have to pitch anybody right um and i bet you if you go through like all of the a-list of hollywood right now you can map their career phases to those different forms of luck you know there's people that like when you need a specific type of actor or character you're like well christopher walkens the the only person who can do that role that's who everybody fills that gap with if you need a certain kind of movie directed like and you want it to be top tier it's going to be one of 10 people and those people had to all like grind and then iterate and position themselves.

29:53And then they became like this singular person who is like, gets the phone call. Like is Christopher Nolan lucky when he gets the next phone call or has he like spent his entire career becoming the person? That's so true. And I feel like that's true in everything in life. It's like a mixture of like data collection that you do and then data collection that other people do on you. And like when those two things come together, you get luckier. And so in the beginning, all you can do is like collect as much data and do as much action as possible, which would be like play a lot of poker hands in the beginning and really learn what the cards mean and what the percentage likelihood is.

30:24And, oh, most people that tell right there they did on their face is actually a thing. And, oh, no, it's a really bad probability if I play that hand. So I probably shouldn't play that hand over time. And I need to put more chips in because if I don't, it turns out over time, actually taking too little risk isn't good. And so I think most people in life don't think about life as like a series of hands or a series of like data collection points. But that is all that it is. So whatever your life is today is really a reflection of how many hands have you paid attention to, looked at the data on, and then iterated on.

30:57And that's it. Yeah. I was a little impatient early in my career, and I'm not advocating for patience or slowness or anything. But my perspective now in my 30s is that the first 20 years of your career is an audition for the second 20 years of your career. And like, if you look at Walter Isaacson, right? Like, did he get lucky when Steve Jobs called him? He was like, hey, I've got a few good years left. Like, I want you to write my biography. It's because Isaacson spent the first 20 years of his career writing, permissionlessly writing biographies of da Vinci and Einstein, like great figures, but they were historical.

31:34Anybody could have written those. He didn't have unique special access necessarily. but by doing that work he became the person who got that call and by doing Steve Jobs's biography he got the Elon Musk biography and so like you know these are permissionless books I've spent the first 20 years of my career like building permissionless curations of public material and like I don't know what's going to happen in the second half of my career but I imagine that it will look like luck and it's only because people have been reading my books for 20 years and have a respect for what they have done that I will get opportunities that you know no other author will have had.

32:08Such a good point. What does Naval say about, or, and I don't know if he does, but this, I have a recency bias. Lately, I've noticed a lot of creative people saying they don't do creative free work. Meaning like they'll want to apply for a job and not want to do a project. And at our company, one of the rules is like, we have to see your work because resumes and history has so little correlation to good and a fit. There's almost no correlation. And it used to be that if you worked at some of these big companies, you're like, there's a pretty high indicator that you might continue to have like a certain output or level.

32:41And since then, we've realized, in fact, sometimes those are the worst people to hire. And now you almost have to talk me out of if you went to Harvard and worked at Google, why you should work here. And so now we make everybody do a creative project. And I don't like to pay people for it, not because of the expense. I don't like to pay people because I want to know how they feel about doing work with us? Are they really interested or are they merely kind of curious? Because if they're kind of curious, there are many companies to go be curious at, but it's not this one. And so I'm curious, you've done so much free work throughout your career, both writing and collating things and doing lots of stuff on the internet.

33:24One, how do you feel about doing free work in order to get eventual super highly paid work? And two, is there anything Naval says about that? I'm very happy to do free work that I assigned myself. Um, I don't know if I have the same relationship to like free work that somebody else wants me to do for them. Uh, if it's along my natural curiosity, maybe, but, um, like getting kind of a natural independence is like when you're doing things for their own sake, you do them at a different level. Um, but if I want to really wanted a job at a company, absolutely. I feel like I would do a project to get a job for sure.

33:54Um, I don't know. It's, I mean, Naval is a fan of like doing things for their own sake. Um, and he has an interesting story. He tells that I, I think about all the time where he's like the most lucrative year of my career where I created the most value. I didn't think I was working. I told everybody I was retired and I just kind of like cleared my calendar and did what I wanted and followed my curiosity. And like, in retrospect, that was outrageously productive and I didn't know it and I didn't intend it. I didn't trick myself into it. I just followed my curiosity and it all worked out. So I think, you know, like many things, uh, sometimes rewards our best pursuit indirectly.

