Eric Jorgensen was someone I found off of Twitter, this entire podcast is all about the future of technology, very, very interesting organization. Whether you're a young entrepreneur or whether you're a young sci fi enthusiast or whether you're just someone who enjoys extremely deep, knowledgeable, impactful conversation. Eric Jorgensen is the guy you need to listen to. He's also spent a majority of his time studying the court's teachings, parts of one novel, Navigant, who by many is considered to be one of the greatest minds and philosophers of the modern world.

Eric is responsible for writing the book, The Almanac of Nevada, Oregon, A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. And of course, we spoke about Nevada, we spoke about wealth. We spoke about happiness. And very crucially, we also spoke about leverage in this broadcast. Leverage is a concept used to amplify the amount of work you're doing in your life, amplifying the power of all your decisions in your life, amplifying and even amplifying your happiness, amplifying your leverage is a concept that is obsessed with.

Of course, we had to break that down, but we also broke down a bunch of other topics, including everything from the mentality of the average Silicon Valley entrepreneur to the future of artificial intelligence to crypto currencies, to the future of mankind in general.

One of my most stimulating episodes, this one left me with a lot of thoughts, a lot of questions and a lot of hope and positivity for the future, even though parts of it were kind of negative either way.

Without further ado, I'm going to leave you with Eric Jorgensen, Andre and Beashel.

Eric Jorgenson, welcome to the show, brother. Thanks for having me. It's good to be here. I appreciate it.

So you know what? Usually I run people through who I'm having on the show. But you've got a very interesting profile, and I'd kind of like you to introduce yourself to the audiences. And I'll also tell you this. The audience loves it when Americans primarily on the show, because you guys are like fantastic conversationalists. I don't know why. I think it's something in your culture. I don't know what it is. But you guys can hold conversation with anyone.

So that's what Indians pick up from you. But go on with your introduction.

I think the same of Indians that most excellent like high energy question asking like curious culture. I love it. I love every time I get to talk to an Indian man. Oh, yeah. This is the best. So I'm glad to be here. This is this is kind of the culmination of like a few years of side projects for me. So, like, I started came up an entrepreneurial family and like, you know, my dad ran a small business that my grandfather started.

My uncle ran a pizza shop and a newspaper. And so I was the kid, like, selling candy out of my locker and getting in trouble for that and like giving kids rides to school for money and like just always kind of hustling and finding ways to put it all together in college. Sorry. Are you Jewish? No. No. What what what's your family's ethnicity?

We kind of like Nordic, I guess. Like Scandinavian on one side and British on the other. Yes, we've been we've been in America as long as I can, you know, traceback. So it's been we got a little so I was just like got in the startup world really like in college sort of building websites when tech was getting big. Facebook is growing like crazy. And I was like thought I was going to be the next Mark Zuckerberg and so got into tech that way.

And but in startups for like ten years and building stuff on the Internet.

Is the X scene in the American startup world. Always an exciting place to be in? Like from the outside, it looks like you guys are always planning for the future. And this is like a historical kind of outlook on things like we had Steve Jobs creating computers, Bill Gates creating computers. Then you have Mark Zuckerberg creating the next wave. So is it exciting on the inside right now as well?

Yeah, I think it's I think it's kind of always exciting. I mean, like, tech just gets to choose whatever is exciting and then, like, redefines it as tech. I like tech. It seems to be always the frontier. Right. So, you know, forty years ago was computers and then it was the Internet. And now it's you know, you can say tech is crypto and bio and, you know, self-driving and like whatever is the frontier.

And it's kind of like in the valley, whoever is working on, like, almost the farthest future thing is like gets the most street cred, you know. So like, you can, oh, you can be really successful. I believe they'll be successful or you can be successful by like you can be at least perceived as exciting by doing something like so far out in the future and crazy that like nobody else, I've hardly even knows what you're talking about.

And it might not be a successful companies. Maybe you're too early, but it is at least like really interesting to people to learn about and hear about like what's going on.

Right. So you spoke about bio. You mean biohacking, right?

Yeah, I mean, biohacking, health, like the whole there's this bio kind of in a few different directions, like around climate change, around genetic testing, around like I'm far from an expert on this. I just know enough to know, like there's really exciting stuff happening that I don't understand any of in a few of those different directions. I mean, the revolution around like sort of self measured health care. And so the continuous glucose monitoring with levels is just coming out.

And, you know, the Apple Watch, is it ever more advanced? And so this feedback loop of like measuring yourself more and more intensely and understanding more and more about, like, good health markers and how, you know, our diet and exercise and habits, I feed into those super interesting, beautiful.

So, you know, when you yourself are active, if you're someone from the tech world, you have a much clearer outlook of things and you've kind of made your own mathematical formulas in your head about what the world will possibly look like ten years from now. So according to you and according to what you've seen, what can we expect in 2030? And the reason I ask you this is because I remember back in 2002 or 2003, touch screens on phones became a thing.

And that was fascinating for me as a nine year old kid. And I looked at that and I was like, OK, well, this is all futuristic. Seven years later, the iPhone's, like, become a worldwide sensation. Screens are way bigger, you know, three, four years after that, big screens become affordable for like Third World country populations. So what can Third World country populations expect in 2030, which they're not expecting right now?

Yeah. I think Josh Wolf from Luks Capitol has talked about like this next trend being technology getting smaller and smaller and closer and closer to us. So in the same way that, like, touch screen phones were really exciting. Now we kind of have, like air pods and a watch. And these, like the phone is almost disappearing. Voices getting better and better. The systems are getting smarter and smarter. So they're able to kind of intuit more.

And so it's you know, I think we may be reaching peak amount of time staring at our phones and getting better and better at technology, like complimenting our experience and kind of working around what's happening. And, you know, people are getting the phones are getting really good at delivering dopamine, but we're also getting more and more good at saying, like, I don't know if this is healthy for me to just stare at this tiny screen, like right in front of my face for 14 hours a day.

And people are realizing how good it feels to, like, sit and talk to someone in person and be a part of more physical. And so, like, the technology kind of recedes and supports that a little bit more than than defines it now. And I mean, I think the health trend that we talked about, like people are going to get we're realizing how individual health is and how individual everybody's circumstances are. And we're going to get better and better at providing very personalized experiences in health and in medicine and things like that.

So those are at least two of the trends I'm seeing now. Beautiful.

So everything is becoming more inward.

Could you say that, like everything's becoming like more within you get closer and closer to just like I mean, like we used to have a computer sitting on a desk and now we have a laptop and now we have a phone that's like always in our pockets and that's moving to like air pods that are in your ears. And so eventually you can imagine this being like a transplant, like something that goes in your, you know, like implant in your ear that can just play sounds automatically or a contact lens that is like in your eye or something that is like similar to an Apple Watch.

You know, I've seen tech that can like that is almost invisible, but it can you can be much more manipulated. And so, like, just by moving your fingers and wearing a bracelet, you can have a full keyboard. And because it looks at like the nerves that's on your in your forearms and sees what's moving and it can measure that. And so the time is just getting smaller and smaller and closer and closer to our bodies. Wow.

OK, beautiful like that. Some black mirror shed light right there. I see. Black Widow. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's a bit spooky, but it's like proof enough base that you're kind of like yeah. You can see that happening. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think you know black metal, I mean for all the listeners we've not checked it out. Please go check it out, especially if you're someone who's business oriented, you're just open up your mind in terms of possibilities. But here's what I love about black metal, that it highlights the possible negative aspects of what can happen due to the positives. And someone else who does that is this article. Yuval Noah Harari, the guy who wrote Sapience. Yeah, he always highlights the negative aspect of the positives as well.

And his third book is the one I started reading FWS called 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. And he spoke about nanobots. He said that, OK, beyond what Eric just spoke about in terms of contact lenses and airports, the next stage after that's probably in the 20s, 30s or 40s would be these tiny robots that actually can be in your bloodstream and they can help fight disease. They can spot even like the smallest cancer cells when they begin to form like basic gandules, like multiplication of cells that you don't want multiplied.

