being like a transplant uh like something that goes in your you know um like implant in your ear that can just play sounds automatically or a contact lens that is like in your eye or um something that is like similar to an apple watch uh you know i've seen tech that can like that is almost invisible um but it can it can be much more manipulated and so like just by moving your fingers and wearing a bracelet you can like have a full keyboard and because it looks at like the nerves that's on your in your forearms and sees what's moving and it can measure that and so the tech is just getting smaller and smaller and closer and closer to our bodies wow okay beautiful like um that's some black mirror like right there have you seen black mirror oh yeah yeah there's nothing spooky um but it's like truth enough bass that you're kind of like uh yeah you can see that happening yeah yeah and i think you know black mirror i mean for all the listeners


you know black mirror i mean for all the listeners who've not checked it out please go check it out especially if you're someone who's business oriented it just open up your mind in terms of possibilities but here's what i love about black mirror that it highlights the possible negative aspects of what can happen due to the positives and um someone else who does that is this author called yuval noah harari the guy who wrote sapiens he always highlights the negative aspect of the positives as well uh and his third book is the one i started reading first which is called 21 lessons for the 21st century and he spoke about nanobots he said that okay beyond what eric just spoke about in terms of contact lenses and airports the next stage after that probably in the 2030s or the 2040s will be these tiny robots that actually can be in your bloodstream and they can help fight disease they can spot uh even like the smallest cancer cells when they begin to form like basically cancer is


when they begin to form like basically cancer is like a multiplication of cells that you don't want multiplied so when that nanobot is in your body it will spot cancer cells multiplying and it will destroy those first few cells so that they're not able to multiply or you know it can just track all kinds of data within your body everything from your zinc levels to your vitamin levels to your minerals everything possible and therefore create like a chart and predict how healthy you are what possible diseases you're prone to is there anything related to nanobots that you're familiar with that's happening in silicon valley right now uh i mean the one i can't believe i didn't think of for my first set of examples is neurolink that elon musk is working on and so that is like either nanobots or technology in your actual like neurons in your brain that turns your brain a little bit more into something programmable or affectable or controllable and there's an awesome um series called uh it


and there's an awesome um series called uh it starts with nexus um by this futuristic ramaznam it's like a sci-fi series it reads like a movie it's an awesome awesome book but it's all it's like maybe 2040s and 2050s based on the neural link technology and things before neurolink was even founded i mean i wrote these like five or ten years ago um but it's a really cool kind of like what it becomes possible when the brain becomes programmable you know you effectively become superhuman when you can like write programs and change your responses to things become more rational become more uh tolerant of pain like tune up your reflexes like it's it's crazy and it's really fun like near future sci-fi stuff so uh eric could you explain neuralink elon musk's neural link to a four-year-old who's listening to this podcast not that there's four-year-olds listening to this podcast but uh you know what what's your simplest explanation of it yeah so turning your brain


simplest explanation of it yeah so turning your brain into programmable hardware i i think is the like um controlling like the way the way elon musk puts it is um reducing the latency between like your brain in the real world um so if you can type at 100 words a minute that is a like data transfer mode of however many megabytes per second and if you can actually like turn the brain into hardware and make it extensible so that you can automatically connect to the internet or download information faster than you can read it faster you can listen to it faster than you can um and export faster than you can type or speak all of a sudden you're like the feedback loop between what your brain can do and what the you're affecting in the world is much much tighter um and it's it's i mean crazy the implications of it are pretty uh wild i mean you get through like one or two interviews with him i'm far from an expert under a link i just think


far from an expert under a link i just think it's like a cool thing to learn about and listen to and um fantasize about i think anybody who's like close to the science would say it's still like a ways away um so i don't have to like worry about this in the near term but like in our lifetimes it's it's one of those things that elon musk likes pushing on it's like there's no reason why the physics aren't possible it's just really really really really hard and so if we just start like working on the problem um you know maybe 20 years or maybe 70 um but but we may get closer to it yeah that's why elon is such a fascinating inspiration for so many entrepreneurs all over the world he just takes on these difficult problems and says you know what let's try it let's see where it goes um you know but even with the neural link when you when you think of all the positives there's so many um uh applications of it for example


there's so many um uh applications of it for example if you want to get more disciplined in life probably there'll be some kind of app in the neural link which will help you get more disciplined or if you want to stick to a diet or if you want to become more punctual you can actually change the way you are as a person to benefit those around you and to improve your own capabilities have you seen this movie called limitless with bradley cooper yeah yeah uh it's it's so for the listeners it's basically a movie where he takes this pill which kind of expands the capabilities of his brain so he becomes smarter faster uh nicer and he just gets more done in life so within a month he becomes one of the country's top stock brokers he tries becoming the president of the movie lots lots of things happening but eric i think you were saying something about elon musk right now that's why i interrupted you uh yeah well i think it's just interesting that he


uh yeah well i think it's just interesting that he like the the mental model that he uses of like is there any reason in the physics why this isn't possible like if no then let's try it then let's at least keep working on the problem like it almost doesn't matter to him how hard it is it just matters like is it possible and if it is possible like he'll push on and he'll work on it and he'll like um you know getting to mars seems so like infinitely huge of a problem and getting hardware into our brains like seems so infinitely complicated of a problem and most people wouldn't even try it and i loved his attitude of just like why not like there's only one way to make progress like he's gonna start chipping away at it let's see what we can do yeah yeah you know um so that that's the issue with asia in general asian countries don't like people are kind of taught to aim just for stability people are taught to kind of limit their


stability people are taught to kind of limit their own thought processes but because of the internet because of globalization because of podcasts like this american mindsets and american schools of thought or international mindsets and international schools of thoughts are kind of making their way into an asian teenager's head and it kind of opens up your possibilities like when i was a teenager no one told me that you could become a content entrepreneur but then once you actually get to it you realize oh this was possible why didn't anybody just give me that little bit of hope um so i i mean that's that's kind of the intention behind this podcast as well uh and that's that's my next question to you you're someone who studied naval ravikant in detail now naval ravikant is someone who indians look up to a lot because you know when an indian sees another indian doing well on an international stage you're like hey that's that's that's a guy that's a guy that's that's the emotion


guy that's a guy that's that's the emotion uh but we will get to naval the question i want to ask you is generally in silicon valley on a very human level what kind of mentality difference do you notice compared to the rest of america because you stayed all over you grew up in detroit you're in kansas city right now but what differentiates those guys why are they why are those guys there i mean silicon valley is uh like a lot of interesting stuff going for it which is one is like the smartest and most ambitious people all around the world select to move to silicon valley right like that is almost like a credential on its own it was like did you go you know live there for a while that's less true now maybe and going forward than it was um why do you why do you say that well there's so much more that happens in like in the cloud right in the internet there's so like the information is so much more accessible the relationships are so


information is so much more accessible the relationships are so much more accessible um you know like crypto especially like in the last few years has happened very very in a very very distributed way and so some of those things like some of the frontiers are happening more and more on the internet and the you know this work is all more meritocratic you know in you know 20 years ago 10 years ago even you had to kind of go there and build a physical relationship with someone to build credibility and build trust and that's just less now you can build you know if you're checking in great code and into open source projects you know on github like you can build a reputation you can build um you can build credential on twitter or through podcasts or through blog posts in a much more real way um than you used to be able to like i don't think things are dependent on being co-located anymore now that the tools are there and now that we're used to trusting people on the internet and evaluating like proof


trusting people on the internet and evaluating like proof of work essentially like you can look somebody up online and see that they're a valuable contributor to an ecosystem or a community and start working with that person you know i know people who've co-founded companies with people they've never met in person like that is you know i never met neval like to write this book we never even talked a lot it was all email and us just kind of like seeing each other for who we were through the internet um and that so that is more true than it's ever been um i think that silicon valley culture extending um being like kind of extensible through the internet is is amazing because it it provides all of this sort of um it creates the context for innovation and ambition you know just like you're talking about this is um it's very accepting of failure you know like you can have you can fail and as long as you were faithfully executed a plan faithfully executed like with good intentions as


a plan faithfully executed like with good intentions as long as you took on a great vision with with kind of like great intentions um you're not doomed if you fail like you it is expected that over the course of a career an entrepreneur will have some wins and have some losses a developer will ship great projects and shitty projects and designers will do great work and and craft work and that's just part of aiming really high and trying to do like great huge things is that sometimes you're going to fall short sometimes you're going to miss the mark and that's part of the game in silicon valley and it's becoming part of the game on like the frontier and um an acceptable piece of innovation that you know is is a tradition and maybe uh something that wasn't as true 50 years ago or wasn't widely accepted but the returns of that are getting more and more obvious and so we're seeing more and more of it um and i love like you know what you're doing what we're doing


