#181 Eric Jorgenson – Your Guide to Technology, Truth & Building The Future

He was the co-founder of Council , the former CTO of Coinbase and is also a managing partner at Andresen Horowitz . This podcast gets into the detail of his new book , the Anthology of Biology . What's up , people ?

Before we get into this video , please make sure to subscribe , like and comment down below so we can get bigger and better guests for you every single week . Let's get straight into the video right now . All right , man , let's kick off . So today we're going to be going into all the details of the new book , which I'm really really excited for .

So the Anthology of Biology a guide to technology , trust and building the future . So it's interesting because , of course , your first book on Naval into right now . It's like two books on different people , one for people that are alive , your document and their story .

So it's a very unique style to begin with , but I wanted to start with a quote from the book that I pulled out , which I there's a lot of good quotes in there right ? The execution mindset means doing the next thing on your to-do list at all times . We write the list every day or every week in response to progress .

This is easy to say but extremely hard to do . It means saying no to other people , saying no to distractions , saying no to fun and exerting all of your waking errors on a task at hand . So how much significance has that had on you in writing the book and analyzing biology during this process ?

You're like oh yeah , like is all the productivity gurus , all the like tools , all the check . It's like it doesn't have to be any simpler or any more complicated than just like a note card and your to-do list and hammering the list and constantly being willing to reprioritize based on what's happening around you .

And that's that feedback loop of getting reoriented can be tricky to know , like how often to do it , and the answer is like as quickly and as often as you possibly can , right , like that's . That has you have to reorient based on what's happening . And the faster you do it and the faster you respond , the more effective your next to do is going to be .

But definitely there's some stuff , there's plenty that , even whether you agree with it or not , I'm just kind of like I'm willing to like suspend disbelief on this and be like well , let me see , like , let's see I'm open to that being a possible future , or maybe that's more true than I thought it was .

There's a lot that I mean biology is extremely opinionated , right Like , and he's got like I think Mark Andreessen said about him which the biology worked at a 16 Z for a while , like with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz , and so they know each other well . And Andreessen said when biology is wrong , it's because he overextrapolates .

If he takes an idea to 11 when actually , like a reality , stops it at five , and I think that's a really helpful lens to sort of put on some of these really extreme or far out predictions or things that seem crazy is like he might be .

He's just seeing farther , he's willing to extrapolate further than most people have ever considered before , and that's just a really interesting thought exercise , whether or not you take it at sort of at face value , or you're like oh yes , I believe that that is going to happen too . It's just an interesting perspective to see .

So if I kept on telling you that you had a problem with the book over time , you'd be like , oh , there's a problem with the book and you try to fix it .

So it's the fact that I think for a lot of people they might read some elements of his work and think , oh , in isolation this has no relevance to me , but I think it's more important when someone like biology is so focused on expanding human lifespan or improving , like information diet , that at that point you think , okay , this guy has done so much research .

I shouldn't shut down the idea , I should be open to the perspective and the very least of things .

I always thought technology was cool , like I was thought it was awesome and like got excited by it , like a Star Wars nerd and stuff like that . But this like the biologies lays out so simply in this book , like how critical it is , like the foundation of all good things for humanity .

The fact that we're not like hunting , gathering and like worried that we're somebody's going to stab us in our sleep all comes down to the progress of technology and having a respect for that and appreciation for it , working on it , seeking it out , investing in it , and just like the moral obligation to respect , appreciate and invest in technology feels so obvious

to me in life after writing this book and I hope it's obvious to people after reading it .

And he references value in terms of technology and well , from two different , multiple , different lenses , but one of particular in the fact that it can speed up our output , especially your outcome .

So if you're writing this book , if you had a pro , if you had a prompt that would help you , or if you'd a way to revise your additions that increases the value from it . And there's definitely been elements in time where people say no to technology or just say no to the next thing that can help them .

But I think that's where someone like yourself , of course , as an investor , and someone like biology who has that forward thinking to be looking to reinvent themselves , do you find that kind of be a blocker or maybe like an element that people will disagree with to some degree .

Right Like , tech is those set of companies and no technology is just like the frontier of new capabilities for humanity . Right Like we have always had technology . Just what is at that frontier has changed over time . And to appreciate technology is not to say it's easy to do .

Right Like there's always friction in bringing something new into your life , of learning a new skill , of you know going to buy chat , gpt and figuring out how the hell to write some new prompts and how it can be useful in your life or your business . And I'm not by nature one of the people who's like , oh cool , a new tool .

Like , let me , let me tinker , let me play with it , like , let me go do that .

This has made me more , more eager to go do that , I think , and more excited about what's on the other side of that work , because it's work to go learn a new thing , suss it out , find out if it's real , dive into it , figure out how to apply it , figure out all the use cases of it .

But seeing what's on the other side of it makes me more eager to do it In life , in business , like I was arguing , arguing . I was on Twitter the other day having a conversation with somebody about you know the trilemma , the like something can be faster , better or cheaper , but like not all three at once .

And he's like if someone has something they're trying to sell you something that's faster and better and cheaper , like they're lying to you , run away . And I was like man , that's like the efficient market hypothesis for operations , like I can't , that's to say , nothing has ever gotten better over time .

And the whole story of technology is things getting faster and better and cheaper at the same time , and I can show you all these examples through history of things getting all like faster , better and cheaper constantly . The equilibrium as well was moving .

So if you want to offer something that's better than your competitors for less and do execute your things faster , like , the answer lies in technology and you have to go , do the work to find the technology that can enable a better product or a better service and find a way to improve , like fold it into your service , fold it into your products .

There's a lot of good that can come from it . But it's a different kind of work than like , oh , grind it out , like lift harder , work more hours , like it's working smarter , and that's not always easy .

