The One You Feed - The Price of Wanting: How Desire Shapes Happiness, Fulfillment, and Who We Become with Eric Jorgenson

Episode Date: December 9, 2025

In this episode, Eric Jorgensen discusses the price of wanting and how desire shapes happiness, fulfillment, and who we become. He explores the power of useful beliefs, agency, and a growth mindset. Eric also delves into authenticity versus attachment, the role of judgment, managing desires, and the influence of environment on habits. Drawing on thinkers like Naval Ravikant and Elon Musk, discover practical strategies and philosophical insights for living intentionally, fostering optimism, and building a fulfilling, empowered life. Help us make the podcast better—share your input in a short survey:: oneyoufeed.net/survey. Thank You! Exciting News!!!Coming in March 2026, my new book, ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠How a Little Becomes a Lot: The Art of Small Changes for a More Meaningful Life is now available for pre-orders!⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Key Takeaways: Personal growth and mindset development Cultivation of positive habits and beliefs The parable of two wolves representing internal good and bad qualities The concept of “useful beliefs” and their role in achieving desired outcomes The importance of agency and a growth mindset in personal development The impact of internal narratives on self-perception and motivation The balance between authenticity and attachment in relationships The development of judgment and its significance in decision-making The challenge of managing desires and their effect on happiness Strategies for creating an environment that supports positive habits and reduces temptations For full show notes,⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠click here⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠!⁠ Connect with the show: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Follow us on YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@TheOneYouFeedPod⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Subscribe on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ or ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ If you enjoyed this conversation with Eric Jorgenson, check out these other episodes: Search Results for: luke burgis Are Your Desires Really Yours? How to Recognize and Reclaim What You Truly Want with Luke Burgis How to Find Zest in Life with Dr. John Kaag By purchasing products and/or services from our sponsors, you are helping to support The One You Feed, and we greatly appreciate it. Thank you! This episode is sponsored by: ⁠⁠Aura Frames⁠⁠: For a limited time, save on the perfect gift by visiting ⁠⁠AuraFrames.com /FEED ⁠⁠to get $35 off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames – named #1 by Wirecutter –  by using promo code FEED at checkout. This deal is exclusive to listeners, and frames sell out fast,  so order yours now to get it in time for the holidays! ⁠⁠Uncommon Goods ⁠⁠has something for everyone – you’ll find thousands of new gift ideas that you won’t find anywhere else, and you’ll be supporting artists and small, independent businesses. To get 15% off your next gift, go to ⁠⁠UNCOMMONGOODS.com/FEED⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠LinkedIn⁠⁠⁠: Post your job for free at ⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/oneyoufeed⁠⁠⁠. Terms and conditions apply. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You don't need to be born into a certain situation or a certain level of sort of neurochemical happiness to become a happy person. There are people who are. But for the rest of us, like, there is always a change in that slope that you could make through deliberate sort of attempts and practices. Welcome to the one you feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I had a moment a few years ago when I realized I was carrying around dozens of half-formed desires that were just draining me. I should be in a band. I should be writing more. I should do this. Should, should. There's a line in this conversation that hit the nail on the head for me.

Keep your desires few and carefully chosen. My guest today is Eric Jorgensen, the curator of the Almanac of Naval Ravakant, and we spent a good chunk of our conversation on this idea of desire as either your greatest ally or your worst enemy. One of the best moments for me was when Eric talked about understanding the price of a desire. And if you're not willing to pay that price, you should let it go, not someday, but now. because every desire we hold that we're not willing to work towards is just stealing energy from what actually matters.

This isn't about lowering our ambitions. It's about getting brutally honest about what we're committed to. I'm Eric Zimmer, and this is the one you feed. Are you thinking about senior living for yourself or a loved one? Choosing the right community is important. At Amica Unionville, we offer personalized care that evolves with seniors' needs and 24-7 support and security for peace of mind. Plus, Amika Unionville residents never need to worry about cooking or cleaning so they can focus on enjoying social activities and rediscovering passions.

We're ready to welcome you. Don't spend your time on a wait list. Book a visit now at 905-947-990 or at amica.ca.ca.ca slash Unionville. Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show. Hello, fellow Eric. Thank you for having me. I'm happy to have you on. You've done a bunch of things in your life, venture capital, different things. One of the other things you've done is sort of compile the thoughts of what I would consider some of our newer best thinkers. And the book that I used to prepare for this interview is called The Almanac of Naval Ravacon. So we'll be talking about that.

