Naval 对实习生说：把共事的人筛到最严，把品味练到最准

00:00What's up, Naval? Thanks for coming. >> Which mic are we using? >> We're going to use this, and this is for a camera. The other one's for a camera. >> Oh, okay. >> Um, so Naval was actually here. I don't know. I didn't tell you this, but you actually did this a number of years ago, uh, when the event was much smaller, and I was looking at the attendee list of the last event that you came and spoke at, last intern puzza you came and spoke at, and Dylan Field was interning at Flipboard at the time. >> Wow. That long ago. not long ago. Um, and so I appreciate you spending time again with all of us today.

00:33Um, >> will the next Dylan Field please stand >> There's two. Okay, good. >> We got two. Um, but I I uh have a number of questions I want to ask you today. Um, and uh I I'll I'll kick it off with that you have kind of famously said um earn with your mind and not your time. And so if you were an intern in the audience today and you were 21 with no money but a lot of time and an internet connection, how would you spend your >> Yeah, when I say earn with your mind, not with your time, I don't necessarily mean that like you don't have to work hard. You have to work as hard as you possibly can, but there's only a limited number of hours in the week.

01:13Uh what is 168 or something like that? Um so you it's not the fact that you can win by out earning somebody else. Um can you do it by being more clever, more intelligent? Yes. But you also have to know how to direct your your time and your mind because life is full of compounding. Like every little decision you make adds up to bigger and bigger decisions. And so you got to get the big decisions right and you have to know how to allocate your time well. You made the biggest decision correctly which is you're in the tech industry. You're in the Bay Area. So that's a cheat code. That's a couple of cheat codes right there.

01:44You're at the forefront of the smartest people in the world. You're working alongside the smartest people in the world. you're in the largest concentration of high IQ motivated people. Um so the next set of decisions is well now that you're in the right place and you're in the right industry, what do you choose to work on and specifically who do you choose to work with? So those are probably the next most important set of decisions and they're going to be along the lines of what do you have a natural inclination for? Um what's like a sufficiently deep topic or field? uh you know in the Peter Teal sense where do you have a secret or some kind of a competitive advantage or an an interestbased mode or specific knowledge that only you have and then are you working with the absolute best

02:27people possible and I would argue in that latter axis you probably aren't um the the single the single biggest shortcoming people have early on is that they stay extremely limited uh in the group that they're next to um they tend to start companies where they tend to work with, they they tend to hang out with, they tend to learn from the people who they just kind of happen to be next to. And it doesn't work like that. Life is a search function. And you you fulfill the first part of that search function by landing here, but the next part of that that curation continues. So, always keep kind of curating who you're working with.

03:02Um, and and it can be on a variety of different topics. And this is my problem with advice. I hate giving advice. And you've probably been hammered with advice all day long. Like people giving you a whole bunch of advice. It's like people telling you they're winning lottery ticket numbers, right? It's like it doesn't really it's not really actionable on your part. But I I do think there are a few overarching core principles. Like if you talk to older people who are successful, they will pretty consistently tell you that the number one most important thing was like who they worked with. And right up there with that is that they made sure they enjoyed what they were doing.

03:32not because you know the journey is a reward or any of that those cliches but for a different cliche which is that um if you don't enjoy it you're not going to be good. So um these principles are easy to talk about. They're very hard to follow in practice because in practice they involve rejecting people and making very difficult choices and walking away from good situations to head towards great situations. >> When did you start doing that? When you were 21, what was the naval like? Yeah, there was no plan. I don't listen to anyone's advice. There was no there was no top down reasoning. This is all uh you know uh reasoning.