So when that nanobot is in your body to spark cancer cells multiplying and it'll destroy those first few cells so that they're not able to multiply up or, you know, it can just track all kinds of detail within your body, everything from your zinc levels to your vitamin levels to your minerals, everything possible, and therefore create like a chart and predict how healthy you are, what possible diseases you're prone to. Is there anything related to nanobots that they're familiar with that's happening in Silicon Valley right now?

I mean, one I can't believe I didn't think of for my first set of examples is neural link that Elon Musk is working on. And so that is like either nanobots or technology in your actual, like neurons in your brain that turns your brain a little bit more into something programmable or perfectible or controllable. And there's an awesome series called It Starts with Nexxus, Both Features and Ramezani. It's like a sci fi series. It reads like a movie. It's an awesome, awesome book.

But it's all it's like maybe 2014 and 2015 based on the neural link technology and things before and was even founded, I mean, wrote these five or ten years ago. But it's a really cool kind of like what becomes possible when the brain becomes programmable, you know, effectively become superhuman when you can like write programs and change your responses to things, become more rational, become more tolerant of pain like tuneup. Your reflexes like it's crazy and it's really fun, like near future sci fi, so so Eric, could you explain NewLink Elon Musk's neural link to a four year old who's listening to this podcast?

Not that this four year old's listening to this podcast, but you know what? What's your simplest explanation of it? Yeah. So turning your brain into programmable hardware, I think is the like controlling the way the way Elon Musk puts it is reducing the latency between your brain in the real world. So if you can type at one hundred words a minute, that is like data transfer mode of, however, many megabytes per second. And if you can actually, like, turn the brain into hardware and make it extensible so that you can automatically connect to the Internet or download information faster than you can read it faster than you can listen to it faster than you can and explore faster than you can type or speak.

All of a sudden you're like the feedback loop between what your brain can do and what you're affecting in the world is much, much tighter.

And it's it's I mean, crazy. The implications of it are pretty wild. I mean, you get through like one or two interviews with him. I'm far from an expert on neuro link. I just think it's like a cool thing to learn about and listen to and fantasize about. I think anybody who is like close to the science would say it's still like a ways away. So I don't have to, like, worry about this in the near term.

But like in our lifetimes, it's it's one of those things that Elon Musk likes to push it on. It's like there's no reason why the physics aren't possible. It's just really, really, really, really hard. And so if we just like working on the problem, you know, maybe 20 years or maybe 70, but we may get closer to it. Yeah.

That's why Elon is such a fascinating inspiration for so many entrepreneurs all over the world. He just takes on these difficult problems and says, you know what, let's try it. Let's see where it goes. You know, but even with the new relink, when you when you think of all the positives, there's so many applications of it. For example, if you want to get more disciplined in life, probably there'll be some kind of app in the new relink which will help you get more discipline.

If you want to stick to a diet or if you want to be a more punctual, you can actually change the way you are as person to benefit those around you and to improve your own capabilities. Have you seen this movie called Limitless with Bradley Cooper?

Yeah, yeah. It's so for the listeners, it's basically a movie where he takes this bill, which kind of expands the capabilities of his brain. So he becomes model for Kneisel and he just gets more shit done in life. So within a month, he becomes one of the country's top stockbroker's. He tries becoming the president in the movie. Lots, lots of things happening. But I think you were saying something about Elon Musk right now. That's why I interrupted you.

I think it's just interesting that he like the mental model that he uses of like is there any reason in the physics why this isn't possible? Like, if no, then let's try it. Then let's at least start working on the problem. Like, it almost doesn't matter to him how hard it is. It just matters. Like, is it possible? And if it is possible, like he'll push on and he'll work on it and he'll like, you know, getting to Mars seems so like infinitely huge of a problem and getting hardware into our brains, like seems so infinitely complicated of a problem that most people wouldn't even try it.

And I love this attitude of just like, why not? Like, there's only one way to make progress on this aren't chipping away at it. Let's see what we can do.

Yeah. Yeah. You know, so that's the issue with Asia in general. Asian countries don't like people are kind of total aim just for stability. People are taught to kind of limit their own thought processes. But because of the Internet, because of globalization, because of podcasts like this, American mindsets and American schools of international mindsets and international schools of thoughts are kind of making their way into an issue. And teenagers head and it kind of opens up your possibilities.

Like when I was a teenager, no one told me that you could become a content entrepreneur. But then once you actually get to it, you realize, oh, shit, this was possible. Why didn't anybody just give me that little bit of hope? So, I mean, that's that's kind of the intention behind this podcast as well. And that's that's my next question to you. You're someone who studied ragon regarding detail now is someone who Indians' look up to a lot because, you know, when when an Indian sees another Indian doing well on an international stage.

Yeah, that's that's that's a guy. Yeah, that's a guy.

That's that's the emotion. But we will get to the question I want to ask you is generally in Silicon Valley on a very human level, what kind of mentality difference do you notice compared to the rest of America? Because you've stayed all over you grew up in Detroit. You're in Kansas City right now. But what differentiates those guys?

Why are they why are those guys that Silicon Valley is like a lot of interesting stuff going for it, which is one is like. The smartest, most ambitious people all around the world selected to move to Silicon Valley right like that is almost like a credential on its own is like did you go, you know, live there for a while? That's less true now maybe and going forward than it was just. Why do you why do you say that?

Well, there's so much more that happens in like in the cloud, right. In the Internet. There's so like the information is so much more accessible. The relationships are so much more accessible. You know, like crypto, especially like in the last few years has happened very, very in a very, very distributed way. And so some of those things, like some of the frontiers are happening more and more on the Internet. And the you know, this work is all more meritocratic.

You know, in you know, 20 years ago, 10 years ago, even, you had to kind of go there and build a physical relationship with someone to build credibility and build trust. And that's just less certain. Now, you can build, you know, if you're checking in great code into open source projects, you know, on GitHub, like you can build a reputation, you can build you can build the credential on Twitter or through podcasts or through blog posts in a much more real way than you used to be able to like.

I don't think these are dependent on being co-located anymore now that the tools are there and now that we're used to trusting people on the Internet and evaluating like proof of work, essentially, like you can look somebody up online and see that they're a valuable contributor to an ecosystem or a community and start working with that person. You know, I know people who have co-founded companies or people they never met in person like that is, you know, I never met of like to write this book.

We never even talked a lot. It was all email. And I was just kind of like seeing each other for who we were through the Internet. And so that is more true than it's ever been. I think that Silicon Valley culture, extending being like kind of extensible through the Internet is is amazing because it provides all of this sort of it creates a context for innovation and ambition, you know, just like you're talking about. This is it's very accepting of failure.

You know, like you can have you can fail. And as long as you were faithfully executed, a plan faithfully executed, like with good intentions, as long as you took on a great vision with with kind of like great intentions, you're not doomed if you fail. Like, it is expected that over the course of a career, an entrepreneur will have some wins and have some losses. A developer will ship great projects and shitty projects and designers will do great work and and crap work.

And that's just part of Amy really high and trying to do like great huge things is that sometimes you're going to fall short, so you're going to miss the mark. And that's part of the game in Silicon Valley and it's becoming part of the game like the frontier and an acceptable piece of innovation that, you know, is a tradition. And maybe something that wasn't as true 50 years ago wasn't widely accepted. But the returns of that are getting more and more obvious.

And so we're seeing more and more of it. And I love, like, you know, what you're doing and what we're doing here to kind of help share that message. I think it's really easy to to miss that and to miss the opportunities because of that. Like the cost of downside, the downside of failure is much lower in the cost of ah, the upside of winning is much higher, you know, than it has ever been. And that's just going to keep being more true, I think, as the leverage gets longer and as markets get bigger for all of these things.

Right.

You said something super interesting right now about Twitter and you said that how you connected with now all over the Internet, you know, how does Silicon Valley look at Twitter and LinkedIn?

Do they actually scan people's profiles and say that, OK, you know, this is someone I can work with, this is someone I vibe with.

So I mean, because I'll tell you why the image that Indians have, what we do is that it's extremely political, extremely right wing versus left wing. And that's why people stay away from it. And I'm sure that there's a section of Americans as well who think the same way that all of us do politicos. I'm not going to be on it. But then there's this whole entrepreneurial side of Twitter with everyone who's following Narvel, befalling people like yourself, following people like, you know, like, I don't know, all these like thousands and thousands of self-help and amazing self-help books.