But before we get into it, we'll start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild. And they say, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. one is a good wolf which represents things like kindness and bravery and love and the other is a bad wolf which represents things like greed and hatred and fear and the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second they look up at their grandparent they say well which one wins and the grandparent says the one you feed so i'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do i like that parable i think it may be a little optimistic in that it assumes that you always know what's right. And I think the hardest parts are knowing whether you're truly, even though when you believe you're guided by virtue, whether you're doing the right thing for yourself and for those around you.

But I think it's very true that, you know, the one you feed, the loops you reinforce, the stories you tell yourself, that's what you become over many iterations. So I think, you know, every little proof point you have for yourself, every little bit of reputation you gain for yourself of what type of person you are. makes it a little easier that day to wake up and be the best version of yourself the next day. And that's really, really helpful and useful when you have a positive loop going. And it's perhaps not as useful of a belief when you don't have a positive loop going. So I would say, I'm a fan of leaning into useful beliefs.

And if you don't find that parable to be useful in the state that you're in, I'd put it aside and find a useful narrative. And then if you do find it useful, I'd continue to use it. Excellent. So let's talk about that for a second. That's a great phrase. Useful beliefs. I often think of thoughts that way. When interrogating a set of thoughts, I'll be like, since a lot of this I'm just constructing

anyway in my mind, why not use a useful interpretation out of it? But what does useful beliefs mean to you? I mean, the number of times that you're like objectively correct about something is extremely low in your life. And so it's a lot of times more useful that better, depending on your outcome, like to ask, is this a useful belief or is it not a useful belief? rather than is it specifically true or specifically false. It's also helpful you see someone else's story.

You're trying to help someone through something or trying to reflect on something that you've been through. Like, useful is a good measure that people rarely evaluate their own thoughts by, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think that is so important because, like you said, the number of things that are objectively true are relatively low compared to the number of things that we are narrating a story about, which is most everything, right? We're meaning making machines. And that ability to construct meaning based on useful is really good. I think the place that gets particularly tricky is sometimes in stories about ourselves, where we've got some sort of limiting belief, or when we're predicting the future and we're maybe looking at past results as a

guide. So what's the best way that you found in either of those situations for you to find a useful belief? I mean, a useful belief is usually the most positive or optimistic interpretation I found, right? So I think it's, I think it's called the Hanlon's razor, but it's this tool of thought where like you never attribute to malice something that you can attribute to incompetence or even like a good natured mistake. And I think a lot of people, you know, go the opposite. You see malice in things that have no malice in them. And then you kind of feel like you have to go around with your guard up, with your shield up, because the story in your head is that there's all these attacks, sometimes even personal attacks, like coming your way. And so you go around with a protective shell on.

You go around with suspicion. You regard people as perhaps not having your best interest at heart. And humans are really smart at subconsciously evaluating sort of someone else's state of mind. mind. And so if you come in paranoid about somebody, if you come in expecting them to take advantage of you, they're going to read that and they're going to close themselves off or they're going to see you as paranoid or see that they don't trust you. And so I think a useful belief is like, even if somebody is specifically out to get you, just assume they're not. Just assume they're just like suck at their job or having a bad day or mad at somebody else. And you were, you know,

accidental, incidental collateral damage that, you know, just unlucky maybe to be in that time or place or receive that word. And like, that's a useful belief. I don't know. I think that's a, it helps you stay optimistic. It helps you stay open to the next positive thing that could happen to build trust with the next person that comes along rather than assuming the negative path because that's the pattern that you see. Right. There's certainly the case where we are applying beliefs or stories to people outside of us. And I love what you just said there. What I often find is that it's the internal stories where the useful belief can be harder. You know, where you're looking at maybe you haven't succeeded in the way you wanted to up to this point, or you've tried some things that didn't

work up to this point, or you've formed some picture of yourself at this point. And I think where we get stuck in finding something useful is also finding something that we believe to be true. And so how do you work with that, say, you know, yourself with dealing with any sort of interior feelings of doubt or belief or belief in your ability, etc. Or do you have them? I mean, I think everybody has them. It's just a matter of, I think, where you place the focus, where you place the emphasis. We all have times that would be failed when we hope to succeed, but we also have many successes, like no matter how small. And we tend to, I think especially those of us who are striving, trying to be better, yearning, you tend to focus on the areas where

you're weak rather than the areas where you're strong. People take their victories for granted and focus on their failures. And maybe that comes from a place of believing that that's how you would make progress, rather than leaning into your strengths to like avoid the weaknesses or correct the failures. But that has this negative impact of having you focus on the places where you're underperforming rather than the places where you are performing. And so I think a really helpful habit. I mean, some people do this through journaling. Some people do it through gratitude. Some people do this through like, you know, annual reviews or something like that. But if you zoom out a little bit and look at the progress that you've made can be really empowering and really helpful.