04:11The reality is it's just in your nature. What's in your nature? It was always in my nature to make decisions for myself to be a rebel. I I would say my my bar for who I work with was not high enough. Uh and that's obvious to me in hindsight. I would say that my bar for what I worked on, did I enjoy it was not high enough and that's only obvious in hindsight. uh like for example the first couple of companies that I got involved with as a founder both starting and being involved uh I at that point I really just wanted to be uh a founder right and that was like that stamp was more important and so that desire kind of overrode everything and then later so so it was more like oh I really want to be a founder I want to found a company who can I found a company with

04:55where can I found a company so it was sort of not a pure motivation and Then later my motivation was much more around you know simple things like money and power like nobody wants to talk about it but those are fundamental drivers like yeah I want to make money and I want a company that has an influence uh and even that wasn't that pure of a motivation wasn't that great of a motivation and now looking back in my career where I was most successful was when I was uh when I did projects either because I was genuinely curious about them where I was trying to figure things out because I was like oh this is really interesting what's behind this oh

05:27that's really cool what's behind this and then just following my own intellectual curiosity gave me insight that then led to good investments and good startups and good outcomes and then I would say now I'm in the lucky position where I don't have to do things for money or status or any of those normal motivations so now I can concentrate on just what product do I want to see exist what's like a beautiful thing that I can make that wouldn't exist if I didn't put effort into it and what people do I want to spend all my time around and how do I make sure that there is a combined effort efort a team that I can work with all day to

06:02to spend time with them because the truth is when when your material desires are somewhat met, you end up extremely bored. There's nothing to do. Okay? It's like when you don't have to hustle uh for a living, you're just like, well, what do I do? You've lost your purpose in life. And you could, you know, go meditate in a corner for a long time. That gets boring, too. Um you can go completely hedonistic, and that's a death trap. you know, people blow themselves up or blow out on drugs or just empty lifestyles. Um, or you kind of realize like actually what I want to do is I want to self-actualize. I want to be the best version of myself.

06:36And what does the best version of myself mean? That means creating something. Uh, it's better to create than to consume. It's far more fulfilling and you learn along the way and you build. And then what do I want to create? Well, I want to create something beautiful that I'm passionate about that I want to use that other people won't do well or won't do right or won't do in my time frame. And then how do I want to do? Well, I want to do it with friends, people that I really respect, really admire, that I spend enjoy spending time with. Uh, and then you can kind of craft that perfect team. And I wish I'd kind of had that kind of motivation and insight, you know, 20, 30 years ago.

07:06I'm not sure I could have, though. You know, sometimes you just have to follow the path and see how it plays out. >> Are there people uh that you met when you were 20 or 21 or 22 that you still work with today? Yeah, you know, one funny thing is um when I first got into the industry, there were, you know, there were a lot of people around that I met, but there were a few that I just gravitated towards because they were so intelligent and so interesting and so talented. And I remember at the time thinking, man, what an unfair world that these super talented, interesting, engaged uh people are not that are getting all the fame or the credit.

07:43And the reality is now I look back 20, 30 years later and those people, they're all incredibly successful. They're all reasonably famous and they've all gone on to do great things with almost no exception. So if you find somebody who's genuinely talented, intellectually curious, hardworking, high integrity, mark my words, I guarantee you that 20 years from now, those people will be successful. Uh, and I wish I just invested in or stayed close to every single one of them. I I can't think of a single exception. >> Yeah. What else? So, everyone here is kind of doing or most people here are doing an internship right now.

08:19They have come from all over um you know, the United States. They're here for the very first time. And so, when you came here for the very first time, what were some of the things that you did uh that you'd recommend people do here? >> Yeah, it's a it's a magical place. I mean, I think the Bay Area is a huge cheat code to a level that I can't even talk about on Twitter because it would just piss people off who can't get in here. Um, it's really good here. Now, obviously, you know, quality of life might be better in some other places or the cost of living might be better in some other places, but your earning power here is unparalleled.

08:51The weather is pretty darn good. Um, there's a lot of you're living in the future. You know, you can you can take a Whimo, you'll be able to take a robo taxi, you can see all the drones, you can see all the cool stuff being built out and developed. But the single biggest thing is you're here with the smartest people in the world. It's the highest IQ density of anywhere in the planet. And I would argue that through human history, there have been a few magical places at a few magical times. So maybe it was Athens during the Greek Renaissance. Perhaps it was Rome during, you know, when the Roman Empire was up there. Maybe it was Manchester or Birmingham or London during the industrial revolution.