It's not those cliched ones. There's there's gold on Twitter. And if feel people don't utilize it enough.

So how how is Twitter and LinkedIn looked at in that world?

Yeah, I mean, Twitter is Twitter's huge. It has been for me in my career. Personally, I think I think any platform can work for you. If you if it is a fit for who you are and the kind of content that you want to produce. You know, I'm not an Instagram guy. I'm a Twitter guy. And that has worked for me. Some people on Instagram people or Facebook people or LinkedIn people, and that works for them.

And you can build a community on any platform. I think Twitter has has political pieces, but it's also like an incredibly huge and diverse platform. And then millions of people sharing their own expertise. And it takes work to. For Twitter that you want, right, like there is not one Twitter, there's there's one Twitter for each of us, and we create the kind of feed that we want and we have to be very deliberate about choosing the people and the voices and the information that we want as our inputs.

Because you can't trust your inputs eventually, like you become those inputs and you have to kind of, you know, losing trust of your own judgment and losing sight of who you want to be. And so these like you have all these algorithms around you, like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube. And like, if you don't push back against what they're trying to push on you, like, you've got to work really hard to create those inputs and to be sure that you're choosing the right voices to let in your head because that becomes who you are, you know, 100 percent.

You're referencing social dilemma here, right? Like the whole social dilemma concept. Yeah.

And you got three million followers and every one of them has, like, opted in some chapters on YouTube. I don't even know where you are on the other platforms, like every one of them has opted into choosing like your curation and your taste. And they trust you to bring them people and insights and wisdom from, you know, wherever you can find it. And that's huge in the same way, like people who want to build a great Twitter for themselves and have these, like, really valuable inflows of information.

Like it can be a huge tool, but you have to put in the work to curate it and teach it what you want and find great people and build relationships off of them. Right. You know, so much good has come from for me from there. But it's also, you know, I spend a lot of time on it. I almost can't help but spend time on it. But but that is like something I enjoy doing and benefited from it.

It's maybe a lot of who I am.

Yeah. I like to also mention that it's probably a precursor to a new ruling in many ways. Twitter, not just your Twitter feed. You can you can become the people that you follow. And the thing is, I really like that you highlighted the fact that you need to be a dynamic use of Twitter in terms of you need to actively follow and unfollow people and shape up your own mind to the people that you're following an unfolding. That's a fantastic insight and that applies to every single social media platform.

Yeah, we all just seem like just generally with social media in India. Um, so I'm twenty seven, born in ninety three. I speak to people who are born in like ninety seven or ninety nine and they're extremely different from what I was when I was that age. I speak to people who are born in 2003 and they even more different and in India in some bad ways, but mostly good ways. And the good news is that they're primarily way smarter, like the way smarter, way more aware of the world.

And you know that what that means is that content creators who don't reinvent and this could be content creators on Twitter, it could be YouTube, it could be Instagram, whatever, rapidly fade away. The game of content is very much like an athlete's career where you know that there's going to be a shelf life. And unless you add a three point shot, unless you learn how to rebound, unless, you know, at least like how I keep referencing LeBron James on this podcast every year, he adds something to his game.

Even in your seventeen. In your eighteen, he learned something about what he can do to improve content is very much the same. And it's not everyone's cup of tea to keep reinventing often. So the world of content is pretty brutal. But on the flipside, I feel like we're heading into a much smarter world. And if you are someone who can keep up with the reinvention process, you can become one of those kings and that's model.

And years from now, there's something super interesting in there, I think, which is I read that the size of generation gaps are actually shrinking as technology and like the pace of technology increases. And so every year for every ten years, like technology was different enough that the minds that it shaped were different than ours, maybe every five or every three. And so like people who come up natively with, you know, editable a notion and roam and just aren't using them fluently at 16 is very different than somebody who's, you know, 40, who has done, like, relearned with high effort all of these tools and put them on old mental maps.

And somebody comes up with like Bitcoin is just their native currency because they're doing this is on the Internet before they're doing business anywhere else. And so there's sort of like really interesting. And I think young people underestimate maybe the advantages that they have by being like absolutely fluent in new technologies just by virtue of when they were born and what they've kind of learned and done already. It was something I underestimated, certainly when I was like, you know, in my teens and 20s.

Yeah. I mean, do you do you think that these are the kids who are going to create those artificial intelligence start ups and those new rolling styles, start ups? And this is the kind of training that they're getting for that hyper futuristic world, which will also possibly bring with it some negative aspects like black metal, like what you are Numerati says. So whilom whole. Full about that generation of kids, I am kind of concerned as well. What do you think?

I think technology is is always used for good and bad. You know, that's something that is actually like pretty well explored in that Nexus series, as I mentioned, like, there's good and bad uses for, you know, every technology that's ever been invented. You know, fire cooks food and burned down buildings. And, you know, knives are used to, like, make rafts and to kill people. And so, like, I think the almost old technology, you know, this is not a well considered opinion, but I think almost all technology and certainly technology as a whole is like has more good uses than bad uses.

But it's defined, you know, by the people who use it. We we as long as we remain, you know, ethical and united as a species and aware of what we're doing to each other in the world around us, like technology is a tool for for good. And people are vastly more good than they are bad. You know, that said, we might accidentally, like, create some sort of apocalyptic event. I'm not an expert on it, but if anybody's working on, I go read like Eliezer Yudkowsky and just like make sure you're not going to end the world before you, you know, flip the switch or something.

Yeah. In terms of, you know, books about the future of books, about where the world of technology is, I. Do you have any recommendations for the listeners?

Yeah, I love reading sci fi. I mean, that's basically sci fi is the proving ground for the wise of technology. And so that's you know, I've been reading sci fi since I was a kid and it's like makes it really fun to think about, like what could happen, what are the first and second and third order implications of what could happen. So everybody has their own taste in sci fi. I like kind of like near future stuff.

I love the three body problem. I loved Nexxus. I like the Bob Diverse we are Bob. And like that whole series I just read, you know, they read like movies. There's really fun. Like this guy becomes like a NASA satellite on his own and just like it's shot out into space to go like figure it out and become self replicating and like it's a super fun, super fun, kind of like easy read. I find whatever stuff is interesting to you and like dive into it.

You know, you can learn as much from from fiction as from nonfiction, I think about leadership and technology and, you know, psychology and everything that you need to. Beautiful.

I got to ask you about Silicon Valley once again. I have a couple of questions.

The first question is that, you know, there's this misconception that you have to learn how to code in order to be a part of Silicon Valley.

And the second question, I mean, so is that true? And the second question is that with remote work becoming a big thing after the pandemic happening after coronavirus, do you think it's possible for like a really smart Indian designer slash entrepreneur to be a part of Silicon Valley while they can sit in India or anywhere in the world? How does Silicon Valley on the inside look at this outward situation? So I think let me start with the first question and see if I answer all of them.

So I think you do not have to learn to code, but if you are detail oriented and engineering minded and mathematically inclined and you know, that can be the right path, that what do you what do you mean by that?

Like what do you mean by like could you expand a little bit on that?

Yeah. I mean, great, great engineers tend to be like detail oriented and patient and like system thinking and like, you know, that does not jive with my personality as much like I am very like gets 80 percent done as quickly as I possibly can and go on to the next thing. And I'm like, you know, I'm more oriented towards language than towards math that I have been since. I was like, absolutely a kid. Like, I can do math, but like, I don't relish it.

And so some of those things are just like don't feel like you have to learn to code in order to be a part of the valley. If you have gifts that are more you know, if you are a great visual designer, you see you have better taste and have better kind of spatial relations, maybe you may make a better designer if you are great at relationships, are very outgoing energy for people. You may be better at sales. You know, there are not infinite ways to be to like add value to a tech company, but there are definitely more than just learn to code write code.

Design and sales are probably the biggest three pillars, I would say. But but there are many you know, companies are big. There's many jobs to do. And there's probably a unique job for you if you're just looking to like, how can I put a label on myself and like, be great at this thing and get in the door and start working and getting paid. You know, there's coding is a great one. But there are there are more on the list.

