#1287 Eric Jorgenson | Balaji Srinivasan’s Big Ideas on Bitcoin, Tech & Media

Eric Jorgenson is the author of, “Almanack of Naval Ravikant” and “Anthology of Balaji.” He also serves as CEO of Scribe Media, and General Partner at Rolling Fund writing checks to high-tech startups. In this conversation, we talk about his books, the process, Scribe Media, and then we dig deep into the ideas and takeaways of Balaji Srinivasan. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= Trust and Will has simplified the process of creating and managing your will or trust online. They leverage a data-driven, design-first approach and amazing customer support to help you protect your legacy from the comfort of your home starting at just $159. Sign up today for 10% off using ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://trustandwill.com/pomp⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 250,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 0:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Eric Jorgenson is the author of The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, which has now sold more than 1 million copies. He also has a brand new book called The Anthology of Balaji, which is now available at all places that books are sold. Eric, in his free time, serves as the Chief Executive Officer of Scribe Media and also a general partner at Rolling Fund, a brand new venture capital fund that he is deploying money into early-stage opportunities. In this conversation, Eric and I, we talk about his books, we talk about the process, how he's taken over Scribe Media as CEO, and then we dig deep, very deep, into the ideas of Balaji Srinivasan and what Eric took away from them as he worked to get the book put together. I really enjoyed this conversation with Eric, and I hope you all

• 1:14Anthony Pompliano?

  enjoy it as well. Once you get done listening, jump on Twitter and let us know what you thought, what you liked and what you didn't like. We always appreciate the feedback. Here is my conversation with Eric Jorgensen.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer-two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps. In the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org or follow along on Twitter at BuildOnBase.

• 2:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Again, that's at BuildOnBase to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. Today's episode is brought to you by Trust and Will. I've gone through a number of different changes in my life over the last few years. I got married, I had a kid, and I had to start thinking about, how could I ensure that my wife and my child would be okay if anything ever happened to me? That's where Trust, Will's, and Estate Planning come into play. Now, most people, what they do is they get introduced to a friend, an uncle, or someone in their local community. It tends to be someone who's really expensive, a lawyer, an accountant, or somebody who does estate planning, and they just simply are using a one-size-fits-all template and just telling you, "Pay me thousands of dollars, and I'll use the same thing for you as the guy down the street." But that's not what Trust and Will does.

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• 4:00Anthony Pompliano?

  between someone being taken care of and someone not. Go check them out today at trustandwill.com/pomp.

• 4:08Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Eric here. Eric is book number two. As many of you know, he wrote the bestselling book with Naval's ideas. Now he's back with the anthology of Balaji, A Guide to Technology, Truth and Building the Future. It's fantastic. I've read the whole thing twice. Got my highlights. I did all my work, Eric. You know, I actually enjoyed it. Let's just talk about some of Balaji's ideas and kind of what maybe you took away from them. I think would be interesting as well. One of the first ones is only trust as scientific truth, what can be independently verified, which seems to be a hot topic over the last three or four years.

• 4:47Speaker 02

  I like that one, man. And so I'm glad to be here talking to you about this because I think these are like, I think this is the middle of your wheelhouse, right? Like all your overlapping circles of like media, crypto, like technology acceleration, like it's all in here. And I feel like I knew you'd be excited about it. So I'm glad we get to dive in. The whole middle section on truth, I think is gonna be nobody's favorite, but I actually maybe think it's like the most important, like it's so important. And we all spend so much time on the social media, like basically believing what we read, whether we like it or not, like just the algorithm

• 5:31Speaker 02

  just feeding you stuff. And there's been a lot of like last few years of like, trust the science, do this, do that. And people are like, losing track of what science really is. And I think biology puts it, I haven't rarely heard it put better. And I think that quote like belongs up there with with Feynman, right? It's like, it has to be independently verified. And what he says, you know, he worked in academia for a long time, like, because he got a PhD.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  And he's like, just because it's a peer reviewed paper from an academic institution, like, does not mean it is science, does not mean it is independently verifiable, does not mean the results will replicate, and doesn't mean that we should be like, changing our lives or governing the country, or changing our habits even based on this one paper. And especially when you dive in and you see the incentives behind who's funding some of the research and what institution actually comes out of. So like, let's get back to the intellectually honest roots of science, which is like, a bunch of people just trying to figure out what's true, like running experiments that can, that work the same time, every time. This is expansion

• 6:37Speaker 02

  Treating everything with the scientific method and the scientific, like the apparatus of scientific method instead of the true intellectual rigor. And I think that's like very bad for society. Most people don't have the discernment to tell the difference between the appearance of science and the fundamental truth of one intellectually honest truth that a bunch of people have verified and is true every time regardless.

