MI306: Almanacks and Anthologies w/ Eric Jorgenson

24:53To me, it seems like Naval is more and more getting into the philosopher role in many ways. And certainly wealth is important and it provides a lot of optionality. But correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't he say, here's the path to wealth. It's not going to do it for you, but you probably won't listen. So here's the path. Is that accurate to say? I think the last tweet of the famous tweet storm was when you're wealthy, you'll realize wealth wasn't really what you wanted, but that's for another day. Right. So let's go into that. What does he mean by that? I think the more that's a little, it's a quip that is, I think, meant to like leave you bleeding a little bit, but the more pertinent idea I think is, or the more useful is the money only solves your money problems.

25:40By all means, go get rich. Naval says something along the lines of it's easier to just achieve your material desires than to try to eliminate them in the modern world. And for some people, some of the time, which it goes back to the which desires do you want to choose? But money only solves your money problems. You might work for 30 years to get rich, reach some arbitrary number that you decided is what rich means, and then find out that money does solve some of your problems, but it's maybe 20 % of them. It's not going to make you fit. It's not going to make you happy. It's not going to give you internal peace.

26:13It's not going to give you good relationships. If you're really deliberate with how you use it and you already built the skill of chasing those other paths to happiness or solving those other problems in your life, money can be a lever to it. You can hire a personal chef. You can hire a personal trainer, but nobody can make you fit. Nobody can therapy you into having a great relationship with your spouse or your kids, no matter how much money you spend on it. So you do have to also address those problems directly in ways that money is never going to be able to achieve. So I think finding that balance in your life and remembering that there are problems outside of money problems and tackling those with the tools that they deserve.

26:54I heard you talk a little bit about the process of writing the Vols book and it sounded like you just put everything into a Google doc and I mean, it was a long process. I wanted to hear if like that process stayed the same with the Balaji book? Did it become easier to write the second book? Can you talk a little bit about the second book with Balaji and the process? Yeah, it's something that I think the tools are not glamorous. I will say that upfront. It doesn't take anything more than Google Docs to write a great book. The second book was really, I feel like I'm better now at the craft of curating and the craft of stitching these things together.

27:29I know more what the work feels like. And there were certainly less what I'll call creative doldrums or difficult crossroads along the way. The first book, I had no idea what the finished product would look or feel like, even the scale it should be. There was times when I wasn't even sure it was going to be a book. And so, this setting off on the second book and having like, I understand this person, and I understand how the finished product is going to feel and a little more about what it feels like to walk the maze along the way. There's still a lot of uncertainty around what's the final structure going to be?

28:00What are the big ideas that will emerge? It's a very organic process of consuming absolutely everything, trying to organize it, collecting the pieces, sort of shifting them around. And the best analogy is doing a jigsaw puzzle to me. Like you have to collect the pieces, you have to craft them, you have to organize them, and you have to experiment in different sort of formats to see what things come together. Have early peer readers sort of give you input, sand and polish and sand and polish, all the different things so that it reads very consistently and ideas flow into each other and naturally answer the question that emerges in your head.

28:37I think that's where you hear that people are like, oh my God, I read this in one day. I did not put it down. You're like, that's awesome. And to me, that feels like we succeeded in creating a really strong through line of idea and idea question answer, idea question answer for the reader. And hopefully a lot of that sticks. But yeah, it was a really, I feel like I leveled up and did my job better in this book, for sure. You know, his biology is different than Naval. The ideas are different. The audience will probably overlap, but not fully. This book airs much more on the side of entrepreneurs, technologists, builders.

29:12It's a little more of a like a handbook to like, go get out there, you know, get to work and a little less philosophical. But I think they go There's a lot more of the tactical uncertainty people might have had emerging from the almanac of Duval of like, I understand that leverage is important. I understand I need to build specific knowledge. I know I want to end up with equity in a business in order to become wealthy. Okay, what direction do I head now? And this is a little, there's very tactical stuff in here about finding new platforms, thinking about the technologies that are going to emerge, ideating for new companies and validating them with early customers and seeing which markets are going to emerge into being the biggest and where the opportunities arise in your industry or for your business.

29:57I hope that some of the stories from this turn into people being like, I applied this, I started a company, it is successful, here we go. I wanted to take a step back a little bit. And for our listeners that just aren't familiar with Balaji yet, how did you get intrigued by him? What was it about his ideas that you decided to write your second book about his ideas? And a little bit about his story as a person? Sure. Yeah. He's somebody I've been following for a long time as well. He's become very well known in Silicon Valley and sort of the, I don't know, the tech frontier tech people in general.