So I run a service business , we run a media company , right , we use technology , combination of Slack , google Drive , youtube , video files , compressors , all this stuff right , and it's a tech company that obviously does media things right . So , for instance , you mentioned there about the cost .

The cost of experimentation is so low these days that there's pretty much that is the opportunity cost that you should be experimenting , because it's not like a biomedical field , you know , a genome experiment where we have to test a million datasets and have no idea how to view into it .

So it's kind of like having that open perspective , which is actually what comes from his idea . But the idea overall is to eliminate scarcity that he's explaining or eliminate mortality at a more extreme level . Can you give me a little more top-roasted on that in terms of like , how we attach like mortality , like and to eliminate mortality with technology ?

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Okay , let me , let me like this is pushing my brain farther than I thought . So his the theory is basically everything that we want or work to get costs us some of our life , whether it's the time invested in getting it or whether it is . You know , we spend our time to earn money and we spend that money on something that we want .

And so the theory is like , if we can extend lives , or for some period of time or indefinitely , you're changing the denominator of that . You're changing the cost of everything you ever consume by giving us more currency , and that is a very interesting . It's a very interesting take .

We're obviously a long ways from indefinite physical life , but there's a lot of progress that can get made .

And I think a really interesting thing that he points out as adjacent to this is like we used to care a lot about extending lifespan , like pushing the human lifespan longer used to be the single , like most key metric of technological progress , and that has kind of stopped happening .

Not just stop happening , but , like we have gone , our lifespan has decreased in a lot of areas , a lot of geographies , which is insane , and I don't know if it's technology taking its eye off the ball or sort of regulatory capture that's happening in different places , or just we got too comfortable .

There's a lot of interesting potential explanations , but it's a reminder , I think and he lists a lot of potential technologies that show us this that that doesn't have to be the case . We did not run up against a lot of physics that stopped us from continuing to improve human lifespan .

There's a lot of technologies laying around that could continue to make our lives better and a lot of people have just I don't know lost focus , lost motivation , lost interest , which is again something I hope . I hope we put a dent in with this book .

However , that seeped into , like all different aspects . It's like AI exploration . We also need now AI regulation to stop any sort of exploration , so that rate of discovery of new technologies or advancing technology or advancing human lifespan is being limited by these extra factors .

I think I thought it was an interesting link between biology's anti-establishment view and his early , early childhood , which is like him in school , whatever , and then his views on like regulation , which kind of seeps into crypto , seeps into everything .

It seems that , like these people who are , you know , futurists or alternative thinkers , they've always had that anti-establishment view because it blocks anything that was going to advance human lifespan or whatever .

And I kind of tried to flip that in this book and be like here's all the good stuff , here's all the potential that's being held back by that thing over there .

But I'm not going to spend too much time on you know railing against the government or the establishments or anything like that , but I want to just like show people what's on the other side of that and in the his . Really this is his foundation why he wants to go start new countries , why he wants network states , why he wants to reform the FDA .

Like it's not . It's not just like because the man or because , like the system needs to change and he believes that there's technology there that can let us live healthfully to 110 , 120 . And because of the context of institutions that we live in , we don't even have the chance to try it .

We've sort of stamped out that innovative routes of America where people were , you know , building planes in their backyard or building bridges , building skyscrapers , like , and it was risky , you know like people died , like a lot of them there were sniffing the chemicals . The test Building railroads , sniffing chemicals yeah , building like .

You know the , the right brothers , just like building planes . There's probably plenty of people trying to build their own planes that didn't go nearly as well , right , like , but that we have to be willing to take some of those risks as a society and as individuals .

You know he points out that we take risks all the time , but there's all these different cases where it's illegal to take risks with our own body , with our own health , to try out , you know , new cutting edge drugs , even if we're sick , even with terminal illnesses .

There's , there's people that cases that have gone into the Supreme Court of people with terminal illnesses saying there's an experimental drug that I should be able to take and the FDA literally won't let me take it . I'm going to die anyway , like , give me the chance to take it .

Why don't I have that personal freedom and I don't think anybody's won any of those cases which is fucked , like that's fucked , and yeah it is .

There's plenty of risks with no upside in society today and I hope to sort of get people thinking about some of the risks that we could take with upside and where technology can go , when you allow test pilots to fly a new plane or take a new drug or synthesize something new , and this is , this is sort of the foundation that you said of you know why biology

is trying to start network states and create new , like new , jurisdictions with new rules , and it is all to make space for innovation , for progress and for technology .

And when you look at other countries , he references China , having you know , two weeks to build a skyscraper . And if you convert that to the States , if you convert that to Ireland , ireland , where I'm originally from , jesus Christ , they're still building it . Right , if you look at that ?

And if you look at like Dubai , abu Dhabi , saudi or the new country now that they're building , it gives you a baseline , because that's like the benchmark or that's the baseline . That's where all the GDP is flowing in , that's where all the money's going in . That's where all the jobs are going . It's clearly working in other aspects of the world .

So it's obviously just rude and bureaucracy that's not happening elsewhere . Now the question for you here is like , how do you change ? Like , how do you change that institution ? I know that's such a big question , but like there has to be a next step .

And I think it's really helpful , as you point out , to be like look around and be like we're not the best at some stuff , like like a pretty , like I love America , I'm bullish on the future , but like there's some stuff we could learn from plenty of other countries and and it would be great if we could do it I want to believe that that those institutions

can change or sometimes be reformed or be the sort of new great leadership , can make changes and can move some things in the right direction , at least in some places . That's not always supported , like it doesn't always happen , it can happen .

Biology is basically basing his life's work on the fact that it's very difficult , not impossible , to reform institutions and you just have to go to the frontier and create something new , which there's a . There's a chapter on the front , on frontiers , which I think is interesting , sort of through historical context .