like you know what you're doing what we're doing here to kind of help share that message because i think it's really easy to to um miss that and to miss the opportunities because of that like the cost of downtown the downside of failure is much lower and the cost of or the upside of winning is much higher you know than it has ever been and that's just going to keep being more true i think as the leverage gets longer and as markets get bigger for all of these things right you said something super interesting uh right now about twitter and you said that how you connected with naval over the internet um you know how does silicon valley look at twitter and linkedin do they actually scan people's profiles and say that okay you know this is someone i can work with or this is someone i vibe with so i mean because i'll tell you why the the the image that indians have about twitter is that it's extremely political extremely right-wing versus left-wing and that's why people stay away from


versus left-wing and that's why people stay away from it and i'm sure that there's a section of americans as well who think the same way that oh no twitter was too political so i'm not going to be on it but then there's this whole entrepreneurial side of twitter with everyone who's following naval people like yourself following people like you know like i don't know all these like thousands and thousands of self-help um and amazing self-help accounts not those cliched ones there's there's gold on twitter and i feel people don't utilize it enough so how how is twitter and linkedin looked at in that world yeah i mean twitter is um twitter is huge uh it has been for me in my career personally i think i think any platform can work for you if you if it is a fit for who you are and the kind of content that you want to produce you know i'm not an instagram guy i'm a twitter guy and that has worked for me some people are instagram people or facebook people


for me some people are instagram people or facebook people or linkedin people and that works for them and you can build a community on any platform um i think twitter has has political pieces but it's also like an incredibly huge and diverse platform and then millions of people sharing their own expertise and it takes work to build the twitter that you want right like there is not one twitter there's there's one twitter for each of us and we create the kind of feed that we want um and we have to be very deliberate about choosing the people and the voices and the information that we want as our inputs because you can't trust your inputs eventually like you become those inputs and you you have to kind of um you end up losing trust of your own judgment and losing sight of who you want to be and so these like you have all these algorithms around you like the twitter and facebook and youtube and like if you don't push back against what they're trying to push on you like you've got to work


trying to push on you like you've got to work really hard to curate those inputs and to be sure that you're choosing the right voices to let in your head because that becomes who you are you know like 100 you're referencing social dilemma here right like the whole social dilemma concept yeah and you got three million followers and every one of them has like opted in subscribers on youtube i don't even know what you are on the other platforms like every one of them has opted into choosing like your curation and your taste and they trust you to bring them people and insights and wisdom from you know wherever you can find it and that's huge in the same way like people who want to build a great twitter for themselves and have these like really valuable inflows of information like it can be a huge tool but you have to put in work to curate it and teach it what you want and find great people and build relationships off of them right um you know that so much good


of them right um you know that so much good has come from for me from there um but it's also you know i spend a lot of time on it i almost can't help but spend time on it um but but that is like something i enjoy doing and uh i've benefited from it it's made me a lot of who i am yeah i'd i'd like to uh also mention that it's probably a precursor to neuralink in many ways twitter just your twitter feed you can you can become the people that you follow and the thing is i really like that you highlighted the fact that you need to be a dynamic user of twitter in terms of you need to actively follow and unfollow people and shape up your own mind through the people that you're following and unfollowing that's like a fantastic insight and that applies to every single social media platform um yeah we're also seeing like just generally with social media in india um so i'm 27 born in 93 i speak to people who are born


born in 93 i speak to people who are born in like 97 or 99 and they're extremely different from what i was when i was that age i speak to people born in 2003 and they're even more different and in in in some bad ways but mostly good ways and the good news is that they're they're primarily way smarter like they're way smarter way more aware of the world um and you know that what that means is that content creators who don't reinvent uh and this could be content creators on twitter it could be youtube it could be instagram whatever rapidly fade away the game of content is very much like an athlete's career where you know that there's going to be a shelf life and unless you add a three-point shot unless you learn how to rebound unless you know at every like how i keep referencing lebron james on this podcast every year he adds something to his game even in year 17 in year 18 he learns something about what he can do to improve content is very


about what he can do to improve content is very much the same and it's not everyone's uh cup of tea to keep reinventing often so the world of content is pretty brutal but on the flip side i feel like we're heading into a much smarter world and if you are someone who can keep up with the reinvention process you can become one of those kings in that smarter world 10 years from now there's something super interesting in there i think which is i read that the size of generation gaps are actually shrinking as technology in it like the pace of technology increases and so every it used to be every 10 years like technology was different enough that the mines that it shaped were different and now it's maybe every five or every three and so like people who come up natively with you know air table and notion and rome and just start using them fluently at 16 is very different than somebody who's you know 40 who has to like relearn with high effort all these tools and put


relearn with high effort all these tools and put them on old mental maps and somebody who comes up with like bitcoin is just their native currency because they're doing business on the internet before they're doing business anywhere else and so those things are like really interesting i think young people underestimate maybe the advantages that they have by being like absolutely fluent in new technologies just by virtue of when they were born and what they've kind of learned and done already it was something i underestimated certainly when i was like you know in my teens and 20s yeah uh i mean do you do you think that these are the kids who are going to create those artificial intelligence startups and those neural links style startups and this is the kind of training that they're getting for that hyper futuristic world which will also possibly bring with it some negative aspects like black mirror like what you all know harare says so while i'm hopeful about that generation of kids i am kind of concerned as well what do you


am kind of concerned as well what do you think yeah i think technology is is always used for good and bad you know um that's something that is actually like pretty uh well explored in that nexus series i mentioned like there's good and bad uses for you know every technology that's ever been invented you know fire cooks food and it burns down buildings and you know knives are used to like make rafts and to kill people and so like i think the um almost all technology you know this is not a well considered opinion but i think almost all technology and certainly technology as a whole is like has more good uses than bad uses but it's defined you know by the people who use it um we we as long as we remain you know ethical and united as a species and aware of what we're doing to each other and the world around us like technology is a tool for for good um and people are vastly more good than they are bad um you know that said we might accidentally like


bad um you know that said we might accidentally like create some sort of apocalyptic ai event i'm not an expert on it um but if anybody's working on ai go read like ellie eiser yodkowski and just like make sure you're not gonna end the world before you you know flip the on switch or something um yeah in in terms of uh you know books about the future or books about where the world of technology is at do you have any recommendations for the listeners yeah i love reading sci-fi i mean that's um they say like sci-fi is the the proving ground for the whys of technology um and so that's you know i've been reading sci-fi since i was a kid and it's like makes it really fun to think about like what could happen what are the first and second and third order implications of what could happen um so everybody has their own taste in sci-fi i like kind of like near future stuff i love the three body problem i love nexus i like uh the baba verse


i love nexus i like uh the baba verse uh we are bob and like that whole series i just read um you know they read like movies they're just really fun like this guy becomes like an ai satellite on his own and just like it's shot out into space to go like figure it out and become self-replicating and like it's a super fun super fun kind of like easy read um yeah i mean find whatever stuff is interesting to you and like dive into it you know you can learn as much from from fiction as from non-fiction i think about leadership and technology and um you know psychology and everything that you need to beautiful uh i gotta ask you about silicon valley once again i have a couple of questions um the first question is that you know there's this misconception that you have to learn how to code in order to be a part of silicon valley and the second question i mean so is that true and the second question is uh that with remote work becoming a big


question is uh that with remote work becoming a big thing after the pandemic happening after coronavirus uh do you think it's possible for like a really smart indian designer slash coder slash entrepreneur to be a part of silicon valley while they can sit in india or anywhere in the world uh how does silicon valley on the inside look at this outward situation so i i think uh let me start with that first question and and see if i answer all of them um so i think you do not have to learn to code um but if you are detail-oriented and engineering-minded and mathematically inclined and you know uh that can be the right path um that what do you what do you mean by that like what do you mean by like could you expand a little bit on that yeah i mean great great engineers tend to be like uh detail-oriented and patient and like system thinking and like i you know that does not drive with my personality as much like i am very like get to 80 done