30:33He's early to crypto. He's actually was the CTO of Coinbase for a while because a company that he founded even before that was acquired by Coinbase. He was a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. And before that, he was the co-founder of a clinical genomics company because he's got a, I forget the exact degree, like a master's in chemistry and a PhD in, I think, computational biology from Stanford. So he was in biotech, then VC, then crypto. And he's an investor, he's a futurist, he's a writer. He's done a lot of different things over the years. And he's very much a polymath, right? Investor in hundreds of companies.

31:13He was, I think, became much more widely followed for being one of the first people to kind of see what was emerging in the beginning of the COVID pandemic and being like, guys, like we got a problem here. Like look at these exponential curves. I know the chemistry of these viruses and how they work. Like we've got a real problem on our hands. Certainly early investor in cryptocurrency and a big believer in sort of making space for technology to flourish and for allowing technology to drive progress forward, which is a lot of where the idea is. He wrote The Network State, which became a bestseller.

31:45And that's really the driving force behind a lot of his work is just like, how can we use technology to make the future better? And how can we change the structure of our politics and our institutions to enable that? Because we've lost a lot of what made today great has changed. And what was a tailwind has become a headwind, I think in a lot of cases. I want to dive into a little bit more just about Balaji as a person you've done hours and hours and hours of study of him and his writings. Talk to me just about some, just a few ways that he like lives, thinks, acts differently than the average guy because he's a different class of human being.

32:23Yeah. And people are like, it's easy to get intimidated. I think like I've heard that a number of times of like people have trouble, like bringing him down to earth or applying what he says or following the thought pattern. And yeah, I mean, he is keyed up. He talks fast. He has deep, obscure references. He often explains something in order to explain something, which loses a lot of people. But I think at the core of it, he's a really, really smart guy. You can see that through his entire career. He's incredibly high horsepower. And he spends a lot more of his mental energy extrapolating than distilling.

33:01That's something I noticed working with Naval. He's got these killer four to 10 word things that are so memorable that just stick with you forever. Balaji has some hooks like that for sure, but he spends so much more time explaining the second, third, fourth order effects of his ideas or a problem that we see. His ideas cover a really wide swath of modernity and spends a lot more time on contemporary issues. And to me, what I hope this book does is sort of do the distillation work, is show the most fundamental key ideas, the most applicable, the most evergreen ideas that Balaji has shared, and give you the seeds of his worldview, right?

33:40Like what Mark Andreessen says of Balaji, which I think is a really interesting, like fair critique or context, I guess, to provide is like when Balaji is wrong, it's because he over extrapolates. Almost everybody on earth, when they're wrong, it's because they under extrapolate. biology is somebody who takes an idea to 11, even though maybe reality only takes it to a five or six. But through that lens, it's really interesting just to see how he thinks, see where the world could go. And maybe you'll arrive at a different conclusion and maybe you'll stop extrapolating at four, but without seeing him take it to 11, you might not have made it past a two, right?

34:12So just seeing somebody who spends so much time thinking so far into the future about all the different crazy possibilities, I think is just a really helpful, interesting mental exercise. And it's helped me see podcasting differently. Even some of the basics of that, you start to just pattern match once he gives you some of these mental models and stories and you apply them in your own world. And maybe it'll help you see around a corner or two. So you mentioned the podcast. How has it changed how you think about your podcast, Smart Friends? You've interviewed Balaji. He seems... I know I would be massively intimidated by interviewing him, I noticed that he'll ask you questions like, have you heard about whatever he's talking about?

34:53And it's like, nope, I haven't actually. Yeah. I don't think he's expecting you to say yes, you know, for most of the French revolutionary war specific battle. Well, it's the perfect metaphor for this thing that I need to explain. And he's like that in conversation too. Like, you know, we've gotten to talk sort of offline and what you hear on a podcast is exactly what you get in real life. And I think he's got a real gift for partly where those references come from is he's a deep student of history. You mentioned the book recommendations and this book, just like Naval, the whole last chapter is book recommendations that show you the foundation of his worldview.

35:28A huge part of that list of maybe the biggest piece of it is history. Balaji's read a lot of history, which I think is a really good, it's a good inoculation against sitting here in the present and thinking that the present or the near future is going to be just like the recent past, right? And when you're a student of history to the degree that biology is, you're like, man, all of these people in all these different turning points of history woke up on Tuesday and were like, yep, today will be just like yesterday. And one day they were just so wrong and a revolution happened, you know, an archduke was assassinated, like a pandemic started, crazy things happen all the time.