• 7:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I think it's a great point where people are being told something is true because it gets a label almost, right? And I always go back to like, the internet has in some ways reduced our critical thinking as much as it's given us a plethora of information, like done all this stuff like now you're just like, oh, it's on the internet. It must be true. Whereas like, you know, I don't know, thousands of years ago, hundreds of years ago, like if somebody told you something like you kind of had to figure out, because you actually do it at home, right? It was like they passed it on by word. So maybe it's actually not this new idea. It's just like a return back to the way the world used to work.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I don't know. I mean, maybe there's a period where like the cost to write something down was so high that you were more selective with what you wrote down. But I imagine, I mean, I would like to think we as a society are more correct about some of these fundamental truths than we have been ever in our history. But there's a lot that we believe today that is still going to be wrong and obviously wrong to future generations to come. But yeah, the internet just gave absolutely everybody a microphone and like, then you really get to see everybody's inner thoughts sort of treated like with equal weight and truth. That's when it's like, oh, maybe, maybe not everybody's right about everything. But

• 8:20Speaker 02

  there's a lot of people that are just fucking wrong about some stuff. And it shouldn't be like, shouldn't be socially unacceptable to say that, especially when they're saying like, this is a truth with a capital T when it's. Objectively provable that it's not. And the politicization of science and scientific truth or the tribalism of it is is so bizarre and so damaging. Like, it really would behoove us to just all concentrate on the truth.

• 8:52Anthony Pompliano?

  So my dad used to always tell me whenever I'd ask him, you know, how do people believe something or like, why is this happening or whatever? One of his favorite kind of go to comments was, think of the average voter. And remember, about half of the people are dumber than that.

• 9:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And he was like, by the way, like, like, if you're on the left, you think that of the right. If you're on the right, you think that of the left. If you think, you know, if you're in academia, you think that of everyday people. If you're everyday people, you think that of academia. Like, there's no, somebody is actually smarter or better or whatever. It's just like, that is how we arrive at some of these situations. It's like, yeah, actually, there's a distribution of critical thinking, intelligence, and, you know, other skills that might be helpful in figuring some of it out.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  And when you, there's another biology point that I think is simpler and close to that one that you brought up originally, which is we, as humans, have a proclivity to, like, our hardware basically wants to treat social consensus as truth. So when you hear the same thing from a bunch of people, your, your brain hardware is automatically like, oh, that's what's correct. If everybody agrees, I don't want to be out of step, then that's truth. And I'm on board with it because I don't want to be ostracized for my little tribe. And

• 10:03Speaker 02

  that's not a particularly effective way to like, understand truth. And it

• 10:10Speaker 02

  takes work to swim upstream or to stand apart from a crowd, especially when people are really vehement about it. But knowing that that's your tendency, I think, makes it a little bit easier to battle that. And when you hear everybody saying the same thing, especially to your point, it's people who are likely to be average or below average in like, actual information and critical thinking skills, then you should actually probably start with a hypothesis, like somewhere far away from wherever they are.

• 10:38Anthony Pompliano?

  There's another quote, "Many of our leaders today are selected for legitimacy, but not for competence," which kind of plays into this to some degree, right? Where it's like, okay, do we trust the social consensus? But then also, do we trust like maybe the leadership? And so how do you think about that of like legitimacy versus competence in positions of leadership, which then gets some degree of authority over groups of people?

• 11:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I thought that was a very interesting distinction. I think Paul G. has got a gift for these like creating categorizations and like divisions, separating concepts that seem that most of us treat as conflated. And I think legitimacy and competency is a good one. You know, as a tech guy and like sort of a West Coaster, he would say like, you know, founders are selected for legitimacy and competency, right? They built, they basically accrued vote by vote, customer by customer. Their company, their position, they built their empire around them. They didn't just get voted into being in control of Facebook or Apple or Amazon, right?