much like i am very like get to 80 done as quickly as i possibly can and go on to the next thing um and i'm like you know i'm i'm more oriented towards language than towards math and i have been since i was like absolutely a kid like i can do math but like i don't relish it um and so some of those things are just like don't feel like you have to learn to code in order to be a part of the valley if you have gifts that are more you know if you are a great visual designer uh if you see a better taste and have better kind of like spatial relations maybe you may make a better designer if you are great at relationships and very outgoing you get energy from people you may be better at sales um you know there are not infinite ways to be to like add value to a tech company but there are definitely more than just learn to code right um code design and sales are probably the biggest three pillars i would say um


probably the biggest three pillars i would say um but but there are many you know companies are big there's many jobs to do and and there's probably a unique job for you if you're just looking to like how can i put a label on myself and like be great at this thing and get in the door and and start working and getting paid um you know there's coding is a great one but there are there are more um on the list i would say um what was the other question oh is it possible yeah the remote work yeah remote work like absolutely i think um you know we we have been hiring like people increasingly remotely and increasingly just like merit based like doesn't matter where they are or who they are as long as they can do the job and do it well it does rely on having a portfolio of work it does rely on showing that you can do what you can you know that you can actually like have the good skills and deliver on what you say you will and


skills and deliver on what you say you will and um all of those things but but you can become a part of a community and build you know your your proof of work and show off your skills and you know i think become increasingly like a part of the you know online silicon valley community um and that's more accessible to people around the world now than it has ever been before um it just you know it takes learning where people are hanging out whether that's twitter or hacker news or you know product on whatever and just like being a part of that community and learning the the patterns and the work and the language and every community kind of has its own um set of like its own subculture right and so like learning that subculture and um showing showing your value to it um you know is a great formula for picking up jobs and getting offers and um just starting to work with people and build trust and uh you never know where that kind of stuff is going to lead so it's basically you


stuff is going to lead so it's basically you need to have some work experience like a portfolio of your work and if you have some kind of digital presence like on twitter or linkedin or reddit or whatever that would help is that what you're saying yeah and they don't have to be higher jobs i would say previously it's just you know um show that you can do what you're offering to do you know um so like if somebody i had somebody reach out to me today and was like hey i'd really love to help you you know with this project that you're talking about doing like be careful be careful saying that on this podcast but go on this is generic advice for anybody who's listening to reach out to anybody else but it's it is like if you show that you can you understand the context that you understand what you uh sort of can like you've already contributed that you already have the skills needed to contribute and that you can get there from here like that like there's


you can get there from here like that like there's plenty of people with um who the skill for them is like putting together talent with opportunities and putting all those things together like that is a huge um that is huge skill on its own but it takes someone showing initiative and showing the skill and showing that they want to contribute and have already uh but if all you can do right now is like build projects on your they don't even have to be real like you know if you want to prove that you're a designer start redesigning homepages post them somewhere publicly start tweeting about it you know or whatever your version of that is um like show show the work show the skill show the interest and and the opportunities will present themselves yeah i just got to highlight a personal story of mine here um so we we're running a media business and we're consciously always on the lookout for great hires uh last year there was this kid who basically kept landing up at our office


this kid who basically kept landing up at our office and myself and my co-founder we weren't at office uh in in at those moments where he landed up there and he wasn't from bombay he was outside he was from this place called jabalpur which is a smaller town in like central india so it's pretty far from here and he kept coming to bombay to meet us and we weren't uh you know we didn't end up meeting him so this dude he studied my life entirely my co-founder's life entirely and he created an instagram feed okay and he he listed out everything about my parents the girls i've dated my work experience um what we're doing with the podcast right now then he made sections on that instagram feed about uh each podcast he broke down each podcast he edited each video and that was his job application yeah he was a 19 year old engineering college student and my entire team sent in that page to me and i saw i saw design skills i saw editing


i saw i saw design skills i saw editing skills i saw content based skills and we got him on for an internship did fantastically well for six months he called i mean then after at this point i was talking to him on the phone i was guiding him a little bit with his content and he told me that he wanted to drop out of engineering college but since i know that he has this natural skill set in the world of content and i also know that that's translatable to the world of entrepreneurship like you can take those same skills and create an entrepreneur out of that he's he's working with us now so he left his house he ran away from his house he ran away from his parents which is a huge deal in india like we live with our parents throughout our life i live with my mom and no one does that usually he dropped out ran away and he's he's staying in my office right now we built out a room for him and he's gonna head our content


room for him and he's gonna head our content division probably five years down the line and that's that's just like yeah one one story of um you know if if you if you really want a job you gotta prove it you gotta like put it out there you've gotta show that you're capable of doing something and it makes your chances of getting that job way higher so there's a lesson in there for like the listeners yeah that's huge i mean and i would say like he didn't just show you his skills but he showed you his hustle he showed you that he put hours and hours and hours into that application that you call it right into that project to show you how much he cared about that you know that particular thing um that's that's huge it's really huge especially earlier in your career where you don't have you know you don't have much of a resume already but you can create you know you can work so hard and put so much into it and be so considerate about who


so much into it and be so considerate about who the person is that is a perfect example which is why i want to ask you about nawal why did you you know choose to write that book the almanac of naval ravikant what was your thinking behind it you know if you google your name that's the top suggestion in india at least uh it's eric jorgensen space naval so what got india and you know the things you say i mean i'm sure you've studied the guy inside out and there's this saying in the world of yoga that if you want to gain another human's traits you study that person you think about that person possibly create something related to that person and you're able to inculcate some of their traits it's not really a yogic theory it's basic uh human science like you know if you think about someone i really like lebron james i study his career inside out possibly subconsciously i apply certain things in my own business that he did when he was my


my own business that he did when he was my age or younger so i want to ask you about nawal what what about that guy fascinated you so much that you went and wrote a book on him yeah i mean i've been following of all for more than 10 years probably um and when i was you know young and trying to find my way to silicon valley that was like one of the first things i heard was like go read all paul graham and go read all of the stuff that naval is sharing on his old blog venture hacks um and so to me he was kind of like if you want to understand the value if you want to get into it like this is what you have to read um and so that's when i started following him and kept up on on twitter and listened to his talks his podcast over the years and like seen you know everything that he has shared along different stages like has been stuff that i've been interested in so you know he's he's


i've been interested in so you know he's he's like a sci-fi futurist like i'm into sci-fi and futurism like he got deep into like crypto of blockchain like that stuff is really interesting he talks about building startups and investing and kind of principles for wealth building that are generalizable talks about you know philosophy and and you know the study of happiness and finding peace and how that's as a skill like all of those things are stuff that i'm interested in for for myself i have subjects right so it was it's just as much that like he was sharing what he was interested in and i was like over and over again like man this guy gets it like he's you know 10 years ahead of like what i'm interested in and studying and so him's kind of like looking at his path and looking at the stuff that he was distilling and sharing was super interesting to me and i got a lot out of it um and so when i just kind of you know as this stuff


when i just kind of you know as this stuff kept going and kept coming kept coming he started thinking more like you know he's sharing all this amazing stuff but it's in twitter and it's in podcasts and it's just like gonna disappear in a few years like that stuff tends to have a shorter shelf life and books you know are just this medium that's been with us forever and it kind of as soon as it's in a book it feels like it's going to stick around forever and everybody knows what to do with a book and people gift books in ways that they don't you know share podcasts and things like that as often and not everybody listens to podcasts not everybody's on twitter but everybody either reads or knows what to do with a book and so getting transforming this into something that was more accessible and more permanent and more evergreen and easier to access and that they could you know flip through table of contents reference read gift share leave on your nightstand like it just felt


gift share leave on your nightstand like it just felt like the right way to kind of carry these ideas forward to make them more accessible to more people no that's that's beautiful could you give my listeners context on his story like behind like the brain what what did the guy do like as when he was a teenager when he was a college student when he was a young entrepreneur what was his life like yeah he's had an interesting life he um emigrated from delhi to uh brooklyn new york at like age nine i think um and single parent house you know his dad wasn't really around his dad's degree didn't transfer but he's like you know single mom working two jobs with him and his brother and so he kind of had a pretty independent childhood it sounds like um you know spent a lot of time in the library reading a lot of books studying had some menial jobs you know catering and washing dishes and delivery that kind of um helped the family and then as he was getting into


helped the family and then as he was getting into high school um he's clearly like very kind of naturally brilliant and he spent all this time in the library and learned a lot and said he's like passed this test to get into this relatively early high school um and once he was in that high school he got into dartmouth and started so ivy league school was a great school and started studying computer science and economics and from there you know it looked like a few adventures early in his careers like started the law firm and like didn't really like that culture and work and um started off as a software engineer um and then just kind of got more and more into tech and tried a few different things started a few companies in like uh started one in the early 2000s it was part of like the early.com boom and was um basically cheated out of it by a co-founder and that turned into a little bit of a legal battle so that was like an almost win and then a