36:07The government started repossessing assets or there was a coup or the history is just full of these crazy unpredictable things that there are patterns to and a fair kind of response about it. He's like, oh, there's doom and gloom. He's just predicting different disasters. It's like, yeah, because he's studied history and seen how often different circumstances have led to crazy outcomes. And he is often right about the risks and assessing them. And these are all very complex systems. It's really difficult to have any specific prediction turnout to be true. But I think it's a helpful lens to have on the world to see all of the different setups and all the different outcomes that have happened throughout history and just get a little more appreciation for the breadth of consequences that different actions or different scenarios could put forth.

36:56Obviously, I haven't read all of the history that he recommends in there. He's decades ahead of my reading list. But even if you just pick a few or read synopsis, go read the Wikipedia page of the thing that the book is about. You'll start to see, I think, a little more of what he sees in the world, for better or worse, and maybe be a little bit more prepared for your life, your business, your future. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle.

37:36Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows. We Study Billionaires is our flagship podcast, and we've made a name for ourselves over the years by interviewing the best investors in the world, including Ray Dalio, Howard Marks, Joel Greenblatt, and many, many more. My colleagues Stig Brodersen, Clay Fink, Kyle Greve, Preston Pysh, and William Green each host their own We Study Billionaires episodes and bring their own unique perspectives. A whole new world of insights awaits you. Just go ahead and type in We Study Billionaires into your podcast app and see what you've been missing out on.

38:12Seriously, go ahead. I promise you'll like what you find. Bonus points if you show your support for our work by clicking follow. If something piques your interest, just start listening. No hard feelings. I'll be waiting for you back here. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor, and I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investors Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors, and now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

38:49With my How to Get Started with Stocks course, you can master the principles of excellent lifelong investing with valuable insights for both beginners and pros. The course covers 10 different sections, beginning with the basics of what a stock actually is and how the stock markets work, to strategies to optimize your retirement savings, how to pick great companies for the long term, what to look for in ETFs, and how to monitor your investments, plus so much more. To begin getting smarter about investing, just visit theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash get started with stocks.

39:25And for a limited time, you can use code STOCKS15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. Not to be cliche, but building a market-beating portfolio really doesn't have to be a mystery, at least with the right tools. If you've listened to our podcast for a while, then you know we spend a lot of time learning from savvy investors. So why not use the same tools we do? With TIP Finance, you can. Screening for great companies, calculating intrinsic value, keeping up with legendary investors' portfolios, and more are all not just possible, but easy to do. TIP Finance was created by investors for investors.

40:03It's quite literally the tools we wanted to use ourselves when researching investments in a simple to use interface. You can get started by creating an account for free. Who knows, maybe TIP Finance will help you find your next 100 to 1 investment. Between the screener and Legend Investment Portfolios to reference, I've gotten a ton of ideas from TIP Finance. What are you waiting for? Take the next step in your investment journey today with the right tools at your fingertips. Grab your device and type into your browser, theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance to get started. That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash tip-finance.

40:44All right, back to the show. Yeah. So I was fortunate enough you sent me an advanced copy of the book, so I got to spend some time with it. So thanks for doing that. I really enjoyed it. The last week or so, I've been spending a lot of time with it. So you broke the book down into three parts. The first one's on technology. Second one is on truth. And then the third part, which was my favorite, was about building the future, building a company, building a even set of a new country or a nonprofit. But I wanted to touch on just some big ideas in each section. And the one that stood out to me in the first part was transhumanism.

41:17And I hear him talk about transhumanism a lot. Explain to me what that is, because I'm not sure I exactly understand it, but it's an important concept to him. It's an important concept to him. And I think the definition that's in there is very simple. Transhumanism is self-improvement with technology. And in that sense, the transhumanism of the past would be like boats, planes, riding computers, bikes, learning to ride horses. like the entire tech tree could be seen as transhumanism of the past. What are things that we can use that are more than like just the hands that we were given as, you know, evolved monkeys to increase our capabilities, right?

42:03And people, I think today, you know, you hear transhumanism and people have this sense that like, which is bizarre. It is absolutely bizarre when you see the full evolution of time, but they have this sense that like wherever they were born is the correct amount of technology to have and that any new technology is scary and unnatural and unsafe and insane and should be illegal. But thank God we have planes. Thank God we have vaccines. Thank God we have open heart surgery. Thank God we have air conditioning. So all of these transhumanism is just self-improvement with technology. And I think that's a really helpful, it's a helpful way to see it.

42:42There are some, you know, he's got a long list of them in there, sort of near-term opportunities for really crazy capabilities to get added, right? Externalized memory in our computers now. We could have AI partners, we can have robotic help, we can have self-driving cars, and people might be excited or fearful about any set of those, but you can't deny that they are adding to the set of human capabilities pretty quickly. He talked about having a dashboard instead of looking at your phone right off the bat, scrolling through Twitter, looking at your whatever, your notifications. He talked about having a dashboard that would monitor your health, wealth, truth.