And particularly jarring when you haven't actually paid any attention to the things that you've done right because you sort of took them for granted. You've just focused on, you know, the thing that's not yet done or the deal that didn't happen or, you know, the time when you got in a fight instead of all the times when you avoided a fight with somebody that you're, you know, trying to build a relationship with. So the positive evidence can be invisible sometimes. And depending on who you're talking to and the loops that they're reinforcing and the evidence that they're highlighting and what you sort of are ruminating on. And I've been in this place myself. you can spend hundreds or thousands of times more time thinking about something that you did wrong or negative or haven't done yet or feel bad about than something that you feel good

about. And there's the opposite version of this of somebody who's like, you know, still going around talking about one tiny thing they did right 10 years ago. There's an unhealthy version of that skew also, right? But I think a lot more people probably traffic in their negative feelings, you know, orders of magnitude more than they traffic in their positive. And it takes a deliberate habit to shift those and counterbalance them. And it feels so refreshing to like feel that pendulum swing a little bit back the other way and gets you back to that useful belief of like, yeah, there's things I still want to do. There's times when I haven't been my best self. But there's also, you know, 90 or 99 or 99.9% of the time I'm actually doing pretty good. And I just have to

remember that that's actually how it breaks down. Yeah. Yeah, I've worked with a business coach for a number of years now and one of the things that he just does a really good job of is exactly what you're saying like before I meet with him he asked me to fill out a form so he kind of knows what's going on he can come into the call prepared and and the first thing on the forum is always what has gone well since we last met and that's a really useful framing and then he often in the call will in our time talking together we'll do the same thing he's like I just want to pause for a second I want you to reflect on where you were at X point and now look at where you are now. Like let's remember, let's look at this gap. I mean, we're obviously talking about the

problems yet to be solved, but we can all approach the problems yet to be solved from a better place. BJ Fogg once said he's a behavior change scientist about habits and he has a phrase I don't know if I'll get it exactly right, but he said people change best by feeling good rather than feeling bad. And I think that's true also with any sort of problem we're trying to solve or a decision we're trying to make. Coming at it when we're a little more cognizant of and reflective of our strengths is just a much better place. Yeah.

And it's interesting how often we need that positive reinforcement to come from outside of ourselves rather than inside. Like, if you evaluate the number of times you give yourself compliments versus give yourself criticism. And then, of course, try to externalize that and be like, would I have, would I keep someone in my life if this was how they talked to me all the time. That's just such a useful reframe, I find. I want to go back to something you said when we first talked about the parable. And you said, you think it's optimistic in that we know

what's right or what the right thing to do in a given situation. It reminds me of a quote that is somewhere in the book. I don't have it exactly where he says something to the effect of the problem is not that people can't do the things they set out to do. The problem is they don't know the right things to do essentially. Again, I kind of butchered it. You might know it better, but I think it's a really interesting idea. I actually think both sides of those equations can be problematic for different people at different times. But that knowing what the right thing to do, this ability to make decisions, in the book, there's a whole section on building judgment, which I think is all about this core idea. Yeah. If there's one core theme of the book, it is just that

you have agency over things that you may not realize you have agency over, that the realm of possibilities of your life is much broader than most people tend to think. And things like, obviously, the whole first half of the book or first section of the book is about building wealth, but then also about building judgment and also about building happiness. People tend to view those as like relatively fixed things. You know, someone is smart or not smart. Someone is rich or not rich. Someone is happy or they're not happy. They just assume they're born into some sort of level and then they stay there. And what I find so refreshing about Naval's sort of approach to life is that he assumes all of those things are changeable. They are all learnable skills that

if you break them down and evaluate them and understand them properly, you can make progress along those things. You don't need to be a genius to have good judgment. You don't need to be born into a certain situation or a certain level of sort of neurochemical happiness to become a happy person. There are people who are. But for the rest of us, like, there is always a change in that slope that you could make through deliberate sort of attempts and practices. And I just find that to be a really, really helpful starting place because it applies outside of the things that he specifically talks about. Health is another one. I think that's one of my most core central beliefs is that there's always like a positive step, a positive direction, a positive