34:33And so like this book is excellent. If people see excellence in it is not because like somebody told me to make it great. It's because I cared about it enough to invest a lot in making it great, um, of my own choice and volition. Like I'm not a perfectionist in any other area of my life, but like when it comes to putting out a book with my name on it that I think, you know, might make a difference in people's lives. I'm like utterly meticulous. Naval has a line I loved, which is desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Yeah. What a line. What does that mean?

35:10And how do you integrate that into your life or how did you see him do it? Yeah. He, he's his happiness arc is so interesting right so he had like achieved all this incredible material success he built successful companies he'd been an incredible investor he was well known in Silicon Valley and he sort of looked around and was like I all the things that I thought would make me happy do not I have them and they do not seem to have made me happy so maybe I need to just make a study of happiness and like somebody said to him if you're so smart why aren't you happy and is like, oh, I can apply my intelligence to this problem and I can break it down.

35:44And so he started reading, you know, like the most of the happiness canon is kind of this Eastern Buddhism and things like that. So desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy and to get what you want. It's a very, it's a modern phrasing of a Buddhist idea that like, you know, type A business people like us sort of immediately identify with. And it identifies like if you set yourself a goal, which we are all doing constantly, unconsciously, probably hundreds of times a day, especially if you're on social media, Instagram in particular, seems like this bottomless well of desire creation.

36:20Of course, you're going to be unhappy. And if you can learn the discipline of having few desires carefully chosen, his words, that you spend a lot more time being content, being happy, not feeling lesser, not waiting for some future state where you have something that you don't yet have, which is like a very natural human tendency. But you can make just as much progress and maybe more by just like not holding a strong burning desire that is like making you unhappy every minute until you've achieved something. Naval also talks about getting a partnership and what it means to be in like partnership.

36:55What would Naval say is important in choosing your partner? Naval Walt cites the great Buffett as like using the energy, uh, energy plus intelligence plus integrity as like the formula for a successful partner and somebody that you want to work with or invest in. Um, I mean, Munger and Buffett are like the partnership that everybody aspires to, right? Like great friends, phone call every day, you know, 60 year zero fight partnership. Um, and Buffett is track record is investing in CEOs and abdicating entirely to them. And so like, you gotta be a really good people picker when that's your strategy.

37:33Um, and so I think that's, you know, a perfectly great formula to, to emulate. I can't remember if it's Munger or Buffett that says, um, when you get a dog, uh, don't do the bargain for it. And, uh, and so I like that in partnerships too, it's the same thing, you know, don't hire a CEO and then do the CEO in the forum. Yeah. Um, I think that makes a lot of sense. what about um it's interesting because we've talked about happiness with elon musk we've talked about happiness with naval and sort of that neither of them really seem to aspire much to raw happiness um do you think that success and happiness go together would naval say that they go together do you believe that they go together i think they go together for some people i think some people um there's a balance of like for some people, it's easier to achieve your material desires.

38:25And for some people, it's easier to lower them or dismiss them. And Naval's got a great line. It's maybe like the ultimate Naval line, which is the true test of intelligence is whether you get what you want out of life. And if what Elon wants out of life is to be the maximum contributor to the flourishing of humanity and human progress, no matter what the cost or risk, then he's getting what he wants out of life. and if somebody just wants like as much peace as possible then like they should go live in a monastery and like yield any desires uh to affect the material world and or have deep relationships and and maybe they have an incredible subjective experience and most people will end up somewhere in between right um but as long as you're at peace with the trade-offs that you're making and you're not trying to you know fit five impossible things to coexist into one life I think, you know, your formula for happiness and getting what you want out of life is going to be uniquely yours.