43:21Those are I think the three aspects that he said were most important, right? First pursued truth, then health, then wealth. We often get that backwards. So talk to me a little bit about the dashboard idea. Yeah. I think the whole middle section, truth, is really an interesting sort of weave between the different types of truth that there are, like fundamental physical truth, social consensus truth, economic truth, and how the media that we are used to using, whether it's traditional media or social media, tends to distort that truth and make it more difficult for us to find fundamental reality.

43:57And this is the role of media, that's its job, but it's grown to take over a huge percentage of our lives. And there are people who live in this absolutely unreal world created for them by social media and how they choose to interact with it. And his point, I think, is rather than open an algorithmically derived set of the most triggering things that engagement bait that you can find or that the algorithm has found for you every morning that are someone else's priorities, perhaps the most important thing to do is wake up and look at, for me, it's like my whoop, the resting heart rate variability, basically how healthy, How good were my habits yesterday?

44:35How well rested am I? How ready am I for the work that I have to do today? Where are my personal finances at? Where's my budget? Which not everybody looks at daily, but are you tending to the things that are in your house, in your yard? Are your relationships strong would be something that if you could quantify in some sense, and there was like a little red alert going off, it's like, hey, yeah, you worked pretty hard yesterday. Like, how's your spouse feeling? Like, how many minutes did you talk to them yesterday? Are your true priorities reflected in how you're using your time both yesterday and your plan for today?

45:04I think that's the dashboard that you can imagine. You could draw it out on paper like, what do I wish I had a report on every morning? And a lot of that's yet to be built. But the technology for a lot of it could be there. And just replacing maybe a bad habit with a good one will trigger some different changes in how you use your time. Yeah. So the third section is building the future. I think that was your favorite section as well. Yeah, I think I said in my intro, the first section is the most important, but the third is my favorite. Yeah. So let's go into some of the bigger ideas in the third section, which was how to build a future.

45:39He's got a lot of great ideas in there about just building a company that can be applied to almost anything. Yep. Building a country. That's really the foundation of the network. I assume that's the ultimate goal of most people in real estate, right? Is like go start their own country, own the whole thing, triple net land. So the building the future section is broken up into three sections, which is like sort of the internal game of the mindset and how to think and how to prioritize and determining what the best opportunity is for you. And then founding, which is just every verb from starting your research all the way through sort of executing and surviving as a company and enshrining that legacy.

46:17There's a lot of messy stuff in between. And Balaji's got, I think, a really uniquely rigorous, quantitative, strict approach, basically, to navigating that messy piece. And I think he's been a huge athlete. He's invested in hundreds of startups, many of which have become incredibly successful. He has started a few of them himself and is very much an in the trenches kind of founder. So I think there's a lot to be gained from that. And actually, I have sent those chapters to a lot of founders that we invest in or friends even who are just starting companies like, hey, this is the clearest framework I've seen for how to go from zero customers to a bunch of customers pre-committed to features you have not yet built with a prioritized list of features and revenue.

46:58expectations attached, which is a really helpful framework to have when you're trying to go from zero to one. And he taught a course. A lot of that material is from a course that he taught at Stanford for founders and technical founders that I think a quarter million people took that course online. It's an open online course. And some of the technical information is outdated now, but some of the ideas are still really key. And I compiled all those into the course notes in a PDF. If you want the full context version, that's on the website, the book website, biologyanthology.com if you want to go deeply into that.

47:28But I hope that this is sort of the successor to Zero to One in terms of like very tactical builders manual. Like that's what this section is really meant to be. So if you liked Zero to One, I think this will hit the spot. I agree. And the book is coming out when? Next October? October 24th. That's great. Yeah. Hopefully it's already out by the time you're hearing this. It should be. So I'm excited to get a physical copy. I love physical copies of books. So I'll definitely be getting one. One of the things that I wanted to kind of touch on is Balaji's Bitcoin bet. He's really well known for that.

48:01Talk to me a little bit about the impetus for that bet. For our listeners that aren't familiar with it, a little bit of background on why he made the bet and the specifics of it. Yeah, some of this is definitely over my pay grade, but I will do my best. So this gets to some of the contemporary issues that Balaji gets involved in. And his view is that we have dangerous levels of inflation sort of coming to the US and impending financial crisis of some sort. His view is that the Fed intentionally or unintentionally has like, due to the rate changes, has really caused trouble for the banks and caused the bankruptcy, the failure of some of these banks like SVB and is sort of hiding even more inflation in some of these operations.