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Whereas in the mayor of New York, didn't have to build New York around him. He just sort of won a popularity contest to assume control. And those are very different skills. The skill of appearing as though you will do a good job at this, or building a consensus amongst a group of people, or just getting the approval of 51% of a mob of humans. That's not the same skill set that it takes to build New York in the first place. And if you see like, read a biography of a founder and then read a biography of Robert Moses, who like is one of the builders of New York, and then look at who the mayor of New York is, or who the mayors of New York are. And it's very interesting to see the different personality types

• 12:28Speaker 02

  and the different hurdles that they had to overcome and the different sort of.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Talents or perspectives that they bring. And it's an interesting question, you know, who the founding fathers were. And our early presidents and what they did compared to like what our presidents do now. Different people, different skill sets, different challenges, different routes to the position. And Balaji's point is, is, you know, learn to separate, learn to see who's who and choose leaders who are competent, not just have the appearance of legitimacy. Yeah, I think like a good example is Vitalik in the crypto space, right? Like, nobody just, we didn't have an electoral college, like, primary process to get Vitalik.

• 13:14Speaker 02

  Like, he has earned his position and I think continues to earn it through just good stewardship and intellectual honesty and building trust and serving the community that supports him. And I think it's a fascinating way to look at the world and important to remember. And you, especially as you make your own choices, like, try to be competent, not just legitimate. Maybe especially in the, in the social media world, like for kids that want to grow up and be influencers, be creators. That's something that is a little bit more like about appearance than competence. It's a meritocracy, like, don't get me wrong, and it's not an easy path and it's hard work.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  But it rewards the appearance of competence, not necessarily the underlying competence. And that underlying competence will get you much farther for much longer and, and be better for all the people around you.

• 14:10Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it reminds me of, I think Palmer Lucky recently gave an interview and they asked him about like, you know, chasing dreams and he was like, no, kids should not chase their dreams. And of course, you know, everyone's like, oh my God, like, that's so bombastic, why? And he's like, because their dream is to literally be a YouTuber. Like, we should give kids better dreams and then chase those. And like, you know, there's a balance, right? I don't know, I got kids, like, you want them to kind of chase the things that they're excited about. But also you're like, ah, maybe, yeah, maybe we can influence you to like, do things that are more material to the world or kind of have a bigger impact than just, you know, kind of go to the easy things that, that are right in front of your face.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, we're memetic. So the things that we watch people do, we tend to, our first order reaction is like, oh, well, I want to be that. Like, if you listen to a lot of podcasts, you want to be a podcaster. It's so funny to like, watch people go to Tony Robbins courses and he like, fires them all up and like, but then they just want to be Tony Robbins. So they become life coaches instead of like, whatever they actually wanted to be before they walked in and saw this incredibly powerful example of a life, happy, like, powerful life coach. It's because they want to be Tony Robbins, not their own version of themselves. But yeah, Palmer Luckey's was a great, that was a great little bit. He's like, kids used to want to be astronauts. Hell, yeah, go be an astronaut, you know, you have to be a Navy SEAL with a PhD with like, perfect

• 15:33Speaker 02

  powers of Stoicism and like, broad scientific capability, and chosen from millions of applicants to represent your country on the frontiers of technology and be a hero and risk your life? Yeah, that's a great dream. Oh, you want to, you want to be like a Twitch streamer? Like, the shirtless, the shirtless Twitch streamer who like swears a lot? Like, that's a, yeah, that's a shitty dream. And you should like, do better.

• 15:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, I, I mean, look, there's a lot of kids who had their dreams shattered listening to Palmer. But yeah, that is true. Speaking of maybe kind of how to influence some of what children, but also adults think of, there's another quote in the book, "Code is how machines know what to do. Media is how humans know what to do." And I thought it was just a perfect way to, again, kind of describe this idea. How did you think about that?

• 16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's a lot of similar ideas in there that, you know, the idea of memetics is really, really important and really powerful. There's a great book by Luke Burgess called Wanting. He oddly seems to really rail against biology online, but whatever. The, the concept of memetics, if you haven't come across it before, it's basically like, we learn by mimicking other people. It goes back to this kind of like, when you spend a lot of time watching podcasts, you want to become a podcaster. We learn how to walk by watching our parents walk. We learn how to speak by listening to other people speak.

• 17:07Speaker 02

  And it goes much deeper than that. Those are just the obvious examples. So when you see a bunch of people like railing against or scapegoating somebody, you tend to, people tend to join them up for psychological and physical safety. And the media writ large, all of these things that we become, you know, I think somewhere else in the book, he says, like, you know, if you could get the nutritional facts on everything that you're consuming, if you could see how many times different concepts, different words like pass into your eyes and ears, that literally would determine like what you believe and what you are, and it would show you how, maybe how nutritious your inputs were. So if you're