This is like America is what it is today , or became what it what it was Because it was the frontier . For so long it wasn't over regulated , there was plenty of space to grow .

There's plenty of experiments being run , lots of people were trying new things and the internet has been and is the frontier really for a lot of us now over the last 20 years or so . It's where you can go enter a meritocracy , do your work , experiment with new things and meet the people you want to meet .

And he's like you know , the institutions are slowly always trying to sort of close the doors on the frontier and bring it into their control and the pioneers and experimenters are always trying to create new frontiers or push things farther . And you know , the frontiers today are maybe out on the ocean , in international waters . They're the edges of the internet .

They are maybe in space , like maybe Mars will be the next frontier . But the value of that space to experiment without sort of threatening the institution or needing to reform it , to just have the space for people to try things that they want to try .

I think someone for like you , like you know things like economically being like it makes sense and biology is like it makes sense to build it this way . But there's obviously a reason on the other side which is like an incentive , a misaligned incentive , and I think that's you know . He mentions that about our companies growing and you know I've seen that .

I've been in early stage startups , I've been in late stage startups . We have four or five employees in our company ourselves . You know the alignment changes as you grow , right , sticking kind of closer into that topic you mentioned about you know , like even the political side of stuff , but it all feeds into one .

I think this is what's interesting about this is the fact that , as you're mentioning these aspects , they still fit into the broader piece of like alignment across like policies , governments , companies , product services , and one element is if it enrages , it engages . Now , that's an absolute great quote . That's like . That just sums up Twitter to me .

To be honest , that's just that one lineman , because you know , it just shows that , like , technology has been set up in a way to position , rage and enrage people as a result , because if it engages , if it enrages , it engages . Yeah , how much significance does that have for you , for someone who actively uses Twitter now ?

It's just it's cheap and short-sighted and lame , it's just not . It's just not valuable . And , like my , my moral code is something closer to like if it's not good for people , don't do it , just don't . I don't care how good it is for you .

If it's not good for other people , like it will make you worse , it will make them worse and you will like hollow yourself out into this disgusting thing if you continue to pursue strategies that are good for you and bad for others .

The context of that quote is is about the traditional media and the clickbait headlines and the fact that they tend to distort stories exactly because they're incentivized to get page views and clicks and a lot of this .

You know , the whole sort of middle part of the book is about truth , the different types of truth , the way that media is , especially traditional media , but to an increasing extent , to your point , also the incentives around social media are misaligned with finding truth , creating truth , sharing truth with others , and there's a lot of people you can see it

empirically online who just live in this increasingly like unreal world that they've created for themselves through this echo chamber of misinformation they lean into and it is a .

It is a absolutely like fabricated synthetic world that they live in , full of beliefs that are borderline insane , that they have no way to distinguish from fundamental reality and truth , because this is just their whole set of inputs and all right guys .

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I know you and a lot of your listeners have business in media and there's probably five , maybe 10 very specific ideas for media companies to be built that are around much fuller alignment with their audience . It's about creating a win-win between the company and the audience .

It's about delivering actual high value things other than engaging headlines , other than optimizing for views , short termism , just raw numbers .

Like if you can create something that actually improves your listeners' lives and helps them be better people , helps them be better in their community , helps the country be better , helps the world be better , moves human civilization forward , like . You can make that choice and you can choose to optimize for those metrics .

You can choose to use a better playbook and I think that those are all going to build better businesses over the long run . There's no shortcuts , man . A shortcut is a dead end to a place you don't want to be in the first place . So take the hard road and set a high bar for yourself and your impact .

So , following that pursuit , and as you mentioned there about the different echo chambers , it's funny because your idea of what you think that echo chamber could be like is completely different than what I think , because there's so many of them , right .

There's like the money Twitter space , there's like the financial Twitter space , there's the Instagram space , all that , yachts and whatnot . It's all like fucking rented and everything .

So it's like all of these different elements and that's why it's huge for me with this podcast that the whole idea has been like to help younger people live a richer and more filling life , and that's not woo , woo , it's like literally , because it helped me and I was the first listener , I was the first customer and I feel like that's very important because

there's so much information but , like , 99% of it is garbage . Most people are making up numbers , posting screenshots of straight accounts that are fake , or there's politics stuff that are completely misaligned at the same time .

So , in that and knowing this and having this awareness , where does the truth lie in terms of information and how can you create a truth machine for yourself ?

You know we're not used to thinking of truth as anything other than singular and like the hunt for it , but the fact that there's there is scientific truth , which is , like I think , what most people think of , but even scientists would say we're iterating slowly closer to the truth , like we only have hypothesis with high degrees of confidence , like that's as close

to a scientific truth as we can get . There are maybe mathematical truths that are even more fundamental than that , but there's such thing as like a political truth , which is where a country border is or who the president is , which is really just consensus of a bunch of people .

But there's also like areas where , no matter what people believe , the fundamental truth is could be something totally different . I like like this is a scientific truth and then there's a social truth , and the social truth may not have anything to do with the scientific truth and you can come up with your own examples , but it is a .

It is a fascinating thing to sort of see where the consensus of a group differs from what might be fundamental reality and that's where the that's where the opportunities are right . That transition in the book between like here's how you learn to see truth and see the gaps . That's a source of incredible business ideas .

Innovations , like where people say one thing and do another , where they say they prefer this , but they're actually willing to buy this thing that they said they didn't want . They say , you know , like with the economic truth supersedes the political truth , is a fascinating and deep pool of ideas .

Like , how do we move ? How do we move the general population closer to a mathematical truth versus societal ?

So if you suspect that you may not have a solid grounding in critical thinking , which is like you don't need anything other than kind of the basics , but you have to be willing to apply , like the basics of math , reading , maybe some stats , maybe some physics , but just being willing to be skeptical , about a lot of those things and seek out alternative opinions .

