Anthology of Balaji - Book notes

How much I recommend it: 10/10

Author: Eric Jorgensen; Balaji Srinivasan

My all-time most read book is Eric Jorgensen’s other book called The Almanack of Naval Ravikant. This book is similar in many, many ways which I why I enjoyed it so much.

Both books are compilations of essays, tweets, and transcripts from influential Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors - Balaji Srinivasan (in the case of Anthology of Balaji) and Naval Ravikant (in the case of The Almanack of Naval). Both books start with an autobiography from the subject and it was immediately obvious how similar the two are. Both are children of Indian immigrants. Both grew up poor in New York. Both were obsessed with reading from an early. Both got obsessed with technology and science, went to good universities, and ended up founding companies and becoming investors. And, both are incredible writers who can distill complex ideas into concise, simple sentences.

The Anthology largely talks about technology and the future but it also touches on startups, Bitcoin, health, philosophy, and politics.

As with The Almanack of Naval, I ended up highlighting almost the entire book because every line is packed with wisdom or insight.

Here’s some of my favorite sections, all copied straight from the book:

“Some principles:
Every citizen is a citizen journalist.
Every company is a media company.
Media scales.”

“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”

“We have bad metrics as a society. Rather than GDP, GDP-per-capita, or the stock market, perhaps we should have dashboards of life expectancy (health) and net worth (wealth). A good leader is one who improves these metrics for individuals and society as a whole.”

“Money seems to be locally zero-sum (after a trade happens, Person A has –$1, Person B has +$1), but actually money is globally positive-sum. In a voluntary exchange, A and B both gain in wealth because they both get non-monetary benefit from making the trade”

“Wealth creation is the technological creation of order. It is the difference between a bunch of bricks lying on the ground and a house; the difference between a bunch of pieces of wood lying on the ground and a chair. You can see those differences in physical space”

“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.
In any functional society, you can just start yelling that 51 percent is oppressed by 49 percent. That will always work to get attention and arouse passion. 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. You’re pitting some faction against another.”

“The hard way to gain status is to build something, to accomplish something, to add value. The easy way to gain status is to accuse someone else of being a bad person. It’s a status-acquisition hack, a quick way to gain relative status. 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.”

“Doing more than one thing is very hard. You can do one big thing, and you can attach lots of subroutines to that. But if you’re trying to do more than one big thing, you have to decide every single moment of the day, am I spending time on A or B?”

“You have 168 hours per week, ~112 awake. Substitute capital for time, technology for both. Avoid travel. Cancel meetings. Focus on doing.
You can work sustainable seventy-hour weeks if you work when you want, sleep when you want, wake up when you want, work out when you want, and never travel.
I want to maximize the total number of hours I can work, including weekdays and weekends. I might want to work for sixteen hours one day, then rest the next day. I do meetings only one day a week. The rest of the week, I am totally free to work spontaneously. That’s my single biggest productivity hack: stack all meetings on (for example) Monday and Thursday. Then you are always no more than three days from a meeting, yet you get five focus days per week”

“You can’t invent planes without test pilots. We have to have early adopters.
We allow people to go bungee jumping and skydiving. We allow people to sign up for the military to fight and die overseas. There should also be room for people to take risks to advance technology.”

“Today, we don’t have the same level of risk tolerance. People want an extremely high level of safety, but they don’t realize we can be too conservative. Being too conservative on safety actually leads to systemic risk. Systemic risk happens when you stop taking risks and get stuck with a system that no longer improves.”

“Democrats need to learn experts aren’t always right.
Republicans need to learn experts aren’t always wrong.
Libertarians need to learn that a state can succeed.
Progressives need to learn that a state can fail.”

“Transhumanism is human self-improvement with technology. This is a very wide set of things. Transhumanism encompasses self-measurement, external devices (like phones, watches, glasses, earbuds, contacts), body modifications, super-soldier serums (check out myostatin null), brain-machine interfaces (like neuralink), nootropics and other cognition-enhancing drugs (like in the movie Limitless), genetic modifications with CRISPR for genetic diseases, and AI-augmented human capabilities (bionics, telepresence). It’s basically a suite of technologies to power up humans.”

“You’re pursuing truth, health, and wealth, in that order.”

“Guns destabilized the feudal hierarchy; a strong right arm was suddenly worth less than a strong left brain, because the technology and supply chain to produce muskets was suddenly critical. The gun helped catalyze the transition from feudal hierarchy to nationalist republic and enabled the “republican” ideals of the American and French Revolutions to thrive.”

That last paragraph blew me away. I would probably take two pages to explain what he did in two sentences.

So that’s the Anthology of Balaji. It’s well worth the read!