• 17:52Speaker 02

  watching, you know, these brilliant people like, you know, this, the Poor Charlie's Almanac just came out, and like, Charlie Munger is a hero to me. Like, I just, I picked up his book off my book, Dad's Bookshelf at like 21, and it changed my life. And I'm like, man, the more time I spend in the company of Munger, the better of a person I'm going to be. The more time I spend on the Twitter, or some sort of attention mongering, like, extreme creators, maybe the worst of a person I'm gonna be, at least farther from who my idealized version of myself, according to like my values, my principles. So there's

• 18:34Speaker 02

  the sense of media makes us who we are and tells us what to do, that we can choose that media. It's also that if you just sort of passively pay attention to whatever the media decides to put in front of you, like whatever the headlines of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post are, that's someone else putting their agenda sort of in your mind and in your brain. And that always happens to some extent, like whether, you know, if you listen to every Pomp podcast, like, you're gonna focus on the things that Pomp wants you to listen to and pay attention to, and you're just placing trust in Pomp to do that. And I think that's Increasingly actually a good way to go through life. Like, somebody who's listened to 50 hours of you, 100 hours of you, has a good sense of who you are

• 19:18Speaker 02

  and what you're interested in and what your values are. And they trust you to put good people in front of them that are interesting, that are valuable, that are constructive. And it's just a little harder to understand the motives of a larger media organization that has hundreds of reporters and editors and you're not sure who they are, you're not sure what the ties are. And there's a whole history of this kind of very overt media manipulation. There's an amazing book by Ashley Rinsberg called The Gray Lady Winked. It's about the history of the New York Times. And I think we're now on like our sixth generation of male descendants named Arthur Solzberger,

• 20:01Speaker 02

  who are editor in chief and basically sole control of this thing that's like one of the most valuable media properties on the planet. And there's a lot of interesting backstories about mistakes that were made, sometimes in error, that changed the course of world history, but sometimes overtly and potentially maliciously that changed the course of human history. Very fascinating book, a little worrisome, but it will definitely change your it'll change your level of awareness about like, you know, media scripts, human beings. It's how humans know what to do. And if the New York Times tells you to be mad about something and you just decide to be mad about it and you don't know who's telling you that or why, then like, that's

• 20:44Speaker 02

  not a very enlightened way to go through life, I don't think. It's maybe not a very intellectually honest way if you haven't really evaluated the opinions that you hold for yourself. And it's hard, it's hard work to do all of that, but it's gotta be done or, you know, you You don't feel that hand up inside you, but you are you are a puppet to some extent. If you haven't done that work.

• 21:09Anthony Pompliano?

  So there's a lot of people who I think recognize there's issues and they're like, man, this sucks. Like, you know, I want to criticize this thing. And so Blaschis has this quote, "The most constructive type of criticism is building an alternative." And it feels like maybe the internet now is getting to that point where people realize we can take this skill we have of building things and marry it with the criticism that we previously lobbed on social media. And like, that is, that equals opportunity as like an equation.

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, there I counted, I think I did a specific read of this book and counted business ideas. I think there's at least 20 very specific, like probably a paragraph each about things that you could pick up and go build that exists with technology today that solves a problem like this or adjacent to it. And I think, I think if I remember correctly, I put that exact quote on like the back of the book because I want it to be like, I want this whole thing to feel like a call to action to build. Don't argue online, build the future. Like the answer to this, the answer to everything, the best answer is not just to whine online or point fingers, is to build something and build

• 22:22Speaker 02

  a better solution than what we have today. And there's a lot of problems and a lot of challenges with the media, but these are solvable. And what I tried to do, like this is not a crypto book, but there is a lot of allusions to the blockchain in there. And Bology does as good a job as I've ever heard anyone do of showing sort of what the world could look like with a crypto spine and foundation under it and why it's so important to have this record, this, this technology that can help us keep a record of truth. And if we can build an entire sort of media ecosystem on top of this record of truth,

• 23:02Speaker 02

  man, does the world change? And a lot of these kind of risks around.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  People fabricating like outright lies or intentionally or unintentionally and pushing the world in the wrong direction or covering things up or making false claims does really, it's limited and it goes way down and way more people have an incentive to build and distribute things around the truth. And he makes a really interesting point in there. You know, you could start with like, why does that matter? Like, why does the truth matter? It's all just competing narratives anyway.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  And he tells the story of the USSR and the US, kind of the like Cold War ramp up in production where we're really having like an economic war between communism and capitalism. And Bology says that the US won because communism basically requires you to lie more. Like, you have to make up numbers for projections. You have to tell people to do specific things. You have to tell them that things are coming, maybe when they're not. And capitalism just adjusts way faster rewards people to act on truthful information. Like, what is, what is the actual supply? What is the actual demand? How do we change the market clearing price? How do we orchestrate these different companies and these different people most

• 24:25Speaker 02

  effectively to produce, you know, food and houses and cars and tools that we need to take care of our population? And that capitalism just rewards truth in a more effective and immediate way. And that that is why the US won. And if you think about that scoped out and see blockchain as a technology for improving sort of the feedback loop between the truth of the fundamental reality and our ability to interact with it. You know, it's just one more of these huge variables that goes towards sort of accelerating the future. There's a long list of them, but it's an important one. It's one I'm, I'm excited to like, keep adding to that list and exploring all of them and just seeing, you know, how wild can the future get? Like, I'd love to live to see some cool shit and like, let's.