I would say one. The other question. Oh, is it possible to say, yeah, the remote work. Yeah, remote work like. Absolutely. I think, you know, we have been hiring like people increasingly, remotely and increasingly just like merit based, like doesn't matter where they are or who they are, as long as they can do the job and do it well. It does rely on having a portfolio of work. It does rely on showing that you can do what you can.

You know, that you can actually have the good skills and deliver on what you say you will and all of those things. But but you can become a part of a community and build, you know, your your proof of work and show off your skills. And, you know, I think become increasingly like a part of the, you know, online and Silicon Valley community. And it's more accessible to people around the world now than it has ever been before.

It just you know, it takes learning where people are hanging out, whether that's Twitter or Hacker News or, you know, product on whatever. And just like being a part of that community and learning the the patterns and the work and the language, and every community kind of has its own set of like its own subculture. Right. And so, like, learning that subculture and showing showing your value to it, you know, is a great formula for picking up jobs and getting offers and just starting to work with people and build trust.

And you never know where that kind of stuff is going to lead.

So it's basically you need to have some work experience, like a portfolio of your work. And if you have some kind of digital presence, like on Twitter or LinkedIn or Reddit or whatever, that would help. Is that where do you see.

Yeah, and they don't have to be hired jobs. I would say previously it's just, you know, show that you can do what you're offering to do, you know.

So like if somebody had somebody reach out to me today and was like, hey, I'd really love to help you, you know, with this project you're talking about doing like be be careful, be careful saying that on this podcast, but go on.

This is generic advice for anybody who's listening to reach out to anybody else.

But it is like if you show that you can you understand the context, that you understand what you sort of can like. You've already contributed the you already have the skills needed to contribute and that you can get there from here like that. Like there is plenty of people with the skill for them is like putting together talent with opportunities and putting all of those things together like that is a huge that is a huge skill on its own. But it takes someone showing initiative and showing the skill and showing that they want to contribute and have already.

But if all you can do right now is like build products on your own, they don't even have to be real. Like, you know, if you want to prove that you're a designer, start redesigning homepages, post them somewhere publicly, start tweeting about it, you know, or whatever your version of that is like show, show the work, show the skill, show the interest and the opportunities will. Present themselves. Yeah, I just got to highlight a personal story of mine.

So we were running a media business and we consciously always on the lookout for great Hiles. Last year there was this kid who basically kept lining up at office and myself and my co-founder, we want ad office in those moments where he landed up there and he wasn't from Bombi. He was outside. Both of you from this place called Jabalpur, which is a smaller town in like central India. So it's pretty far from you. And he kept coming to Bombay to meet us, doesn't we weren't you know, we did end up meeting him.

So this dude, he studied my life entirely, my co-founders life entirely. And he created an Instagram feed, OK? And he he listed out everything about my parents, the girls I've dated my work experience, what we're doing with the podcast right now. Then he made sections on that Instagram feed about each podcast. He broke down each podcast. He edited each video. And that was his job application. Yeah. He was a 19 year old engineering college student.

And my entire team sent in that page to me. And I saw I saw design skills. I saw editing skills. I saw content based skills. And we got him on for an internship, did fantastically well for six months. He called I mean, at this point, I was talking to him on the phone. I was guiding him a little bit with this content. And he told me that he wanted to drop out of engineering college. But since I know that he has this natural skill set in the world of content and I also know that that's translatable to the world of entrepreneurship, like you can take those same skills and create an entrepreneur out of that.

He's he's working with us now.

So he left his house. Evana away from his house. He ran away from his parents, which is a huge deal in India. Like we live with our parents, who I live with my mom, and no one does that. Usually he dropped out, ran away. And he's he's staying in my office right now. We built out a room for him and he's going to head our content division probably five years down the line. That's that's that's just like one one story of, you know, if you if you really want a job, you've got to prove it.

You got to, like, put it out. You've got to show that you're capable of doing something and it makes your chances of getting that job way higher.

So there's a lesson in there for like the listeners.

Yeah, that's huge. I mean, and I'd say, like, you didn't just show you his skills, but he shows you his hustle. He showed you that he put hours and hours and hours into that application that you call it right into that project to show you how much he cared about that. You know, that particular thing. That's that's huge. It's really huge, especially earlier in your career where you don't have you know, you don't have much of a resume already, but you can create you know, you can work so hard and put so much into it and be so considerate about who the person is.

That is a perfect example, which is why I want to ask you about Navar. Why did you choose to write that book, The Almanac of Nevada, with to what what was your thinking behind it? You know, if you Google your name, that's the top suggestion in India, at least it's Eric Jorgensen space. And also what got into, you know, the things you say. I mean, I'm sure you've studied the guy inside out. And there's a saying in the world of yoga that if you want to gain and other humans traits, you study that person.

You think about that person, possibly create something related to that person and you're able to inculcate some of the traits. It's not really a yogic theory. It's basic human science. Like, you know, if you think about someone I really like LeBron James. I studied his career inside out, possibly subconsciously. I apply certain things in my own business that he did when he was my age or younger. So I want to ask you, what in the world what what about that guy fascinated you so much that you went and wrote a book on him?

Yeah, I mean, I've been following the all for more than ten years, probably. And when I was young and trying to find my way to Silicon Valley, that was like one of the first things I heard was like, go read old Paul Graham and go read all of the stuff that Demolisher on his old blog, Venture Hacks. And so to me, he was kind of like, if you want to understand the value, you want to get into it, like, this is what you have to read.

And so that's when I started following him and kept up on Twitter and listen to his talks and his podcast over the years. And I've seen, you know, everything that he has shared along different stages, like has been stuff that I've been interested in. So, you know, he's he's like a sci fi futurist, like I'm into sci fi and futurism. Like he got deep into, like, crypto block chain. Like that stuff is really interesting.

Talks about building startups and investing and kind of principles for wealth building that are generalisable, talked about, you know, philosophy and, you know, the study of happiness and finding peace and how that is a skill like all of those things are stuff that I'm interested in for for myself. I have subjects. Right. So it's just as much that like he was sharing what he was interested in. And I was like over and over again, like, man, this guy gets.

Said like he's, you know, 10 years ahead of, like what I'm interested in and studying, and so his kind of like looking at his path and looking at the stuff that he was distilling and sharing was super interesting to me. And I got a lot out of it. And so when I just kind of, you know, as the stuff kept going and kept coming, kept coming, I started thinking more like, you know, he's sharing all this amazing stuff, but it's in Twitter and it's in podcasts and it's just like, you know, disappear in a few years.

Like that stuff tends to have a shorter shelf life. And books, you know, are just this medium that's been with us forever. And kind of as soon as it's in a book, it feels like it's going to stick around forever. And everybody knows what to do with a book. And people gift books in ways that they don't, you know, share podcasts and things like that as often and not every to listen to a podcast. And everybody's on Twitter, but everybody either reads or knows what to do with a book.

And so getting transforming this into something that was more accessible and more permanent and more evergreen and easier to access and that they could, you know, flip through table of contents, reference, read gift share, leave on your nightstand, like it just felt like the right way to kind of carry these ideas forward to make them more accessible to more people. No, that's that's beautiful. Could you give my listeners context on his story behind, like, the brain?

What did the guy do?

Like as in when he was a teenager, when he was a college student, when he was a young entrepreneur? What was his life like?

Yeah, he's an interesting life. He emigrated from Delhi to Brooklyn, New York, at age nine, I think, and single parent house. You know, his dad wasn't really around that. That degree didn't transfer, but he was like, you know, single mom working two jobs with him and his brother. And so he kind of had a pretty independent childhood. It sounds like, you know, spent a lot of time in the library reading a lot of books, studying and had some menial jobs as a, you know, catering and washing dishes and delivery that kind of helped the family.

And then as he was getting into high school, he's clearly like very kind of naturally brilliant. And he spent his time in the library and learned a lot. And so he's like, pass this test to get into this relatively early high school. And once he was in that high school, he got into Dartmouth and started an Ivy League school is a great school. He started studying computer science and economics. And from there, you know, like few adventures early in his career is like starting at the law firm.

I didn't really like that culture and work and started off as a software engineer and then just kind of got more and more into tech and tried a few different things, started a few companies in like sort of one in the early 2000s. I was part of like the early dotcom boom and was basically cheated out of it by a co-founder. And that turned into a little bit of a legal battle. So that was like an almost win and then a crushing loss and that turned contentious.

