He Spent Years Studying Naval, Balaji, & How to Leverage AI: Eric Jorgenson

Hello, welcome back to the Alchemist Library podcast. Today on the show we have Eric Jorgensen. Eric is the author of the Ammonac of Invol, a book which has sold over one million copies, and he just came out with a new book, the Anthropology of Bellagy, and today we are going to discuss the wisdom of those two books, some of the lessons learned and much more. I'll catch you guys inside peace. Are you doing this work to?

facilitate growth or to become famous. Which is more important? Getting and letting go?

Mr Eric Jorgensen, thank you for being here today, sir.

Thank you for having me in your library. It's a good place to be. The library is a good vibe.

I appreciate that. I don't think anyone said that before.

I don't know. I walked into a library today and I just like it smells like a library, it just has such a unique feel. It's good, it's good stuff.

There's something special about a library, for sure.

Yeah, it's like you could feel it in the air.

Absolutely so. You just wrote this book on Bellagy. You have the book on N'Vol, which has sold over a million copies. Congratulations for that, by the way. So from N'Vol to Bellagy, I understand like, okay, the format. You're like this works, let's stick with this. But why write a book about Bellagy, of all people, and go on?

Yeah, I mean I had kind of a short list of people that were interesting to me that I'd followed for a long time. You know, n'vol's book was such a happy accident and that was just like it's such a perfect fit. And then, yeah, realizing how many more people fit the format of what I had just done and that I'd be happy to like go swim around in all of their content for three years, right Like, to write one of these books, it takes me, takes a couple of years. It takes consuming like all the media that someone's ever done and rereading this book like dozens of times. By the time I finish a book I've probably read it at least 20 times, start to cover or cover to cover. And that's just like a high bar for somebody that you have to have so much interest in so many pieces of what they say, that it's just like it can't be that long of a list of people and for who this actually benefits that they're like prolific but haven't written a book but would benefit from curation and editing. But you know, so it was just it was a short list and biology, like a bunch of people recommended it to all right, like as soon as it came out the N'Vol book, people were like oh, do biology, do Paul Graham?

like do.

Mark Andreessen do, vitalik do, and I was like, oh man, like these are all good ideas and people that are people that I respect and admire too and I can't remember which one it was, but biology and I started DMing about one of them and we're just kind of like, yeah, like this could this could work. He was busy writing the network state and he's like I'm not going to touch like so many of these ideas, but I think there, I think there's more, there's still a book to write, and I was like, yeah, man, I'm like I'd learned a ton from Bob. I think he's really interesting and I think there's so much to learn from his worldview that he actually doesn't spend that much time thinking about or speaking about specifically. Like most of the stuff he's you see on Twitter is very contemporary. He's usually like shows up and talks about COVID, or shows him and talks about like the network state conference, or shows him and talks about what's happening in politics and that's what you see in the public domain, but you don't see the foundation of his worldview and like what's really driving him and what are the pieces of more like tactical advice that he shared, when it's really his company building days, which is what's really interesting to me. So that's kind of what I filtered for in this book and what I think is most useful for the widest group of people. Like that's what I filter for when I try to build these books evergreen, timeless, widely applicable and like immediately useful to somebody's life.

So for those that don't know, how do you describe the format?

The format. Those are the parameters I start with. I say it's a curation and a compilation of someone's most useful and important ideas. It's usually sort of, I think of it as like rescuing these really important ideas from ephemeral media, right From podcasts or Twitter or something that is just it's easy to interact with. Like I listen to podcasts on my Twitter all the time. I love them, but it's not as broadly accessible, it's not as timeless, it's not as like there's just something lindy about books and there's an incredible sort of dialogue around them. People gift them to each other. Like you don't see that happen with the podcast. So there's a lot of value, actually, I think, to be gained by one through curation, which I think is just as important as creation and kind of exists on the same spectrum. And then two by just transforming mediums. You know, you see things all the time shift between mediums that turn out to be sometimes even better than their original format, or at least art worthy of standing on their own once they transform formats, and I think that's like overlooked as a craft maybe.

It's a fascinating concept because you know the lindy effect in. That is so interesting because you know you take a guy like Naval who has such incredible ideas but has never sit down to write that book. A lot of those concepts are just lost in time without someone compiling those ideas and putting them into a work like the Almanac.

Yeah, and I think in Naval's case in particular, that would have been just a damn shame. You know like he's such a gifted distiller and so widely read and so thoughtful when he puts those ideas together and you can see him working on them like years a year. After a year he's like refining the same idea from, you know, 30 words, down to 20 words, down to 10, down to five, like most memorable things and that's a skill and I think you know, if the right idea at the right time, you really change your life. And, if I can, you know, through the work of transforming things between mediums and packaging them differently and curating them and putting them in the right context, help people find that right idea that helps them change their life. Like it's work I'm proud to do.

Totally. I usually start my podcast by asking guests what's one concept that's had the biggest impact on them, and for that I was having trouble for this conversation. I was having trouble trying to word that because I was going to do what's one concept from the ball that's had the biggest impact on you and what's one concept from Bellagio that's had the biggest impact on you.

Yeah, I threw you off with that library thing, huh.

Exactly.