09:27Maybe Paris during a certain period of time. But there are these magical places where the best people in the world even people who are not necessarily in the industry even like artists or business people or whoever they're attracted to that place. So I would argue that you know by being here you are in the right place. So when you're here, you do want to meet people, but you kind of want to I don't I don't believe in empty networking, you know, like uh I don't believe in like networking for networking's sake where you just like mingling and shaking hands and wearing a name tag, no offense, and you know, like like offering to meet up with people.

10:06You ha you have to be a little discriminating. What you're really looking for is like-minded people who you deeply respect. I I would say um earned respect is what you're looking for. You're looking to earn other people's respect and you're looking for people who earn your respect and they will earn your respect through their talent, their curiosity, their good nature, their low ego, their high drive and sort of their vision, right? And so, and it's different for everybody. It's not like there's one person in the crowd we're hunting. That's the, you know, um, that's the Dylan from Figma problem, right? Like trying to find like the one person who's going to be successful.

10:47You can't do that. That's impossible. Rather, it's just who in here is like-minded, someone that you can learn from, someone that you enjoy interacting with, is goodnatured and open-minded, um, and you just want to stay in touch with. So definitely you do your basic networking, but your networking is really just to find those people you connect with. Um and and the best way to match I think honestly is through work. It is not through uh shaking hands or through talking. Uh it's through working. So that's where hackathons are pretty good. Uh that's where small projects are really good. You know, it's like any group project you're in, whether in school or whether in your business or company, you'll find there's usually like one person in the group that's carrying all all the load,

11:27right? and there's a lot of people talking, a lot of people slacking and like hopefully you're that person. But if you're not or if you're like number two or number three and be honest with yourself, you know, find the person who's number one who is carrying the load and make yourself as useful. Trust me, it'll pay off. It just takes a long >> How is Naval spending professional time and days these days? >> I I got a new startup company. Uh it's called the Impossible Computer Company. Um I've got an unbelievable team that uh quality I've never seen match. They're all artists and engineers. >> How did you find them?

11:59>> Uh they kind of found me. Uh I would say that uh well I mean some of them I've collected over the years. There's uh one guy I work with since the day I met him uh 20 years ago. We have never like not worked together. Um so we stayed together. Uh there's another guy I met at my last company about four years ago and he was just so good that we just stuck it out together. Um but really it's it's a team that had assembled around a related project and then we kind of merged. Uh but I think the way that team mostly got together was through shared mutual respect. Uh my co-founder is incredibly uh has has incredibly good technical taste.

12:40So what he'll do is he'll find products or research or insights or papers or code that he really admires and it's usually really weird stuff. It's not mainstream stuff. He's kind of a collector of uh idiosyncratically cool products and and technologies and he'll find this this person somewhere on the internet who's created something marvelous and he'll deeply understand it because he falls in love with it and then he reaches out to them and he sort of will compliment them. He'll offer to help them. He'll ask them good questions. He'll contribute to the code. He'll contribute to the learning. And he's kind of been doing this his entire life.

13:16It's sort of his nature. And so he's ended up just surrounded by some of the most brilliant artistic driven people that I've ever met who are also they don't think of themselves as oh I'm an engineer or I'm a coder or I'm an industrial designer or I'm an electrical engineer. I'm an AI person. They don't think of themselves that way. They're just like these are creators, people who want to create things and then they'll just pick up whatever skill is needed to create those things. And in this age of AI that's easier than ever. I mean these AIs are incredible learning engines for autodidacts. They can meet you at your level.

13:48You can interrogate them. You can learn whatever you want. And so I think these people just don't pigeon hole themselves and they can kind of dive into anything and learn anything and build anything. >> What are you talking publicly about the company? Are you all in person? Not in >> Yeah, that's about it. Small team. There's less than 20 of us. Uh, everybody works really hard >> in person. >> Uh, in person mostly. There's a few people who who are remote, but they're trusted and known for a long time. >> SF or Peloto? >> SF. Yeah. like being in the city. My my rule on this is I don't ask other people to do anything that I myself wouldn't do.

