Eric Jorgenson: Leverage, Permisionlessness and Naval’s Book of Wisdom

Mark Bidwell 0:39
Before I introduce you to this week’s remarkable guest, I wanted to tell you about a leadership program I’m running in the next few months. As you may have noticed, I don’t run third-party commercials on this podcast, because I want to respect your attention and your time. But I suspect some of you listening will find my peer-based leadership program called Outside Views of real interest, especially if you’re facing problems and challenges that you can’t solve by relying on your existing playbook, your past experience. As we often discuss on the podcast, our world is increasingly characterized by VUCA problems – that’s volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous problems, problems which can really only be properly addressed by looking at them through different lenses, which brings diverse perspectives. And if you’ve listened to some of my past episodes, you will know that the data is clear and unambiguous. Increasing your diversity increases your revenues, your innovation, your ability to solve complex problems. Just being in the presence of someone different from you, causes you to think differently. The Outside Views program, which I founded in 2016, gives people like you – executives, founders, entrepreneurs, and intrapreneurs – access to these diverse perspectives, teaches you key leadership and indeed life skills for thriving in today’s world, and makes you part of an exclusive and accomplished peer group of like-minded individuals who you can learn with and learn from. And if you’d like to know more, check out the Outside Views section of my website OutsideLens.com. We don’t run this program very often, and there are only eight slots in each cohort. So I do urge you to take a look. Without further ado, let’s get to this week’s episode.

Mark Bidwell 2:39
My guest this week is Eric Jorgenson. I discovered Eric and his work a few months ago, when I came across his book “The Almanack of Naval Ravikant”. I got to know him when I signed up to his online program about Leverage. We discussed both of these topics in the conversation that follows, as well as exploring areas such as WEB03, crypto and permissionlessness. And I’m going to be handing out copies of Eric’s book as Christmas presents this year. I highly recommend, in addition, his Leverage Course. They didn’t teach you this kind of material in business schools or in any gadget development or leadership programs that I know of anyway. And yet, I would have loved to have had access to this kind of material 15 or 20 years ago. I firmly believe that many of these tools and these models and these insights are going to be fundamental for surviving and thriving in the world we live in and that we face. For example, I recently found myself quoting Eric’s work to my 20-year old son in a discussion about his future career. And a number of projects that I’m actively working on today, really owe quite a lot of their design and momentum behind them to Eric and his materials. So, I’ll let Eric say a little bit more about these topics in our conversation. Here’s Eric.

Mark Bidwell 3:59
Well, Eric, great to have you on the program. First question, how do you answer the question, what do you do?

Eric Jorgenson 4:05
It’s a good question, and I feel like I should be writing a blog post about it because I don’t fully understand it. And that’s usually my approach for something I don’t fully understand is, prescribing myself a 1000 words on it, which I have not yet done. But I basically spend all my time chasing my curiosity and sharing what I find. So, my week is a pie chart. It’s some mix of learning about crypto, recording a podcast, playing with things I find fun on the internet, writing new books, and reading and writing blog posts. So I just found that, if I pursue my curiosity aggressively enough, things tend to work out. And I’m just going to trust that assumption until it proves wrong.

Mark Bidwell 4:48
On LinkedIn, you say you’re shipping personal projects.

Eric Jorgenson 4:51
Yeah, that’s probably the LinkedIn way to say it. The Twitter way to say it is probably like full time fun or something like that.

Mark Bidwell 4:59
Yeah. You’ve had, I guess, 10 years or a number of years in a company, leading up to this situation, right?

Eric Jorgenson 5:05
Yeah, I’m just coming off of basically 10 years in one particular startup that raised a bunch of money, a venture-backed startup, iterated through a few different marketplace focuses and models, mostly in the home services space, was founded in San Francisco, moved to Kansas City, and we just sold that company not quite a year ago. It’s not like a blockbuster acquisition or anything, just not the outcome that we had hoped for necessarily, but a good happy ending for most of the team and our most recent investors. So I’m now in one of those mid-career sabbaticals, where I’m just like getting reoriented with everything that’s happening and catching up on all the stuff I wanted to do, when I was heads down building for a while.

Mark Bidwell 5:46
We’ll get into it in a minute, but it does seem there are others like you. I’ve been following your career and the arc of what you’re doing over the last few months. And, oddly enough, I was having lunch with my son today who is much younger than you, but he’s thinking about careers, and I was talking to him about it. The danger is he’s going to follow his parents, so we both started off as consultants in the corporate world and stuff. And I was trying to encourage him to think about the world rather differently, and using you and some of the energy that you bring to the world as an example. So we’ll get into that in a bit. But it does seem to me that you’re experimenting in a very open way about what the future of work could actually look like.

Eric Jorgenson 6:26
Yeah, it’s fun for me to push that boundary and try to live on that edge a little bit. I do think we are trending, I remember hearing 20 years ago, in the future, you won’t just have one salary, you’ll have 10 different forms of income. And that’s attractive to me, not only from a de-risking, diversification perspective, but also it suits my broad curiosity, and lets me dabble in a bunch of different things. I think it’s true, probably more so the way of the future. I have no idea whether that’s going to apply to 5% of the population or 50% of the population over the next 20 or 50 years, but it certainly suits me right now. I think it’s something worth considering for the next generation that it’s not necessarily zero or one to one employment, there’s a lot of ways to earn money, and if you unbundle the concept of a career, all you’re really trying to do is get money in the most suitable way possible for your particular set of tastes and interests. And there’s a lot of ways to do that. Certainly not just what jobs do I like, so broadening that question, recomposing that, you can get to some interesting places.

Mark Bidwell 7:31
Yeah, and one of the guys who’s waving their philosophical flag abou it is Naval. Let’s talk about him in a minute. But just before we get there, do you have some entrepreneurs in the family, or how you found yourself in this situation, if you like?

Eric Jorgenson 7:45
I feel extremely lucky. I’m extremely lucky in many, many ways, but probably one of the primary ones is that I grew up in a household where being a business owner was, that’s what my dad did. He bought the business from my grandfather who started it, and so our dinner table conversation was like, oh, it’s going to be tight to make payroll this week, or somebody quit and we need to find out something. So that was a normal thing for me, so I feel very grateful to have not had to make a big leap from having two parents who are lawyers or something like that, or, company men and women to making this leap into entrepreneurship. But growing up, I was the kid selling candy out of my locker and getting paid to give kids rides to school and practice, and importing T-shirts from China when I was in college, getting paid to build websites for local companies and stuff like that. I’ve always been poking around the edges of that. There was no moment where I had to jump off those tracks to get on these other ones. I feel lucky for not having to have gone through that necessarily, because I know that can be very, very scary. And there’s a lot of people who focus on helping people make that leap because of that.