No, I think uh, naval, all credit, maybe most with leverage in a business context, and just probably happiness as a skill, in the kind of philosophical happiness context. It's really difficult for me to like prioritize those because I think they belong sort of next to each other. Biology the most important idea, which is why I like put it first in the book and what I really hope sort of to inset people with like through this book, is just the value of technology, like technology as this incredible, like fundamental moral good. That is what generally makes our lives safe and dry and warm and comfortable and safe and beautiful, but that we tend to take for granted because you know it's been around for so long and we haven't seen a regression. But never taking for granted that you know we, we get, we earn the right to exist at our current level of technology forever. Like civilizations rise and fall all the time, and if a bunch of smart people don't keep working hard on technology, that it can go backwards and that when it goes backwards, like people turn ugly. So that's the like human reason for it. The other is just, you know, a purely personal sort of like how do you win at life level? The advantage is so often come from technology. Just whoever's you know, the first one to pick up a new tool and new technology, a new piece of information, is so often the one who wins, whether that's, you know, a political battle or a literal physical war, or in business. There's so much value to be gained from that and I think that's a really interesting world view. And back to the point about you know, biology doesn't talk about that as much, but more and more people are coming around to it. It's actually what I see as a kind of a key input to this, like effective acceleration movement. Like if you ever see people on Twitter like E slash ACC in like their name or their bio.

I was going to ask you about that.

That's a. I'm happy to explain it if you want. But that is like. That is the group of people kind of rallying around the feeling that, holy shit, like we need, we need to be backing to technology, we need to be supporting it, like that is the root of so many good things in our life and there's so many competing priorities for people like personally and for society at large that are edging out the need to like. There's a million examples and if you want, we can go in them. But yeah, that's what that means. It means it stands for effective acceleration.

Effective acceleration. It's so fascinating. I think that there's two things that stood out from what you said. The first one is the whole concept of that book. Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Just goes back to being the first one to pick things up, like I think the example in the book was Bill Gates like starting to code at a super young age and just really picking up that skill. And then the second one, which is which I found was very interesting, was you becoming more pro technology from writing the book. And you know we have this perception, especially nowadays with how advanced AI is getting, that it's gets a bit doom and gloom and scary and people have a very negative perspective on the way things are developing. And it's probably just human nature and the way things have always been. Humans are always a bit scared of the future. But it's fascinating that the book made you more pro technology.

Yeah, I think to some extent there is. Humans are naturally. We're evolutionarily evolved to be pessimistic, right Like optimists get eaten in the jungle. So I think there's something to a natural human sort of inborn like fear of the unknown and the new. But I also think we are, we exist in an environment that is like so extremely media in general is so extremely rewarded for being negative. Like we click on negative headlines because of that inborn nature, like the media says negative things and we click on negative things and so they get paid to tell us negative things and so we click on. They do it more and then we click on a more. And you know there's this. I don't deny that there is a doom and gloom sort of like vibe sometimes and people are just like moping and complaining and being scared and there's always an industry in fear mongering, right, like because of that. But it's such a dangerous place to live, sort of for you individually and for us Broadly, like as a society, as a species, is just like not a helpful place to exist. Because you look at something like AI and you say, like AI could be this incredible, incredible advance for all of us. It could liberate people from a drudgery of not just physical manual labor but also a bunch of what is actually kind of very shitty mental labor, like white collar labor also. It's an incredible tool. It's maybe the greatest tool since computing itself. But all the headlines just say, oh my god, ai is going to kill us all. Somebody call the government, take it all away, make it stop, and like we're not actually very close to being in any peril and there's huge disputes about that. It's an interesting conversation going on. And then you think about like how many things AI might must help us solve that are other existential risks to humanity. It's like, okay, what if an asteroid was coming towards Earth and the only way to solve it was like if we had had 100 years of development into AI that helped us build the thing to divert the asteroid. Or what if we needed AI to help reverse engineer the next pandemic? That's like significantly more dangerous than the one that we just went through. Or what if AI could help us, like, build weapons that prevented a nuclear war? Like there's a lot of risks that we face as a species and every tool that we have and technology that we have ever come up with has helped us sort of move forward, support more people, support more ideas, support more infrastructure. That then helps us sort of increase our scope and our capacity and our capabilities and like that's what's beautiful about us as a species. And so every technology that I can possibly think of has done more good than harm, like because humans are generally more good than bad, and I don't see AI as being any different. In fact, I see it as being like one of the catalysts for the next industrial revolution, and that's something that I think especially like I'm in my 30s and people even who are like 50 years old, like we haven't lived through any totally mind bending, physical, like life altering, tangible inventions Like phones, computers, amazing, very incredible, but like have just sort of increased exponentially, like within software, right, like we haven't. We didn't live through the feeling of going from like humans will never fly to oh my god, we built planes. Oh my god, we have commercial air travel, oh my god, we just landed on the moon. Or electrification, like. Imagine living through the feeling of like you don't understand what's happening to, like there's a light bulb and there's wires being run and all of a sudden we move from torches to light bulbs, railroads, steel, gas and oil, eternal combustion, like that kind of orders of magnitude, leaping capacity is something that's available to us and something that we could live through in the next 50 years. And we get our shit together and we actually support AI, support nuclear energy, support, you know, advanced nanotechnology there's all kinds of crazy, crazy cool stuff that can, that is coming, that, if you are optimistic enough and close to the frontier enough to see it coming and you're even near the first one to pick it up, if you're in the first 10% of people let alone 1%, 10th of a percent, 100th of a percent of people to understand it, contribute to it. You know that that's where millionaires, billionaires and trillionaires are made and where the future of the species gets saved. Like if you think about so many of our heroes today, they're the people who un-crocked new technology for the first time and really helped it get distributed to do the maximum amount of good.