39:23What are the lessons that you keep going back to from Naval? Like you've studied him for years and now interacted with him for probably like a decade plus. Like, what do you go back to? I think that test of what you want out of life is a good one. um i i first felt drawn to naval in the same way i felt drawn to munger because i such a high percentage of what they said was both surprising and just like immediately like felt correct to me when like 90 99 percent of what you hear somebody say is like huh nailed it um in a way that felt right to me like they're not going to be everybody's heroes but they they spoke to me for some reason um and naval takes all of munger and sort of puts him in a like progressive technological setting that's like exciting and futuristic and um more growth oriented and i like the combination of those very much um but naval also lives like a quite a balanced and well-rounded life like i'm more of a munger guy than a buffet guy because munger is kind of a polymath and buffet is like maniacally focused on just like berkshire and compounding his capital but munger is many different interests and many different curiosities has gone down many rabbit holes and live many lives in the same way that naval does he's founder of angel list and investor in a ton of companies and started many companies and is intellectually well-rounded and well-read and curious and plays around with ideas and applies them in many different ways and um you know has found a way to find like both peace and happiness and success like material success kind of all at the same time and material success in a way that is like meaningful to him not externally or image driven i think in my my view which is like certainly what i aspire to because those are uh those are winnable games like the inner scorecard is a winnable game you can set the goalposts and achieve them and you can make sure that like you're always happy with where you are um that you're not trying to like fill this bottomless bucket with like something someone else's perception you have no hope of control.

41:28Naval has a line that I love that's very jarring about how a salary is like the most addictive form of heroin, something to that degree. It's a Taleb quote. The three most addictive substances are these heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary. And that push to get you out of the comfort zone, right? Like Taleb's morality is all around like, are you a risk take care are you exposed to the upside or downside of your own behavior um or are you kind of like a lamb in the paddock and you know like many things nabal finds like a pithy kind of powerful way to phrase it but it's a it's a nice way to just kind of like give you a nudge um towards your authentic self and to like feel the rush and the risk of being feeling your skin in the game and feeling exposed to the upside and like being a little more authentically you and on life's adventure.

42:27Yes. It's, you know, I think a lot of people live life like they're watching the football game and they've never stepped foot on the turf. And that to me is sort of sad because the difference between feeling what a hit feels like and, you know, smelling the grass and, you know, having that actual adrenaline that comes up at the beginning of it versus the small percentage that you feel when you watch somebody else do it is, you know, it's a world away. Yeah. And so I do think a lot of what I've learned from Naval, at least, is how do you get a little closer to the action? Because like that, that is the only way, one, you get leverage, but two, it's the only way that you can actually feel like the full human experience in many ways.

43:11And he talks about, I don't agree with him on all of it, but I do like, I like that he pushes. Like there's, he talks about how, you know, you'll never get rich renting your time. Yeah. And I actually don't agree with that. I mean, mathematically, it's not true. Like Sheryl Sandberg, quite rich, always been an employee. But also she was an employee at the level where she had massive equity upside, right? Well, I think that is the part that gets waylaid in some of this. Like is a belief that you can't be an employee without massive upside. and you can rent. I mean, she does typically, she does actually, you know, quantifiably rent her time.

43:51She has paid a salary, right? But her upside probably comes all from equity warrants, options, et cetera. Well, so maybe explain that. Like, that would be an interesting question, which would be something like, can you get really rich on a nine to five? Can you get really rich renting your time or on salary? Maybe the nuance is that you need asymmetric upside, Right. And so one of them, of all, sort of directions in one of the chapters in the book is like build or buy equity in a business. Like you need equity upside. You need asymmetric exposure. And there are many jobs. There's many ways to get that.

44:27There are people who get reasonably rich, who become millionaires, who work nine to fives their whole lives, but they're really diligent savers and investors. And they max out their 401k and they live on half their salary. And this is like the fire movement. Right. Their way of getting equity is just like buying the index with half their salary and living below their means. That's a way to get equity. You probably won't become a billionaire on$100 ,000 a year and a 50 % savings rate and equity, but you will almost certainly become a millionaire if you're diligent about it over a 50-year time period.

44:59If you ascend to, if you're climbing the corporate ladder, there are career paths where your salary will go up, but you'll still never get equity exposure. I feel like doctors are the famous example of this, right? Like we all know cash poor doctors who are like making 700 grand a year, spending 700 grand a year. They never have equity. They never bother to figure out the game and they have no retirement plan or they have a, you know, they never build up a net worth because they're just like their lifestyle consumes everything that they earn and they have no equity. But in the case of CEOs, CFOs, C-suite, VPN above, you just want asymmetric exposure.