Don't just take what you get at face value . And remembering that , I mean a little like you said earlier , like you're constructing the truth , you're constructing your perception of the truth through every little decision you make about who to hang out with , who to follow , who to listen to .

And it's not physically possible to be a deep first principles critical thinker on every decision and every fact that you're ever presented with right . You have to trust the people around you or the people you follow to some extent for some domain .

A lot of the time , maybe even almost all the time , so it becomes really important to determine what kinds of people you want to allow to establish facts for you and who you trust to sort of outsource the job of assessing truth to .

I think there's a line in the book about many people accept only social truths , like everyone accepts different kinds of proof for when they decide what a truth is .

And it's really important to know what people are looking at when they determine what's a truth and it's you know , back to your point about who you choose to follow and influencers and what's real and what's not . Like you gotta be really careful to only choose influences on your life that are examples of where you wanna end up .

Like it is extremely difficult to pick and choose people and say like oh , I follow this guy for his business advice but I don't wanna be like his family life , but I listen to everything he says in business and it's like that is a very difficult line to draw and you have to constantly like hold the wall up .

You don't know where his business life and his personal life sort of advice starts and ends . It's all the same thing . Like you can't pick and choose . So pick heroes , influences you know , inspirations who you admire the whole of their life , ideally closer to the end of their life , so you know how their story ends .

And don't be willing to sort of take on people's outlooks on life until you , unless you want the results that they got , and I don't think most people want . Like the people that tend to become famous and tend to become big influencers that people follow tend to be extreme people Like that's why they got famous in the first place .

People are attracted to extreme versions of their own opinions , their own little seedlings of opinions , but they don't actually want to be that extreme , or shouldn't . Or if they find themselves there , I've regret getting there or have this crisis along the way right . So try to find even if they're much quieter , lesser known heroes or inspirations like .

Try to find people that you actually want all of their life . Otherwise , you know you may be signing yourself up for a dangerous fall one day .

So I even had someone reference recently to me that someone was mentioning but Alex Ramosy , and you're like , oh well , I don't listen to his personal advice , but only his business advice .

So , just like you said there , right , but the dude works 16 hours a day and also I've spoken with like psychologists who , like examined his level of deep work and that puts him in like the top 0.001% of all time .

Like he's someone who can focus for like 8 to 12 hours a day , whereas , like most of us , monkeys can only focus for four hours a day , like literally scientifically . So it's like those people are in that extra bracket that he's like a human of human right . He's just like a super human as a result .

So it's like taking these things out of pinch of salt , but finding the right mentors , right , having an Alex Ramosy as a mentor versus someone down at your local bar is 10 times better to move towards that goal , but it's about when , and I actually you might find it's interesting . I call it the graduation phase .

So it's like when I wanted to start my first podcast , I had , you know , some of that . I really inspired and I quite I graduated out of his content because I wasn't learning how to do this anymore . And he moved on to better people right , and then he moved on to apology .

When you're trying to , you know , build your first fund and invest in the multiple different companies and there's nothing wrong with that .

I don't think there's anything wrong with that , because as you mature as a human , you know , when you have your first kid or you get married or whatever , you'll have new influences that positively influence where you want to go on your life .

If it's important to you because you feel like you're constantly making this trade-off of like oh I'm trying to be this person , but there's no time , there's no space for that in my life , even though it's important to you because you're modeling yourself off someone that doesn't give a shit about something that's important to you , there's all those like you can

create a lot of tension and stress for yourself . I guess by trying to become five very different , very extreme people at the same time and , dear boy , like you know , it's maybe better to have somebody at your local bar .

It's great to just be able to index against the best of the best of humanity and have access to them without feeling like you have to adopt the entire persona of all of them at the same time .

You mentioned in the book many things that are true are unpopular and many things that are untrue are popular . So that's like a fucking great quote .

Because I think to me what that means is , like you know , doing the basic stuff works , especially in like business , right , so I use it for a service business Cold outreach works , fulfillment works , make my customers happy work , and that's what builds a business In many aspects .

You , as an investor , you look a lot at the X , you invest wisely , you just make the process better and you learn from the experience , right ? I feel that a lot of people are just chasing the stuff that's just popular , that's just largely untrue , and they lead to Lead to ruin in many aspects , right ?

And , again , like , 90% of the time it's probably best to go with the crowd , like if everybody's eating at this restaurant , it's probably good . If everybody's not eating this food , like maybe it's bad . There's a ton of times when you have to go with that and it's exhausting to not do it , but you have to .

And I think this quote , that quote , is a really good reminder for when you're trying to do something special , you've really got to stop and say what is most popular is probably untrue and there's probably a different path .

For me , and I'm , in this domain of life very specifically , seeking out a different path and I'm willing to do a lot of extra work or look a little silly or get booed or like , take a risk of failure , to find that other path , to find something that's unpopular but true , because that's where a lot of the returns are in life .

So when you start your business , everyone's like oh , well done , thank you for well done , for leaving the nine to five . And then when you start it , everyone hates you or thinks it's a scam or thinks that it's gonna fail or whatever , and it goes down to U-curve and then a funny takes off and gets consensus .

So it feels like we need to go off to do something that's different . In that regard , like you explained Initially , everyone claps and then everyone judges and then people ask for advice and that's how I can describe it , right ?

So , like , how have you seen that even what you develop Because , like what you're investing in or what you're looking at is obviously abstract ideas a lot of the time , otherwise you wouldn't be investing in it , right ? So like , how does that play out in your own kind of mental model ?

Right , when you first announced a company or it's a baby , or everyone's like oh yeah , like this is amazing , you're gonna be great , and it's like hey , I love you , I support you , I love you , I support you . But just so you know , like you're not shit until you've achieved some stuff .