so that was like an almost win and then a crushing loss and that turned contentious and then he became an investor um it wasn't until you know he it has some great investments but those take a long time to percolate you know invest in twitter and uber or postmates um started to fund and then started blogging through venture hacks which turned into uh angel list which has now this beautiful incredible platform that you know has investments and jobless things and like you know is the website that silicon valley takes place on basically like investments get through their jobs go through there and so there's this um kind of huge body of work now but it took you know decades of like putting pieces together and taking small steps and making small investments and um sort of building this this credibility and this reputation and um it's it's kind of incredible now to look at you know the principles that he shares and see how he's been applying them for years and years and years um but i i


for years and years and years um but i i wouldn't say it was a um an easy path um or a clear one even yeah and he's someone who's worked on his craft and if you listen to his podcast even though he did one with tim ferriss recently he spoke about two very interesting concepts one he said that his his fire comes from his process of learning uh which is what he's working towards he he earned money in order to be free and in that free time he thinks about things he learns that's why he's called the modern world's philosopher like he's he probably will go down uh in the same way that you know you look back at aristotle you look back at you know there's a bunch of indian philosophers in our culture he'll go down as one of those guys according to me because he's that hungry for for his learning process and purely in terms of wealth he said something really cool he said that i don't look for massive cash outs i just want


don't look for massive cash outs i just want to ensure that i i keep making a little bit of money as my life is progressing and that making that little bit of money teaches me formulas and i just keep reapplying and reworking those same formulas and therefore i compound and i accumulate wealth which is something that a lot of young people probably all over the world need to understand everyone's chasing that massive splash of money that massive explosion when really the game is about setting fire running away coming back setting fire again running away and chilling while you're you're running there because the goal of life isn't money it's also happiness yeah and you can't uh you know you can't dedicate an entire chapter of your life to like i'm just going to spend this 10 years only making money as a recipe for misery and in your relationships fall apart and your health falls apart and you see that like in the valley probably to a fall you know of people just overly focused on accomplishing


you know of people just overly focused on accomplishing one thing at a time in their life instead of finding balance and finding principles and finding ways to keep everything like working together well and and um make progress on wealth make progress on your relationships and keep your inner peace and keep your health and in a good spot and so finding all those things um yeah even even for somebody who's in a hit driven business like investing and startups you know exactly what you're saying he says this didn't come in one big splash this is you know a lot of chips stacking up time over time over time you know stuff like chain link is getting better at interacting like between the blockchain and the real world um and so some of those things are kind of frontier i think um that he's that he's still investing in and of course angelus is still doing like you know new and exciting things they just rolled out um rolling funds and so that kind of changes the dynamic between uh angel investors and their


of changes the dynamic between uh angel investors and their lps which changes the amount of capital available to entrepreneurs um and so there's still innovations happening like on just you know how the plumbing of the you know startup ecosystem and the investing and um you know that just keeps every year they keep getting more and more money flowing into tech startups as and we just keep seeing the market grow and more and more successes we get more and more investment and that the cycle just keeps running so eric uh i'm gonna have to ask you to explain to a four-year-old the basic concept of blockchain and cryptocurrencies how would you explain that okay forget to a four-year-old but what's your what's your simplest explanation of it to someone who doesn't understand it at all i'm totally the wrong guy for this um but i'll i'll do i'll do my best um which is the the blockchain is a mathematically secured ledger of transactions so that wouldn't that wouldn't work for a


so that wouldn't that wouldn't work for a four-year-old but basically like imagine an accounting state an accounting statement um that's public that cannot be falsified um and so all transactions back and forth you know the analogy that um naval uses for bitcoin is like imagine one perfectly impenetrable swiss bank account shared by all of humanity that has like a fixed size and so if you want to store assets in it you can store assets in it um but we are all pulling we're all giving to and pulling from the same pool and so if you need to store assets in it you have to buy an asset from somebody who already has or by the space from somebody who already has an asset in it um there's there's a i did a compilation of all sort of summaries of blockchain and crypto on the website so you can read in his own words rather than relying on my uh my imperfect recollection um for people who want to want to kind of dive into that but it


to want to kind of dive into that but it is a very interesting world um and and uh like naval takes the kind of foundations of crypto and merges it with um a lot of like the ideas from sapiens you know you all know harare that you were mentioning earlier and combines those and really looks at blockchain and crypto as a new way to organize human effort um so like at the highest level you know we use political systems to organize humans and govern we use markets to organize humans and reallocate resources and in the same way we can the blockchain can be used as the system to transact you know and organize human effort and reallocate resources um if the rules are set the blockchain can execute them and we can all operate in a without necessarily even having to trust each other or upon relationships because the blockchain like forces trust and security in those in those relationships even if people don't know each other um and so i think there's a really interesting uh vision of the world


think there's a really interesting uh vision of the world that can come from imagining what does it look like to remove the need of trusts between any transaction like you know how does it work you know those we were talking about earlier like how can remote people get access to work that they've never done before um in that is based on a relationship that they don't have like the blockchain may remove the need of that if all the blockchain is doing it's like hey you need to perform this task and if you do you'll get this reward the trust doesn't matter the you know the relationship doesn't matter like through if a blockchain sort of is extended all throughout um all of the like gifts and rewards of executing a task um you can imagine they call them like uh decentralized autonomous organizations and it's just like views the firm a company as a nexus of contracts and those contracts can be executed through a blockchain automatically in a trustless way and all of the independent kind of parties that


and all of the independent kind of parties that plug into a company can just like opt in or out of any particular task or any particular job or role or responsibility um continuously completely fluidly in a perfectly liquid way and that's a really interesting you know we're aways from that but it's a really interesting vision for the world and as you think through the second and third order effects of that it's um it's pretty incredible so a human being earns money or does things in this world primarily to take care of his family and live a happy life so from that perspective how does the concept of cryptocurrencies change your existence as a basic human being like how will it change an average person's life in nigeria or new zealand or latvia you know like how will it just change a normal person's life yeah i think the the cryptocurrency um sort of wave can really reduce the differences between uh people living in different countries like political systems and borders uh become much less important um because countries aren't


uh become much less important um because countries aren't as insular in how they do business and business and relationships are less dependent on who is the nearest and so the world becomes much more flat um with like a cryptocurrency and blockchain driven world individual currencies individual governments become less powerful and the world becomes much more of a meritocracy so the best person for a particular job it's easier for them to find it it's easier for them to get it it's easier for them to get paid doing it rather than you know some of the challenges of international business today like are going to be dramatically reduced as cryptocurrency makes it easier and just kind of creates one um one whole lot of humanity online it makes it easier for us to cooperate basically it's a new form of human cooperation that transcends governments um and just makes markets significantly more efficient and more um reduces some of the friction that comes with uh the need for trust and the need for a pre-existing relationship


need for trust and the need for a pre-existing relationship so the effective answer is that it takes power away from the government and gives power to the people who are doing the transactions the businessmen or the shopkeepers or whatever yeah it increases liquidity in in the global labor market i think which means that every individual is going to have more jobs available to them at any given time right more opportunities um it's much more of a meritocracy um which means the returns for being the best at what you do or even great at what you do are much higher and it matters less where you are or who you are or how old you are um it matters much more like how good you are at a certain thing and how important that thing is that you are good at right which is possibly why governments might be against the use of cryptocurrencies going forward because they might realize that oh we're not we're losing power to like these tech people or these entrepreneurs and might create some roadblocks in the past of


and might create some roadblocks in the past of cryptocurrencies yeah i imagine it'll make it harder to collect taxes it'll make it harder to keep to retain citizens if a government is not if a citizen is not happy with the government it'll make it easier for them to like i'm just going to put on my assets in in like the blockchain somewhere in bitcoin and i'm going to get over a border and i'm going to collect them again and um it'll be much easier to transfer between countries which means countries will have to compete for the best citizens much more maybe much more effectively than they do now right you know so say in the year 1999 no one thought that within 20 years we're going to have a television a bank uh a photo album a camera every all of that and much more inside one small device that can fit in your pocket so 1999 that was the perspective 2019 that perspective was oh this happened this is what our life is like now so i feel