• 25:10Anthony Pompliano?

  So speaking of kind of building this future and building the alternative, there's another part of the book that says startup equals growth. If you don't consciously optimize your company for growth, you will be outgrown by a competitor who has. And whether it is effective accelerationism, whether it is just startups in general, it feels like this growth verse like degrowth or deceleration tends to be a hot topic right now. How do you think about those two things?

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I mean, this is, the whole back third of the book is very tactical startup founder advice. Basically, it's kind of like zero to one, I think. And it's like a handbook for founders, like get out there, get off the ground, find ideas, iterate on them, sort of triage your biggest ideas and your best ideas. And then, you know, go from truly go from zero to one and scale out from there. I think, you know, this is not general small business advice or lifestyle business advice. It's very specifically in the like high tech, high scale startup. But startup equals growth, I think, is PG's thing. And not just growth, but growth in a very big market.

• 26:22Speaker 02

  And so another apologies kind of idioms in that is, you know, all other things being equal, choose the opportunity with the bigger market. Like that is a, that should be a mathematical rule of startups. It pushes you as you're sort of running the maze towards what idea you want to start. Start something and grow like hell. Start something in a truly enormous market. And then figure out how to start really small and iterate feature by feature through customers are willing to pay for feature one. Customers are willing to pay for feature two. Customers are willing to pay for feature three and minimize the amount of capital that you need sort of at each stage as you go along. I'm, I am really.

• 27:02Speaker 02

  I have been on the accelerationist sort of train since I think before we had like the effective accelerationist movement. The book Where's My Flying Car was really my first like, I put the book down and I was like, I am an accelerationist now. Like I want, I want a next industrial revolution. I want it now. I will dedicate my life to making this happen. And it really actually influenced the ideas that I selected to go in the anthology of biology. Like it informed my curation and it, I had these vague notions coming out of that book that biology, it turns out, had incredibly well put ideas around, you know, just

• 27:44Speaker 02

  about technology being sort of the driving force of history and about technology being this incredibly important moral good that keeps us out of this realm of scarcity where people start to turn on each other and things get dark.

• 27:57Speaker 02

  The, there's just so, there's so many fascinating things that could be and could be in the next 10 years or 50 years that could happen in our lifetimes. And it's just a fundamental source of optimism for me. I love looking forward and I love sort of pushing on that movement and helping other people who see a bright future.

• 28:21Speaker 02

  And

• 28:23Speaker 02

  you know, this ties into the media point. Like I do not know why, but there are a lot of people putting a lot of other, I don't know if they're against progress, against acceleration, or if they just have other priorities that they think are more important. But there's some really, what seems like really obviously dumb debates and things happening, like especially in the media and especially around technology at the moment.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  Where the media just like instinctively attacks technology and in particular new technology. It makes sense in this, in the course of like, they were attacking social media and the internet because it was eating into their ad revenue, right? For the last 20 years, we've had, you know, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, eating into newspaper and online ad revenue. But with something like self-driving cars, I think is like the best example that we're living through right now.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Ten years ago, when self-driving cars were just a concept, everyone was so excited. Oh, my God, we're gonna have self-driving cars. Hundreds of thousands of people aren't gonna die senselessly anymore every year from car accidents. It's the leading cause of tragic death, basically, in life, especially of young people.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  But it's so, it's so wild. We were so excited about it as a concept. Now, ten years ago, or ten years later, we have self-driving cars. Like, they exist. I've seen videos of them on the road. I've ridden it up there in multiple cities. And all you see in the headlines is people like, oh, self-driving car causes chaos in San Francisco. So, but there were 10,000 fatal accidents all over the US. And fires from internal combustion cars, but you're attacking electric cars and you're attacking autonomous cars in every headline. Why? That is so, so obviously better for society to have this thing. And fewer people will die and there will be fewer, less suffering and it uses less resources. Like, can we not all be on the same team about that?