So like let's not retire on day one because some people are complimenting you . Like it's easy to get complacent when you have that acceptance and then a few years later , where you're two years in and nothing that you thought was gonna work is gonna work , and you've sort of let down your first few customers that you thought were slam dunks .

Then it's like you come in with the and people are really down and people are calling you you know overrated from what they said about you from the launch . Then you gotta come in with like hey , like this is the second inning , this is a long game . You've learned so much .

There's plenty of game left , like you've got this , that you still have people who are interested , there's still huge potential here . Like stick with it , stick with it , stick with it . And then you know , as you come out of that it's like okay , like let's not let off the gas . People are excited about you but we've gotta keep moving . We've gotta keep moving .

Thinking decades , you know , keep almost moving the goalpost on yourself to just see what you're capable of .

And then you obviously wanna break through and like you're probably losing so much money and you know there's a lot of different factors that come into it , right ? So like I run a service business which is cash flow positive . So like , if things go tits up , we still have cash that can pay salaries and pay this and pay that . Does that make sense ?

It's like a different model . It's still completely a place in different ways , but I feel like that the . I feel like that the the depth of the you curve is less severe in non tech businesses , which is obviously why you know you get the airbnbs and the Google's when they break , true , but it's like how long has Google been running ?

For 25 years , and it's only at that point now and still people want to close it down , right ?

So it's like I didn't have that incentive which is like , oh my god , I have to literally eat , like look , rice for like the next four years , because it was like I was allowing it to grow While I was working and then , as it was picking up steam , I kind of came through that trough period , you know , and I feel like it's a series of miniature troughs at

some point that's where life is right . But I feel like that that gave me such a good instance in terms of like business . It was like a micro level because it was less severe . And then when I moved into running a media company , I've obviously had that . I've had like many downs , but it's I just .

I just know personally , I know a lot of founders are guys who doing 10 , 20 million evaluations of companies and it's just not as intense . I'll put it that way .

I've tried to do something similar of like layering those curves so that , like when you have one business or product that is like going really Well , you're investing in another one that can do really well later , so that you know you're a little more Balanced out .

You go through the trough when you still have a nine to five , if you get the chance to , can be really psychologically balancing , I think for sure .

So he speaks a lot about you know I have building SaaS first , code second and higher last . And Can't we true that process in terms of like , how that applies to Like ? Even the earliest stage startup was that . You know we'll try get even venture back to early on .

Very specific all the way through , like sort of the mindset and then thinking through ideas , validating them , launching , building , engineering , like growing . There's a lot of Biology's approach is , I think , kind of unique for a lot of those different things , and so I'm excited to like see what people , what people can do with it .

It's a little , if you like zero to one , like that whole section is like Biology's version of zero to one and he's such a quantitative thinker and like so rigorous with the frameworks that I think you know I've already sent that chapter to like some founders that I know who are like how do I approach this ?

And I'm like here's like the three chapters that you need there's like literally is the step-by-step Guide to like here's how you structure your thinking and execute against that , because it's a weird . You know Some of those are really weird problems . It's hard to figure out . But yeah , the like the SAS first .

It's like can you solve this with a $10 a month tool and eliminate your time ? If not , can you build a program that can solve it ? If not , can you hire somebody who can handle it for you ? So it's just like what's this , what's the fastest , cheapest way to solve this problem and move on to the next one .

And that's I think that's the quote you started the show with like what's the most important thing I might to do list , how quickly can I , how quickly and effectively can I solve it , reorient and move on to the next one .

Now , for a lot of founders like that's , it's quite interesting because , like you know , like I'll give you an example , my friend has a robot advisory company . So robot advisory is like popular Most people know it's , it's not new anymore but he has like a B2B robot advisory firm that does like for huge , huge banks .

So that's small within a larger industry , but then there's still like a really big industry within that industry . That's less evergreen . If it was a , if it was an robot advisory firm , that was B2C , for instance . So that's what was kind of interesting .

So I was relating that back to biology's example and I was like , well , yeah , one smaller than the other , but then the larger market has more competition . So that's , that was a weird one for me .

So like Facebook enormous market every human being on earth should have the thing but also famously very Specific , very small initial market , which was the students at Harvard , the current students at Harvard , and then it became students at multiple campuses , then it became all students , then it a college students , then it became all high school and college students

and it just sort of slowly expanded for that very specific initial market . And so you'll see a lot of , even very , very big companies started with super hyper specific markets that they win the majority of that market and then move to an adjacent market , move to an adjacent market .

So what the decision that you want to make early on is just not to is to pick a big market eventually , but then find a very specific entry point where you can win Quickly , cheaply , the majority of that market , and then that makes it easier to win the tip the next domino and the tip the next domino and then tip the next domino . So I think there's a .

That's one the other is just Comparing the scale of the eventual opportunity makes everything along the way easier , especially in technology , right ? So as an investor , like venture capitalists , if I'm looking at three different companies , it's very . You diligence the founders . Sometimes it's easy to tell who's great , rarely . You diligence the technology .

Sometimes you can tell if the technology is real not always the things that are . Just being honest is very difficult to diligence the technology when the founder is saying like hey , I need $3 million to go see if this technology is real , and that's sometimes the story and you're like you know , how do you diligence that ? I don't know ?

You give the guy the money and go see . So how do you diligence the founder in that regard ?

Now we're talking like you got the distribution but , like you know , there's a lot of people who are like but , like you know , there's one company we invested in . I did a podcast with the founder actually , so like that's kind of an interesting you could hear that in that conversation . Or he came and he's like hey , I worked in this lab at MIT .

There's incredible battery technology that is like we did in the lab . That could be like a 10x improvement on all lithium ion batteries . I want , like I need some money to go see if we can build like a larger format version of the technology that we proved in the lab , and so I'm like that's fucking awesome . Like that is an incredibly huge market .