And then he became an investor. And it wasn't until, you know, he has some great investments, but those take a long time to percolate, you know, invest in Twitter and an Uber housemaid's sort of fun and then sort of blogging through venture hacks, which turned into Angel List, which has now this beautiful, incredible platform that, you know, has investments and job listings. And like, you know, is the website that Silicon Valley takes place on basically like investments, get through their jobs, go through there.

And so there's this kind of huge body of work now. But it took, you know, decades of like putting pieces together and taking small steps and making small investments and sort of building this credibility and this reputation. And it's kind of incredible now to look at, you know, the principles that he shares and see how he's been applying them for years and years and years. But I wouldn't say it was an easy path or a clear one even.

Yeah.

And he's someone who's worked on his craft. And if you listen to his podcast, even though he did one with investors recently spoke about two very interesting concepts. One, he said that his his file comes from his process of learning, which is what he's working towards. He he earned money in order to be free. And in that free time, he thinks about things. He learns that's why he's called the modern world's philosopher. Like he's he probably will go down in the same way that, you know, you look back at Aristotle, you look back at you know, there's a bunch of Indian philosophers in archaeology.

He'll he'll go down as one of those guys, according to me, because he's that hungry for the loading process and people in terms of wealth. He said something really cool. He said that I don't look for massive cash outs. I just want to ensure that I keep making a little bit of money as my life is progressing and that making that little bit of money teaches me formulas. And I just keep reapplying and reworking the same formulas. And therefore I compound and I accumulate wealth, which is something that a lot of young people probably all over the world need to understand.

Everyone's using that massive splash of money, that massive. The explosion when really the game was about setting fire, running away, coming back, setting fire again, running away and chilling while you're running there, because the goal of life isn't money, it's also happiness. Yeah.

And you can't you know, you can't dedicate a entire chapter of your life to like, I'm just going to spend this 10 years only making money is a recipe for misery. And in your relationships fall apart and your health falls apart. And you see that like in the valley, probably to a fault. You know, people just overly focused on accomplishing one thing at a time in their life instead of finding balance and finding principles and finding ways to keep everything like working together well and make progress on love, make progress in your relationships, and keep your inner peace and keep your health in a good spot.

And so finding all those things, even even for somebody who's in a hit driven business like investing and startups, you know exactly what you're saying. He says this didn't come in one big splash. This is a lot of chips stacking up time over time, over time. You know, stuff like chain link is getting better at interacting, like between the block chain in the real world. And so some of those things are kind of frontier, I think that he's that he's still investing in.

And of course, Angel is still doing like, you know, new and exciting things. They just rolled out rolling funds. And so that kind of changes the dynamics between angel investors and their LPs, which changes the amount of capital available to entrepreneurs. And so there's still innovations happening, like just, you know, how the plumbing of those, you know, startup ecosystem and the investing and, you know, that just keeps every year they keep getting more and more money flowing into tech startups.

And we just keep seeing the market grow and more and more successes, we get more and more investment. And the cycle just keeps right.

So I'm going to have to ask you to explain to a four year old the basic concept of block jayann and cryptocurrency. How would you explain that? OK, forget Bill, forget all. But what's your what's your simplest explanation of it to someone who doesn't understand it at all? I'm totally the wrong guy for this, but I'll be OK. I'll do my best, which is the block chain is mathematically secured ledger of transactions.

So that wouldn't be I wouldn't work for a four year old, but basically like imagine in accounting an accounting statement that's public that cannot be falsified. And so all transactions back and forth. You know, the analogy that EVOL uses for Bitcoin is like imagine one perfectly impenetrable Swiss bank account shared by all of humanity that has like a fixed size. And so if you want to store assets in it, you can store assets in it. But we are all pulling we are giving to and pulling from the same pool.

And so if you need to store assets in it, you have to buy an asset from somebody who already has or buy the space from somebody already has an asset in it. You know, there's there's a I did a compilation of those sort of summaries of Washington crypto on the website so you can read his own words rather than relying on my my imperfect recollection for people who want to want to kind of dive into that. But it is a very interesting world.

And Nivel takes the kind of foundations of crypto and merges it with a lot of like the ideas from sapience, you know, you all know in Harare that you were mentioning earlier and combines those and really looks at block chain and crypto as a new way to organize human effort. So like at the highest level, you know, we use political systems to organize humans and govern. We use markets to organize humans and reallocate resources. And in the same way we can, the block chain can be used as the system to transact, you know, and organize human effort and reallocate resources.

If the rules are set, the boxing can execute them and we can all operate in a without necessarily even having to trust each other or about relationships because the watching forces trust and security in those in those relationships, even if people don't know each other. And so I think there's a really interesting vision of the world that can come from imagining what does it look like to remove the need of trust between any transaction like, you know, how does it work?

You know who we were talking about earlier? Like, how can remote people get access to work that they've never done before? And that is based on a relationship that they don't have. Like the watchman may remove the need of that if all the blocking it is doing. It's like, hey, you need to perform this task. And if you do, you'll get this reward. The trust doesn't matter. The you know, the relationship doesn't matter, like through if a block chain sort of is extended all throughout all of the, like, gifts and rewards of executing a task.

You can imagine they call them like. Decentralized autonomous organizations, and it's just like used the firm, a company as a nexus of contracts, and those contracts can be executed through a block chain automatically a trust lost way. And all of the independent parties that plug into a company can just like opt in or out of any particular task or any particular job or role or responsibility continuously, completely, fluidly in a perfectly liquid way. And that's a really interesting you know, we're always from that.

But it's a really interesting vision for the world. And you think through the second and third order effects of that. It's it's pretty incredible.

So a human being owns money or does things in this world primarily to take care of his family and live a happy life. So from that perspective, how does the concept of cryptocurrency change your existence as a basic human being? Like how will it change an average person's life in Nigeria or New Zealand or Latvia? You know, like how will it just change a normal person's life?

Yeah, I think the cryptocurrency sort of wave can really reduce the differences between people living in different countries like political systems and borders become much less important because countries aren't as insular in how they do business and business and relationships are less dependent on who is the nearest. And so the world becomes much more flat with like a cryptocurrency and watching driven world individual currencies, individual governments become less powerful and the world becomes much more of a meritocracy. So the best person for a particular job, it's easier for them to find it.

It's easier for them to get it. It's easier for them to get paid doing it rather than, you know, some of the challenges of international business today, like are going to be dramatically reduced as cryptocurrency makes it easier and just kind of creates one one a whole lot of humanity online and makes it easier for us to cooperate. Basically, it's a new form of human cooperation that transcends governments and just makes markets significantly more efficient and more reduces some of the friction that comes with the need for trust in the need for a pre-existing relationship.

So the effective answer is that it takes power away from the government and gives power to the people who are doing the transactions, the businessmen or the shopkeepers or whatever. Yeah, it increases liquidity in in the global labor market, I think, which means that every individual is going to have more jobs available to them at any given time. Right. More opportunities. It is much more of a meritocracy, which means the returns for being the best at what you do or even greater what you do are much higher and it matters less where you are or who you are or how old you are.

It matters much more like how good you are at a certain thing and how important that thing is that you are good at. Right.

Which is possibly why governments might be against the use of cryptocurrency going forward, because they might realize that, oh shit, we're not we're losing power like these tech people or these entrepreneurs and might create some roadblocks in the path of cryptocurrency.

Yeah, I imagine it'll make it harder to collect taxes. That'll make it harder to keep to retain citizens. If a government is not if a citizen is not happy with the government, we'll make it easier for them to like I. I'm just going to put on my assets in like the block chain somewhere in Bitcoin and I'm going to get over a border and I'm going to collect them again. And it'll be much easier to transfer between countries, which means countries will have to compete for the best citizens much more, maybe much more effectively than they do now.

Right. You know, so say in the year 1999, no one thought that within twenty years we're going to have a television, a bank or a photo album, a camera, every all of that and much more inside one small device that can fit in your pocket.