• 30:18Speaker 02

  And if we can't be on the same team about that, then like, how do we move forward on all these other things that are actually potentially much more nuanced and much more difficult and much more socially challenging? So it is, I hope that this book sort of brings people a little farther along into the technology is good, acceleration is good, like there are beautiful things in our lives. Like, your life gets better as a function of the technology in it. You know, it's the reason that we are safe and warm and a temperature that we're happy with and we have a roof over our head and that we're all get to eat delicious things pretty much all year round. Like, we live in an absolute unfathomable abundance compared to where we were 200 years ago.

• 31:01Speaker 02

  Where we could be in 200 more years is absolutely even more mind-blowingly incredible because we're on that exponential curve. But we owe it to the future generations to not fuck that up and send them back to the Dark Ages and we you know, it's not a 0% chance because we don't all collectively have our shit together to be rooting for technology and excited and adopting new things.

• 31:25Anthony Pompliano?

  The one thing I'll add is also the problems are going to multiply. So self-driving cars, one of the, um, one of the things that just hammered at home for me. When self-driving cars solve car deaths at some point, whether that happens in two years or 20 years, there will be a crisis. The crisis will then be on organ donation. Because the largest component of organ donations come from car accidents. And so you solve one problem, another one pops up, right? You gotta go solve that one. And so like, there's never a shortage of problems, even when you kind of eat into the problem list. Which is almost to me like an even stronger argument of like, you think our problems today are bad.

• 32:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Wait till we solve some of these and then we get our, you know, the, the problems we have earned ourself. And we better be really, really good at accelerating technology to, to be prepared for that world as well.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, there's always somebody saying like, but that, but if we do that, that will cause this problem. And it, I think it is a fundamental tenet of technology and progress to always believe the next problem is solvable. You know, there was somebody at Kitty Hawk, when humans took flight for the first time, being like, we gotta shut this shit down. Like, somebody's gonna die. These things will never be safe. And now, like, truly, only a few decades later, like, not a huge scheme, in the huge scheme of things. Like, we have an incredibly reliable, safe, worldwide, commercial area infrastructure. Like, that is absolutely wild and we should all be incredibly proud of that. We should be doing a ton more things like that. Yeah, I think, you know, the organ donor example is a great one.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, let's do some like genetic cloning, grow some organs in some labs. Like, the next problem is solvable. AI is, there's a ton of debate around AI and AI safety. And I'm in the camp, it's like, AI is not without risk. No technology is without risks, but every technology that I can think of in human history has done more good than it has bad. And I think AI is going to be the same way. And the camp that I fall into is, we face a ton of risks, a lot of, like, we're trying to become multi-planetary. We could have a much more dangerous pandemic at any point. We could have nuclear war, we could have a meteor headed our way, like. What if inventing AI and like having that multiplier effect on the capabilities of humanity

• 33:44Speaker 02

  is the only way that we can develop technology to the point where we can steer away the meteor, fight the next pandemic? There's so many things that AI helps us do that I think it is a net benefit to humanity. It could save us from all these other risks, let alone that it increases the standard of living for all of us along the way and helps us support like a much broader, more robust, more humane life for billions of people. Like, that's so, that's so important. I understand it takes a little bit of a counterintuitive leap to get there and that everybody's first reaction is like, oh my God, oh, no change. Like, it's scary. I might lose my job. And it's like, well, do you like your job? Like, no, it sucks. It's like, all right, well, then what are you worried about? Like, get a new job.

• 34:30Anthony Pompliano?

  The book is called The Anthology of Balaji, A Guide to Technology Truth and Building the Future. I highly suggest anyone who's not read it, please go check it out. Again, I read it twice. I probably will end up reading it again many times over the years. So, Eric, I appreciate you taking the time to put it all together. Before I let you go, on your side gig of Scribe, why you are a bestselling author over and over and over again, you now are going to have other people write books and kind of get into the author game. Talk a little bit about Scribe and what you guys are trying to do.

• 35:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, dude, this is a wild story. Okay, so I, in writing the Almanac of Naval, I had no idea how to write a book. I was just kind of like collecting Naval's ideas. And somewhere along the way, I tweeted like, hey, I think I have a manuscript for a book, but I don't know how to publish it. And Tucker Max, who I'd been reading for a long time, reached out. I was like, hey, I'm happy to help. Like, let me know what I can do. And so I got on the phone with Tucker and he was the founder of this company, Scribe. And Tucker really helped me understand the publishing landscape and sort of walked me through the options and talked to me about like, what would make this a great book and what I needed in order to do. And I, Scribe helped me publish that book. The Almanac of Naval was absolutely, it was life-changing to write.