Mark Bidwell 7:46
I interviewed this guy the other day called Mohnish Pabrai, who’s a very successful investor. You probably know of him right?

Eric Jorgenson 9:04
Yeah, I read his book, ‘The Dando Investor’, and I really enjoyed it, there’s a lot of great stories in there. I read that when I was 24, and thought I’d found the key to infinite riches. And so I started just like cloning the Cloner and followed him into some investment horsehead holdings that ended up in disaster. I know he’s had a lot of winners, I do think he’s a good investor, but yeah, I got my ass kicked on that one and learned a bunch of stuff, but wish I hadn’t lost all that money. His name still makes me chuckle in that whole thing.

Mark Bidwell 9:37
He was saying that growing up, his parents were serial entrepreneurs. I think they went bust or all their businesses went bust about eight or nine times. So he said, by the time he’s 16, he’d had a full 10 years of MBA education on what to do right, what to do wrong and stuff like that. It’s interesting, these formative experiences when you’re growing up tend to resonate through, echo through the rest of one’s life, I guess.

Eric Jorgenson 10:00
Yeah. And you hope you learn from those failures and get some pattern recognition out of it. If you’ve paid the tuition, you may as well take the lesson.

Mark Bidwell 10:09
But he does say, I asked him about failure, and he did say, you want to explore your failures and dig into that, but not too much. Don’t dwell on them either, just move on.

Eric Jorgenson 10:18
Yeah, there’s got to be some paradox in there of, never forget the lesson, instantly forget the pain, or the burden of it or something like that. Yeah, I’ll have to go listen to that interview with him. Actually, I’ve never heard him on a podcast, I’ve only read his book.

Mark Bidwell 10:31
One of the questions we’re going to get to is, what have you changed your mind about recently, and he actually fundamentally changed his investment strategy as a result of COVID, and reading William Green’s book about the Nomad Investment Partnership, guy whose name escapes me at the moment, but basically, he’s not hunting for 100 baggers, that’s part of his investment strategy. And he’s just changed his mind about how to do that. We’ll put the link in the show notes, I’ll send it across to you. But I’ve learned a huge amount, and we’ll talk about this later on podcasting. But in the preparation, I read the same materials that you referred to. The conversation was great, and then just reflecting, the wisdom that you start thinking about, reflecting on and trying to put into action is just that journey of learning in public, which the podcast is a vehicle of, with him was particularly powerful.

Eric Jorgenson 11:17
Awesome. I’m excited to dig into that.

Mark Bidwell 11:20
Cool. So let’s get into Naval. For people who don’t know, maybe you can introduce who he is, and then just tell the story of how you came to publish his Book of Wisdom.

Eric Jorgenson 11:30
Sure. Naval is an interesting character, very much like the immigrant American Dream kind of story. He came to the US from India when he was, I think 9 or 10 years old, grew up in a single parent household, clearly, very bright, genetically probably, started like testing into high-end high schools early on, ended up going to Dartmouth and working in tech. A little bit of an auspicious career start, which I thought was interesting. A little bit of a good balance for all of the prodigal narratives that float around Zuckerberg starting Facebook at 21 or whatever. So, a little bit of ignominious start in the Valley, but became an angel investor.

Mark Bidwell 12:12
In the Valley, that was when the company he was in sold out from under him or something.

Eric Jorgenson 12:18
Yes, in his first 10 years in the Valley, and he was a software engineer, and eventually went to found Epinions, which is like dotcom company that sold to another companyat a very suspiciously low valuation, but then the company that it sold to went on to use their technology and IPO at an incredibly high valuation. Some of the early founders of that company, their contributions had been devalued, and their remuneration, their equity, had been crunched down. But the people, the investors, and the remaining founder have still done incredibly well out of that in what seemed like a very unfair situation. They had some lawsuits, which is incredibly uncommon, like co-founders do not sue each other, and they certainly don’t sue their venture capitalists. But that happened, and is all public record and settled. This is 20 years ago now probably, but that all came out in the wash, but what happened through that process was Naval became incredibly, incredibly smart about the every term in the term sheet, and passionate about making those term sheets and those investment agreements more entrepreneur friendly, which in those days, they really weren’t. If you go watch “Something Ventured,” there’s a great documentary about Silicon Valley in the early days and beginning of venture capital. Those venture capitalists owned that company, and they could give the hook to any CEO and put in a new one with very little notice. And it was before the belief in founder-led companies that we have today. So he started writing, really, and created a blog called Venture Hacks, which is still up and has a bunch of great content with his partner Nivi. They were writing about the game theory of venture capital. So when you’re an entrepreneur who’s for the first time negotiating a term sheet, you really want to know what the person on the other side of the table knows, and what all the terms in this very complicated legal agreement are, and what you’re actually agreeing to, and in what circumstances you’re gonna have a favorable outcome versus an unfavorable one, know, who’s getting a liquidity preference, what is the waterfall equity payout, all of these details that you don’t know when you’re a first time entrepreneur. They started writing that blog and turned that into an email list and started sharing deals on that email list. That’s what turned into AngelList. Some of the early companies that came through AngelList and Naval and Nivi invested in were Twitter and Uber and Postmates and all that era. So he’s a very successful angel investor, he has also built AngelList, which is now this family of companies that he’s the Chairman of. They went on to buy product hunts, they’ve expanded into AngelList Talent AngelList Venture and launched Republic, which is more like a crypto version of what’s happening on AngelList. It’s a very interesting ecosystem of companies, that’s taking Silicon Valley into the cloud and letting founders find money and talent. They have some very new products called AngelList Stacks that lets them launch companies with full bank accounts and paperwork and all that instantly. It’s a very interesting and innovative company that a lot of people tend to overlook, just because unless you’re a founder or an investor, you don’t tend to interact with it very often. But yeah, it’s a really interesting story, and all throughout this process, Naval, maybe 10 years ago in what Balaji calls post-economic became incredibly successful, had great exits, and started tweeting more about philosophical concepts. And as the story developed, it turned out that Naval had achieved all of the things that he wanted to achieve in life when he was a young man and became rich, became known, became well followed, built a successful company, built a successful portfolio, and it did not solve all of the intrinsic happiness, internal needs, internal problems that you think success is going to solve for you when you’re young. And so he started learning, and I think someone said to him this pivotal quote, if you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy? Yeah, which is a very interesting way to look at it. He’s objectively smart, pretty successful, he’s achieved everything he set his mind to, if you care about being happy, set your mind to that, work on it. And so he started down this rabbit hole of learning happiness, and worked on it very intentionally and pretty publicly, I think, over the last five years, and became incredibly well known on Twitter for it. He’s 1.5 million followers or whatever now. So there’s people who know him from being early to crypto, there’s people who know him from the investment and startup community, and there’re people who know him just from sharing his philosophies and habits and learnings on happiness. I’ve followed it for 10 years and really appreciated all of the things that I’ve learned from him, but almost everything that he creates is in these very ephemeral mediums like Twitter and podcasts, even blog posts. I got so much value out of these things and just had this kernel of an idea to turn this into a book, which is this incredibly lengthy, long lasting technology. We have books from 2000 years ago, so I don’t worry about books being lost nearly as much as the hard earned wisdom in Twitter or podcasts getting lost. And so I wanted to really recompile this and turn it into something timeless and turn it into something accessible. Everybody on earth knows what to do with a book, not everybody has podcastsn ot everybody has Twitter accounts, and even if you did this, the information is not particularly well organized or accessible.