is what our life is like now so i feel like in the human story especially as we're moving forward there's gonna be these massive technological advancements because of which the human experience suddenly becomes way different than it was even five ten years ago and this is probably that next jump where because of remote work becoming a possibility because of what naval ravikant said about code and content of the future so if you're capable of creating code or content you'll be all right financially going forward you know uh these are the new skills required of the world and possibly cryptocurrencies uh will be the form of payment will be the new gold in many ways uh is that is that fair to say that probably by 2040 we're gonna be living in a very different world where i don't look at you and i say okay you're an american or someone so chinese or so-and-so is ethiopian i just say okay you're a human you need me to do this you'll pay me through crypto i'll do the service for


pay me through crypto i'll do the service for you extremely well and then we'll work together long term based on you giving me my salary and cryptocurrencies or or vice versa yeah i think that's i think that's a very reasonable vision for especially for the tech world right like this is not going to be true universally you know if you're a contractor and your job is to build buildings it's going to be much harder for you to kind of transition into like a digital world but for the people who living most of their lives usually their digital relationships and digital work you know they just need a laptop and they can be anywhere in the world and you know have their whole life with them and everything that they need to perform their craft and do their business um that's not gonna be true for everybody but it's gonna be increasingly um increasingly true for the digital you know the people who kind of live digitally um and and those lives may diverge much more quickly than people who


lives may diverge much more quickly than people who are you know doing a job or responsibilities that fix them to a certain place or you know the physical world or the governmental world so for some people change will happen radically and quickly and for others you know it may not happen at all or it'll only sort of tangentially affect their lives right uh in fact in 21 lessons for the 21st century you are noah hirari says something beautiful he says that borders like a country's borders are a very new concept for mankind these things didn't exist earlier everything was pretty much a bunch of similar people in one area and we call ourselves indians or we call ourselves japanese or whatever but borders as a concept is a very he he actually i think in a part of the book he kind of looked down on the concept of borders he said that probably for this 200 300 year phase of human history borders have become really important but going forward borders are also going to disappear


but going forward borders are also going to disappear again and i do feel that cryptocurrencies are a massive part of that change that's going to happen he also had a whole chapter on patriot autism where he said that patriotism is basically a tool used by governing bodies to control mass populations and mass thought processes now if i say that on a podcast i'm sure i'm going to get hate from people saying are you saying you're not patriotic no i love my culture i love india i love what india has given me but it's just a nice concept to think of you know that patriotism is a way for governments to tell you oh you're not thinking this way that means you're a bad japanese person or you're a bad ethiopian or you're a bad nigerian or you're a bad indian or a bad american so it's just some fun concepts to think of and i feel like that's why it's also important to read books because it just opens up


also important to read books because it just opens up your mind in ways that you didn't expect yeah noel has a helpful kind of tool for that where he says um you should be suspect of any uh beliefs that you got in a package so if it comes with you know you're an american you're supposed to believe you know one two three you're catholic you're supposed to believe one two three you know you're a buddhist you're supposed to believe one two three like anything that someone is handing you a bundle like you've got to learn to unbundle those and select the beliefs that maybe serve you um and you know i think like the government certainly wants us to think and act in certain ways that makes us easy to govern and good citizens but it's also like our culture sets that i don't think that it's like a puppet master thing so much as like there are cultural norms that we are all held to and by our community and the people around us because we


by our community and the people around us because we need to rely on each other we need to have a set of you know cooperation rules and expectations so that we can um effectively collaborate and work together as humans to like accomplish things and um you know use each other's skills and gifts and abilities and support each other like that's um there's nothing insidious about that i don't think yeah have you heard of this guy called russell peters he's a stand-up comic he says that eventually the whole world is gonna become beige like everything's just gonna become one thing like we're all just gonna become one kind of race which is very true like that's what i strongly believe and in many ways it's not just biologically all of us are gonna have sex with each other it's also exactly what we spoke about that you can work with anyone whether they're sitting in hawaii or fiji or wherever they are in the world russia you'll you'll kind of feel


in the world russia you'll you'll kind of feel a oneness and also i mean i do have a very spiritual aspect of my life and even the world of yoga the world of spirituality predicts that for the following two or three centuries that we're probably gonna live in a much more unified world because people are gonna become much more connected through globalization therefore have much more perspective therefore become much more empathetic and therefore kind of look at themselves as one and not look at oh you're a pakistani i'm an indian i'm supposed to hate you so i hate you everyone's gonna look at humans as humans yeah i'm really rooting for some sort of alien invasion that just unifies humanity i feel like that's gonna really bring us all together yeah yeah for sure so because you're into sci-fi is there anything you'd like to highlight about the next 10 to 20 years that people would assume is from a sci-fi novel but in truth it's already yo for example


novel but in truth it's already yo for example flying cars or you know even hyperloop is pretty sci-fi according to me but uh i mean is there anything you want to highlight specifically i mean the hyperloop is is really cool um i mean that's just an exciting one like there are flying cars they're just like really not that practical um like i can't imagine the amount of like regulations and danger and i don't know it's a like the the tunnels that uh the boring company that elon's working on too is like a pretty cool thing um i think there's probably the like breakout thing that's gonna change our society the most we may not know yet um or it's maybe like a fringe of ai uh i mean the the gpt3 like experiment i don't know if you've seen that but that is like no no pretty close to it is a huge i think it's um i think it's a google ai project and you feed in like inputs so you could take like my whole twitter


like inputs so you could take like my whole twitter history give it to it and say give me a hundred more tweets and like at least half of those you probably would not be able to tell are from a robot or from an ai and so there's like if you look if you look these up you can start to see it's still expensive you know it takes a lot of computing power to do it but we are we are seeing ai that is already kind of at least in in moments like able to fool us i think there's um there's definitely like video and photo things that are uh very very close to the real thing enough to fool people like deep fakes um so you look up deep fakes and see some of those and that is like predictably improving to the point where like just hold up i just gotta give the listeners context deep fakes is basically they'll uh say you know you really like shahrukh khan so shahrukh khan has a lot of photos available on


khan has a lot of photos available on google.com uh an ai device will go scan all the photos and kind of create a 3d version of his face and therefore be able to plaster that 3d version of shahrukh khan's face onto any video so you can have a video of say donald trump giving a speech but it will look like shahrukh khan's talking with donald trump's voice and i'm sure that they're going to do this for shah khan's voice as well as they'll probably be able to generate someone's voice as well at some point which also means that um you'll be able to take a human being's data like their face their voice their body language everything about them and create an animated false version of them which looks feels and thinks completely realistically but go on eric yeah that is uh i think they already can do voice at least to some extent if they have a lot of recordings of a person so like you can go on and get like you can basically


you can go on and get like you can basically like we are not too far from someone being able to completely fabricate a believable video of someone saying something you know that they've never said um which is going to really change how we have to as individuals like react and and like verify information and like you can imagine that being used for a lot of you know not great political nefarious purposes um and being used against private citizens and it's going to be a really interesting um that that's something like that technology is already there she's not very widely distributed yet and that'll be a real change to like it's something that like people need to know about so that we are not totally taken by surprised by it um if we see it because i can imagine some of the first versions of that when this information is not widely known can be catastrophic for people yeah i'm thinking i'm going to call this podcast why humanity is going forward but anyway you're a little uh optimistic


going forward but anyway you're a little uh optimistic we're choosing positives so so here's here's my brotherly share of data with you um i don't know whether it's human culture or indian culture but five years of content creation has taught me that if you want to generate clicks on a particular piece of content if you package it in a negative tone or if you if your first bit of the content where most of your users end up leaving most content pieces in your first 10 20 seconds where first 10 to 20 seconds are either negative or thought extremely thought pro provoking which often you know if your if your thought is negative it it automatically becomes thought-provoking so uh if you have a negative kind of cover on the book then people stick around for the entire book so that's just the curse of content creation not just in india that's a rule all over the world but it works even more in india and a lot of media houses like we have this news channel called india tv


houses like we have this news channel called india tv it's our equivalent of i think fox news for you guys you know where um you you know what i mean right like um people so uh yeah exactly sort of it's it's something like that uh and uh uh they've primarily grown based on packaging even neutral or positive content in a negative way so but i i think this is more a human thing than just an indian thing anyway the one you were saying no no i mean i agree i think it's an unfortunate there's um there's a book called uh contagious i think that is uh examines like what content gets shared and what are the emotional like triggers that that uh content creators have to hit in order to get content shared and there's there are positive ones but there are also like very reliable negative ones that are like outrage you know um yeah shame shuts people down but outrage gets them to share and signal like that they disagree with it and that they think that