• 35:47Speaker 02

  It was unbelievably life-changing to publish. Like, we've now sold over a million copies. This thing's translated into like 40 languages.

• 35:56Speaker 02

  It precedes me everywhere I go. It's and we've given away another five million copies for free. Probably everything in my life that's happened in the last three years is because of this book.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Life-changing experience and I had a tremendously high-quality, like incredible experience as an author with Scribd. And so it was obvious I was I was gonna work with them again for the anthology of Bology and they did help me publish this book also. And along the way, I started hearing like rumors that they were having financial trouble. And what it turned out it had happened is that Tucker and Zach Oberon, who founded the company, both great dudes had hired a CEO and sold it to him along the way. And the CEO had brought in his own investors and didn't really have a board, didn't really have a CFO, like

• 36:48Speaker 02

  made some mistakes, like definitely made some mistakes that the fundamental model like was very sound. He just got really over-exuberant and had a loan and so the bank foreclosed on the business and they ended up, I was like, oh shit, like this company that I rely on to publish my books that I had such an incredible experience with that I loved everybody there like is in great peril. Like, let me see if I can save this thing. Like, I want to keep using them. I'm a big believer in what they do and what they represent in the publishing industry. So

• 37:22Speaker 02

  I took him around to some friends who buy buy companies, you know, I've got friends with long-term holding companies or small private equity funds. And so just made some calls and one of them went under LOI, did the diligence, was blown away by the team and I mean, Scribd is an incredible position. They're the biggest and the best of these professional publishers. They published 2000 books, including Goggins and Talib and some big, big name authors and books that have gone on to sell millions of copies. And they let authors retain their full creative rights, all their independent decision-making and 100% of the royalties. They're basically professional services instead of saying like, here's an advance, but we get all the control and all the upside on the book, which I think is a really important thing for.

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Incredibly important in an era of creators who already have their own audiences.

• 38:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Eric, explain this part a little bit more because I don't think people quite understand when they hear publishing. They think I get the advance, you take all of the money until some magic number in the future. But basically what people are doing is they're paying a flat fee with help in the publishing world. And then they get 100% of the quote, quote profit of the success of their book.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Yes. So, and I know that you know this because I know that you guys have been through, you and your wife have been through the traditional publishing machine. Most people don't realize those big publishers, they take 75 to like 90% of all the profits. And they basically get final edit, final decision making over everything in on and around the book. If you don't like your audiobook narrator, too bad. If you don't like the cover, like the too bad. They can change the title, they can edit, they can do whatever they want. And they basically own that they have a lease on the copyright for the full length of the copyright. So the authors that you see who sell a ton of books often do well, but the publisher gets 90% of that.

• 39:18Speaker 02

  Plus, and there's an agent in there also. And what Scribe offers is the ability for, it's not actually that expensive to publish a book. Like if you bring a manuscript to us, we will help you get it published at the exact same level of quality and professionalism in design and page layout and proofreading and copy editing, distribution that these traditional publishers will, and it'll cost you like $18,000. So if you think your book is going to be worth 500,000, a million dollars of the full value of that asset over the course of its whole life,

• 39:50Speaker 02

  that's a no brainer. Like, why would you give up 90% of that for $100,000 advance? And I think what's happened, you know, it's a classic like innovator's dilemma. Like the context has changed around traditional publishers, but they haven't updated their model. 100 years ago, you had to. You needed distribution into bookstores and the physical distribution, the infrastructure to get it, or you couldn't sell any books. Now 90% of books are sold on Amazon. Doesn't matter at all. Secondly, you needed a huge upfront capital investment to get a print run. Now, most books are print on demand. Also, don't need the huge capital upfront investment to get your book out there. And third, you used to need these connections

• 40:31Speaker 02

  into centralized media to have a book review, or get it in the newspaper, or go on the late show. And without that sort of in from the traditional publishers and the like New York media elite, like you couldn't get the word out about your book. So they were gatekeepers and they could price themselves like gatekeepers. The thing that now, there's no gate. Like, anybody can list a book on Amazon. You don't need upfront capital because it's print on demand. And everybody just talks about books and recommends them to each other on social media. And so it's much more of like an open decentralized meritocracy. And so especially if you already have an audience and have a derisked message, there's no reason to give up 90% of your upside on your book. And what we work with authors from the full