45:39If you believe in the company that you're working at, you want part of your package to be equity so that you get... Even salespeople have asymmetric exposure. They have non-linear earning potential. But if you ever want to be truly passive and live off the capital you need to start figuring out the uh the equity game it's so true nivall has a quote where he says the real winners are the ones who step out of the game entirely who don't even play the game who rise above it these are the people who have such internal mental and self control and self-awareness they need nothing from anybody else what does he mean by that i think this is the very ultimate inner scorecard right um so much of what people are driven to do is driven by this like mimetic desire and they're always sort of moving the goalposts on themselves

46:30um you have to know why you're playing the game um like this is a this is like the enlightenment path right and there's there's all kinds of books that he recommends and conversations that he's had with with people but if you like um study those sort of enlightened people they're just like removed from it um and some people feel compelled they can't remove themselves from the game until they've won the game and not everybody's like that some people can be like this this is a all a hallucination i'm just gonna remove myself um but some people need to win the game and then look around and be like oh there's nothing else here um so i can escape the game um but there are so many games that you can spend your whole life playing them and just kind of leap from one to the other and always feel you know behind or pressured or like driven and uh if you know where the road ends like what i took from naval reading this you know building this book when i was like 30 is like oh if you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue and like right all the way to like winning the game finally achieving all these things that you hope to the whole time you have the same epiphany that you can have right now which is that like none of it matters it's all made up you don't even exist none of this exists we're all in a hilarious absurd dream state so don't take it all so fucking seriously you can get the things that you want or you can choose not to want them or you can um you can be almost you can probably be equally effective by just like uh by having emotional detachment rather than having like being all in all consumed emotionally like wringing yourself out every day feeling massive stress about everything that you're doing and if you know that that's the eventual end state is like do i need to wait until i'm 80 and i've lived a whole life of mistakes before like embodying that epiphany or can you just be like i can keep playing the game because it's a fun game and we're here and why not like yeah it's a fun dream and that it kind of doesn't even have to stop you from your speed like i don't know about you but when i was younger i used to think well if i don't care the most and if I don't get emotional if I don't get upset then I'm not gonna win because that's what winning takes but I realized actually having like a pretty big step back from like that pain in your stomach or that anxiety in your heart when something happens and being able to look at it rationally is a complete step function change in your decision making capability because you're not living in flight or fight and your longevity in the game and your energy level within it and your ability to sort out like what is, what matters and what doesn't.

49:13Yeah. Because otherwise you just, you get adrenal fatigue. You're just, you get burnt out, you have decision fatigue. You know, it's interesting. I had a member of my team and, you know, he was really good. And, you know, in his words, he burnt himself out. And so I was like, well, let's talk about that. And, and he said, well, you know, I just don't know that I want to keep doing this and I've got all these things. And I go, well, do you need to hire somebody? Like, do you think that that is a truth that you always have to stay in said role doing the exact same thing continuously? And then, yeah, surely if you look down into the future, 10 years down the road, you probably think that doesn't look like a very fun road to go on.

49:52So why would you? And, uh, and what I found was a lot of people that job hop or, um, you know, can't figure out what to do next or when they jump around, you know, they, they have a great sprint for like two years and they're kind of not sure, it's like wherever you go, there you are. And so, you know, you can change your location and even change your title. But if you are a people pleaser and you stay well, and if you don't know how to delegate and you never figure it out, it's really problematic because you can, you build like this like constraint that isn't even there. And so some of the stuff I think that he at least teaches me is, yeah, it's about what do you want or not want, but also like even figuring out what is possible or not.

50:31And where do you have these fake constraints that you don't even realize. Back to the Elon algorithm is like the question of requirements and having like, how do you give your team members agency over their environment? It's like, I love this company, but like this role is now breaking me. You know, what do we need to change in order to unlock this and continue it and help the energy sort of proceed? And like, of course, there's many solutions to that. What questions do you ask yourself when you're in that position. Because I think part of this is like self-realization with Naval, right? So Naval would like, you would even have to first recognize in yourself, I feel this way.