I love that. I mean I think that you know the only. You rarely hear the good when it comes to all of these things. Like we were saying before, the possibility, I mean that nanobot technology, like even when it comes to health and the eradicating disease and possibility of living these longer, healthier lives, I mean the possibilities are endless and it's almost overwhelming when you think about what that switch would be from the candle to the light bulb, like it's fascinating to think about what that next step is.

And there's like that's what I love about living in this world at the edge of technologies and investing in these early stage tech companies and reading about what's happening at the edges of these, these frontiers is like there's so many reasons to be incredibly optimistic, like I have my mind blown like monthly, if not weekly, by meeting so muchpreneur or some scientist and seeing their vision of the world for the first time. You know like what, what could be if their mission pans out for the next like 10 or 20 years. I mean, I can talk about some specifics if you want, or places to go for people to like follow and learn some of this kind of news. But it's there's so many reasons to be optimistic and I hope I just enjoy every day more. When you're like looking in that direction, facing the sun, like looking towards a bright future and trying to figure out how to contribute to it, then you know, looking backwards, looking forward and seeing just regression and doom and fear and pain and it's just. It's just a hard way to go through life and nobody's making you, nobody's making you have that perspective. But you know you biology says, like you believe, if you are what you eat, you start to, you are also what you see and whatever media you are taking in eventually becomes you. It's rebuilding the ideas in your head day by day. So whatever headlines you read, whatever people you follow like, that is what becomes the voice in your head. That's what becomes you. That becomes the things that you say. That becomes how you are seen by other people. And you can, if you choose those inputs, you remake yourself and you have the power to do that.

It just requires some attention deliberately choosing to be an optimist is such a great perspective because, for the majority of people, what you can do about the negative things is very low when you have a very cynical view on the world as a whole. So choosing, even if it's a bit delusional, to just be like things are going to work out, the world's going to be a better place.

You're going to be delusional. Either way, right, you're not going to be correct so you may as well lean towards optimistic and what makes you feel a little better every day. You know there's something I think everybody goes through at some point. You know there's something like alluring about being this, like sarcastic, like smoking, like intellectual pessimists who just like can pick everything apart and tell you all the reasons why something's like not going to work right. So it's. It is like the laziest way to appear smart is just to like point out what's wrong with everything else and it's so useless and not constructive and actually like repels people from you by like trying to show them what's wrong or show them how smart you are. It's a thing I think a lot of people do in college or in the early 20s. Like there's an insecurity at the core of it and I find myself just more and more choosing to be around people who are, who ask questions like what would it take, or how can we get it done, or what's the bigger version of that, or how big could it possibly be. You know that's a much more fun and exciting and interesting conversation. It's more likely to lead to positive things for you. It's more likely to lead to a new company, a new investment, a new friend, a new worldview and, just you know, trying to look smart and cool in the moment.

What are some of the technologies that excited you?

Oh, dude, there's okay. So there's so many. So the three? There's this incredible book called Where's my Flying Car and it's by Stripe Press. It's written by a PhD in nanotech and he basically says that the next industrial revolution will be the product of three sort of co-evolving technologies. Right, so, a huge increase in energy. One, so building a ton more nuclear energy is the cheapest way to get new energy. And two, ai, which will help us build more energy faster. And AI can help us get to mature nanotechnology. And nanotech is like kind of mind-blowing, because what he calls mature nanotech like you know what we might have in 30 or 50 years is something like it's like Legos at an atomic level. It is basically godlike perfect control over the material world so we can program a machine or a small sort of organism. There's like kind of the mechanical path and the organic path in this. But let's just say, 20 mile high tower made of diamond that is like the space elevator Totally fine. Building the size of your iPhone that synthesizes food from air and water Fine, like totally doable. Building tiny nuclear reactors that are the scale of like a can of coke that could like go in a jet pack Doable, right, like flying 10 mile cube, flying cities Like Avengers, shit. You know Like this is wild stuff and we tend to treat it just like fantasy, but that nanotech, like a Manhattan project for nanotech, could get us there within a few decades. And they actually kind of tried this. This is all in the book where's my flying car? But they tried this in the late 90s I think, and basically the government kind of like fucked up the allocation of resources and that like the wrong academics just kind of like co-opted it for the wrong reasons, but there's still huge potential there. There's some people working on it. Like nanotech has not yet has its SpaceX moment. So, anyway, I think those three are like incredibly important, incredibly important frontiers. Then there's gene editing and CRISPR and some really cool, crazy stuff on the biology side. I mean, some stuff that we have personally invested in is like a significant leap in energy density of batteries. So I've got a podcast interview about this with the founder, ethan Loosbrock. But he's building changing the battery chemistry to get much higher energy density of lithium ion batteries and so a Tesla's range right now is like 300 miles and with his sort of proposed chemistry improvements and this is speculative, you know this is like so in the research, scientific research phase but it could go 3000 miles like one charge, one battery straight across the country, like your laptop wouldn't need to be charged for a week With that kind of energy density. You could also have electric jets like vertical take off landing, like you can do some really, really crazy stuff. There just wouldn't be gas stations anymore. Homes could go off the grid very, very easily. There's just so many really interesting things and you know we're probably not going to have all of these in five years or even 10 years, but some mix of these things are coming and the closer you can get to those frontiers and just seeing, like what seeds are planted and how they're coming along new longevity drugs, new health research like there's some really really interesting stuff out there.