14:22So I like the office to be in a location where I like to go to. I like the offices themselves inside to be like nice private high quality offices. I like to pay people well and treat them well and give them a lot of stock and high salaries and good compensation. Uh and I expect them to always 247 be either working or thinking about work because that's the same bar I hold myself to. >> Was this always the case or as the companies have gone on? I think uh as time has gone on, you know, one of the advantages of being older is you just get to be more idiosyncratic. You get to do things more your way. So I think I'd always wanted to do it that way, but I just didn't have the confidence in the past.

14:59So as an example, you know, there's this most companies they have cubicles or desks and you'll see people crammed into small spaces and I think that's inhuman. Like when I go home, I enjoy my home office a lot more because I have my private space. So now I want everyone in the company to have an equivalently nice private space u because I think it's more human but it's easy to fall in the trap of uh hustle culture and you know everyone around the desk and sort of grinding but I think a lot of that just pretend work. Um so that's an example of something that I kind of rose past. >> And so you you just mentioned too you didn't have the confidence to do certain things maybe when you were younger.

15:34Today what are some of the unpopular decisions you're making as a CEO? >> Yeah, I fire people much much faster. uh hire people much much more slowly. Uh resist hiring. Uh I I pay people better. Uh I give them more stock. Basically my rule on this like you know pay twice as much but but expect 10 times the output. Uh and I don't mean that in terms of hours. I mean that in terms of like actual output because we're in creative domains. So in a creative domain the right decision is infinitely more important than the wrong decision or infinitely more valuable. Uh, and the same way that someone who's properly leveraged is incredibly high output.

16:12You know, Keith Ravoya has this thing where he talks about barrels versus bullets. Like everyone better be a barrel. There's no room for bullets in the in a small company. >> Talk to us more about that analogy for those that don't know it. >> Yeah. The barrel bullet analogy. I think this is Keith's analogy, so I'm going to mangle it, but it's uh bullets are like you fire you you aim the barrel and you fire the bullet. So, you're kind of directing those people and barrels are the ones providing the direction and deciding when to pull the trigger. So there it's more the guidance. Uh and in a big company you always have that you have management and then you have execution.

16:43Uh and because most of you are interns you're always going to be slotted into the bullet role. U but we don't have that concept. So we have one guy that we hired uh who's 19. Uh and he's a peer. He's everybody an equal. Nobody tells him what to do. He works for himself. Um he's paid just as much. He's going to be compensated just as well. And we're going to expect the same level of output out of him. Everyone's a bullet. There are no barrels. And it's very easy to fall into this trap of well because they're younger, you know, they're automatically a bullet. That's not the case. U my co-founder is actually 23. He started working when he was 15.

17:17Um he is absolutely a peer. He and I have the same level of stock with the same level of authority. >> Do people push back to Nal or do you get in arguments or people you feel like you have to deal with that? >> You know what's funny is we haven't had a real argument ever in the company. I'm trying to think. >> Is that good or bad? >> Well, it's early so honeymoon. uh maybe there'll be real arguments down the line but I think usually you know whose domain something is in uh especially when it comes to technical stuff when you're building it's very clear like the person who's doing the job actually

17:46has the best insight so yes you can offer ideas you can debate but when you're building the real way you debate something is like okay well if you're saying you can't do that well I'm going to go do that right that's how Elon Musk does it right he's like okay if you're not going to get this shipped within three weeks I'm going to sleep underneath my desk I'm taking over your job I'm going to get a ship within three weeks So those kinds of debates can be resolved through execution. Um there are often debates you find in you know marketing or bisdev or kind of these fuzzy things. Um luckily we don't have that because I'm the only one doing that.

18:16So there's nobody else. Um we are actually debating like what the product name is going to be for example and there is a little bit of a debate forming there and uh I can already tell like that's the kind of thing where if you have too many marketing droids in a company you're just going to go in circles on that. But I think the way we'll just settle that is um we'll probably just pick the three people in the company who have the best taste. Um and we know who those are. Um you can tell by the way they dress and the way they behave and what their house looks like, right? Um and those three will basically vote on it.