51:08I need to name it. I need to figure out why. Like how would you, if you were struggling right now and felt trapped or lost and not know what to do next, what have you learned? To me, the most universal thing and the most, the thing that I come back to most often here is like thoughtful desire management. um i've i've now noticed when a new desire enters my mind and i have to like triage it uh and i've learned to like you know i used to i used to like watch stand-up comedy and half of my experience of watching stand-up comedy would be like i want to be a stand-up comedian i fucking love stand-up comedy there's a version of me that should be a famous stand-up comedian like and i i've just totally dispelled that desire in my life i still love it i still respect it as a medium i think it's incredible and i don't know if it's age or just awful desire management whatever but it's like very clear to me now that i do not want to pay the price to become i don't want the lifestyle i don't want all the things like you know the price tag is too big it's a fun thing to fantasize about and now that's kind of like i've just completely dispelled that desire um and that's there are a thousand examples like that and i bet you know open instagram or twitter for five minutes and you will feel a new desire welling up in you.

52:22You just walk outside and a new desire will well up in you. And big or small, learning to identify that and say, do I really want that? Is that a meaningful desire? Is that a long-term desire? Is it worth changing the course that I'm on? What would I sacrifice? Do I want that thing enough to pay the price tag for it? Almost always the answer is no. And the quicker you can close that loop, and the fewer of those that exist in your head at any given time, the happier you are on a minute to minute basis. So how do you do that? Do you literally go, okay, I feel a desire. So like I hear in my head, I want that.

52:57So I recognize that. And then I think what would be the prices that come with that? Like, what does that thought process look like for recognizing a desire and not immediately latching onto it? Well, I mean, an example, like a friend texted me today and is like, did you hit your targets for the book launch? And I was like, I don't have targets for book launch i don't have like that is an arbitrage i'm not going to pick a number that i have like may or may not work is if i pick 10 000 copies and i sell 9 000 am i supposed to be sad for how long like is that a useful desire or not a useful desire um it was just arbitrary so like i don't know i don't hold any desires um particularly closely and the longer the term and the more vague they are, the more helpful it is, right?

53:44Like, um, I want to have a wonderful relationship with my wife. I want my kids to have an incredible life. Am I stubborn about any of the specifics about how that needs to look? No, not really. Um, and so the version of like, you know, do I have to go to one specific place at one specific time on a vacation? No. Oh yeah, I don't know. It's just, um, there's like a loose grip over almost everything is like maybe where you end up after some practice of like triaging these desires. It's fascinating because it is very Zen in many ways, but I guess you and your career have, have been like that. Like you've done tough things, a turnaround, you know, of a company while writing books, books themselves are not easy to do in general.

54:27You've also had startups prior to that. Um, and you've felt what failures felt like. Um, so I guess maybe the last thing would be, are there quotes you turn to from Naval, this book, this period in your life that you think would be helpful to someone who's listening right now, who is a little lost maybe and doesn't know where to go next? I think the lesson that so many of us learn and have to learn many, many times is to trust yourself and your intuition, right? Like, that seems to be like the weird arcs and turns of my career, like have all sort of come back to like just trust trust that little voice a little sooner um sometimes i is that like also your experience yeah i think we're wrong a lot less often than we think we are you just talk yourself out of it yeah um that's not in every case but especially once you've developed that in the beginning i would say i was a little bit of an idiot and i thought i knew a lot probably and through most of my 20s they're kind of like dunning kruger like yeah yeah exactly small information, high conviction.

55:35Exactly. And then at some point you start to see a lot of cycles and think, oh, I've seen this before. I should just listen to it. Then when you figure out that little voice in your head is telling you something, I think then the question becomes like, what do I do with that? Because usually it'll tell you something, but it won't say, you could go bad. Like if you say like, I'm so mad at my wife, I'm going to leave her. Well, that might not be, it might just be saying there's something really wrong in my relationship. Like that's what the voice is saying. And so what does that mean? Well, maybe it means you actually lean in more, you do more things, but I think most often we just try to like shove it down, ignore it.