that they disagree with it and that they think that it's wrong and um so yeah it's a very like um it's an insidious thing and i think like it's a shame because we when we reward when we as like viewers reward content creators for leading with negative things we get more of that and then we all suffer for it um and it's you know something that i filtered for when we were talking about like how we choose our twitter feed and the people that we want to interact with like my favorite people are pretty unfailingly either optimistic or or neutral you know they don't seek the negative perspective on things they don't take the worst possible interpretation um you know those are i think it's hard enough to always remember that you can choose a positive interpretation as yourself that if you surround yourself with people who are doing the same or if you take in media that's always doing the same it is really uh that gets much harder yeah for sure um so you know i wanted to talk


for sure um so you know i wanted to talk to you about this concept of leverage as well not just in terms of content or career but leverage is something you speak about a lot generally with your brand uh could you explain the word leverage to someone who doesn't understand it like in very simple words and could you kind of expand on what you've learned about the concept of leverage over your own career yeah duvall kind of introduced this idea and i i totally fell in love with it i think there's so much more to kind of explore here um leverage the most kind of high level definition is just a force multiplier um and so the forces that you on a personal level might want to multiply you know your judgment the decisions that you make um your effort your skills uh that the methods of leverage are things like tools labor capital uh and and product you know media code productization uh things like that so um as you look at the kind of inputs um whether it's a decision that


the kind of inputs um whether it's a decision that you're making an investment or you know the work that you're putting into something and you want to get a much you know a 10x output you've got to find ways to leverage that input and so you know if you have a thousand dollars and you're trying to make an investment um you know you might earn ten thousand but if you can get ten thousand dollars to make that same investment that same decision then you might make a hundred thousand it's a very very different outcome and that capital is providing leverage to create a much larger outcome from the exact same initial motion um you get the same leverage from from labor from you know hiring imagine that anything you're doing in your life is done with the help of a knife leverages your process of sharpening that knife to do everything in your life yeah you know tools is probably the most basic version if i sent you out in the woods to chop down a tree with your bare


the woods to chop down a tree with your bare hands it would take you a really long time and if i give you an axe it would take you a little less long and if i give you a chainsaw it would take you even less time and if we sent you out there with like five people and a giant machine you could do a hundred trees in the same amount of time so it is really looking at you know what are your skills what are you trying to accomplish how can you amass and use all of the different types of leverage available to you this podcast is a great example i know you got people around you right now with different skills contributing their time to helping this podcast come together once it's in a product now it's now it's in a package it's in you know saved in the cloud it's in a podcast and now people in the future you know whether it's tomorrow or in five years can listen to this and can replay us anytime they want to we are


can replay us anytime they want to we are we are packaging and using leverage on our own time right now um in an incredible way that was that has never been true before you know leverage used to be let me get it in front of an auditorium in front of 100 people and now it's let me record a podcast and 10 000 people can listen to this like that's that's absolutely incredible um and these new technologies are giving us new longer forms of leverage and so small content businesses in particular and software businesses are so much more profitable and so much more high leveraged than any other you know businesses in the past had an opportunity to be just because of the the leverage that technology is providing so um you know again because you're someone who studies naval because you're someone who studies happiness and human existence what do you think works as leverage for your own happiness for me it's my practice of meditation my practice of learning through people like yourself my practice


my practice of learning through people like yourself my practice of going deeper into the world of spirituality spiritual learnings that's that's what works for me on a personal level and while i understand that may not be one answer that fits everyone but what what do you think is a general way to um use leverage to enhance your own happiness levels yeah i think the way i've been thinking about this recently is uh trying to think really hard about what are the things that only we can do for ourselves right so you cannot outsource your breathing you know you cannot outsource controlling like your inner voice you can't outsource your your workouts um so there's things that you can get people to help with there's things that you can safely ignore there's things that you can um do without in life uh and it's hard to build the habit of learning to do the things that are good for you and the things that do make you happy um even in the medium term like it's so much easier to just like


term like it's so much easier to just like open your phone and get a quick hit of dopamine and to remember like i'll actually feel better if i go to the gym if i go to go on a walk if i just go get out in nature if i go listen to the waves um if i go have coffee with a friend like all of those things will make me happier than they like dopamine in five seconds that i can get um and there are things that like you know it doesn't feel better to have someone else do it for me you know so some of the work can be shared some of the responsibilities can be shared um but remembering and learning those habits so that you can uh take care of yourself and be sure that you're you know giving yourself the space and um the appreciation almost that that you deserve um and it's so easy to get yourself in a place where you like you think that the more unhappy you are with yourself and the harder you


unhappy you are with yourself and the harder you are in yourself the better you're gonna do and the more productive you'll be um you know i still catch myself doing this all the time and it's it's not true it's not helpful to be um you know to be hard on yourself to punish yourself to to postpone your own happiness thinking that you're going to get more done in the meantime you'd be better off just allowing yourself to be happy doing what you're doing and only do things that that make you happy you know find ways to to make progress and enjoy your time at the same time and and um those are things that take a while to give yourself permission to do um but once you've kind of flipped that switch and once you've gone to ask yourself these questions and evaluate you know i'm sure you're uh you're enjoying this time and the work that you do you're making progress and enjoying yourself at the same time um yeah much more than you would


the same time um yeah much more than you would if you were you know i don't know practicing corporate law or something something like that yeah my first internship in college was this internship at ernst young fantastic work culture and all that but i'd enter that office with the intention of leaving i'd think myself oh i got to be here for like nine hours at least and that's when i realized oh man this is not the career i want for myself and the moment i ever came in front of the camera for the first time i realized oh this is this is something that speaks naturally to me yeah so you saw how good you look you're like i'm feeling myself in here this is great something like that there's just things that come naturally to you know whether that's career choices or systems that you kind of apply within your own life you've got to keep experimenting that's that's my two cents on leverage that throughout your life you're changing as a person even when you're


life you're changing as a person even when you're turning 29 even when you're turning 30 but you've got to keep your experimentation on because maybe the 30 year old version of yourself will want different things from the 28 year old version of yourself so just as long as you keep your experimentation alive my uh hypothesis is that by the time you're like 40 maybe you're you know your energy slightly lower your head's not working as rapidly you're also much more sorted out from a career perspective when you have time for self-actualization you'll have your systems in place after years of experimentation and understanding yourself so you've got to get to the core of who you are yeah i think um maybe the way that this was said before that stuck with me the most that peter kaufman said this he's like if you saw a child who was seven and they didn't change between age seven and age ten it would be a tragedy like it'd be a very noticeable painful something something is wrong but


a very noticeable painful something something is wrong but if you don't change between 27 and 30 it's almost expected it's almost expected that adults don't change and the people around us actually like almost subconsciously encourage us to stay the same they want us to be predictable they want us to um to not change too much because it's inconvenient for people around us and it's it's hard and it's hard for us and you can only change so many things at once and some of those are um that that sticks in mind to me as like if you don't change it's it's a tragedy there's always something you can you can grow there's always something that's going to be important to add there's always you know your context is changing even if what the system in the self that you had was perfect for you know where and who you were at 27 where and who you are at 30 is going to be different and you've got to change and grow and adjust to that so you know eric you're someone who


adjust to that so you know eric you're someone who has a stable career you're someone who learns a lot therefore i'm pretty sure you're someone who's also calm most of the time on a very personal level i'd like to ask you do you if you even have any void in your life like on a very personal level do you feel that there's anything that's incomplete for you after this much of learning and this much analysis oh yeah yeah i mean this is a thing that i like um it is it is really hard to uh not just look at the gap between who you are and who you want to be right um and you always you kind of have this um it's really easy to lock in expectations for yourself and to um very quickly pick up new desires and pick up new hopes you know it's easy to go scroll instagram for 20 minutes and you come out thinking like oh my god i want to cook like anthony bourdain and i want to be like a super wise balanced philosopher and


want to be like a super wise balanced philosopher and i want to travel the world and i want to you know lift until i look like arnold schwarzenegger and like you just have all these like expectations of yourself that pile up that are when you when you look at the mountain of expectations and desires that you set for yourself wildly unreasonable you know like if someone told you that those were all their goals you'd be like you're crazy um but you don't always see that you're doing it you don't always like evaluate the whole pile you just pick them up one at a time and throw them on your like desire list um and then you wonder why you're like unhappy with with who you are or you're like you know the void you know you're like i'm i'm not where i want to be um and to anybody any of your friends any of your family and you know they're kind of like what are you talking about like you're in a great spot things are things are