18:45>> And so you've you've worked on multiple startups. Um how do you know when to you know what you're doing is is you should stop or you should keep going before you have any kind of traction. Yeah, I think people run out of energy and you know they'll start feeling burned out and burnout to me is a clear case that like you're not enjoying this anymore and if you're not enjoying this anymore you should probably stop working on it. So I don't I don't believe in this temporary model of burnout where people are like oh I'm burned out but if I take two months off or just you know ramp down a little bit then I'll come back and it'll

19:18be better than ever. No, it doesn't work that way. Generally uh I've seen people who are working around the clock but because they really enjoy what they're doing and the company's doing well or the product is going somewhere or there's clear meaningful progress being made either in product development or in deployment um they don't burn out. Whereas you'll see some good people have left. It's not clear um where things are going to go. That's that's when people start quote unquote burning out. But I don't think burnout is a temporary phenomenon. I think it's a deeper indication that probably you should be working on something else or just really like move to the next thing which might require a break, but it's not that you're burned out.

19:54You'll come back on this thing. >> Do you think there's sort of, you know, people often recount Elon kind of starting with something easy and then graduating to something harder to work on? Do you think that's a fair line of thought in 2025 or should that be rethought as people think about the various things they want to do with their lives? Yeah. So Elon did what? Zip 2 and then he did uh X which was PayPal uh and which was his uh bank uh and then he did SpaceX in Tesla and Solar City. Uh I I have definitely noticed a tendency amongst founders that they do deep tech startups later. So Kyle Voit did this with Cruz later and now his robot company and I think before he was um was it Gusto or something?

20:34It was it was one of those fintech kind of companies or it was Twitch or something. Yeah. Um, and and you see kind of similar track record with other entrepreneurs. Sam Alman did loop and then he did open AAI. I'm now working in hardware. Um, but I actually started my career in hardware. My first company was building linear optical amplifiers. So back in the day it was even more deep tech. Um, but I think some of that is the times right because AI is making software dev so easy and SAS and software in general see feels quite saturated. Um, some of that is inspiration. When you're watching companies like SpaceX and Open AI and Tesla, uh, and you know, you see what an impact Apple has had and so on, then I think people feel inspired.

21:15Some of it is because of supply chains. It's easier to do hardware companies than it has been in the past because you can build up these supply chains. Um, so I I think you should go to whatever you're most inspired by. Um, the the nice thing about deep tech is you get to learn a lot. The learning curve is insane. Uh, you have less competition. you're probably doing something that is more meaningful or more impactful possibly. Um, depends on the details of course. The downside is it's way harder. Your odds of success are much lower. There are many cases uh of otherwise successful looking products. These are products you use every day or that you aspire to build that you think these are great companies with great products but the founders didn't make any money.

21:55The investors didn't make any money because they got wiped out along the way. It took too much money. um or they build what looks like a great product and it's good for all of one or two years and it gets cloned in China or Korea. Uh and then there's a zillion clones of an Alibaba and there's no ability to monetize. So it is actually quite a bit harder u and the team you have to assemble it's more difficult. But actually I would say if you're going to start in deep deep tech it's better to start early because when you're early your failures are more forgivable especially like you know pre-25 like there's a lot less pressure.

22:27um your learning curve is going to be tremendous and you'll start meeting uh people who are doing hardware and those are great contacts for later >> Got it. >> Much better moat in this age of AI. >> Interesting. What else do you think are the bigger moes today? >> I think design is always a moat. Good design. Uh good design requires good taste, requires a good eye. Uh AI can generate anything you want. uh but that means the world is going to be full of average and then eventually people will get tired of average so they'll say I want extreme so then AI will full fill the world full of extreme right there's going

23:03to be uh every possible permutation of everything imaginable will be out there think of it like I don't know if you've read Bourhees's uh the library of babel great story by the way but you know it's like every permutation of every book is in this library including the reputation of every book the translation of every book the opposite meaning of the book etc so at some point you realize that the the core task becomes editing, it becomes selection, it becomes curation. Um so developing your judgment, your taste is really important. And so that means having a good eye for products. Um not getting caught up emotionally disliking something just because somebody else did it.