56:10Yeah. I mean, listening to the voice, um, allowing it to, allowing it to go long enough that you see the patterns, right? Like in that moment of, of anger, um, maybe you're not getting a clear signal. If you think that twice a day, every day for six months, maybe there is something really, you know, really wrong with the relationship, but in another, like, after you listen, you need courage. Like a lot of people hear the voice and the choice is either to reply, repress it or to act on it over a certain amount of time. And I think the people that end up the most unhappy, um, have repressed so much because they never summoned the courage.

56:48And so they're like deeply aware of what it is, um, that they, they truly want to be doing or feel like they could be doing and just never took that next leap. You know, there's, I think it's a Winston Churchill quote, like courage is every virtue at its highest form. And so like you can understand all the virtues, but if you don't have the courage to, to act on them when it's difficult, when everything else is sort of going against them, like they have no, they have no form. If we were going to get really tactical with it and somebody wanted to hone their desire plus their courage, what would you tell somebody listening right now?

57:23How do you get more courage? And how do you listen to that little voice inside of your head more often? This is not an avalism, but I know people who swear by this, which is just like a morning brain dump on paper. The process of externalizing these thoughts somehow helps you evaluate them and it forces you to be honest. And so if you see what sounds like absolute certain reality in your head of like, I have to be this or become this or get this, or I will never be happy. As soon as you write it down, you're like, that's stupid. But if you just live with it in your head the whole time, you're like, you could feel your body responding to it.

58:08And that, that practice of externalizing it just helps you observe it rationally. rationally. And it's a shortcut to doing that. Meditation is the same way. It helps you separate sort of the evaluator, like the observed from the observant, like see your own thoughts from above, but writing it is a shortcut to doing it. And that's a helpful method. And by the same token, like doing that over time, like you can only write, I hate this job. I want to quit so many times before you're like, oh my God, you know, you will respond to observing that over time. Um, you know, whatever it is, like if you stay present with it and the courage, I think will eventually sort of culminate and you will manifest that in some ways.

58:55That's so true. That's so true. Um, I loved this book. It was one, it was my, obviously my first book I read of yours. I read it years ago. I come back to it often. Thank you for writing this and so many others. So we get to learn from the great. Thank you for having me. It's been, uh, it's been really fun to sort of co-evolve with you and see like you are living some of the principles in this book at an extremely high level and it's really um it's really awesome like if you don't for people that don't understand sort of the journey that you've gone on i think like the principles here that are making you successful are above like leverage and equity and compounding are like uh you took this blueprint and ran with it and built something i definitely did we've known each other a long time now now that i think about it how many years do you think uh this book this came out in 2020 so yeah well definitely before that so eight ten years maybe um it was like it was like early twitter x you know i was like we were in a like twitter like support group together where we were like you you assembled this like team of people to help each other like it was like support group dude it was like a sprint 100k and like you made it in three months and now you're at what i think 700k 700k yeah unbelievable um it's true well that is another thing that i think you know both the leaders we've talked about do a really good job of and i've tried to learn from is like not just like it's a big world pull along other people like why do we have to shove other people down i mean i pretty much never ever talk shit on the internet to an individual because i just find that like it's so much more beneficial to like celebrate friends celebrate wins you know try to win more myself and then get in other groups where other winners already are you know and i learned i think that group most of those people in there probably besides you and i were bigger than us on the internet um and now probably aren't um because like i think we were connectors and you're like a super connector you know with lots of companies and people on the internet so that's another lesson i've learned so we got to sit at home and write and like you're you're out there running a media empire well but that's what i like to do i like to run companies i like to sit home and write where you sound right no and you definitely know who you are like i think it's a good it's it's a very good point that like this makes me incredibly happy what i do yeah so i consider myself a happy builder even though it's really hard and uh and it my happy looks totally different than yours but we both like kept listening to that little desire and playing into it more and more and more and sort of obsessing on it.

1:01:29So like people are going to have a hard time beating you at writing these. People are going to have a hard time beating me at building media companies because it's just what I do for fun. People are incredibly unique. And like the further you go in life, the more unique you should become. You know, like if you're not weird, how do you know you're free? Oh yeah. One of our main 13 principles is bring your weird. It's better than boring. Yeah. So like that is so true. All right. You're the male. Thank you. Thank you.

1:01:57you