like you're in a great spot things are things are like you've accomplished great things and um but we all have expectations of ourselves you know that's what's drawing us along that are that are farther ahead than where we are now um and you know the thing um a trainer told me this is like you're very it's very hard to love yourself and change yourself at the same time you know like you've gotta um you can't in order to change yourself you almost um instinctively like start disliking who you are and where you are and that sometimes can be a force for motivation and sometimes a force of change but it also causes you pain every day until you see that change and you can have both you know you can love yourself for who you are and want to change at the same time you don't have to choose one or the other um it's hard work to balance that you know it's like walking a tightrope psychologically but it's possible to do both and i think you know


it's possible to do both and i think you know that's i want to spend my life both loving who i am and growing and changing at the same time and so it is worth building that skill and working hard to get on that tightrope and learn to kind of keep walking it is that why you study naval in detail so much because he's he at least from the outside it looks like he's achieved that you know he's happy with himself and at the same time he's comfortably growing yeah that's partly what drew me to him and i think um the interesting thing is that he it took him many years to get there right like um he says you know that he was very hard on himself and very unhappy for most of the time when he was building his wealth and building his career and earlier in his life um and now that he is you know established and wealthy and has his company and has his investments in his portfolio he's now turning to like philosophy a little bit


now turning to like philosophy a little bit more and finding happiness but um the core kind of question that we are left with is like could he have done what he did and have been happy at the same time um because he he didn't um but i think that we can and it helps to study things to look past like um you know i've given this this book as a gift to friends who are you know in their early 20s and they read the wealth section you know 10 20 times and the happiness section once or twice um and i think if you look if you look at your whole life earlier and holistically and start to look at some of the philosophy a little bit earlier you can inculcate some of those ideas and you can make progress you can grow yourself and love yourself at the same time um but it takes work to reach beyond you know just i think that one maniacal goal that you're focused on and seeing the whole your whole self and your whole life for what


whole your whole self and your whole life for what it is and trying to kind of put it all together gorgeous and uh i mean i gotta ask you about the career side of leverage as well because i also feel that you know the curse of being an entrepreneur or working in startup related environments is this problem that we just spoke of that we're always trying to get to that next step without being kind to ourselves it's that michael jordan you know like you keep keep working at the cost of holding in all the steers and then crying once you win the championship but uh from a career perspective what have you learned about leverage like you know how can you use leverage to enhance your career progress yeah i think leverage um the first question to ask yourself that kind of sets you down the path is like what are for each one of us each individual what are my highest value tasks you know what are the things that only i can do or what are the very best uses of my


do or what are the very best uses of my time and so if you could only accomplish one task this week what would it be if you could only spend two hours on your company this week what are the two what are the things that you would do in those two hours um and you may actually like have a really interesting answer to this like do you know like is your time spent interviewing guests the most high leverage use of your time it's the thing that no one else can replace you with doing right yeah uh it's exactly this and you know it's not just me recording content i'm learning through every podcast right uh and you know people who don't know the brand think that i'm just running a podcast but honestly these are my this is my higher degree this is my higher education it's my mba that i'm doing through people like yourself i take that information i sit with it i probably research i read and then i relay it to my junior team my business development team and say


to my junior team my business development team and say that okay you know this is this information this is what we can create with this information so please go and create and then they go and create come back to me i review it and i i green light or red light it based on uh how good or bad it is but then my process has to be focused on being the face of things and learning at the same time for the sake of the team yeah so your your high leverage tasks are the interviews themselves your learning which you can't you can outsource your learning you can get help you can get input but like you can't substitute yourself for taking in the information and it sounds like your your taste you know you set the quality bar in your organization you you decide what goes and what doesn't and so those are you know those are your highest leverage tasks the things that only you can do you've got people who help you with editing and people who help you with promotion people who help


and people who help you with promotion people who help you with repackaging and merchandising and people who help you book book guests and you know all of those things are things that you get help with so that you can keep doing the super high value high leverage things you see it in you know a senior accountant will have an assistant and we'll have you know somebody who helps on the hr side of things and somebody who's like working the back office doing you know tasks that are so if you look at people who are are leveraged you'll see that they spend the most of their time on jobs that only they can do and they get help either through tools or products or um systems or you know it just they freely spend money and resources so that they can stay focused on the high value tasks and and build systems around them so they're standing on this like mountain of levers you know and in controlling a lot of things around them through their judgment and their skill that they built over


through their judgment and their skill that they built over the course of their career so um if you had to like i mean i know it's very difficult for you because you're someone who studies a bunch of subjects but if you're to highlight three uh lessons about the world it could be leverage it could be the future of business it could be the future of the world what would you like to share with all the listeners for the sake of the 2020s um i think um i think i would i would start with the idea internally that like you know we all control our own experience you know no one can control your perception of events except for you and and that is kind of the foundation of everything um that that is you know old old wisdom but it's something that everybody needs to kind of learn for themselves and learn maybe thousands of times over um and continually learn so that's that's a timeless thing that's maybe not 2020s but it's everybody's got to do it um i think


it's everybody's got to do it um i think uh compounding is one of the most powerful sort of mental models that exists and understanding the results of of thinking long-term um in relationships and in investments and in careers and in skills you know take as long term of a perspective as you can and that doesn't mean delay action you know one of my favorite things from naval is impatience with action patience with results and i think that turns that turns the idea of compounding into you know a mantra that you can use every day so you've got to get your workout in you've got to get your work done you've got to read the next book impatience with that next action but get patience with the results allow time for the investments to to grow allow time for you know the savings to build up a lot of time for the skills and the perspectives to build up and uh i mean the third i would i would say leverage but we've talked about that um a fair a


but we've talked about that um a fair a fair bit already um and i think uh maybe maybe the last one that i'd sub in instead then um is just that like happiness there's maybe two schools of happiness and one is is you're completely independent and you need to control your own perspective and choose happiness and the other is that you know we are social animals and you know some of the most long and high investment happiness studies come down to like the quality of your relationships um and as we're talking about leverage and things that you cannot outsource and things that you must do for yourself like maintaining healthy positive close relationships with friends with partners with family um you can't outsource that you can't ignore it um you know in the same way with your health and everything else and that is going to be um you know a source of of esteem and of pride and of peace and of calm and um they're really gonna i think help you and things you'll find rewarding you know over


you and things you'll find rewarding you know over over your whole life eric jorgensen thank you for being on the runway show brother i really appreciate you sharing all your wisdom and i hope that someone ends up writing an almanac on you as well uh thank you for what you've shared with the world man i really hope that this reaches maximum listeners uh this one one and a half hour conversation is extremely value-adding uh especially from a modern world context so really from the bottom of my heart thank you for teaching me thank you for sharing it with my audience thanks for having me this is super fun i'm glad to be here for sure thank you brother i'm going to be linking all of eric's handles down below guys make sure you go follow make sure you go uh tweet out to him if you want a job no don't do that but uh eric will probably be back on the runway show at some point that would be awesome you're the man this is a great interview thank you


the man this is a great interview thank you so much i appreciate it


nas daily on the runway show one of the most legendary content creators of this recent content creator generation asked him about the future of content asked him what the 2020s are going to look like ask them about his secret formulas for success without revealing too much in the intro i'm gonna allow you to slip into one of the heaviest podcasts especially if you're a content creator take notes because this one super value adding but also super positive because he's one of the most positive guys i've come across he's one of the most positive dudes we've had on the podcast and now i'll allow you to slip in to nash daily on the runway show [Music] indian vibe people love you here i love your vibe as a content creator so much freshness so much positivity what's your thank you what's your driving force what's your driving force man ranveer thank you so much for this i i tell people sometimes why the hell do indians watch me and i think it's because they think


watch me and i think it's because they think i'm indian too you know i care about the same things indian care about and uh i've also visited india many times so sometimes i feel like i'm a more indian than israeli or american or palestinian i've visited israel once in my life and i've traveled a lot all over the world not as much as you have but i have traveled in my life and israel is one of those places that stays with you forever uh just something something about your country man um i i can't i can't define it israel stays with you forever for good or for bad it is a very yeah yeah it's a very controversial country but the most controversial country in the world i would say uh but they're definitely doing a lot of things right and they're doing a lot of other things wrong and that's i think what's unique about israel yeah i mean you know as a tourist you don't really get to see much of the wrongs you