23:39Uh and just trying to always learn, always having that intellectual curiosity to figure out what makes something great. And then if you're hardworking, you can take that taste and you can literally translate it into um creating something great. Like I I never thought of myself as a builder or creator um or even as a writer, you know, like on Twitter I got good writing these short pathy things, but uh I never started out as a writer. I actually remember when I was young, I tried to write a book like we were forced to write a book for uh some English class and I might have been like the only person in the class who didn't finish the

24:10assignment. I couldn't write the >> Um so I was not >> Twitter wasn't around. >> Sorry. Twitter wasn't around. >> Twitter wasn't around. So, I wasn't a particularly good writer. Um, and then I liked reading. I like to read a lot. So, I read a lot and I like poetry. I read a lot of poetry, but I couldn't write poetry and never figured out metric rhythm or verse or bothered to learn amic pentameter or any of that stuff. Uh, but then when Twitter came along, I was like, okay, well, we're limited. It was 140 characters. Um, so you have to like pick every word carefully like it's poetry. Um, and so that turned out to be useful.

24:41I developed taste without realizing it just by having had a passion when I was young for reading that stuff. It was something you could never predict. You can never connect those dots looking forward. Yeah. >> But I think developing your genuine taste is actually a useful thing. >> How do you know if you have good taste early on or if you should develop, you know, all right, I I'm a shitty designer or I'm a great designer. >> No, that's that's actually a really good question. It's very hard. Like for example, everybody says, I want to work with people better than me. And I'm like, well, why would they want to work with you, right?

25:13It's like if you if everybody has that mindset, then they don't want to work with you. So, you do have to bring something unique to the table. You do have to be really good at something. Uh, but I think almost everybody is good at something, right? Usually, it's an intersection of two or three things. What Scott Adams calls a skill stack where you're combining a few things that don't seem like they make sense uh from afar, but they do. And you'll find that out in action. you know, you'll go out there, you'll build things and people will say, "Wow, that's really great." I don't, you know, no, not just falsely complimenting you, but that thing that you just did, I find that really hard to do.

25:45So, if there's something that you can do and it doesn't feel like work to you, it feels like play to you, but it looks like work to others and other people are impressed by the output, then I would argue that that's somewhere along the lines of your natural talent and you should lead into that. Uh, I don't think in this age of specialization, it's worth covering your weaknesses. The way you cover your weaknesses is by allying with other people who have who are very strong in those areas. And what you should do is you should double down on your >> If you were to, you know, you mentioned a little bit earlier about extremes.

26:15Um, talk to us about how you think the future will deal with the extremes and what the extremes might look like. >> Well, I mean, I've been saying this for a while, but uh, the leverage in the system is just insane, right?

26:28>> Tell us more. What do you mean by that? Leverage is just force multiplier for your work. And historically the forms of leverage, the oldest form of leverage was labor. You have people working with you or for you. Then it was capital. You're investing money or throwing money behind the problem. Uh then it's media. You're writing a book and people are listening to you and your words are moving many people to do things. Uh then it was uh things like videos and podcasts and other kinds of media. Then code came along. Code is this incredible permissionless form of leverage where you have robots and data centers cranking away for for you.

26:58And now the leverage is increasing through AI, through agents, through robots, through uh supply chains, through 3D printing, through, you know, all the different things that you can do that can just amplify your work. So the leverage in the system has just gone insane. And you know, people talk about how there'll be one person billion dollar companies. There actually already have been. That's been true for over a decade. Uh Notch, the guy who coded up Minecraft and sold it for two billion to uh Microsoft, that was a oneman show. Satoshi Nakamoto Bitcoin that was probably a oneep one person show. Uh so I think the leverage is already there for an individual to do a billion dollar company or for 20 people to do an amazing hardware company.