That was actually my follow up question, so it goes back to the thing that Bellagio was saying before about being the first one to pick things up or being early on in these stages of doing things. How does somebody position themselves in a way to be on that frontier, understand that you started a venture venture fund after, after writing the Neval book, and I guess that's one way. But if, what are some ways for for most?

I mean the easy. The easy start is just like start following some of these people on social media, right, like? Packey McCormick is amazing about this. He shares a ton of crazy cool stuff. Jason Karma, as three news, is just kind of at the edge of this. Something interesting that happened over the last like 20 years is apparently all of the tech publications just started like hating tech. They became more media companies than tech companies and so, like you know, you see articles in Wired magazine or tech crunch and stuff and it's all like anti tech news and it's like what are you doing Like you were? Why are you hating on the industry that you are like supposed to be covering? Like how is this? How is this helpful for anybody? So we're starting to see Mike Solana and Pirate Wires is another great one. There's a ton of it. Once you kind of like get a toe in, you'll you'll be able to kind of lily pad hop from person to person. You'll see them recommend each other and again, you just search E slash ACC in Twitter and like start following people. That have that in their names or bios. That's a good way to get involved. I think there's a. You don't have to go, like, become a founder of a tech company or investor or anything like that to sort of participate. I think it goes all the way down to just whatever your job is, looking for ways to do it better, looking for new tools, new methods. I don't know what almost every single person who is listening there is a tool, a technology tool probably, that you could use to better do your job. You know, whether it's chat, gbt, some sort of you know Zapier automation, you know upgrading from a spreadsheet to an air table, like there's there is some crazy cool tools out there and just spending you know a few hours to search out something and create a success. Like there are tiny steps all the way through civilization. That's like you don't have to go get a PhD in nanotechnology to contribute to the slow drumbeat of like humans getting better at using technology. And when you hear people like this is another good example of a technology, that is like here, self driving cars, right. Like I don't know if you remember 10 years ago when Google was like we think we can build self driving cars, and it was like fuck, yeah, let's build self driving cars. That would be amazing. Millions of people dying car accidents senselessly every year. Like let's build that, can't wait. Can we have them yet? Can we have them yet? Are they ready? Are we ready? What progress are you making? We're all excited about it. And now we have self driving cars. They're like cruise is active in San Francisco and Phoenix, austin, and they're testing and people are like posting videos and driving and self driving cars. Every press article you can find is about isolating and calling out the problems that they caused, or small issues and calling for them to be regulated and being very against them, when all the data actually shows that they're like three times safer and like 10 times safer in terms of actual, like human deaths involved in car accidents, when there's an autonomous car versus a human driven car. And so it's like I just I don't understand. Like who are these people who are see the potential improvement, ignore the data and like just push back on this very obvious improvement that could really save human lives? So I think, just things that come down to that right, like when you're in Thanksgiving table with your aunt, who's like self driving cars are dangerous, they can't. It's like no technology is good, like they are better, it is scary. Like people used to not want to get into elevators. Like it's we get comfortable with these things. Like this is a process Like let's get, let's respect what technology can do for us and what it's done for us in the past. So we owe it to the future generations to sort of build on what we were given, not make things worse.

I love that point about just researching ways you could do the things you already do now better with technology and AI. I mean, there are the limits of that, are? I mean, the possibilities for that are insane. I'm super into the health stuff. I'm like I have I've been researching AI tools that will read blood work and give you probabilities of dysfunction in each organ based on the results and like that's. That is a simple tool, it's like 20 bucks to use, but that's like life saving technology and that's already here. And then there's, I think, the cool part about the future from my perspective and thing I'm excited about I'm curious to take on this is the possibility of scaling with very lean teams because of the leverage that technology is providing for us, and I just think it's going to open the door for these possibly billion dollar companies that have like four guys.

Yeah, I mean we've seen a few of them already. I think biology I don't remember how exactly specific he is but there's like there's been billion dollar companies that are basically built by one person, and I think that trend is like only getting more extreme. I mean, people were joking when Chad, GPT and GitHub Copilot came out. That's like, you know, every 10 X engineer just became a hundred X engineer. You know, if you think about Satoshi is basically one person and like what? What do you call Bitcoin? You know, what do you call Minecraft? Like plenty of fish was like a very big dating site that's basically built by one guy and that was 15 years ago, before you have AI, before you have robotics, before you have there's some, there's some really crazy stuff out there and I think if you, especially if you place that kind of value of being high leverage at the very core of your company yeah, I mean, Instagram was like 15 people and they acquired WhatsApp was like a couple dozen, 17 billion dollar acquisition Like there are wild, wild outcomes that are possible if you really embrace technology and really adopt that mindset of how do you, how do you as one person or two or three people, what work can you do that, can do the work of hundreds.