Mark Bidwell 17:35
And it’s shut now of course, Naval shut his Twitter account doesn’t he, or he has limited access?

Eric Jorgenson 17:40
He did. I don’t know if that’s permanent or not, but for some reason, somewhere along the line, he turned it off to new followers. There’s 1.4 million people in there and there’s bots retweeting his wisdom and stuff like that. There’s a lot of Naval’s content out there, for sure, but I I think that there’s a lot of value that can be created in transforming mediums and in curation, really. That’s something that’s been a theme of my career so far, and it felt like a really fun project to pick up. I really just tweeted this kernel of an idea out with a stupid pun, thinking that nothing would come of it and just went to bed and woke up to find that Naval had retweeted it, and 5000 people said yes, we want this book, please do this immediately. And I was like, oh, okay, I then set off to make my first book thinking that it was going to be a three or six month project, and three years later published the “Almanack,” which has been out for a little over a year now, and been doing really well, and I got great feedback on it. I appreciate people who message and DM me and say, thank you so much for putting this together, please translate this or whatever the messages.

Mark Bidwell 18:45
There was that great Charlie Munger lecture he gave, The Psychology of Human Misjudgement. A friend of mine listened to it every day for 30 days on his commute, and it transformed how he thought about it. Actually I listen to Naval when I’m out exercising, and it’s a similar kind of stuff. It doesn’t matter when you pick it up, you can get into it, it just resonates and it doesn’t get boring. He feels to me like, he’s not the next Charlie Munger, but it’s timeless stuff, but it’s also up to date timeless stuff, if that makes sense.

Eric Jorgenson 19:16
Yeah. I am also a huge fan of Charlie Munger, I picked up the “Almanack” from my dad’s bookshelf when I was 20 years old and it totally changed my life. I think that’s one of the puzzle pieces that put this book together for me is that some of my favorite books are compilations of existing material. Peter Bevelin’s books, ‘Poor Charlie’s Almanac,’ ‘Principles’ by Ray Dalio, I think are really interesting.

Mark Bidwell 19:39
I haven’t read that yet.

Eric Jorgenson 19:42
It’s not a compilation, Ray wrote it with help. It’s basically the end of career reflection on all the things that he’s learned and his particular unique worldview. One of the things he says in that book is, I wish more people would sit and write their reflections. And I wished the same thing, and I sat there being like, I wish Naval would do this. And I realized then that he had created all the raw material, but he was unlikely to sit down and do all of the basically just editing work to turn it into a book. I was like, well shit, I can do that. This does not require him to put the puzzle pieces together. It just requires somebody who understands and has a vision for creating a high-density, high-utility compilation of all of these evergreen ideas. That’s something that I have done before at different scales with different sets of ideas, and I wanted a final product, even if all I did was spend three years learning it myself and create a resource for myself, I would have been happy with that time spent. That was an easy way to get in there, but yeah, I think Naval is attractive to me, because he bridges that, I love Charlie Munger’s ideals and thoughts, and I’m so drawn to his irreverent polymathic approach to almost everything. I’m much more of a Munger guy than a Buffett guy, just because I think it’s interesting that Charlie dabbles in energy independence in architecture, and all of these other things.

Mark Bidwell 20:59
Builds his own boat, for instance.

Eric Jorgenson 21:01
Yeah, he’s trying to redesign, he’s much more Benjamin Franklin or Da Vinci than Warren Buffett, who is just optimizing and optimizing and optimizing of this one specific thing. And Naval to me feels like the future oriented, the technologist version of Charlie Munger. He takes these timeless ideas, he applies them, he’s got deep respect for the mental models of evolution, and psychology. I don’t say it lightly, but I do think that they belong in the same conversation, probably for maybe the next generation. Especially in India, I think, what Charlie Munger was to the generation ahead of me and somewhat to my generation, Naval is maybe to them, this combination of very practical wisdom with timeless effort. The bigger the role technology plays, the more important it is to include that in the timeless wisdom that we’re learning about.

Mark Bidwell 21:54
Maybe we can just pull out a couple of the concepts that carry quite a lot of intellectual weight of his philosophy, and maybe tie it back to the earlier conversation around the future of work and your portfolio. This concept of permissionlessness, for instance, is one I’ve been reflecting on quite a lot. I’m not quite sure in what specific quote that he talked about, I’m just looking at my notes, I’ve got a huge amount of notes from the book, but permissionlessness, the concept that you don’t have to ask for permission to launch a radio station, i.e. a podcast, or to write a book i.e. a blog, or to even build a company because you don’t need money to build a company anymore, because all these assets, the technology is out there today, which is terribly easy and cheap to go after. What do you think about that permissionless concept, because it does feel quite important?

Eric Jorgenson 22:45
It does. It feels also new, it’s a very important thing to recognize. It’s one of those things that if gone unsaid can take us decades longer to realize. I think Naval’s has done everybody, in particular the upcoming generation, a huge favor by shining a light on that concept. I think this is true, even if you go back and look at 90s movies and stuff like that, they’re all about people trying to break in. It’s trying to break into Hollywood, trying to break into getting a column, just one column at some national newspaper, or seeing your name in lights. It’s all about getting the gatekeepers to accept you and pay attention to you. If you ask a 16-year-old today, they wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about. They would just say, no, the internet is this global meritocracy, and anybody can create a YouTube video and anybody can create a Tik-Tok, and the new gatekeepers are just the algorithms and the audience. If you create something that the audience loves, the algorithms will favor you and the algorithms are the new kingmakers, the new gatekeepers. I don’t necessarily love that, I think it’s probably a little healthier than some power hungry, like Rupert Murdoch or god forbid Harvey Weinstein, right? Putting a fallible human at the gatekeeper position is really just begging for abuse of all types. I think the fundamentally more democratic, meritocratic system that we’re working towards is significantly better for everybody and a tremendous equalizer across the globe. Talent is equally distributed, but opportunity is not, and that is becoming the tools and systems that we have, and this Internet of meritocracy is really making opportunity more global and more universally available by the day, increasingly true actually, with I think WEB03 technologies and the assumption of people working under some pseudonyms and coding publicly, and a laptop and an internet connection is really all you need to “break in” and it is much more meritocratic, I think, than it ever has been before. So the permissionlessness is really important to embrace and there’s no reason not to “throw your hat in the ring” because it’s really already there. There is no seam. There’s just, do you see that the door is unlocked, and you can walk out and start participating already?