change, not in an unrealistic way, because, you know, there are some people who have a certain temperament who are never going to be, myself as an example, probably never going to be as happy as some people who have an easygoing temperament. But have I become happier as a result of efforts? Undoubtedly, undoubtedly, right? And I do think that with anything we can get better. I mean, the core idea there is just, you know, Carol Dweck popularized with that idea of a growth mindset, right? Which is that you're not fixed. You can change. And what's interesting is how we can have that growth mindset in certain areas, but not others of our lives. We might believe, indeed, I can get in better shape, but I can't get smarter. Or maybe I can make money,

but I can't become a nicer person. It's not so simple as just to say somebody has a growth mindset or not. I mean, you can see some people who are very clearly have like a fixed mindset about everything. But for a lot of us, it's more subtle than that. Yeah. The original book is like five years old. And I just had the opportunity to talk with Naval for a new special edition audio book that we just did. And he remarked, and it still sticks with me. He's like, it's so interesting how people, the example that he used is like, I know billionaires. Like people who are so smart in the domain of building businesses, making money, invests. investing, who just exert no agency over the rest of their life. And they are miserable because they have not examined the beliefs and assumptions. They haven't tried to hack the system. They haven't zoomed out. They haven't literally applied the things that they know how to apply in the business world to, you know, their personal life or their health or their happiness or the logistics at all. And, you know, through that frame, I don't know, I try to effort to enter a comparison mindset too often. But there's something a little reassuring about knowing that like,

you can become much happier than a billionaire than many of the billionaires very easily by simply like choosing to attempt to make your life a little easier and a little better and, you know, train your brain to be a little happier on a daily basis. Yeah. I think that's a hilarious and a somewhat like motivating sort of frame. Every year I tell myself I'm going to find the perfect gift, something personal, and then I overthink it. This year, I finally got it right.

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This deal is exclusive to our listeners and frames sell-out fast. So order now to get it in time for the holidays and support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply. When you run a small business, hiring is one of those things you need to do, but never actually have time for. For us, it always takes longer than we think and another week slips by without the help we needed. And that's why LinkedIn jobs new AI assistant is so valuable. You tell it what kind of person you're looking at. for and it filters through applicants for you, surfacing only the best matches instead of

a stack of resumes. It even suggests 25 strong candidates every day so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving. Employees hired through LinkedIn are 30% more likely to stay a year than those from the leading competitor. Hire right the first time. Post your jobs for free at LinkedIn.com slash one you feed, then promote it to use LinkedIn jobs AI assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's LinkedIn.com slash one you feed to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. One of the quotes I pulled out is shed your identity to see reality. What does he mean by that? I love that one. We all have an identity. It's built up. It's reinforced over and over again through our own sort of internal image of ourselves.

but also how other people treat us. People have a tendency to want to treat us the same way, to want us to be consistent. We receive positive reinforcement when we show up as the same person over and over again for people, and they roughly want us to stay that. There's all these subtle pushes to be your role at work, right? Like if you're a sales guy, you want to be all these things. If you're a mother, you want to show up as all these things. If you're in one political party, you're expected to sort of believe these bundle of beliefs

and move as part of the tribe. if you live in one city or others, you know, it's very funny how we sort of group together in these little tribes of all different sorts. And there's this like magnetic attraction towards the average of the groups of humans sort of tend to do. And when you do that and it when it becomes part of your identity of like, this is not me, I'm just going to describe this person. I'm a like a Democratic Denver living salesperson. Like you already know kind of what that person tends to believe, almost how they dress, all these things. But that makes it really difficult for you to truly see underlying reality. That person is going to see something very,

very different from a freelance graphic designer living in Eastern Europe who like grew up under communism, right? Those are very different worldviews and they both have a lens on reality that is so independent and so different from each other. And you need to shed those layers of identity and the sort of various aspects of groupthink that are like being pushed on you through the tribes that you become a part of in order to see what might be objectively correct or incorrect in the underlying reality. Group think is a really pernicious thing. We all know these people who have joined a group and we all feel compelled to socially. It's a very safe, psychologically safe thing to do to join a group like evolutionarily. We understand how this