Hmm, what a great question, and I wanted to dive deeper into that concept of leverage, because you brought it up early in the episode when talking about Naval and the big takeaway that you gained from him. What was that insight exactly into leverage that sparked that?

Yeah, I was so like thoroughly folded this into my own world that I forget. I forget what I actually learned from him versus what it built on.

You could just distract it to yourself.

I think the biggest favor that he did was just like label this idea for us and sort of categorize it. I think leverage has a. I want to disambiguate a little bit. So this is not to have leverage over someone, right, like that's like the name of the TV show, that's like or whatever. Then this is not just about like leverage in like Wall Street slang is about debt and like oh, we levered up a company and like got good returns. Leverage in this sense comes from like the basic, the simple machine of leverage. Right, like I can't lift an 800 pound rock. I've been trying, I keep lifting, my deadlift is not there yet. But if you get an 18 foot lever, just big piece of wood, big piece of metal, like anybody, almost any human, can lift an 800 pound rock with the proper tool. And so leverage is just a mental model of like how do you do the work of two people, five people, 10 people? What tools are available to you to increase your outcome? To effort? Ratio is really like the way I think about it. I've adapted in a ball's sort of version slightly. In my mind there's four categories, which is tools, products, people and capital. Tools would be like a lumber jack is not a lumberjack. These are just a guy walking around in the woods picking up sticks until you give him an axe, and then, once he's got an axe, he can cut down a few trees an hour. And then, once he's given a chainsaw, he can cut down 10 or 20 trees an hour. And as you give him a tractor, he can cut down 100 trees an hour. Right, so, like his, his effort to outcome ratio goes up dramatically. With the right tools, products is just a product of your mind. It's where can you externalize your judgment or your experience or your knowledge or your wisdom? Into a podcast, like we're doing right now. A set of written instructions, like a protocol or standard operating procedure or an algorithm or a software automation or a video game, like whatever it is. You can encapsulate it in this thing that can then serve, you know, thousands or millions of people in parallel and well into the future, the third bucket of people. So certainly, most people think of employees first, and yes, that's true, but it also includes, you know, fans, like some of the highest leverage people in the world Don't have that, like how many employees does Taylor Swift have? Or like the Pope right? But like huge outsize, influence, huge leverage in that. And then fourth is capital. So money, but also you know all of your other hard resources, land, things like that and that's the capital is where you kind of exchange the, the interchange for transitioning between different things. And what I normally find talking to people is they have a real gift with one or two of those but a real mental block about some of the others. And usually that block is where they are hitting some limit to the scale. You know they're at some ceiling of that they're trying to break through and the key is often in one of those other things, one of those other categories. You know, if they're, if they're not a good or don't think of themselves as a good people manager, or afraid to hire somebody, then sometimes they run into trouble, you know, just reach the maximum capacity they can by just productizing themselves and with you know through a podcast or something like that. Yeah, it's a fascinating like I go through and like write out a diagram what I have working for me in each of those and try to kind of keep everything balanced. But yeah, it's a fascinating way to look at the world and I think it really helps you see the world for what it is right. You know, society sort of rewards people who use leverage well, with more leverage, that's how founders become founders of big companies is customers sort of voting for their competence by giving them dollars and giving them their business. Or you know why we make some artists famous and some not. So I think you know, think of this as a video game of like leveling up and reinvesting in different kinds of leverage and sort of growing your influence, your effort to outcome ratio, and you'll see. You just see the world a little differently, you know it'll help you understand why some people have these like dramatically outsized impacts on the world or become really famous. And you know, we have incredible, we have never had before a like infinitely extensible, zero, marginal cost form of leverage, like a podcast, like that is such a new phenomenon or software, which is back to your question of like why you know how do we find ourselves in a place where one person can build a billion dollar company? You know, 50 years ago it'd be fucking insane, like inconceivable, and now it's happened, maybe multiple times. It's going to happen a lot more, especially with AI. You know, I think that is a really interesting constraint to see in the world and like, if you back to being optimistically, if you expect that we're going to see a new billion dollar solo founder, like solo one person, one billion dollar company founded every year for the next 10 years, like what are those companies going to be? I think that's an interesting question.

It's a fascinating question. It's something I've been so curious and interested in recently because I've I did some in person podcasts and I just spent a month in Austin and in that month and in that month I spent time with a bunch of different creators and saw how different people approach things and it was like one one, one guy had a team of like 17 people and it was a big thing and it seemed real complicated. And then I got launched with a different guy who has a following probably about 20 x 30 x the size of the other guy and he's just him and writes one newsletter a week that gets that. He reads from line for line for a YouTube video and he has millions of followers and does millions of dollars in revenue and it's like the internet. Being able to take part and enjoy leverage is fascinating to me and I think that we have this mindset of the harder, that if you're not working super hard, you don't feel like you deserve the success, and I thought it seemed like that was kind of the limit to a lot of people using this leverage. Is they, I don't know? It seems to me the grind set, this mindset of grinding away, is so embedded into us. It's almost hard for us to look for ways to make it super easy for ourselves.