Eric Jorgenson 23:56
Yeah, yeah. So that’s one concept, and the second concept, which, once you’ve embraced permissionlessness, is leverage, right? And now, of course, Charlie Munger talks about leverage, which tends to be financial leverage. Munger also says the three L’s in life, the three most dangerous L’s in life, leverage, liquor and ladies. A 1960s quote, but leverage means something different here. He talks about leverage, he talks about compounding. Neval talked about those things, but he also talked about leverage in a different way as well. Maybe we can talk a little bit about that, and then get into your leverage program, which I’d love to get into as well.

Eric Jorgenson 25:55
Yeah. So leverage is probably the most interesting idea to me, that’s in this particular book for a few reasons. One, I think it’s the one with the most unexplored space. So I think you can read this chapter, and I should say, the whole first half of the book is really focused on Naval’s ideas around building wealth, and there’s probably 10 chapters with different key concepts, and one of the later ones is leverage. So there’s some important building blocks to understand before you get to this stage, I think that’s important to say. Stuff like taking on accountability, finding your specific knowledge, let’s not leap straight to leverage because that’s dangerous.

Mark Bidwell 26:33
It works both ways, right?

Eric Jorgenson 26:35
Yeah, the lever pushes both ways. So the leverage concept in Naval’s parlance is really the mental model of a lever from physics. It is how do you use a simple machine to multiply your outcomes? And we’ve gone far beyond simple machines now. We have incredible pieces of leverage available to us. Maybe the most basic example that I use here for a type of leverage, and there’s four types, but two leverages is one aspect, and let’s say you’re in a lumberjack in the forest with no tools. Your productivity is basically limited to picking up sticks and kindling. As soon as I hand you an axe, all of a sudden, you can fell a tree an hour, and you’re almost like a real Lumberjack, when you got a fire going. If you have a chainsaw, all of a sudden, you can fell 10 trees an hour. If you’ve got a tractor and another guy with you, and maybe a loan from your bank, now you’re really like running a logging operation. You can chart out these different types of leverage, and you can even see in exceptional careers how people continue to layer on new types of leverage. Types of leverage being tools, product, people and capital, those are the four main groups. But all of those are really ways to increase your output, increase your effectiveness, and they’re all external to you. I think there’s a lot of clickbait blog posts, headline gurus, about increasing your productivity. That’s really like, a pretty near zero sum game with a hard cap on it, you’re never going to add more hours to the day. The harder you work, the more you push yourself for maximum efficiency, the more you’re going to burn out. I just think it’s so much healthier and easier and more fun to flip the question and just say, how do I increase my impact? How can I use what’s around me? How can I look for the right partnership, the right tools, the right products? How can I make the best use of my time? How do I do the things that only I can do? This is really what the concepts that I explore in the leverage course and community that I put together. I got a lot of messages after the book came out of just like, hey, how can I learn more about leverage? This concept jumped out at me, I can’t find anything else out about it. There’s not an obvious next book or anything or expert to go follow and read. It was a perfect time in my life to focus on that, too. I went from having two jobs to having five jobs and a crazy personal year, all set against the pandemic, and I just was really pushed over this cliff of like, there is no productivity solution to the problems that are sitting on your desk right now. You must figure out how to increase your impact beyond a one to one relationship between your time and your effort. It pushed me down this hole of, how do I record my expertise and use my time efficiently so that I only have to do this thing once? How do I bring the right people into my life and into my circles so that they can take the commodity work off my plate or specialist work off my plate? How do I partner with people who are really, really good at what they do, better than I could ever be, and just let them run with this whole thing? And it’s just worth the money to invest so that I can increase my overall impact. And coming up with frameworks and examples and resources and all of the things that we need to put together to help each other increase our impact. When you look at people who are stunningly productive or successful, they all have help. Back to Ray Dalio is a good example. His is the only name on the front of that book, ‘Principles by Ray Dalio.’ And then you flip to the back in the acknowledgments, and you read that section, and there’s 50 people, he’s got editors, he’s got line editor, he’s got personal assistants, he’s got people he actually calls raise-leveragers, he’s got a whole firm working for him making money, he’s got four doctors on staff, and it is insane to compare yourself one to one to the output of somebody like that, and to not pay attention to what’s going on behind the curtain. I want to pull back that curtain and look at all of the staff and mechanics and resources and capital that these people have working for them, and try to reverse engineer that and help myself and others build some of those edifices for themselves.

Mark Bidwell 30:53
From a personal point of view, I went through the program, as you know, and I had a general session with a couple of guys in our group yesterday, which was wonderful. The concepts themselves are simple, and they’re dangerously simple because you think, oh, I’ve read about this, but that’s about it. Once you get into it, and once you start double clicking on the worksheet, for instance. This is a very, very simple document, but it articulates the tools, the products, the people and the capital, and then, you know, what do you have? What are you using today? What could you have access to also available for you? And then what could you do if you actually double clicked into some of these areas and found out about, for example, low code, or no code software? And it just opens up a whole new world of what’s possible, which, for someone a bit older like me, it’s just like an Aladdin’s cave. Because if you’ve got some resources, and you’re able to put people to work, you can achieve 10x. To your point, this isn’t a linear increase in productivity, this is potentially an exponential increase in productivity,

Eric Jorgenson 31:50
Especially if, as I encourage people to do, you are reinvesting in leverage. So there’s this all important chart I try to use, and I try to keep it all very simple, and it definitely runs the risk of being dismissively simple. But I think there’s simple ideas that are powerful things, so you can work your whole career in a flat line linear relationship, you can add leverage and achieve an up-sloping straight line, or you can continually reinvest in leverage. And you can go from 1x productivity to 10x, productivity to 100x productivity far beyond, right? If you look at people like, these are extreme examples, but people like Elon Musk, or Oprah, are some of the most highly leveraged people in our society. And we have collectively voted over and over again with our dollars and our attention to give them more leverage, because we appreciate what they’re doing with it, and how they’re benefiting everybody. I think it’s important to say also, to disambiguate this type of leverage from leverage over somebody. This is not about control, it’s not about power, and it’s not about debt exclusively, the financial application of leverage. We are all somebody else’s leverage, this is a mutually beneficial agreement between all of us that I think totally results in consumer surplus, to use the economic term for everybody involved.