There's huge amounts of lithium-ion batteries . There's a huge demand for them . If we can build the ones that are at this capacity , it creates even newer markets , totally changes the structure of the energy grid . Totally changes transportation Makes electric jets possible .

Like the world changes a lot If you can reach higher energy density lithium-ion batteries , can you diligence that technology ?

I can read the papers , I can consult with experts who can say like yes , that's theoretically possible , but no one's ever built A large format lithium-ion cell at that energy density before , and this is like what the money is for to go build that . So how do you diligence that technology ? I don't know , but this guy's working on a lot of things .

So like I'm gonna take that bet . It's a chance . You could lose that small amount of money or you could be the first investor in this you know hundred billion dollar company that built all the batteries or some huge percentage of the batteries on earth . Like that's the kind of bet that you have to take as a venture capitalist .

It's just very different than like normal small business investing . Of course that's the kind of bet that you have to take as a venture capitalist . It's just very different than like normal small business investing . Of course the the risk rewards are just very different and bizarre . So it's tough to diligence that stuff .

But to some degree for you and that instance I wouldn't say you're guessing , but I guess you're moving closer towards that to try to find An accurate truth .

So so , yeah , it's , it's Putting on and off different metal models to make different decisions in different domains , but it's also those what I get excited about , because those are the kind of companies that you know back to the back , to the point of the value of technology like totally change the face of humanity and what it is like to be a human and how

good all of our individual experiences are , how comfortable , how adventurous , how exciting , how safe , how abundant , like . All of that comes from that kind of technological leap , and I wish more entrepreneurs , more investors , respected the what comes out of that and spent less time worrying about .

You know derivative options trading , because they know a guy who made a bunch of money on it and more on . Holy shit , there's this incredible new potential battery technology could change the face of the planet and Enable billions of people to live better lives , and there's just like a deep moral good in that and you can make a bunch of money doing it .

So like you're not really giving up on your , your dreams of , you know , riches and yachts , um , you're just actually doing some good along the way . So like I don't know that's um , life is . Life is too short to just like do things For the cause of only money .

Um , and and I think technology is just a really exciting way to Do good learn things , understand more about the nature of the universe , help people and earn a good living along the way .

Right , and to your point , with the finance people I think it was , I think it was , uh , you know almost that said he hates like the financial industry or it's like finance people in general , because they're smart enough to be the founder , they're smart enough to be the founder , they're smart enough to be the CEO and to build a ship of the stuff .

But of course , you're just , they just bought the lie and just went into goman's axe , right , and as a result , it's like lost potential , because those dudes could change direction and build all of these companies , and probably better than most of us making up along the way , which is just funny . I would like we just realign priorities Towards .

It could be Whatever aspect of the world that you actually want to try fix right or just try to work towards .

Um , and probably more successful , like , find a way to grow the pie .

It's not my brain , my brain is not great at that stuff . Um , I think it's a really interesting , like the . The sort of pillars of that statement are from Bologna's point of view , which there is is laid out and , I think , some of the prior chapters . But it's like the rise of robotics is going to be insane .

Like we're seeing , you know , the tesla autopilot cars Really awesome . Like I'm riding in driverless cars so cool , really happening . Starting to see humanoid robots , starting to see a lot more robots deployed in factories .

Um , and the more things get sort of robotified , the more value is it like under the control of someone who can code , can build software , um , can issue commands . Neval has a great quote about this . It's like the robot revolution is already here . They're just packed into data centers .

You can't see them , but they're there and if you learn to code , you can control this army of robots ?

Um , there's , it's an incredibly high leverage skill set and you know , whether you , whether you take there's mark andreason's like software's eating the world quote , like there's a lot , a lot , a lot left to do in software and Now that we have crypto , now that we have AI , now that we have robots , um , or increasingly have robots , there is just so much that

can be done and created . Um , and it's easy to roll your eyes at like , oh my god , another software company . The software is magic . The software is absolute magic . Like the value that is created by this , the right program , is absolutely unbelievable and you know this is an idea from the neval book .

But , like , you can spend 10 hours coding a program and , if it's the right program , you can create millions of dollars of value and you can be retired . If you have the right insight and the right skill , you can create an insane , insane amount of value in an incredibly short amount of time . That takes seeing the fundamental truth .

That takes having built the skill to write the thing in the first place . That takes understanding that that kind of leverage can exist .

That takes seeing the value that technology can provide for millions of people at scale , but it's a really , it's a mind-breaking thing because we are not evolved to understand , you know , having a global market at our fingertips and creating value for them through typing Like it just seems like wizardry , but it's a miracle and it's available to everybody who wants to

sort of jump in that ring . It's an incredible meritocracy .

Like a company that we invested in is Encaster . Like they are slowly like creating beautiful software to give podcasters incredible leverage , to automate .

You know they use AI to do the transcripts , they use AI to do the clips , they use AI to build this ad network so you can like sort of automatically sell ads that are relevant to your audience through this dynamic . It's like Facebook ads for podcasting . Like , you don't need a huge software stack of tools . You don't need a huge team to run a podcast .

There's incredible products out there that are the result of software .

And once they started moving into like ad network direction , we were like , oh , this is really cool , this is really cool .

Like maybe 10 to 15 companies are podcast in our portfolio and it's crazy the amount of interest they have . And it's not from small companies , right , it's from big tech companies who have like large marketing budgets that want to invest in this kind of new way of running ads . And we do like a lot of those integrations and stuff .

So it's funny how you , how like platforms , can facilitate it , because the industry is so fragmented . You've no idea . You've been recording for many years , right , you see it , you see about it's been over the years .

So it is so obvious the need , especially in the like long tail of smaller shows , that to deploy big dollars you have to get programmatic deployment right .