Yeah, I mean I like the like, the elegance of something that's just really simple and really extensible and really works. You know, david Cenra is like, he's the host of Founders Podcasts. He's amazing dude. It's a great podcast. I recommend it to everybody. Yeah, amazing show. He's an absolute machine and he's just so singular about his like. Podcasting is the greatest business model there is. it is like one input, infinite outputs, infinite scale, intimate like attracts just the people that you want, if you are truly like authentically being yourself, like man it is, yeah, and it's the printing press, for the spoken word is is how he puts it, and I was like man, yes, like all correct that I mean he is as passionate about that as, like I am about books for a totally different set of reasons. But, yeah, I think. I think what he's doing and the way he's thinking about it is so interesting and it's a great example of the leverage that one person can have and the kind of life that he's living now as a result of that work is really fascinating. I think a podcasting is such a it's so new that people aren't sure how to relate to it yet. Like they're not sure where it fits into the culture in some ways, and so feels like a subculture. And he never hears anybody say like there's too many books, like you shouldn't write another book, but you do hear people say that about podcasts very interestingly, right, it's like, oh God, like another white guy with a podcast. And it's like, yes, but also the human persistence to like always create new art and new communications and learn new things. And it's this beautiful meritocracy of anybody can create anything and put it out in the world, and shouldn't we all be doing that all the time and feel excited to do it. I don't know that person's just being a hater. They're the smoking person in the corner like tearing shit down. Do we need another podcast? It's like, yeah, but if we do need another podcast, everybody should have one. Let's go, we can't. We can't possibly like make enough stuff. Yeah, just just do you.

Yeah, I mean that concept of asymmetrical opportunities and the podcast is just a great example of that same with your book, and I mean I've been doing this now for I think it's been like 16 months and you know, the success on a monetary front isn't something that's been a huge thing of importance for me and that side of things hasn't been growing. But like the people I've met, the offers I've been, I've gotten like three job offers solely from doing a podcast. And then for you you're such a great example of this is with the book and with the almanac of the law. I'm sure you could provide some insight onto this, but it just opens seems like it's opened so many doors and change your life 100%.

I mean the process of writing a book is really like changes you, but the process of publishing it and having it out in the world and seeing what happens, like the response to it, when you've kind of got that like product of yourself out in the world, like starting conversations and seeking opportunities for you, is really incredible. And I think you hit it exactly like this is something I tell every author that I work with it as scribe like the non monetary rewards and opportunities and the second order effects of your book will absolutely dwarf the first order effects of your book, like and this is true up and down the scale of like success with the book right, the book does not have to earn money to earn you money and I think the same I tell everybody that and the same is true of the podcast right, this podcast does not have to earn money to be an incredible asset for you and your life and your job and the past and the relationships and wherever you go, and you won't know how to attribute the most important things that ever happened to you in your life. You won't know what combination of you know doors they came in or experiences people had with, with like your whole surface area that's out there. But you do know that if you increase your surface area, if you make yourself legible to the internet, if you make yourself findable and understandable that you can, you can increase sort of the rate at which those opportunities present themselves and be very surprised at what comes of. It is just not it's not always predictable what comes, but that something comes is is predictable.

Absolutely. I love what you said increasing the surface area. It's like increasing that probability that something lucky or great or this incredible opportunities stumbles upon you. It's like, how can you increase that surface area? It's the form of levers we've been talking about throughout this episode.

It takes some courage to like put it out there, especially when you're not always getting quick feedback. You know like it doesn't happen the first week or the first month. Sometimes it doesn't happen the first year. You know you might have somebody read a post in three years that you wrote this year, that you did the 20 people read, but that post is what made them reach out to you and offer you a job or invest in your company or like. You just want to create these like breadcrumbs to increase that surface area for whatever comes.

It's just so crazy how the internet just decentralizes that so much that you almost become so. Anybody could see your work, anyone could take a liking to your work, you could connect with anyone in any way. I wrote a stupid health thread on Rick Rubin and his health journey and Elon Musk responds to it. No shit Like the just the world of social media and the doors it opens up. It's mind blowing and it's all that form of leverage.

I think you got to be a little optimistic to think that it's worth doing that work, and like waking up and putting something out, not knowing what's going to come back, you know, back to the kind of the philosophical point we started on.

Yeah, I mean, that's such a fantastic concept of you. Need to be a optimist to work hard.

I think that's a good insight.

Yeah, it's fascinating because it's not. If you don't think, if you're the cynic who doesn't think things are going to work out, you have no motivation or desire to move.

I know some highly anxious, pessimistic people who work very hard, but it's all. It's from this really. It's from a very different mental place.

Maybe it's not the best fuel, and I do.

I think about the longevity of it and it's definitely it feels different. You know, I'd certainly rather work from a place of optimism, work hard, from a place of optimism and excitement and feeling like I'm having a great impact. Not just that, I'm avoiding disaster, which is very interesting thing, but you know, you think about every like superhero. They're always trying to avoid disaster, not create an impact. I think there's a. We need some like civilization level psychotherapy maybe this conversation of fuel.

It goes back to the other concept that you learn from the ball, or one of the biggest takeaways that you had from the ball, which is happiness being a skill.