27:36So the the the leverage will just continue to increase which means nonlinear returns and society just is not built to handle that. You can see all of the outcry against the rich getting richer, billionaires and all that. Um, but it's really it's not that the rich are getting richer. It's that the smart and leveraged are getting richer. So if you are smart and you're highly leveraged and everyone in this audience is smart or you wouldn't even be here and you're capable of being highly leveraged, your earning power and your create earning is downstream of knowledge and creativity. So I would say your knowledge your knowledge creation power is and your ability to then leverage that knowledge creation is so much higher than even like your peers that you may have left behind high school or college that they just

28:18have no idea what's coming. It's going to be kind of a crazy time. >> The last kind of topic I want to speak about is a little bit about education. Um everyone here has you know maybe a year or two left of traditional kind of college education. Um how do you think they should be spending that time? Yeah, that's a good question.

28:37Uh, I don't think there's a one-sizefits-all answer. Um, I'll just say for myself looking back in college, what was useful was when I did really, really hard things. Um, because it gave me confidence to do hard things in the future. So, I remember my computer science classes like I wrote a compiler, which was up until that point like the hardest thing I'd ever done. And that was great. It really gave me confidence that like, okay, there's there's no computer science, you know, problem out there that like other people can do that I can't do. Um, I wish I'd stuck with physics more because then I would have had that same feeling about advanced physics and math.

29:10Whereas right now, I do feel like I run into some things when I'm reading physics or math and I'm like, I don't understand this and then I got to spend a whole afternoon with chat GPT breaking it down. I feel like a at the end. You know, I wish I'd kind of broken those barriers when I was younger. It would have given me the confidence and given me the scaffolding. um when I wherever I learned about systems was really useful. So computer networking, computer architecture, semiconductors, all that stuff was really useful even though I was doing software programming when I got out because just understanding the layers of abstraction underneath were useful.

29:39So this whole idea that you don't need to study software engineering is nonsense. Uh in fact I would say you know go even lower level study chips, study physics, study whatever you can to understand how computers work because that's the greatest form of leverage in modern society. And the people who understand AI, understand software really well, are getting paid more than ever. Uh you know, Mark Zuckerberg's huge pay packages notwithstanding, uh just the average salary for high quality software engineers, uh junior or senior in the Bay Area continues to go up. Um and electrical engineers and industrial engineers and all of those.

30:13Um so that that's kind of in the studying domain. Uh in terms of people, I didn't invest enough into it. I didn't make enough connections with smart people when I was in school. I was very uh I was I was a nerd. I was an uh I guess today you call me an incel, but I was definitely extremely introverted. Um and even to the extent that I connected with people who were really smart, I didn't make an effort to stay in touch with them. That's fine. I mean, I don't I don't regret it. Uh but at the same time, like I think there's probably some versions of the world where I'd met like my co-founder while I was there who was like an incredible coder, incredible builder.

30:47Uh but I just I I just didn't wasn't thinking that way at that time. Uh that was a long time ago. Um should you finish school or not? Probably. Uh especially if you're getting a worthwhile degree, you know, if you're getting a degree in um some social science, then I would question that. I'm not sure how useful that would be. Uh but if you're getting a if you're if you're getting a degree where what you're doing with that degree will be tested by either uh nature or free markets, if it's going to get feedback from a source of reality, then that's probably worthwhile. On the other hand, if you're getting a degree in something where your main feedback is from other people, like people grading you or giving you awards, then I would argue it's a degree and you should probably switch away from it

31:28or just forget about it. It's a waste of your >> Raise your hand if you're studying engineering. If you're not, you should consider switching. It's about the classes. It's about learning. So, I think anything where you're really bending your mind and you're learning how reality works and your work will be tested by having to build something that works in the real world or by compile something that a computer will actually execute or by selling something that people in the market will buy, those are real skills. But if you're writing elaborate papers with lots of citations and then your professors are checking the boxes saying, "Oh my god, this is like the best paper in this and get studied in a journal and you're going to win an

32:04award." That's That's not real. Um, so that if you're getting your accolades from other people or from reviewers or graders, it's nonsense. You're not really learning anything. But you might be having a good time in school. Might be a good party. Well, >> I think that's a great way to conclude. Thank you, Nal, for spending time with everyone. Thanks for having me.