And so , like when you go to Zencastry , you can invest in 100 , 200 , 500 shows at once that all have specific say hey , I don't want anybody swearing and I want them to be majority female audience and I want them to be under 40 .

So like , okay , we can drop you into 400 podcasts in a batch and it's paid per conversion , not just paper impression , which is quite an awesome program .

So I think that's , you know , that's the moment where what is a very inefficient system for ad buying and for revenue generating on the podcast side those smaller podcasts it doesn't make sense to go cut a deal , like for a brand to go cut a deal with 100 different small podcasts . Like the return isn't there , just on the human effort it takes .

But if you can buy ads in 100 or 200 of them at once . All of a sudden that starts to make sense and these podcasters can sort of close that gap between being like man I'm not big enough to warrant like a pitching companies for an ad deal and so they can start offices , start earning even as a much smaller podcast . I'm excited . I think it's huge .

I'm a huge fan of podcasting . I think we're still day one man of this whole industry , so I'm excited about it as a podcaster , as a person with an ad budget and as an investor . I just I'm

psyched .

Then , when I saw podcasting , there was like 14 different platforms and I used to think that was like a lot of things and I used to think like , oh my God , like aggregating , this would be like the best tool , but of course , like at that point , there's still friction between Apple and Spotify .

So there is so many opportunities for SaaS , code and then hire within podcasting and like . I've tried experimenting different things in the past , but it's a matter of time before I actually probably would do something again . That's in the space , because the amount of people that are coming into the industry is like it's actually wild .

It's probably like one of the most kind of secret industries to some degree . That's growing so significantly that no one's really as interested in compared to like AI , for instance .

It's replacing TV in a lot of really interesting ways , like filling all the gaps in like long-form conversations that used to be on like primetime TV , but you don't see on Netflix and stuff .

But I think you know , I think some of these really high production value podcasters like Chris Williamson and David Perrell , are like I think we'll see their catalogs , like optioned into Netflix or Hulu , I think we'll see . You know , my friend David Sunra , as the creator of the Founders podcast , is a huge influence on me .

He's like this is the printing press of audio , like this is day one of an incredible new format .

And , to your point , like I think you know the SaaS code hire like Zencasters trying to be the all-in-one SaaS tool for podcasters of like they do editing , they do distribution , they do transcripts , they do ads , they do like you only need one tool to start as a podcaster and they're trying to be that one tool , disclosure , obviously investor , but that's their

goal , which I think is cool and sounds relevant for probably everybody who's thinking about a media company or actively building one .

So I think it's like novel to some degree and it's like taking in actual films and I think , like your , your mind works like so far ahead . It's like 10 steps ahead . Like I did not even consider like the Hulu or Netflix podcasting , but that's that's like a SaaS product on its own right .

It's like you have all these high production videos that you can index and bring through and then it elevates the standards .

I literally had a LinkedIn post on this , that is like two hours ago , saying that like studio podcasts will decline next year and studio sorry , remote podcast will decline and studio first podcast will increase , like in terms of how audience capture it , how YouTube uh , favorite content just because of the production value will increase .

I know we're going off time to the small bit , but I think it's just quite interesting because , like I love like kind of thinking about how your brain works in terms of this , because you're always thinking two to four steps ahead , which not a lot of people that are not doing it , including myself .

You know I wouldn't be that far ahead in terms of like that . That's that thinking .

I don't know , it depends on how your audience breaks down , right , like whether you know if you're going all in on YouTube , like , um , my YouTube is very small compared to my , like , listenership audience . Um , maybe that'll flip one day , but probably also not without investing a ton . Is your , is most of your still listeners or is you do majority YouTube ?

So when I got into podcasting , I found it very difficult to analyze my own videos or own episodes until it was video . And then I would like watch the Joe Rogan's , I'd watch it Tim Ferriss , so I just always led with it .

And then when YouTube started changing our algorithm and coming out with podcast indexes , I just this was like two years ago , I just went all in on it . So a big premise of our , of our company , is we only focus on video with podcasts . So we do this like higher level of production . And then what happens is it does diverge into um audio .

But for a lot of the shows that we manage , they are businesses that they're you know , they're big corporations doing a hundred million , 200 million a year . So they're looking for like the business incentive in terms of how the products and service integrate which gives us so much dynamic content from video , so it just seems like it's more versatile and flexible .

Um , which is just different , right ? Like people didn't think that it was going to be like a business 10 years ago and then it happened now in a turnaround , and now podcasting is a business . The money decrease , oh yeah .

You know there's just like a prestige and a seriousness of the intent and the packaging around it . Um , that just like signals to listeners .

I want to ask you about the aging element . So I've had many people on my show that were , you know , reversing aging in different domains , or some people are much more health oriented . They were just very focused on good diet , some biometrics , some , um , different even ways to measure your health .

I guess when do you kind of fall in that spectrum in terms of , like , your thinking towards the future ?

You know that the saying , like physics advances one death at a time , I think is true outside of physics , um , and we as a species are constantly sort of investing in the next generation and trying to make them better than the one before . Um , and a lot of .

We are not good at displacing ideas from our heads , and so I'm not sure that us all living forever is amazing . Until we learn to sort of stay youthful in our physical brains , which it feels like a frontier that has not yet been cracked , um , I think we'll learn to keep bodies alive for much longer .

I think we need to invest a lot in the mind side of things , um , but the practical upshot of that day to day now is just let's learn to live more healthfully , let's eat the right stuff , stop drinking , stop smoking , um , exercise , sleep well , sleep well .

You know , part of the abundance that we get to live in now is that we have the opportunity to be healthy , to feel good all the time from being healthy , um , and unless you have done the work to have one of those chapters of your life , it's hard to appreciate how good that feels . Um , but it's , it's there and it's available to almost everybody now .