So 1999, that was the perspective. 2019, that perspective was, oh, shit, this happened. This is what our life is like now. So I feel like in the human story, especially as we're moving forward, there's going to be these massive technological advancements because of which the human experience suddenly becomes way different than it was even five, ten years ago. And this is probably the next jump where because of remote work becoming a possibility, because of what we can say about Gordon going into the future, as if you're capable of creating good all content, you'll be all right financially going forward.

You know, these are the new skills required of the world and possibly crypto currencies will be the form of payment will be the new gold in many ways. Is that is that fair to say that probably by 2040 we're going to be living in a very different world where I don't look at you and I say, OK, you are an American or someone to the Chinese or so-and-so is Ethiopian. I just say, OK, you're a human.

You need me to. This you pay me through Krypto, I'll do the service for you extremely well, and then we'll work together long term based on you giving me my salary and crypto currencies or vice versa.

Yeah, I think that's I think that's a very reasonable vision for especially for the tech world. Right. Like, this is not going to be true universally. You know, if you're a contractor and your job is to build buildings, it's going to be much harder for you to kind of transition into a digital world. But for the people who are living most of their lives digitally, their digital relationships are digital work. You know, they just need a laptop and they can be anywhere in the world and, you know, have their whole life with them and everything that they need to perform their craft and do their business as I be true for everybody.

But it's going to be increasingly, increasingly true for the digital, you know, the people who kind of live digitally. And those lives may diverge much more quickly than people who are, you know, doing a job or have responsibilities to fix them to a certain place or, you know, the physical world or the governmental world. So for some people, change will happen radically and quickly. And for others, you know, it may not happen at all or only sort of tangentially affect their lives.

Right.

In fact, in 21 lessons for the 21st century, you all know Harari says something beautiful. He says that Bordeaux's, like a country's borders, are a very new concept for mankind. These things didn't exist until everything was pretty much a bunch of similar people in one area. And we call ourselves Indians or we call ourselves Japanese or whatever. But Bordeaux's as a concept is a very he he actually I think in a part of the book, he kind of looked down on the concept of Bordeaux's.

He said that probably for this 200 300 phase of human history, borders have become really important. But going forward, borders are also going to disappear again. And I do feel that crypto currencies are a massive part of that change that's going to happen. He also had a whole chapter on patriotism where he said that patriotism is basically a tool used by governing bodies to control mass populations and mass thought processes.

Now, if I say that on a podcast, I'm sure I'm going to get hate from people they are using and not.

No, I love my culture. I love India. I love what India has given me. But it's just a nice concept to think of. You know, that patriotism is a way for government to tell you, oh, shit, you're not thinking this way. That means you're a bad Japanese person or you're a bad Ethiopian or you're a bad Nigeria or you're bad in Detroit, a bad American. So it's just some fun guns, everything go off.

And I feel like that's why it's also important to read books, because it just opens up your mind in ways that you wouldn't expect.

Yeah, Doel has a helpful kind of tool for that. Or he says you should be suspect of any beliefs that you got in a package. So if it comes with, you know, you're an American, you're supposed to believe, you know, one, two, three. You're a Catholic. You're supposed to believe one, two, three, you know, you're a Buddhist or supposedly one, two, three, like anything that someone is handing you a bundle.

Like, you've got to learn to unbundle those and select the beliefs that maybe serve you. And, you know, I think like the government certainly wants us to think and act in certain ways that makes us easy to govern and good citizens. But it's also like our culture such that I don't think that that's like a puppet master thing, so much as like there are cultural norms that we are all held to by our community and the people around us because we need to rely on each other.

We need to have a set of, you know, cooperation, rules and expectations so that we can effectively collaborate and work together as humans to accomplish things and, you know, use each other's skills and gifts and abilities and support each other like this. There's nothing insidious about that, I don't think. Yeah. Have you heard of this guy called Russell Beadles? He's a stand up comic. He says that eventually the whole world is going to become beige, like everything's just going to become one thing.

We're all just going to become one kind of race, which is very true. Like, that's what I strongly believe. And in many ways, it's not just biologically all of us are going to have sex with each other. It's also exactly what we spoke about, that you can work with anyone, whether they're sitting in Hawaii or Fiji or wherever they are in the world. Russia, you you kind of feel a oneness. And also, I mean, I do have a very spiritual aspect of my life and even the world of yoga.

The world of spirituality predicts that for the following two or three centuries that we're probably going to live in a much more unified world because people are going to become much more connected through globalization, therefore have much more perspective, therefore become much more empathetic and therefore kind of look at themselves as one and not look at all. You're Pakistani. I'm an Indian. I'm supposed to hate you, so I hate you. Everyone's going to look at humans as humans.

Yeah, I'm really rooting for some sort of alien invasion that just unifies humans. I feel like that's going to really bring us all together. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, for sure. Also, because you're into sci fi, is there anything you'd like to highlight about the next ten to 20 years that people would assume is from.

A sci fi novel, but in truth, it's already here. For example, Flying Gods or, you know, even Hyperloop is pretty sci fi, according to me. But I mean, is there anything you want to highlight specifically? I mean, the Hyperloop is really cool.

I mean, that's just an exciting one. Like, there are flying cars that are just like really not that practical. I can't imagine the amount of, like, regulations and danger and I don't know, that's a like the tunnels that the boring company that Elon is working on, too, is like a pretty cool thing. I think there's probably the like breakout thing that's going to change our society the most. We may not know yet, or it's maybe like a fringe of A.I. I mean, the three like experiment.

I don't know if you've seen that, but that is like no, pretty close to it is a huge I think it's I think it's a Google A.I. project and you feed it in like input's so you could take, like, my whole Twitter history, give it to it and say, give me 100 more tweets. And like at least half of those, you probably would not be able to tell or from a robot or from an A.I. And so there's like if you look you look these up, you start to see is so expensive.

You know, it takes a lot of computing power to do it. But we are we are seeing A.I. that is already kind of at least in moments like able to fool us. I think there's there's definitely like a video and photo things that are very, very close to the real thing, enough to fool people like deep fakes. So you look up defense and see some of those. And that is like predictably improving to the point where they just hold up.

I just got to give the listeners context, deep fixes. Basically, they'll say, you know, you really like Shotokan.

So Shotokan has a lot of photos available on Google dot com and the device will go scan all the photos and kind of create a 3D version of his face and therefore be able to plasto that 3D virginal shotgun's face on any video so you can have a video of, say, Donald Trump giving a speech, but it'll look like Shotokan stalking with Donald Trump's voice. And I'm sure that they're going to do this for Shotgun's voice as well as they'll probably be able to generate someone's voice as well at some point, which also means that you'll be able to take a human being's data like the face, the voice, the body language, everything about them, and create an animated false version of them, which looks, feels and thinks completely realistically.

But go on it.

Yeah, that is I think they are you can do voice, at least to some extent, if they have a lot of recordings of a person. So you can go on and get like you can basically like we are not too far from someone being able to completely fabricate a believable video of someone saying something, you know, that they never said, which is going to really change how we have to as individuals, like react and and like verify information.

And like you can imagine that being used for a lot of, you know, not great political, nefarious purposes and being used against private citizens. And it's going to be a really interesting that something like that technology is already there. It's just not very widely distributed yet. And that will be a real change to like it's something that people need to know about so that we are not totally taken by surprise by it if we see it. I can imagine some of the first versions of that when this information is not widely known, can be catastrophic for people.

Yeah, I'm thinking I'm going to call this podcast Why Humanity is Fucked going forward, but I'm optimistic or choosing Palin.

So here's here's my brotherly share of data with you. I don't know whether it's human culture or Indian culture, but five years of content creation has taught me that if you want to generate clicks on a particular piece of content, if you package it in a negative tone, or if you if your first bit of the content where most of your users end up leaving most content boxes in your first 10, 20 seconds before 10 to 20 seconds, either negative or extremely thought provoking, which often, you know, if your if your thought is negative, it automatically becomes thought provoking.

So if you have a negative kind of evil on the book, then people stick it on for the entire book. So that's just the course of content creation, not just an alert. That's a rule all over the world, but it works even more in India. And a lot of media houses like we have this news article in their TV, it's equivalent of, I think, Fox News for you guys. You know, where you you know what I mean?