Mark Bidwell 33:09
So maybe we can get some specifics, because I think you put up on one of the Slack channels, your 90-day leverage, 30 days ago or 90 days ago, and today. Maybe can you just tell a little bit of a story? So, you’ve read the book, you put the course up there. What else beyond those two activities? I know there’s a long big slate of things, we’ll get into 3.0 in a minute. But what’s the before and after on your leverage map, those really generated exponential results for you, Eric?

Eric Jorgenson 33:37
So having produced that book, and understood the tailwind of really having a scalable product out there, that can just grow and grow and spread without my daily involvement, and that is decoupled from my continued time investment, is a life changing ‘oh shit’ moment, and now I’m exploring other ways to do that. So working on another book is definitely something that I’m underway now. The course was definitely a response to not just feedback from people who read the book, and were curious about continuing to explore the concepts there, but also the feeling of oh, I can create another product that will behave similarly to this book. In that media product bucket, those two and three are definitely continuing. I think already, but certainly, and combined with capital investments, it’s not unreasonable that after a few years of working on this, you’ve created the equivalent of multiple full-time incomes out of products like this. That’s the difference between continuously trading time for money versus making these deposits into this leverage bank, and continuing to reinvest in leverage and just see, it’s very similar to compounding. If anybody’s familiar with the math of compounding and you look at a compounding returns chart, at first, it’s very easy to get demotivated or dismissive of your first months or years returns. You’re looking at your savings account, 1/10 of a percent of interest return and you’re like, this is completely meaningless, there’s not even a cup of coffee. And then you look at the compounding returns at a higher rate of somebody who spent 50 years investing in the market, even with minimal effort, and it’s unbelievably counterintuitively, disorientingly effective. I think leverage works the same way. I’m only a few years in, and I think there’s people who dream of having redundant and multiple full-time incomes that are not dependent on their time. For a lot of people, that’s the holy grail. That’s achievable within a few years, but it takes months and months and months and months of seeing like a pittance or zero or negative returns as you’re creating these investments. But now that those things are broken out, I think they’ll continue to compound and accelerate, actually. That’s one category for me, I think.Tthe other is, once you’re seeing an increase, your attention threshold changes. And this happens to all of us over time, I think, but when you’re 21, every dollar matters, and you’re scrimping and saving and skipping coffees and buying discounted expired eggs, and even eating stale toast and trying to eat extra meals at the office. Every penny matters, and your attention threshold changes over time, certainly on the expense side, I think that’s easier to understand. But I think it’s true on the earning side as well. As you become more and more leveraged as you ladder up the threshold of opportunities as you pay attention to, should continue to increase. You shouldn’t be paying attention to really, really tiny bets necessarily, or looking at the potential outcome of an investment of time or money and saying, is this worth it? Should I be paying attention to this at all? Or should I be just pushing this aside, because even though it would have mattered to me three or four years ago, it no longer meets my attention threshold today. And that’s a very difficult thing to get yourself to do, and to be aware of when the right time is to turn that notch and make that leap. But that’s certainly part of the journey, something like hiring an EA or a helper, whether that’s an agency or somebody full time or whatever, as life cruft and amount of work builds up around the stuff, that can be incredibly valuable. Learning to reinvest your capital effectively, whether that’s in your own operations, continued products or outside companies, I’m starting to see more success in startup investments that I’ve made angel investments. A project around that is like, okay, how do I add leverage to that, now that I’ve been doing that successfully, repetitively, should I be taking on outside capital? Should I be bringing on co-investors? That’s a way to add leverage to something that I’m already doing naturally, that is certainly synergistic with everything else that I’ve got going on. So there’s a lot of ways, and I really liked that framework that you mentioned, the chart from the course. Look at the full map and see, because almost everybody, and I remember talking about this earlier on, almost everybody really leans hard in one of those directions. They love tools, they love working with tools, they love exploring shiny new tools, but have no idea how to allocate capital, for instance. Or they’re really strong managers, but have no appreciation for breaking out of that one to one personal management role, and focusing on creating products and media that can replicate their experience and their knowledge beyond those one to one small team relationships. So everybody has strengths and weaknesses, but finding ways to balance and take advantage of all of those categories really tends to unblock people, and start that exponential compounding return of investing in leverage.

Eric Jorgenson 33:37
I read that you were saying in an interview that, the way where the book, ‘Who Not How” was recommended, I think by Codie. It sounds like from your conversation with her there, that one of your blind spots was people, in terms of, if you can’t do it yourself, well, then maybe I shouldn’t be focusing on it. And it comes back to the world today. It’s not not an accident. There’s huge amounts of highly qualified people available on these platforms, who can help you resolve that particular issue without an enormous amount of investment. Leverage frees you up to do something else, and it jjust hums away behind the scenes.

Eric Jorgenson 39:23
Yeah. That was an interview with Codie Sanchez on my podcast, and she’s really exceptional at this. I think she said she’s got an interest in 45 businesses with 25 distinct cash flows, and she’s got close partners in many of those companies, mostly private investments, but she’s really got exceptional systems around this.

Mark Bidwell 39:44
It was extraordinary listening to her, I must say.

Eric Jorgenson 39:47
Yeah, amazing story. She presents it all incredibly well. And it is definitely true, I grew up with this Midwestern self-sufficiency value system, where my first reaction to a problem or an opportunity sometimes, is even like, oh, I don’t know how to do that, so it’s not accessible. Even my next step is actually, I don’t know how to do that, I’ll have to go learn it to make that opportunity accessible. Part of why I created all these worksheets is to force myself, I found myself doing this subconsciously and it took a week and a half. But if I sit down with a worksheet in five minutes, I can get into this place where it’s like, oh, I just need to find the right person who already knows how to do this, and they will be as excited to benefit from my talents as I am to benefit from theirs. We can work on it together, unlock this new opportunity and go after it. And that’s becoming easier for me, but it’s definitely still not the one that comes most naturally to me.

Mark Bidwell 40:39
But as you say, when there’s a big gap on the worksheet, that forces your eyes to that space. I’m mindful of time, so the final area I wanted to talk about before we get to the questions was 3.0. and crypto. Lots of people probably know what crypto is at a high level, what’s 3.0, and why are you spending some time in that area?