48:46So the Bitcoin bet, and his view also is another part of the preface is that Bitcoin is the safe haven for investors to move in a high inflation environment. If USD is the reserve currency currently, which it is, and it's entering this crazy inflation state, which his theory is that it is, then the safe place for your currency is Bitcoin. And that that's preferable to moving to any other foreign reserve currency. So it is the bet that he made was that Bitcoin would go to a million in 90 days, which of course it didn't, but it was an incredible publicity stunt. I don't know if he would use those words.

49:26It got a lot of attention, certainly. And the narrative that he shared around it was like, I burned a million to show you they're printing trillions and to bring attention to the kind of impending crisis. And he's released a lot more nuanced information around that, that if this is something you're interested in, I encourage you to go kind of dig into. There's a lot on his Twitter. He's released long podcasts about it. There's a lot of sort of macroeconomic and deep financial analysis and information that goes into it. I'm not an expert in any of those fields, so I'm not the correct person to help you parse it.

50:01But it's an interesting rabbit hole to go down if that's of interest to you. Yeah, it is actually to me. It is a deep rabbit hole and one I've actually gone down myself. So we've got a podcast that I mentioned, Bitcoin Fundamentals. That's great. People can listen to that as well. It's a controversial thing. Yeah. It's one of those where every opinion is interesting in its own way and you got to kind of collect all the extremes and figure out where your worldview fits among there. And that is something Valadji said. It's like, here's the different in the nuanced communication, which is most headlines don't report.

50:35But if you go read his stuff, it's like, here's my expectation of the different possible scenarios. And here's my probability weighting of each of them. And here's what I would do as a retail investor. If whatever you think is the most probable thing, like here's a set of actions you might take to protect yourself or your business. Yeah. It's an interesting rabbit hole to go down, especially for people whose businesses are heavily impacted by interest rates, Fed activities, banking collapse, that kind of stuff. Yeah, we won't go any further into that. We could do a whole show on that. But I want to go into Scribe and you've got this new announcement.

51:10You've manifested your dream job, you tweeted. So talk to me about your next chapter, what you're up to as CEO of Scribe Media and how it came about. Yeah, I'll do my best in brief because we could do a whole podcast on that probably. The publisher that I used to publish my first and the biology book, actually, that I owe a huge debt of gratitude to, went through some financial challenges related to previous leadership and underwent a sale process. And I, as an adoring customer of theirs and a fan of all the humans who I've worked with there, did my best to go support them and make sure that that could remain a stable thing.

51:46And I have some friends, you know, we mentioned who work in permanent equity and private equity and long-term holding companies. And so I just took this opportunity to around to a few of them and Siva and Xavier at Enduring Ventures got excited about the business, worked a lot with the bank to figure out how this was going to unfold and ended up sort of in some form or fashion that is not my expertise, like closing on some of those assets and hiring the team and needed somebody to run it. And I talked with them a lot through the process. They knew that I was a happy customer and had some experience in this industry and some ideas about how to carry it forward and gave me a number of calls.

52:27And so over a few weeks, we talked about it and got excited about the opportunity. So I joined a few weeks ago. Yeah, new to the company, new to the publishing industry, but I'm very excited to cross the line from author and moving into CEO, this professional publisher. I mean, the professional publisher, honestly, they are very well known and respected in the industry. And I think fertile ground for the next kind of the biggest new age publishing company out there. I see that the world has changed around traditional publishing, that the kind of offer that Scribe provides authors, the chance to own their full financial upside, all their creative rights and decisions and copyrights makes so much sense in a world of people who own their own audience, in a world of Amazon.

53:10on being where most books are bought and sold. It's a really interesting shift in an industry that I feel like has not yet fully adjusted. And I'm excited to be digging in. So Eric, this has been really great. I've really appreciated your time today. I hope people dive into both the Naval book and the Balaji book. For people that want to find out more about you, find out about the books, what's the best way for them to learn about you, get in touch with you, that kind of thing. Yeah. Thank you so much for the kind words. I'm really I love to hear that these books have had an impact on people's lives.

53:43All of my projects can be found at ejorgensen.com. That's kind of the beginning of everything. And you can go any direction from there, the podcast, the fun, the books, the blog. And I'm on Twitter all the time, arguably too much. So if you're on Twitter, come find me. Let's have a chat. Eric, thanks so much for your time today. Really appreciate having you and best of luck with the Balaji book. Thank you. Appreciate you very much. All right. Take care. Okay, folks, that's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon.

54:37only before making any decision. Consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.