Like people. Yeah, exactly. Sort of. It's something like that. And they've primarily grown based on packaging, even neutral all. Positive content in a negative way. So but I think this is more a human thing than just an indenting any one, you would say no.

I mean, I agree. I think it's an unfortunate there's there's a book called Contagious. I think that is examines like what content gets shared and what are the emotional triggers that the content creators have to hit in order to get content shared. And there's there are positive ones, but there are also like very reliable negative ones that are like outrage, you know. Yeah, shame shuts people down, but outrage gets them to share and signal that they disagree with it and that they think that it's wrong.

And so, yeah, it's a very like it's an insidious thing. And I think, like, it's a shame because when we reward when we as like viewers reward content creators for leading with negative things, we get more of that and then we all suffer for it. And it's something that I filter for when you are talking about like how we choose our Twitter feed and the people that we want to interact with, like my favorite people are pretty unfailingly either optimistic or neutral.

You know, they don't seek the negative perspective on things. They don't take the worst possible interpretation. You know, those are I think it's hard enough to always remember that you can choose a positive interpretation as yourself, that if you surround yourself with people who are doing the same or if you take in media that's always doing the same, it is really that gets much harder.

Yeah, for sure. So, you know, I wanted to talk to you about this concept of leverage as well, not just in terms of content or career, but leverage is something you speak about a lot generally with your brand. Could you explain the word leverage to someone who doesn't understand it, like in very simple words? And could you kind of expand on what you've learned about the concept of leverage over your own video?

Yeah, Davola kind of introduced this idea and I totally fell in love with it. I think there's so much more to kind of explore here. Leverage, the most kind of high level definition is a force multiplier. And so the forces that you on a personal level, might want to multiply, you know, your judgment, the decisions that you make, your effort, your skills, the methods of leverage are things like tools, labor, capital and products, you know, media code, product design and things like that.

So as you look at the kind of inputs, whether it's a decision that you're making an investment or, you know, the work that you're putting into something and you want to get a much, you know, a 10x output, you've got to find ways to leverage that input. And so, you know, if you have a thousand dollars and you're trying to make an investment, you know, you might earn ten thousand. But if you can get ten thousand dollars to make that same investment, that same decision, then you might make 100000 thousand.

It's a very, very different outcome. And that capital is providing leverage to create a much larger outcome from the exact same initial motion. You get the same leverage from from labor, from, you know, high school to help you and work with you.

Imagine that anything you're doing in your life is done with the help of a knife. Leverage is your process of sharpening that knife to do everything in your life. Yeah.

You know, tools is probably the most basic version. If I sent you out in the woods to chop down a tree with your bare hands, it would take you a really long time. And if I give you an axe, it would take you a little less long. And if I give you a chainsaw, it would take you even less time. And if we sent you out there with like five people and a giant machine, you could do 100 trees in the same amount of time.

So it is really looking at, you know, what are your skills? What are you trying to accomplish? How can you amass and use all of the different types of leverage available to you? This podcast is a great example. I know you got people around you right now with different skills, contributing their time to helping this podcast come together. Once it's in a product now, it's now it's in a package. It's in, you know, saved in the cloud.

It's in a podcast. And now people in the future, you know, whether it's tomorrow or in five years, can listen to this and can replay us anytime they want to. We are we are packaging and using leverage on our own time right now in an incredible way that has never been true before. You know, leverage used to be let me get it in front of an auditorium in front of a hundred people. And now it's let me record a podcast.

And 10000 people can listen to this like this. That's absolutely incredible. And these new technologies are giving us new, longer forms of leverage. And so small content businesses in particular, and software businesses are so much more profitable and so much more highly leveraged than any other, you know, businesses in the past had an opportunity to be just because of the leverage that technology is providing.

So, you know, again, because you're someone who studies Narval, because you're someone who studies happiness and human existence, what do you think works as leverage for your own happiness from. It's my practice of meditation, my practice of listening to people like yourself, my practice of going deeper into the world of spirituality, spiritual learning. That's that's what works for me on a personal level. And while I understand it may not be one on. So that fits everyone.

But what do you think is a general way to use leverage to enhance your own happiness levels?

Yeah, I think the way I've been thinking about this recently is trying to think really hard about what are the things that only we can do for ourselves. Right. So you cannot outsource your breathing. You know, you cannot outsource controlling like your inner voice. You can't outsource your workouts. So there's things that you can get people to help with. There's things that you can safely ignore. There's things that you can do without in life. And it's hard to build the habit of learning to do the things that are good for you and the things that do make you happy, even in the medium term.

Like it's so much easier to just, like, open your phone and get a quick hit of dopamine and to remember, like, I'll actually feel better if I go to the gym, if I go to go on a walk, if I just go get out in nature, if I go listen to the waves, if I go have coffee with a friend, like, all of those things will make me happier than be like dopamine in five seconds that I can get.

And there are things that like, you know, it doesn't feel better to have someone else do it for me, you know. So some of the work can be shared, some of the responsibilities can be shared. But remembering and learning those habits so that you can take care of yourself and be sure that you're, you know, giving yourself the space and the appreciation almost that you deserve. And it's so easy to get yourself in a place where you feel like you think that the more unhappy you are with yourself and the harder you are in yourself, the better you're going to do in, the more productive you'll be.

You know, I still catch myself doing this all the time. And it's not true. It's not helpful to be, you know, to be hard on yourself, to punish yourself, to to postpone your own happiness, thinking that you're going to get more done. In the meantime, you just allow yourself to be happy doing what you're doing and only do things that that make you happy, you know, find ways to to make progress and enjoy your time at the same time.

And those are things that take a while to give yourself permission to do. But once you've kind of flip that switch and once you've had to ask yourself these questions and evaluate, you know, I'm sure you're you're enjoying this time and the work that you do, you're making progress and enjoying yourself at the same time. Yeah. Much more than you would if you were, you know, I don't know, practicing corporate law or something. Something like that.

Yeah. My my first internship in college was this individual, Ernst and Young, fantastic work culture and all that. But I know that office with the intention of leaving, I think myself. Oh, shit, I got to be of like nine hours at least. And that's when I realized, oh, man, this is not the right one for myself.

And the moment I ever came in front of the camera for the first time, I realized, oh, this is this is something that speaks naturally to me.

Yes. You saw how good you look. You're like I'm feeling myself in here.

This is something like there's just things that come naturally to, you know, whether that's career choices or systems that you kind of apply within your own life. You've got to keep experimenting. That's that's my two cents on leverage that throughout your life you're changing as a person, even when you're turning twenty nine, even when you're turning 30. But you've got to keep your experimentation on because maybe that would be your old version of yourself will want different things from the twenty eight year old version of yourself.

So just as long as you keep your experimentation alive, my hypothesis is that by the time you're like forty, maybe you're on, you know, your energy slightly lower. Your head is not working as rapidly. You're also much more sorted out from a career perspective.

When you have time for self actualization, you'll have your systems in place after years of experimentation and understanding yourself. So you've got to get to the core of who you are.

Yeah, I think maybe the way that this was said before that stuck with me. The most that Peter Goffman said is he's like, if you saw a child who is seven and they didn't change between age seven and age 10, it would be a tragedy. Like it'd be a very noticeable, painful something. Something is wrong. But if you don't change between 27 and 30, it's almost expected. It's almost expected that adults don't change. And the people around us actually like almost subconsciously encourage us to stay the same.

They want us to be predictable. They want us to to not change too much because it's inconvenient for people around us. And it's it's hard and it's hard for us. And you can only change so many things at once. And some of those are that sticks in mind. To me, it was like, if you don't change is a tragedy. There's always something you can you can grow. There's always something that's going to be important. There's always you know, your context is changing, even if.

The system in the South that you had was perfect for, you know, where and who you were at 27, where and who you are at 30 is going to be different. And you've got to change and grow and adjust to that.

So you don't think you're someone who has a stable career or just someone who learns a lot. Therefore, I'm pretty sure you're someone who's also got most of the time on a very personal level.