What was that? I mean it's a, I think, of all credits, you know, it's like the fundamental tenet of the kind of the Buddhist, buddhist wisdom, right? It's like suffering is a desires, the root of all suffering, and we are surrounded by things that tend to make us want things. It's very easy to acquire new desires, right Like that's now how I think about Instagram. As soon as you open Instagram, like its goal is to make you create as many new desires as it possibly can, like keep you engaged and dreaming and hoping, and like yearning. And that is also like if you were to create an engine that would generate the most human suffering. That's also what you might create is just like constantly widening that gap between what you want, what you wish you had, and what you have currently. The happiness is a skill is really like it's a very fundamental switch, right, and it's useful to say it's a. I used to say happiness is a choice, and I think it's more productive to say happiness is a skill, because happiness is a choice feels to try, it feels like, oh, you could just choose to be happy right now, just like that, why haven't you? And the fact that it's a skill sort of implies like it's a journey to learning it and like you might be bad at it at first but you can get better if you work hard and you have to remember and you have to keep practicing or you could lose the skill of being happy and it just feels approachable. I think it sets expectations correctly in that it is on the other side of hard work but that it's approachable if you break it down and you keep at it, and that there's a lot of small behavioral changes that, if you practice them consistently like can raise the level of your happiness on a day to day basis. Neval talks about a bunch of them in the book and one of the most important ones is that sort of desires. The root of all suffering the way that's the Buddhist version. Neval's version is desires a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. If you're constantly making new things you want, you're constantly adding contracts to be unhappy until you achieve things, especially if they're unattainable or not near term attainable, then you're going to spend a lot of your time unhappy, like it's not complicated, it's just not obvious until you've done the work to think about it and look at it and remember it at the time, so you need to remember it. So once you've observed this a few times, you can almost feel yourself like adding a new desire. You're, like you know, in every commercial, like almost every post is a commercial of something these days right. So, like every post, every TV commercial, every billboard is trying to make you want something. That's the whole point. And if you feel, if you notice it sort of like entering your list of desires, you can just learn the skill of politely being like actually don't care, like that's not worth my happiness. I'm happy as I am not having that thing that you're trying to add to my list of desires. So it's. It is just a. It's a thing to pay attention to and over, you know, months and years of paying attention to it, I think you start to create your own little toolbox of things you you tell yourself or remind yourself when you notice those things that are affecting your happiness.

It's incredibly empowering, because we typically, if someone's unhappy, it's not very empowering. The answers that society pushes on them are not very empowered.

We tend to externalize it actually Even in the language you use with boyfriend, girlfriend, partner, parents, whatever. It's just like why can't I make you happy? It's not other people's responsibilities to make us happy. We can't rely on others to do it. Something more accurate like am I making space for you to be happy or for you to create your own happiness, which is a clumsy, weird thing to say, but it's probably a better way to think about it. There's not much outside of your own head that you truly need to make you happy. You need other things to make you safe and warm and comfortable and well-fed. There's not much outside yourself that you need to truly be happy. You just need to remember that you're in control of your own thoughts and your own inner voice. You see, the extreme examples of these are all the monks. They just go meditate all day on not needing anything. That's an extreme way to live, but it's a useful sort of anchor. And on the total opposite side, you have billionaires on yachts with everything in the world who still aren't happy because they still want for so much. We still don't have the things. They think they should be able to get anything they want because they have these material resources, but they have a bunch of other desires that are not linked with, that are not solvable through money. Neval says money only solves your money problems. They have a bunch of desires that they can't fulfill even though they feel like they should be able to, and those are some of the unhappiest people out there, I believe. So I think it's just paying attention to wherever you are, remembering that you have all the things that you need as a default state to be happy, that all takes place inside your head, that you are in control of the new desires that you add, and you'll spend sort of more time at peace with yourself if you learn the skill of declining those new potential desires. You know and I certainly add new desires all the time I always work towards stuff. I have a bunch of projects. I don't think it means just lay down and meditate on everything until you waste away. It's just be very selective about the things that you actually do choose to desire and be willing to let a bunch of other stuff go.

That it reminds me and I think, if someone's curious on how to do that, it reminds me of probably my favorite, mike Drump from Naval, when he says something along the lines of we pay so many people to listen to us when for most people, they don't even listen to themselves. Or do you know the?

exact quote, not the one you're going for, but I think I agree with the underlying idea. Right, and that's a big part of what he recommended. Meditation is just like just learn to listen to yourself. Like, if you separate and learn to listen to yourself, you'll start to see, like you are not the voice in your head. You're the one who hears the voice in your head and decides whether or not to agree with it, and you can train that. And it's an interesting thing to like think about. Like who is the real you and like you know by topology's point, like how do you affect it? How do you change it? Like, how do you feed it? How do you transform it? How do you change the? If you change your environment, you know you will have the result of changing yourself.

You described Naval as a monk and Bellagy as a warrior. Why was that?