And you know , even if it doesn't always feel good in the moment , that you're choosing chicken and broccoli over a burger and fries , like your 50 year old self , your six year old self , your 70 year old self would be very , very grateful for it because you are just staying healthy .

Um , you know , almost no matter what your goal is , like , health is a really good precursor to it . Like , if you want to be attractive , most of attractiveness is actually just fucking being healthy . If you want to be wealthy , a lot of being like good at your job and focused and present and impressing people is just being healthy and having energy .

Um , like it is the foundation of almost everything else . If you want to be a good family man , if you want to be around for a long time , be healthy , don't be a burden to your family . Like , be able to still contribute and work at 70 , 75 , 80 .

Um , and just respecting yourself , like that comes from just putting the right stuff in you , um , and doing the work every day to take care of yourself , like that's . That's the beginning of a lot of great things , so I don't worry too much about where the finish line is .

Um , just sort of like make all the decisions each day that give me all the best options for the future .

It's like it's like that meme , right , where it's like trying to be healthy and at the beginning it's just like eat less , train more the tops as eat less , train more in the middle . It's like measuring glucose levels and all this like , to some degree you don't . You don't need all those biometrics .

And it's funny because I interviewed a guy called Chris Mirabelle , such an interesting dude to check out . He's actually he has created like a they raise capital to create like a supplement . It's like a longevity supplement , but it's like it's on a few different elements .

But I recorded with the guy and he has a physical age of 39 but a such biological age and then like a biomarker age of 26 , so it's like 13 years of difference . I think I got those terms right .

And Like , I was asking him , like what's his perspective versus the you know the more extreme , where you're measuring every single element and he Barely measures anything and he still has a you know dessert , what his girlfriend every two or three weeks when I go for dinner and you have a glass of red wine every once in a while and the Dude looks super young ,

he's super healthy , he runs a longevity company and they're really in the longevity space , which is a booming industry , by the way , for instance you may obviously have a little closer added it's like something that's really really been increasing a lot recent , last couple years , but I thought it was interesting as someone who's trying to be at the frontier of

improving longevity . He just focused on strength training , running on the beach in Florida , sleeping in errors , not being too stressed as a CEO of a company , bearer mind , creating good work culture and not basically pissing people too much off and Causing them to have health issues right at all .

Those are super interesting because he was looking at the Brian Johnson equivalent , just thinking that , yes , it'll increase the number on a on a page , but all the other circumstances that lead to that lead to a worse , I would say like livelihood as a result . Maybe .

Like you can't be both of those dudes , you know , nor probably do you want to be . There's stuff to learn from them . It's interesting . I'm grateful that you know there's people out there pushing the boundaries in every direction , and I do think we'll learn a lot from Brian Johnson .

I Don't think you have to be a longevity nut to like gain value from living more healthfully and seeing some of that stuff along the way .

There's another company we invested in that is like their approach is more it's just slowly , like they're starting as a prosthetics company and they're like with a long-term vision , that you can replace an entire physical human body with robotics and that that is a way to sort of increase the active lifespan at least , and again , as much as your brain and head can

hold out . Which takes us back to , you know , the frontier of the mind and how little we know about that and preserving that and Keeping it young , keeping it fresh , keeping it able to change its mind and continue learning and taking in new ideas . And you know it's a . It's an important way to live , even if you're not gonna live forever .

But the longer you live , the more important it is to be able to change your mind and find real fun , fun Truths , the right truths .

That's his overarching element on it . I mean it's fantastic because even last night I was looking at his like sleep supplement stack , like mine like ran out . I was like , oh , I wonder , like what are these different components he has ?

I thought was very interesting in that perspective , because he doesn't like vomit his opinion down , he's just like this is the science , this is exactly what you can do . And those videos are getting three million views , four million views . So that shift is happening .

But versus thinking like how do we live forever , it's like how do we improve your certain circumstances ? It's kind of like when people say they want to be rich but they have like broke habits , right , they're just going out spending money on dumb shit , right .

Why is it fall to Andrew Huberman to be the person who is like Educating us all on what is actually like healthy for us ? And it's largely because Just the constant misinformation from people who you know the regulatory capture of some of these institutions is like .

Let's think about why we're all listening to Andrew Huberman and like trust him more than an agency with a hundred million dollar budget or a billion dollar budget , or I don't even know how big their budgets are , but it's more than Andrew Huberman's . I know that .

Usually when people get a position of influence , they get pushed down right or positively or negatively in that , in that regard , they get canceled or taken off Twitter or taken off different platforms , but for these people , their message has been largely elevated .

It gets some kickback , for sure , but for the most part it's not positive and it's hard to , it's hard to imagine .

The Facebook algorithm , cable news , official channels , whatever . You know , I'm not like a huge conspiracy theorist or anything , but like You've got to consider all of the people . You know there's 300 million two hundred ninety seven million people that aren't listening to Andrew Huberman in America .

And like , what is the health information that they're receiving and what decisions are they making based on that ? And this I'll just say 300 million people should be listening to Andrew Huberman . But like , who is the most right and what is the information that they're getting ? And how does that compare to what is untrue , that but popular right ?

Like yeah , yeah , yeah , of course .

Anyway , it was like his very first Rogan interview . He'd spent like three years at that period and it was like another couple of years from there and then his latest book came out . So I just thought it was quite interesting how like he's devoted his entire life to it .

He looks young and healthy , he's great relationships , he's apparently a very , very nice guy , very like kind people and everything , and I was quite funny right . So it's like often a lot of time you just seek out your own truth and then seeking your own truth leads to these better life . So decisions , yeah , and I want to say a massive thank you .

This was a great , great session . I really appreciate everything I feel we could have gone for Could go on for much longer . Might a different elements of the book I'd love to , you know , extend platform in the future if you'd ever like to come back on for the next book which I hear you're writing .