I'd like to ask you, do you if you even have any void in your life, like on a very personal level, do you feel that there's anything that's incomplete for you after this much of learning and this much analysis? Oh, yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is a thing that I like. It is it is really hard to not just look at the gap between who you are and who you want to be. Right. And the always you kind of have this. It's really easy to lock in expectations for yourself and to very quickly pick up new desires and pick up new hopes. You know, it's easy to go strohl Instagram for 20 minutes and you come out thinking like, oh, my God, I want to cook like Anthony Bourdain.

And I want to be like super wise balance philosopher. And I want to travel the world and I want to, you know, lift until I look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and like you just have all these, like, expectations of yourself that pile up that, ah, when you when you look at the mountain of expectations and desires that you set for yourself wildly unreasonable. You know, like if someone told you that those were all their goals, you'd be like, you're crazy, but you don't always see that you're doing it.

You don't always, like, evaluate the whole pile. You just pick them up one at a time and throw them on your like desire list. And then you wonder why you're, like, unhappy with with who you are or you're like, you know, the void, you know, you're like, oh, I'm not where I want to be. And to anybody, any of your friends and your family, you know, they're kind of like, what are you talking about?

Like, you're in a great spot. Things are things are like you've accomplished great things and but we all have expectations of ourselves, you know, that's what's drawing us along that are that are farther ahead than where we are now. And, you know, the thing a trainer told me, this is like you're very it's very hard to love yourself and change yourself at the same time, you know, like you've got to you can't in order to change yourself, you almost instinctively, like, start disliking who you are and where you are.

And that sometimes can be a force for motivation and sometimes a force of change. But it also causes you pain every day until you see that change. And you can have both you know, you can love yourself for who you are and want to change. At the same time. You don't have to choose one or the other. It's hard work to to balance that. You know, it's like walking a tightrope psychologically, but it's possible to do both.

And I think, you know, that's I want to spend my life both loving who I am and growing and changing at the same time. And so it is worth building that skill and working hard to get on that tightrope and learn to kind of keep walking.

Now, is that why you study in the long in detail so much? Because he's at least from the outside, it looks like he's achieved that.

You know, he's happy with himself and at the same time he's comfortably growing.

Yeah, that's partly what drew me to him. And I think the interesting thing is that he it took him a while, many years to get there. Right. Like he says, you know, that he was very hard on himself and very unhappy for most of the time when he was building his wealth and building his career and earlier in his life. And now that he is, you know, established and wealthy and has his company and has his investments and his portfolio, he's now turning to like philosophy a little bit more and finding happiness.

But the core kind of question that we are left with is like, could he have done what he did and have been happy at the same time? Because he he didn't. But I think that we can and it helps to study things to look past like, you know, I know I've given this book as a gift to friends who are, you know, in their early twenties and they read the wealth section, you know, ten, twenty times and the happiness section once or twice.

And I think if you look if you look at your whole life earlier and holistically and start to look at some of the philosophy a little bit earlier, you can inculcate some of those ideas and you can make progress. You can grow yourself and love yourself at the same time. But it takes work to reach beyond, you know, just I think that one maniacal goal that you're focused on and seeing the whole your whole self in your whole life for what it is and trying to kind of put it all together.

Gorgeous. And I mean, I got to ask you about the career side of leverage as well. Because I also feel that, you know, the goals of being an entrepreneur or working in startup related environments is this problem that we just spoke of. They were always trying to get to their next step without being kind to us. It's that Michael Jordan shit, you know, like you keep keep working at the cost of holding in all this deals and then trying once you win the championship.

But from a career perspective, what have you learned about leverage? Like, you know, how can you use leverage to enhance your career progress? Yeah, I think leverage the the first question to ask yourself that kind of sets you down the path is like what are for each one of us, each individual? What are my highest value tasks? You know, what are the things that only I can do or what are the very best uses of my time?

And so if you could only accomplish one task this week, what would it be if you could only spend two hours on her company this week? What are the two what are the things that you would do in those two hours? And you may actually have a really interesting answer to this. Like, do you know, like is your time spent interviewing, guess the most high leverage use of your time? It's the thing that no one else can replace you with doing, right?

Yeah, it's exactly this. And, you know, it's not just me recording content. I'm learning through every podcast. Right. And, you know, people who don't know the brand think that I'm just running a podcast. But honestly, these are my this is my higher degrees in my higher education is my MBA that I'm doing through people like yourself. I take that information, I sit with it, I probably research, I lead. And then I relate to my junior, my business development team and say that, OK, you know, this is this information is what we can create with this information.

So please go and create it. And then they go and create should come back to me. I review it and I green light or red light it based on how good or bad it is. But then my process has to be focused on being the face of things and learning at the same time for the sake of the team. Yeah.

So your your high leverage tasks are the interviews themselves you're learning, which you can't you can't outsource your learning, you can get help, you can get input. But like you can't substitute yourself for taking in the information. And it sounds like your your taste. You know, you set the quality bar in your organization. You you decide what goes and what doesn't. And so those are you know, those are your highest leverage tasks, the things that only you can do.

You've got people who help you with editing and people who help you with promotion, people who help you with repackaging and merchandising, and people who help you book book guests. And, you know, all of those things are things that you get help with so that you can keep doing the super high value, high leverage things. You see it and, you know, a senior accountant will have an assistant and will have, you know, somebody who helps on the H.R. side of things and somebody who's like working the back office doing, you know, tasks that are.

So if you look at people who are are leverage, you'll see that they spend the most of their time on jobs that only they can do. And they get help either through tools or products or systems or, you know, it just they freely spend money and resources so that they can stay focused on the high value tasks and build systems around them. So they're standing on this like mountain of levers, you know, and controlling a lot of things around them through their judgment and their skill that they built over the course of their career.

And so if you had to like I mean, I know it's very difficult for you because you're someone who studies a bunch of subjects, but if you're to highlight three lessons about the world, it could be leverage.

It could be the future of business. It could be the future of the world. What would you like to share with all the listeners for the sake of the twenty twenties?

Hmm. I think I think I would I would start with the idea internally that like, you know, we all control our own experience. You know, no one can control your perception of events except for you. And that is kind of the foundation of everything that is, you know, old old wisdom. But it's something that everybody needs to kind of learn for themselves and learn maybe thousands of times over and continually learn. So that's that's a timeless thing.

That's maybe not twenty, twenty years, but it's everybody's got to do it. I think compounding is one of the most powerful sort of mental models that exists and understanding the results of of thinking long term in relationships and in investments and in careers and in skills, you know, take as long term of a perspective as you can. And that doesn't mean delay action. You know, one of my favorite things from Devall is impatience with action, patience with results.

And I think that turns that turns the idea of compounding into, you know, a mantra, the. You can use every day, so you've got to get to work out and you've got to get your work done, you've got to read the next book, impatience with that next action. But patience with the results allow time for the investments to grow, allow time for, you know, the savings to build up, a lot of time for the skills and the perspectives to build up.

And I mean, the third, I would I would say leverage, but we've talked about that a fair, fair bit already. And I think maybe maybe the last one that that had something instead and is just that, like happiness. There's maybe two schools of happiness. And one is is you're completely independent and you need to control your own perspective and choose happiness. And the other is that, you know, we are social animals and, you know, some of the most long and high investment happiness studies come down to like the quality of your relationships.

And as we're talking about leverage and things that you cannot outsource and things that you must do for yourself, like maintaining healthy, positive, close relationships with friends, with partners, with family, you can't outsource that. You can't ignore it, you know, in the same way with with your health and everything else. And that is going to be, you know, a source of of esteem and of pride and of peace and of calm and are really going to, I think, help you and things you'll find rewarding, you know, over over your whole life.

Eric Jorgenson, thank you for being on the run.

Be sure, brother. I really appreciate you sharing all your wisdom. And I hope that someone ends up writing an almanac on you as well. Thank you for what you've shared with the world men. I really hope that this reaches maximum listeners. This one, one and a half hour conversation is extremely value adding, especially from a modern world context. So really from the bottom of my heart, thank you for teaching me. Thank you for sharing it with my audience.

Thanks for having me. Is a super fun. I'm glad to be here for sure.

Thank you. But I'm going to be linking all of Eric's hands down below guys. Makes you go follow make sure you go tweet out to him if you want a job.

Now don't do that.

But Eric will probably be back on the runway show at some point, and that would be awesome. The Man is a great interview. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.