Eric Jorgenson 40:56
Yeah, so Web03 is one of those things with an evolving definition. It’s becoming the preferred term for all of the pieces of the web that will get built on top of the blockchain. As we look back through like, Web01 was just publishing things online, Web02 became interactions online, so live websites like Twitter and Facebook and this enabled all the marketplaces. And Web03 is really becoming the web that is built on the blockchain as the back end. A pattern that I see is we just systematically underestimate the impact of software innovations chronically, especially when they’re abstract. And a lot of benefits come from just being able to see around that corner and just believe that we’re massively underestimating these things. So I’ve been working really hard to play with the stuff that’s coming out there, and try to understand not just the technology, I don’t have a very technical background, so I try to understand it a little bit, but I really get excited about understanding what’s newly capable, and how we can apply to existing systems, what effort can save society, how it can change, what is possible and all of our daily lives and what will benefit from it as a result. So I’ve been doing a lot more writing about that and try to come up with a few mental models or frameworks that are useful for people, that are jargonless and useful for people to understand what the next 10 or 20 years might look like, in the same way that somebody writing about the internet in 2002 might have tried to anticipate marketplaces or social networks or things like that.

Mark Bidwell 42:32
So Eric, looking at all that research you did into this space of Web03, and crypto and the new financial world that we’re entering into, what surprised you most as you were doing this research?

Eric Jorgenson 42:46
I imagine that I will still encounter many more surprises. The thing that is probably most surprising and exciting is when I layer the things that I’m learning all on top of each other. There’s a lot of exciting concepts in isolation. And when you wrap your head around one, you’re like, oh, wow, that that’s cool, that’ll change a lot of things, that technology has a lot of applications. Then you realize that that is going to cause a cascading set of changes, and then at the same time, the second and third order effects of these things, I think, are what gets really, really exciting, and where people tend to drastically underestimate things. Even if we understand something that’s now possible, it is really the second and third order effects where things really start to change lives and change the order of society. One example might be, oh, cool, I can buy books on the internet now, and it’s really hard to make that leap from that into, oh, my God, I can get anything in the world delivered to my door within 48 hours, or oh, cool, phones have GPS now, and oh, good, there’s maps too, I can call a car from one app in basically every major city, certainly in North America and in much of the world from this one thing and reliable transportation will be there in five minutes. In the same way, in the crypto world, I think there’s some things, one of the mental models I’ve been using and trying to simplify these things into just general direction rules of thumb to wrap my head around, is that Web03 will be defined by costless transactions. So if you imagine the cost of a transaction drastically reducing by 100x 1,000x, you can almost assume that we will do 100 times or 1000 times more of them. If you think about your daily life, how many transactions do you actually do? Probably less than 10. Maybe you buy lunch, naybe you pay rent once a month, maybe you buy something online. What will your world look like when you do 100 transactions a day, or 1000 transactions a day? And that’s where you start to look at like, oh, in 20 years if transactions are costless, I might watch a movie and in the course of watching a movie actually make 15 transactions where every 10 minutes, if I’m still watching, I pay another fractional sent out of a wallet, that money just streams from my account. Or I might pay rent daily from this escrow account that I have, where my rent cost varies based on how much I have held in escrow, because the landlord discounts because I’m less of a risk when my escrow amount is higher. And all these things might just happen automatically. So distilling technology, translating it into a rule of thumb, and then looking for applications, and just thinking through those use cases, is really exciting and fun. And the second and third order effects of some of those of like, what happens when things that aren’t liquid right now, like rent, becomes significantly more liquid or when media becomes direct paid to creators, and some of these production middlemen, or production studios, where their business model is going to change drastically, and what all happens then? And then all of these things happening in all these different industries at once. There’s a really great book by Carlota Perez, that doesn’t sound or look exciting, but is really interesting in the context of these things called ‘Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital.’ And she really studies these transformations, these fundamental technologies that change not just the efficiency of something, but all of society around it. Steel in the Bessemer process was one of these, and the computer revolution was one of these, and the information technology revolution was one of these. She charts out these changes to not just the technology, and not just the business world around it, but society and management assumptions and governance, and all of the things the assumptions that govern how we live our lives tend to change downstream of this new technology. But it takes decades and it’s a painful process. But it’s a predictable pattern of adoption and change. And it’s a really interesting time to be reading that book and trying to chart where we are in that pattern to what we’re seeing in the world of Web03. I do think that that is going to be one of those technologies that comes to change a lot more than we might expect.

Mark Bidwell 46:59
Yeah, I was talking to some folks a couple of days ago, and they were saying that the number of people leaving excellent jobs, not just in Wall Street, but in consulting and moving into this area, and they were saying it’s never happened before. I felt very old, because it happened in about 1996-97-98. And we can say how it ended in the short term, we can also say how it ended in the long term. The short term was painful, and the long term, it was remarkable, and that built up infrastructure is in place now. It feels like we’re in that space as well. It’s interesting, you referred to a book that gives you some insight, but the problem with books is the moment they’re published, they’re out of date, right? Where would you point people to have limited time to really try and get their mind around the difference, the second and third consequences of this, and just plot the landscape of Web03, for instance?

Eric Jorgenson 47:51
Sure. If you’re listening to this, you’re probably a podcast person, there are some great podcasts about this. I find Bankless as a show to be particularly excellent. They’re pretty advanced, I guess, and that’s probably not where I would start. The focus of my podcast is, probably half people who are working in crypto, and I really try to get a broad landscape of people show how they got into the crypto world and then talk about, really not technological details, but about applications like this, and how we might see the lives of normal people change.

Mark Bidwell 48:24
I listened to the guy who was ex-military who was working out for the Co-op.

Eric Jorgenson 48:29
Yeah, Simon Judd at the Index Coop. Yeah, that’s right.

Mark Bidwell 48:33
And I have to say, he lost me and I went onto the Discord server, and then I just didn’t know where I’d landed. I’m probably on one end of the spectrum in terms of needing to get up the learning curve, but that probably wasn’t the best place to start, I guess.

Eric Jorgenson 48:47
it is really difficult to find those first couple steps. I still struggle a little bit with trying to get people there. Because inevitably, when someone who understands it is talking about it, they use words that take a two page explainer, and they’ve got that explainer in their head so they understand it, but it does take a little spinning up of some of the new vocabulary and concepts to get there. So Bankless podcast and newsletter, about once a year does a reset from zero, try to bring everybody along. So look back at that one. Chris Dixon is a venture capitalist at a16z, who is very good on podcasts and his blog, and does quite a good job, especially if you’re familiar with existing technology and technology companies, pattern matching previous technological revolutions to Web03. He just did a great podcast with Naval Ravikant on Tim Ferriss podcast.

Mark Bidwell 49:45
I heard that and it was outstanding. I fell away at the end a little bit. And I actually got a lot of notes out of that, which I got a follow up on, because he does explain it very clearly, no doubt about it.