really get to see much of the wrongs you go to like the touristy spots you speak to the locals but what stayed with me is man i feel like it has this very very unique energy most people that you communicate with now i don't know whether it's because we were tourists and we are clearly tourists we look different than the rest of people yeah people are nice so people have this different energy and there's so much history attached to that land yeah so again as a tourist when you're seeing it from an objective perspective it just stays with you for sure for sure i think israelis have something you call it hutzpah which is um it's just like slight rudeness but straightforwardness you know we are straightforward this is what we mean this is what we care about if you come off as rude it doesn't matter like that's what hot space get what you want with your own hands and uh you know to some extent it's quite uh uh you know you many people in the world could


uh you know you many people in the world could learn something or two about that from that yeah 100 also possibly one of the world's most intelligent populations and i feel from a modern day perspective it's yourself and you all know a harare of port israel on the map so that's a big statement ranveer thank you so much for that uh i am nowhere near as smart as you've all that guy is crazy smart um but i mean you know it's funny because my intention has never been to put israel on the map i'm actually palestinian israeli so i'm from essentially i belong to both nations in some way or form it's very complicated so my relationship with israel is as complicated as your relationship with your ex-girlfriend you know so i don't know about your marital status but it's a very complicated relationship no i i get it man uh but you know i'll i'll reference something vishen lakhiani said on this show he said that he doesn't belong to a


show he said that he doesn't belong to a nation he belongs to mankind in general and that just kind of put a seed of thought in my head and i strongly believe you're on that same bracket in singapore you lived in dubai from both israel and palestine and yeah i feel the nature of the work you're doing man uh it's very i mean for lack of a better word spiritual but you are putting out a lot of goodness out there despite people trying to pull you down like i know about the whole al jazeera thing that happened and yeah you know i'm dead sure there's more people than just al jazeera who tried pulling you down i don't get why uh but i mean yeah it's it's a little makes me a little sad that someone who's doing such good work is kind of pulled on but that i guess is the nature of mankind in some ways yeah yeah i think um i i you know generally speaking there has never been any change in


generally speaking there has never been any change in the world without drama or without controversy or without uh without someone getting angry like anything that is new or about to change something there is resistance to it like look at the apps that we use today right like uber when uber came along so many people protested they wanted to kill the entire company but now i'm sure you cannot live without uber or grab or or or you know or lyft or whatever same with delivery apps like anytime so the way i like to think of it i think of it as a compliment like how dare someone from israel and palestine come out and not make me hate israel how dare someone come out and talk about this part of the world without going into the politics how dare they do it how dare they not be on my side whether on palestinian israeli i think that is actually as basic as it sounds is relatively new because for 70 years there's been a lot of conflict and social media


there's been a lot of conflict and social media before social media the only people that get to speak are you know the broadcast companies like al jazeera or cnn or whatever and they have an agenda that they'd like to pursue for decades when social media came along now some schmuck from a village can say his opinion and and reach as many people as a broadcast company and that is amazing so that's why i think there's a little bit of controversy because it's new the idea that a kid can reach millions of people is new it's no more than seven eight years old so um i love that i love that um yeah you know okay just wanna interject there with a bit of spiritualism one of the books actually a bunch of the books i read on the concept of spiritualism says what every major religion of the world originally says treat people as you treat yourself and the other thing is consider everyone a piece of the same flesh there's no difference between someone sitting in


same flesh there's no difference between someone sitting in brazil versus someone saying in nepal someone sitting in japan versus someone sitting in alaska right you know it's it's all the same and on the other end we have social media which is polarizing people which is making everything you versus me yeah and no grayscale so um i i mean i feel like we're entering some dark times before things get really positive i feel like thanks to content like yours thanks for calling it like joyce attis people are going to eventually become positive but we're going to go through a dark phase before that but ranvir do you think religions came to unify initially yes i feel that way back all the religions said the same things i feel like and then this is kind of what yuval also says in all his books that initially the goal of religion was always good and then over the years religion became a power game so people near the top of those religious sects said no no let's change


top of those religious sects said no no let's change up this rule and let's change up that rule or let's tell the people that this rule actually means this and then that's why it kind of got twisted over time so uh one of the spiritualism books that i've read also says this controversial thing they say in about 2580 which is like 500 years from now yeah um it's probably not gonna be any religion it's all gonna be like one thing uh we're gonna in the whole world is gonna follow one kind of thought process the algorithm the algorithm will be the name why don't you i mean you pray to that right we pray to that we're like the first followers of this new religion well the algorithm like my new video my new podcast my new image my new ad my new product oh the algorithm doesn't like it well make another video so i definitely pray more to the algorithm these days then i pray to god unfor unfortunately but uh maybe that'll change in the future yeah i


but uh maybe that'll change in the future yeah i mean uh you know i read this amazing thing on twitter once it said that every single person has a god in their life they just call it different names yeah some people it's the algorithm some people it's krishna bhagwan some people it's um you know their diet if they they put their diet at the forefront everyone has something you get offended because of and that's probably what you call god that is true but that's a temporary thing i don't want the algorithm to be you know my my savior i don't want it it's such a pain that's a pain that every creator has so i would like it uh uh i would like to change it at some point maybe i want shareholders to be my new god what okay heavy questions straight up to younes um what's what's the next 20 years of your life looking like according to where you stand right now and i know you're someone who doesn't seem like you plan too far ahead but where would


seem like you plan too far ahead but where would you like life to take you 20 years um 20 years it's a good question uh because i usually try to plan you know five years at a time um but generally speaking you know as creators you you you know some creators enjoy being creators so they just enjoy being in front of the camera and they just make one show every year make a million bucks and call it a day we love it attend as many award ceremonies as possible and that's it i've never actually been a front of the camera creator i think this is just like a new new idea um i've always liked the idea of being behind the camera creator so my next 20 years i'd say uh i would like to make nas daily uh work without nassar so my name is my real name is nasir i would like nas daily to become a big thing without relying on me which means by default you have to build a company you have to find teammates you have to build


you have to find teammates you have to build an organizational structure with accounting hiring video making uh uh deal making partnerships tech everything so i've been really fascinated with the idea of nas nas actually means people in arabic many people may not know about it they just call me nas but if you look at my videos they're always about people almost always like the last few months so many people's stories this person this person this person this person and um so i would like the nas group in the next 20 years i would like to build something called the nas group which is the people's group in which we create products we create organizational institutions where it empowers that are that are good for the world so for example we have nas studios right now which is a studio company a production company that creates content and it's great it creates content uh it helps brands it makes money then we have nas academy which is a it's a way to empower individuals to become an academy themselves it's a technology


to become an academy themselves it's a technology platform that we're building right now which we think could grow really really big in the future and in the next 20 years i see myself building nas hotels nas tours nas fund nas gov i think that's my 20-year kind of like goal after that i think meaning i will lose meaning i will lose meaning in companies i would lose meaning in products i would lose meaning in you know profit and loss statements accounting and all this stuff i will not like the private sector anymore and after that i think the public sector becomes an interesting place to be in because that's where you can have true change in the world media is very powerful but then what's even more powerful is the person writing the law and so i think between private and public i think that's usually kind of where i see the pursuit of meaning is wow do you think you're going to get into politics at some point i think it's not something that's like exciting but it's it's that


something that's like exciting but it's it's that if you look at the options ahead of you like if someone says i truly hate the way the world lives right now like if someone lives in india right now and says i truly dislike the traffic in india at 5 pm i truly dislike it what can you do to change it that's really the question that must you know come down it comes down to okay you can make a media campaign against it you can go a volunteer and raise awareness about it you can build a car that moves a little bit faster a little bit smaller you can build better traffic systems and sell it you can build make more infrastructure get into the real estate but i think at some point you realize no matter what you do the problem of traffic has not been fixed the only actual solution to the traffic problem in mumbai is the freaking governor or the president saying hey we're going to limit the number of cars starting from next week okay bye-bye no


of cars starting from next week okay bye-bye no more than 5 000 cars on the road uh at this point of time great you've limited just like singapore done so i think um solutions actually exist much more on that level rather than on the on the ground level no that's gorgeous plus with bio hacking coming into play people say that anyone who's our age i'm born in 93 you're born in 92 chances are that we're going to live till at least 2092 and 93 and then it's a question of how far do you want to take it after that so it's a weird question to ask someone uh and i'll tell you the reason i'm asking you this yeah i feel when you're born with this blessing that all content creators are born with which is violent creativity where you're thinking of new ideas all the time you want to do a million things so do i i'm also thinking about i'm thinking in a parallel tangent to what you're thinking and that's thanks to that blessing of