Transcript
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:00)
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. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy and to get what you want. If you can learn the discipline of having few desires carefully chosen, you spend a lot more time being content being happy, not holding a strong, burning desire that is like making you unhappy every minute until you've achieved something.
Cody (0:20)
This episode is an important step back from a world that increasingly wants to tell you what to do, when to do it, and how to do it. We're bringing on my friend Eric Jorgensen, one of the best writers of our time on brilliant billionaires and philosophers like Naval Ravikant. He spent the last 10 years studying him. Now we're gonna steal his homework. Naval has a line that's very jarring about how a salary is like the most addictive form of heroin.
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:43)
The three most addictive substances he's heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary like that push to get you out of the comfort zone. Are you a risk taker? Are you exposed? Or are you kind of like a lamb in the paddock?
Cody (0:55)
Can you get really rich on a 9 to 5?
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (0:57)
What I took from Naval building this book when I was like, 30 is like you grind and beat yourself up and have this brutal internal monologue all the way to, like, winning the game. Give the same epiphany that you can have right now, which is that, like, none of it matters.
Cody (1:13)
One of my favorite quotes from Naval is, forget rich versus poor, white collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus unleveraged. What does that mean?
Patrick O'Shaughnessy (1:24)
Leverage is, to me, one of the most important things that Naval talks about. If you don't understand leverage, a lot of things about the world and the outcomes that you see are not going to make sense. And you're going to get, like, bitter and confused and feel like it's unlimited, unfair. But it's actually just the normal workings of leverage. And so, as Naval explains it, there are many forms of leverage. The modern forms of leverage are code media and capital, zero marginal cost and uncapped and accesses this sort of global marketplace. And it's really unintuitive. Like, we're not programmed to think that way. And so understanding that we're in the age of leverage and it totally changes, like, what businesses can be built and where your priorities are. And we're seeing unbelievable businesses get built that sort of have this understanding of leverage of those the core of them.