Eric Jorgenson 49:57
Chris Dixon and Naval are both really excellent, especially from a tech perspective at bringing people along. Once you’ve been through a few of their podcasts, I would dive into Bankless, and Vitalik Buterin is the original author of the Ethereum whitepaper and still the voice of that project. He is really excellent, he’s a true genius, but he’s also a 301, or a 401 level class, and he speaks through math metaphors. He’s very fluent in a lot of the things that blockchains are going to affect, but he’s definitely not the one on one level phase. So depending where you want to jump in and what your proclivities are, that’s at least a few different options.

Eric Jorgenson 49:57
Yeah, super. So final question. Having done that, we talked a little bit about the arc of your work and what you’re doing now. Are there certain decisions that you’ve made as a consequence of that investment of time and money and understanding and space? Just curious about what’s changed for you? What’s on the horizon? What are you working on now, as a result of what you’ve discovered?

Eric Jorgenson 51:02
The first thing is, I got a lot more comfortable buying crypto. I was attracted to the returns I bought, I stuck a toe in the water a long time ago, but didn’t really take the time to build conviction and understand where value is going to accrue, what the long term vision of this stuff was. Once I had taken a month or two to read a book, I read “The Infinite Machine” by Camilla Russo, which is an excellent book about the history of Ethereum, and how that project came to be. It’s also an education in blockchain technology, and the co-op structure that happens around a lot of these projects. So I really built conviction, and that let me invest a lot more than I had before, which has turned out wonderfully. As you say, the analogy is properly about 1997, and there’s actually somebody who charts this, overlays the user numbers I believe, of the internet adoption wave to the Web03 adoption wave, and they are almost pixel for pixel up the same adoption curve, which is both really exciting and a little scary, because we’re definitely still pre-crash, and there may be some irrational exuberance. I do think there’s a lot of reasons to believe this will happen faster than the original Internet revolution, but time will tell. But it’s a very exciting time to be there. The first thing that changed is definitely just placing bets, seeing those returns, and that is a slippery slope. It’s actually like playing with more of the technologies, which is really where I started to get more excited and see more of the vision of the future. It’s easy to mock NFT’s when you’re looking at people just selling JPEGs to each other. The first time you buy an NFT, hold it in a wallet, use it to sign into a website that you have no other account credentials for, and then you have a personalized, unique experience that’s only accessible to you because you hold that NFT in a wallet that you secured, is a really like, oh shit, that’s way better than account password reset life. And now there’s millions of other applications that I can think of to do this. My most popular episode of all time on my podcast was with Jason Hitchcock, who is deeper down this living the crypto life rabbit hole than anybody else that I know. He’s got a history of working in tech with creators and influencers and video gamers, and he is basically full time into De-Fi, decentralized finance and trading NFT’s, advising companies and using all of these tools, and is really a wealth of knowledge about it. He’s got me really excited and brought me along. It is a little hard and confusing and intimidating to use some of these tools for the first time. It’s a lot of new paradigms, it’s a lot of things that you don’t quite have a matching metaphor for yet, especially in the Web02 world. But you’re starting to use these things, starting to onboard into DAO’s like when you listen to assignments, and just go through some of these motions. And when you start to see inside some of these organizations, it’s analogous to a company but there’s a few really different things. And then you can imagine the nature of employment changing, and you can also imagine, you can start to see them like duct taping all these new tools together. In terms of where I spend my focus and energy on new products to build or new companies to start, I’m finding it really hard to get as excited about anything outside of Web03 as I am about what’s happening in Web03, even if that’s just picks and shovels to help people run DAO’s, to help people pay each other, help people organize their portfolios, help people pay their taxes. There’s a godly amount of work to do to bring everybody along, there’s so much need for improved UI, improved education, evangelism design, engineering, there’s an infinite appetite for talent in this space, and there’s so much to do, in the same way that I think people in the late 90s could wrap their heads around it, are like, oh my god, it’s going to take 20 years to build all this. There’s an infinite new blue ocean to go dive into, and I think that’s why we’re seeing so much talent flood into that space. We’re still plenty of years away from a lot of these use cases that people are imagining really taking hold in a mainstream, widespread way. But it also feels inevitable that they will over the long run. The earlier you can, even if you don’t necessarily understand or participate in the distribution of the technology, including new new tools, I think there’s a lot to be said for just spending enough time to respect it and understand it and get excited about what’s coming. Know enough to not feel like you have to dig in your heels or scoff. The later you are in that curve, the less fruit you’re going to get from the tree, I think.

Mark Bidwell 55:34
There’s someone on the leverage program, a chap who’s just leaving Amazon, who’s in my study group, and he’s giving me the summary of his deep dive. So I’m on the journey, whether I like it or not, but thanks for that.

Eric Jorgenson 55:49
That’s good. It really helps to have a conversation. You can listen to a lot of podcasts and read a lot, and it’s just not the same as having somebody who’s a few months ahead of you just sit down and answer your questions. It just hits different when you’re like, but but but but but, and someone can actually walk you through everything.

Mark Bidwell 56:09
He’s actually sent me a note saying, what do you want to discuss? What are the questions you’re trying to answer? It’s such a huge subject, so I really gotta have some proper thought to one of the fundamental questions that I’m wrestling with at the moment, which is almost impossible, just maybe understanding the shape of the landscape. But I’m excited about that, and I think it’ll be an interesting journey.

Eric Jorgenson 56:32
I’m going to take a swing, I’m still working through a lot of these ideas myself, but I’m definitely hopefully in the next short, small number of months going to take a swing at stitching together all of the rough mental models that I’ve been using, and just goin zero to one to bringing people from, why should I care into, oh, I at least see the vision. Not necessarily even about using it or understanding the technology, but hey, here’s the ways that society might change as a result of this, which I think is the right level to talk to most people at, or at least give them the motivation to go self-educate in all the other resources. The Feynman tests, giving yourself the Feynmen test with a blank sheet of paper and explaining it to a 10-year old with simple words is a tough test, but it’s a fun thing to put yourself through and see what you actually understand.

Mark Bidwell 57:23
Look forward to. So wrapping this up, I know your time is tight. What did you change your mind about recently?

Eric Jorgenson 57:30
I try to always have a good answer to this question. I think it’s a wonderful question, I’m glad you asked it of everybody. Probably the one that jumps out to me the most is the relative importance of learning versus doing. Or maybe it’s the order more than the importance. I probably sum it up, my former belief was that if I really focused on learning, the doing would just naturally happen. And now I realize that if I focus on doing something, the learning will just happen. I probably flipped 80/20 from one way to the other way. And it really liberated me too. It’s motivated me to go do more and believe that the learning will fall into place. It’s helped me avoid procrastination, by learning over consuming content and not just getting in there and getting my hands dirty and learning the tactile way.