• 41:15Speaker 02

  range of, you know, almost every author has a motivation other than maximizing book sales. It's either I want impact on my other business. You know, we have authors who just give away copies of their book, but they earn millions of dollars on their consulting business and the book is lead gen for them. We have authors who come in and say, I just want to impact this cause. You know, I want to prevent, you know, gay teen suicide and I will spend thousands of dollars and years of my life on that cause. And all I care about is saving. If I save five lives, I will, I will die happy. And that's what matters to me. No traditional publisher is going to touch that. But you still want that book to have a really professional polished feel. And you still want it to be broadly distributed. You want that author to have the control to make all the decisions that they need

• 41:58Speaker 02

  to make to impact their cause or impact their business. And that's what we do. We give the author maximum flexibility at the very highest level of quality. Nobody, no reader picks up a book because of who the publisher is or what the imprint is. They just know and they feel the quality. And so if we can help authors publish their book at the very highest levels of quality and help them enter that meritocracy, then I think a lot of them are going to have great outcomes. Even if your goal is very specifically like

• 42:29Speaker 02

  Big financial outcome directly from the book, then it's so important to own 100% of your royalties and not have this like big majority controlling partner who has a huge portfolio. And if your book isn't crushing, isn't gonna go, isn't gonna go to war for you. You know, I think the books that we see that are breakout successes are authors with high majority control. They think of themselves as like the CEO of the book. And like, we love to work with people who are the CEO of the book and they treat their book like a business. They think about it like an asset. And they have a long-term view on like, how we make this thing successful. How does it fit into my other ecosystem of products? And I mean, I think books are sacred and there's a prestige around them and it's, it's just so,

• 43:13Speaker 02

  it is truly so fun to now get to play that role for other people that like Tucker played for me and just be like, hey, you got a book, this can be an inflection point for you. Let's talk about how to make it happen, talk about how to position it. Let's talk about what the best places are to get it out there and how we can market it. So it's a, it's a really, really fun thing. And yeah, I, I just like, I'm so glad Enduring Ventures stepped in to like buy Scribe and save it. And then, you know, a few, a few weeks after they bought it, they called me and were like, hey, uh, we need somebody to run this thing and we think that should be you. Um, you know, you're, you're an author, you're a believer, you sold it to us, like,

• 43:53Speaker 02

  you clearly have a feel for this industry. And I was like, I do love working with authors and helping. And so I joined the summer and

• 44:02Speaker 02

  it's been, it's been growing again like crazy. It's been super satisfying work. Um, we're talking to some really big authors and have some really cool books in development. It's, it's a very, very fun gig. And I think, I think there's gonna be a huge next generation publishing company that gets built, that gets to go toe-to-toe with these traditionals and I, I hope it's us.

• 44:22Anthony Pompliano?

  I um, I always judge a idea, a business and a team based on initial gut reaction when I see announcements. And when I saw Scribe, who I've had the pleasure of going and hanging out with Tucker, like, you know, on the property, explain the whole story, like everything, right? Then you and enduring, I was like, got it, makes sense, home run. Like, it was just, it immediately passed the gut check or like the smoke test. And I think that those are usually the best opportunities. Now, obviously, there's a lot of work that's involved, you got to execute correctly and all that stuff. But yeah, it just made a lot of sense when you guys announced it. So it's pretty cool to see.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  Thank you. Yeah, I think I'm really excited to get to work with like a huge swath of incoming book writers. You know, I think, I think there's going to be some really cool stuff done. And I love when people bring us stuff that's like a little too extreme or a little too weird for like a traditional publisher that they don't want to take a swing on. And I'm like, hell, yeah, like, let's go. Let's make this happen for you.

• 45:26Anthony Pompliano?

  The fun stuff.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 45:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Cool. Where can we send people if they want to learn a little bit more about Scribe? Or potentially they're thinking about writing a book and would like to get in touch with you?

• 45:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, scribe media.com, scribe media.com. You can follow us on Twitter, but scribe media.com, come do a scheduled consult. We've got a ton of people who are truly pros in this and we'll talk you through all your options. And if we're not a great fit for you, we know where to send you. But we just love to brainstorm and help authors figure things out. And yeah, I'm egeorgensen.com. You can find all my projects and all my content there. If you want to reach out, I'm happy to like brainstorm through things. And I'm just a huge believer in making beautiful books. And I felt firsthand what a book can do for people. I know your house has been going through the same thing. So hidden genius on bookshelves now.

• 46:23Anthony Pompliano?

  I appreciate you. Pulling our appreciate you more than what more than you know. I appreciate you coming on. We'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 46:31Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me. Let's make it a tradition.