Deep Dive: The Anthology of Balaji - A Guide to Technology, Truth, and Building the Future

Assembled by the same man who gave you the Almanac of Naval Ravikant, this book is a guide to thinking for yourself, seeing possible futures, and learning how to build a piece of that future.

Balaji Srinivasan is a brilliant entrepreneur, investor, and futurist. Applying his unique perspective will help you see opportunities, identify breakthrough technologies, and build something tremendous.

Want to sit with Balaji and spend a few hours deep in conversation to absorb all of his biggest ideas? That’s exactly what this book feels like. It has all of the most useful and timeless ideas from tweets, podcasts, and essays across his entire career.

— Eric Jorgenson

My first bulleted deep-dive into Arthur C. Brooks’ book Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier is available to you today, for free.

And my most recent deep dives into the 2014 books Zero to One by Peter Thiel and The Hard Thing About Hard Things, by Ben Horowitz are available to paid my subscribers, though you can check out the free previews by clicking these links.

If enough people care about this and subscribe, I will invest those revenues to hire more researchers to help me publish more content. I will also look to our subscribers to influence what we research and read out to everyone. 

So without further ado, here is a preview of my deep dive into The Anthology of Balaji, by Eric Jorgenson.

Favorite Quotes

• As states lose trust, their soft power declines. Less deference to the state means less voluntary compliance.

  • Less compliance means more instances of hard power.

  • More hard power means less compliance, and less trust.

  • Which exacerbates the need for the state to use hard power.

• Today we have 90 year old laws, wielded by 70 year old people, to prevent 20 somethings from using 21st century technology

• If you haven’t studied something in depth, your mental model of it is often implicitly reduced to that of a few scenes from a Hollywood movie.

• People want an extremely high level of safety but don’t realize we can be too conservative.

  • Being too conservative on safety actually leads to systemic risk, because when you stop taking risks, you get stuck with a system that no longer works and cannot iterate.

• You should feel no hesitation in starting small and no shame in dreaming big

• Not everyone is Turing, just like not everyone is Tolstoy. But universal computer literacy is akin universal literacy.

• Unpopular truth is the core of many investment strategies. It is better to bet on physics than markets, but better to bet on markets than fickle sentiment

• A startup should be exceptional in at least one dimension. It can’t be “pretty good” at all different things. At least one dimension needs to be 10x better and amazing to bet on

Leadership

Good: Helping others without concern for yourself 

Smart: Helping others while helping yourself

Evil: Harming others while helping yourself 

Stupid: Harming others while harming yourself

• Here is my ranking of types of leaders: socialist < nationalist < capitalist < technologist

  • Why does socialism keep arising over and over again? One way of answering that question: it is the easiest way to become a leader.

  • You can find some unjust axis and start agitating that issue

  • Conflict gets attention, and attention is currency. If you’re shameless, you level up. Socialism is the lowest-skill way to put yourself at the head of a mob

  • This and variants on it, like demagoguery, will work in almost every country

• The good part about nationalism is it stops the conflict internally

  • People are aligned internally because of a common cause. That’s the good part.

  • The bad part about nationalism is that often people are so enthusiastic that they move from nationalism (or patriotism) into much worse jingoism, chauvinism, or imperialism

• Capitalism is positive-sum because you’re creating something of value. You can lead a very large group. The scale of capitalist enterprises can be very, very large. I don’t think we’ve seen the limits of them yet

• The highest level of leadership is technology leadership.

  • It’s not simple positive-sum capitalism; it also brings something new to the market. You’re literally moving humanity forward.

    • For example, you’re not just building an organization that creates chairs (which are valuable), but you are building spacecraft doing something that has never been done before

As we go from demagogic socialist to nationalist to capitalist to technologist, the degree of difficulty gets harder, but more value is added to society in the medium-to long-run. The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value.

• Your critique of the existing system may be correct. But you need a product, not just a critique

  • Don’t argue about regulation. Build Uber. 

  • Don’t argue about monetary policy. Build Bitcoin.

  • Don’t argue about anything; just build an alternative.

  • Don’t argue with words. Build products based on truths many people can’t grasp. If it works, they’ll buy it. Their incomprehension is your moat

• When legacy institutions are beyond saving, build something better, and bury them. 

  • The point of doing a startup is to build something you can’t buy. 

  • Today money can’t buy you a trip to Mars. Or a neural implant. Or a medical tricorder. In the not-too-distant past, money could not buy you a web browser, a search engine, or a smartphone. 

  • When the iPhone did not exist, people had to invent it.

Business

• 6 P’s 

  • Product—What are you selling? 

  • Person—To whom? 

  • Purpose—Why are they buying it? 

  • Pricing—At what price? 

  • Priority—Why now

  • Prestige—And why from you?

• Ideas

  • An idea is not a mockup.

  • A mockup is not a prototype. 

  • A prototype is not a program. 

  • A program is not a product. 

  • A product is not a business.

• STAGE WHAT’S REQUIRED TO COMPLETE?

  • Idea Napkin: drawing of billion-dollar concept: 1 minute 

  • Mockup Wireframe: with all the user screens: 1 day+ 

  • Prototype Ugly: hack that works for single major use case: 1 weekend+ 

  • Program Clean: code that works for all use cases, with tests 2–4 weeks+ 

  • Product Design: copywriting, pricing, physical components 3–6 months+

  • Business Incorporation: regulatory filings, payroll, etc. 6–12 months+ 

  • Profits: selling product for more than it costs to make 1 year+ onward

Health

• Health 

  • Sacrificing your physical fitness or health will also impoverish your team in the medium run. 

  • You can tap into that short-term health sacrifice for only so long. 

    • In the same way that a short term optimization in engineering means taking on technical debt, you are taking on physical debt if you are not working out and eating right each day

  • What you choose to load into your brain first thing in the morning is the most precious, precious space

  • When you get up, set aside some focus time. Now you have at least a few hours each day where you’re moving the ball forward in your own self-determined direction

    • No one in the world can bother you, no one can get in touch with you, no one can tweet at you. You are fine to the entire world. That’s good because you are able to push forward on your priorities. Then you connect and synchronize. You push all your updates. Now you’re on the attack