Mark Bidwell 58:22
Well, I have to thank you for that, because I’ve learned the same lesson that I’m getting partly as a result of coming on that program. Because it does give you a level of, not motivation, but just empowers you. When you hear some of the stories of some of the sweaty startup chap, it’s just about, JFDI. it’s just the case of going off and doing it instead of talking about it. I think the other big insight for me was the innovation model of Amazon, for instance, is all about experimentation. If you reframe your project, your idea as an experiment, you want to figure out how to validate it or kill it as quickly and as cheaply as possible. It changes your energy completely, versus should I be doing this and you’re wandering around for three months thinking is this worth having to go out?

Eric Jorgenson 59:05
I think there’s an element of skin in the game there. You can spend 10 years reading about how to buy and flip and run a rental house or you can go, put 20 grand down and you will be learning in a hurry because you have skin in the game, and it’ll all come together. So yeah, reframing that or reprioritizing that has been really big and actually helps me in crypto. Sometimes I sit down to read a whitepaper and I’m like, this is boring. And then I just throw some money at it, and I’m like, oh, I better learn it, I better figure out if I should be holding this or not, I got skin in the game now.

Mark Bidwell 59:37
The games we play within our minds. Next question. Where do you go to get fresh perspectives, especially when you’re facing some tough challenges?

Eric Jorgenson 59:46
Fesh perspectives… I like to think that I am doing that pretty consistently. I really believe you are what you eat, both nutritionally, dietarily and on your media diet. I follow like 1000 people on Twitter, and I’m sure that it sets the algorithm to the most recent, not algorithmically decided. So that I get a pretty broad sample there. I like just wandering into bookstores and picking up random books and libraries. I think travel is an underrated piece of this, and just displacing yourself from your normal routine. iI really tends to broaden your perspectives. It is one of those things, it’s hard to remember when you need it, it’s hard to put your finger on that as the missing variable. I especially think that museums are an underrated thing for this, I tend to overlook it. But now that I’m talking through the times when I feel most creatively refreshed or inspired, it’s often just after having taken a random trip to a museum, and I’m lucky to have a world class one here and a few blocks away in Kansas City.

Mark Bidwell 1:00:56
There are some interesting reasons why that is. I did an episode with a world class museum curator and director who wrote this book called “The Return of Curiosity.” There are half a dozen really interesting reasons why museums are so important for society. But also, when you go into a museum, for instance, some of them obviously like to be directed, but others, it’s a canvas, you just move and spend as much time as you want, where you want, where you’re attracted to. There’s no fixed itinerary, they can get away in museums with doing things that you’d get sued the hell out of on mainstream media, for instance, because it’s a cultural record of how things were in the past versus today. Now, obviously, that’s changing a little bit. But nonetheless, you can explore society and culture from very different angles in a very liberating and very free way. That’s a really good reason why museums are sources of real creativity and innovation. Interesting.

Eric Jorgenson 1:01:53
Interesting, yeah, that sounds like a fascinating podcast.

Mark Bidwell 1:01:56
I’ll link it in the show notes. And then the final question, how has a failure set you up for future success?

Eric Jorgenson 1:02:02
I can’t draw a straight line from any particular failure that I’ve had to a particular success that I’ve had, but I feel very certain that the willingness to fail has been absolutely critical to exposing myself to the same upside that comes with the upside of success. I’ve certainly learned from my failures, and I’ve had plenty, plenty of them, big and small, throughout my short career so far. I’m sure I’m not done with that ignominious list, whichever word is correct. There’s a small failure right there. But I think it’s really about getting meaningful, tangible experience. There’s a little bit back to the learning versus doing. I’m willing to fail, and that puts me in a place where I can succeed and makes me, somewhat paradoxically, more likely to succeed. If you pathologically avoid the risk of failure, you’re unlikely to put yourself in the path of success, but you can manage and mitigate the risks of failure. Once you’re exposed to it, you really get a tangible sense of it, and it changes how you think about it. My conversation with Andrew Finn, he has a really good example of this. He’s like, most jobs are actually designed to remove responsibility from you and keep you from making important decisions by yourself and feeling the effects of them. It’s critical to, as quickly as possible, to get yourself into a place where you get the feedback loop from your own decisions, whether those are success or failure. In a way, I think, setting yourself up for failure is the same as setting yourself up for success, and just letting yourself feel the results of whatever work you’re doing. .

Mark Bidwell 1:03:54
Lovely. Eric, it’s been great. Thank you very much. Thanks for your you know, for the time today, thanks for having me on the Leverage Program. You’ve shifted a lot of how I think about the world, and I’m very pleased that we got to know each other and got you on the program. Where can people get in touch with you?

Eric Jorgenson 1:04:13
I spend far too much time on Twitter, so that’s probably the easiest way if you’re a Twitter person. If not, you know, you can join my newsletter at ejorgenson.com, and I read all my replies and I’m lucky to have a small enough and tight enough audience that I can still truly build relationships with people who are reading and talking about these ideas and helping each other get smarter about them. So I’m honored by the inherent compliment of having shifted some of your thinking, I’m really glad to have you in the Leverage ourse and community as well. You’ve been super sort of instrumental part of that, and it’s really nice to see everybody coming together and helping each other out. I’m very glad to have gotten to know you as well and excited to go listen to some of these podcasts you mentioned here. It’s quite a list of people you’ve assembled here, and it’s impressito read the big roster. It’s a wonderful thing.

Mark Bidwell 1:05:04
Well, it’s been a great joy. But now you’ve shown me that it’s important to leverage the hell out of it.

Eric Jorgenson 1:05:11
Yeah. Add some leverage, add some leverage.

Mark Bidwell 1:05:14
Super, great. Well, look after yourself. And I noticed you’re wearing a WHOOP, right?

Eric Jorgenson 1:05:18
Yes.

Mark Bidwell 1:05:20
Good stuff. Excellent. Well, we haven’t got time to talk about it, but they’re great. That shifted my behaviour as well there. I’m hoping to get the CEO on the show in the next few weeks. Have you got a 4.0 yet? Here we go, we’re talking about it.

Eric Jorgenson 1:05:33
No, it’s on order. So the 4.0 should be here anytime, I’m very excited about it. I have had this since early on. My gym buddy gifted it to me, and I’ve gotten addicted to it, another good example of leverage and feedback loops. The more you can know about yourself, the number of times the thing guilted me into working out harder, or just adjusted my behavior with the right data at the right time is really amazing. So I’m really excited for the future of the individualized, quantified health movement as well, and this is something I dreamed of having 10 years ago, and it’s exciting to see it really come to fruition now. And they keep pushing and the 4.0 is even better. And it’s very exciting.

Mark Bidwell 1:06:13
Super, pretty good. Have a good rest of the day. Thanks for your time, Eric.

Eric Jorgenson 1:06:16
Thank you.