And you always ask me between the differences between the two or to contrast them, and I think that's the most succinct way to do it. You can feel a difference in how they carry themselves and how they talk about themselves and you know, you hear, the first kind of beginning of each book is a little bit of an introduction to each person and their background. Rough time in school. Learn to fight, never backs down. People stand against an army. I think that's just like who he is and you see him still doing that today, like as an adult, right Like there's not many people willing to just draw the sword and stand in front of like a powerful institution and call them out. I respect the hell out of it. It's just a very different approach. You know it involves a little bit more of like a, like a interplanetary, like judo. Judo like fighter. You know he's just like very gently, kind of like redirects momentum or energy, or like steps aside from the army or disappears like. It's a very different. I don't know, I don't know if it's a different worldview, different personality type, like. I just think I think they're both fascinating and I've learned a lot from both of them and I think part of my role is sort of the like curator or sharer and packager of some of these ideas is to like, try to try to understand the context and the person they come from. You know, I think we can learn something from absolutely everyone, but we should always be careful to careful in which examples we emulate. You know, it's something back to David center and founders like I love learning from all those founders, but I think a lot of them pay to cost that we would not want to pay in our lives for the outcomes that they had. And we spend so much time reading about Elon Musk or trying to be, you know, like, looking up to, to base a Presidents or entrepreneurs or warlords, like whatever these extreme personalities is who kind of stands out among history and today. But most of us aren't that extreme. We don't want to live that extreme, that extreme of a life. We're not that compulsive and we need to. I think it's useful to embrace that. Learn what you can, but be careful not to adopt a whole package of views and actions and beliefs that actually doesn't suit the rest of who you are.

That's a beautiful way to put it. It reminds me of how Mike Tyson puts it. I think he said I spent my whole life being a great man, but I was never a good man, and I think that that concepts hold so true. There's so many of those people who accomplish great things but at the end of the day, we're studying those biographies, man. I mean shitty fathers, shitty husbands even like Marcus Aurelius, who's somebody we all put on such a pedestal. He was a shitty father and a guy who we view as this stoic, perfectly masculine individual, but his life was a bigger wreck.

Most of them are, I mean, even people you consider very measured Benjamin Franklin, pretty weird relationship with his wife, and you can't pass too much judgment, especially in historical context. But I think it's just really helpful to remember and the average person who's just living a good, normal life is in some ways Better than some of these just extreme people whose names we all know. I mean, achilles is like a very interesting, like old story of somebody who chose to be remembered like chose glory over everything else, died young but died known and was given that choice and chose it Like there was a you know, they gave him the prophecy and he went anyway. I think there's a lot of people that make that choice and I don't think everyone does or should want to and also shouldn't live with the, shouldn't create a desire in that gap and feel like they're doing something wrong by not being Marcus Aurelius or Steve Jobs or you know, like most people wouldn't cast out their kids or their family to pursue their personal glory or the impact of their work life, no matter how noble the mission, and that's something to be admired and respected, actually not lamented Like people should be proud of that, I think.

And it's such a important point because it goes back to the desire that we were talking about before when you realize that these people aren't these just because they're exceptional in one aspect of life doesn't mean they're exceptional in all the aspects of life, and having that desire to be like that person is probably going to cause you much more harm than you and you can learn from them without you know you can take the good without taking the bad.

You know you can learn from Steve Jobs without being an asshole to everybody you work with because you're not Steve Jobs. Yeah, it's a common. It's a common thing, I think.

Eric, is there anything we haven't talked about today that you think is fundamental, or anything you want to talk about? That's been front of mind.

I hope everybody reads Port Charlie's Almanac. I didn't even write that one, I just believe like it was for me. I picked it up off my dad's bookshelf when I was like 21 years old and think that Charlie Munger is incredible, somebody to really deeply respect and emulate and learn some of the things that he shares and read the books that he recommends. It is indirectly or direct, I don't know. You know it's hard to trace. It is certainly what led me down, guided me down the path that I'm on now. Some of it writing and what it is, some of it investing, some of it just trying to have an ever slightly more correct worldview and learning to kind of see through some of the bullshit in the world and like interface with the sort of the underlying reality and I just hope people work on important things. It's really easy to get distracted by proxy metrics, especially in tech and entrepreneurship these days, like there's a lot of headlines about a $10 million this or $100 million that and people sort of chasing a chasing a number of monetary outcome and in my personal experience and I've seen it happen dozens of other times the big outcomes for people financially happen when you forget about the scoreboard and just do something that is useful and true to you and fresh off this biology book. You know. I think there's a lot of opportunity for individuals to build incredible things and solve a lot of problems and help a lot of people by looking closer to the frontiers of technology. And I think we're at this interesting point where people hear tech and think software and social media and like the internet and tech, now the world of technologies, the actual frontier, the whole massive frontier of things that are newly possible for humanity and that is happening in energy and AI and nanotech and robotics and like all around in energy and space, like there's such cool shit happening in every direction. Just please, stop building B2B SaaS for dogs and go build some much cooler shit. Go work at one of these companies, bring technology into the company is already working on. Just find ways to increase your effort to output ratio and work on an important problem that helps people.

Eric Dorgensen. Ladies and gentlemen, dude, I am so grateful you take the time for this episode. You blew me away today and I'm so appreciative for your optimism and for your insights and for you doing the work that you do, and just appreciate you.

Thanks for having me. I hang out on Twitter all the time. If anybody wants to DM chat more, I'm at. Egeorganssoncom has links to like all my projects and stuff. But thanks for having me come hang out at the library. I appreciate you.

Yes, sir, have a great one. Yes sir, have a great one.