happens. But it really inhibits your ability. to see the underlying reality for for what it might be or to individually examine those beliefs and select the ones that may or may not work for you going back to like what is true versus what is useful yeah he says in the book any belief you took in a package you know example democratic catholic american is suspect and should be re-evaluated from base principles i love that idea. And it's one that I think I've gotten better at over the last decade, maybe doing this show, different things, looking at the places that I identify in a certain group, you know, as a, here's my political views. And seeing that, yes, if I had to pick between, you know,

we have a two party system, if I had to pick between those two parties, this one far more often seems to reflect what I think. But also then being able to look at each. each of the things that are in there and the ways that they behave from different lenses and realizing that there's a lot more going on in there than we think. And I just think this idea of perspective, right? I don't think we can get away from having a perspective, right? I can't get away from the perspective that comes to a white heterosexual male who lives in Columbus, Ohio in this time and place.

and has worked in these kind of fields. Like, there is a worldview that evolves, and I see the world through it. I think it just happens automatically. But I think what we can do is question that worldview and try lots of different ones on. Yeah. So I think there's a few things there. Like, I think you can transcend that worldview. I think that the Naval also talks about, like, enlightenment is this, like, binary

condition where you have sort of completely surrendered the illusion of the self, right? Where you're like so far, you are just part of the one, right? I agree, yes. I think that that rarefied state. But up to that rarefied state, I think what we do is we transcend one worldview for another. And we transcend one for, but there's always still one there. Yeah. Maybe one step below that, I like to say, like the more people you truly love, the more of the

world you understand. Like if you know and truly deeply. love someone on the other side of a political aisle or a border or a pick your thing, like whatever the thing is that you think you disagree with someone on, if you really, if you have become close enough with someone that you really fully empathize with their worldview, enough that you really deeply love them and you can understand why they believe what they believe and what they're striving to accomplish. I think that's a really useful frame.

And I think the other, going back to the very beginning of the sort of shed identity to see reality is just like I like to ask people if you're not weird how do you know you're free like if you are in a group where any time you question a belief that the group holds you are seen as a threat to that group you are not free like if you if you are trying to choose to stay a part of that and that group holds you to that standard like that is not a truth seeking group and you are not free so long as you are a part of it and I feel like that's a that's a tough situation to be in because, you know, you're choosing that sort of social, psychological comfort versus, you know, being a low identity, truth seeking, like trying to find what the underlying reality is actually telling you. And I think that's why, you know, it's, it's stereotypically kind of a lonely path, like to truly be weird enough to be free to examine all of the beliefs and individually assess them.

One, it's hard work that most people aren't going to do. But two, it's lonely because people tend to sort of push away anybody who's questioning their beliefs. that they haven't themselves questioned. People tend not to welcome that. Yeah, Dr. Gaboramate talks about a lot of things, but the thing of his that I've resonated the most with that makes the most sense is that we are always in a tension between attachment and authenticity. That's always a tension that's happening.

Do I act more this way so I have more attachment, so I'm more connected? Or do I act more in the way that's in truth of me, which may strain or fray some of the those attachments. And I think just seeing that fundamental tension and knowing it never gets resolved, right? It's just fundamental to us. You think? I hope that gets resolved. I mean, I have relationships in my life in which I'm deeply authentic and I think that brings us closer. But they are people who also have, who also sort of reject that dichotomy and who I accept the way, the fully authentic way that they show up. It's not the majority yet, but, uh, those relationships can and I think should exist and should be something that we aspire to.

I agree. But I think even within, like take a close relationship with someone, there's always some degree of compromise that has to happen between those two people, unless they always want the exact same thing, which, you know, maybe happens on one level. But when you get into like close, you know, family ties, there's times where I think I'm making a decision like this is. the better thing for us as a family. This is a better thing for our relationship, even though what I might personally want, just in a vacuum, would be X. And I think that's the way in which I mean that tension doesn't fully resolve. I think the tension of being able to be completely open and honest about who I am does resolve in a lot of cases and in certain relationships. But I think that there's still a tension that arises in what it means to be in relationship with people, which means that not everybody gets what they want all of the time.

Yeah, I mean, I think you can have compromises with authenticity, right? Like, I don't think authenticity necessarily means, you know, doing exactly what you want all the time, every time. But I think of it as like the ability to be fully yourself, express yourself and be honest about who you are and what you want, whether you get it or not in every individual circumstance. There's relationships where that doesn't exist and people who insist on, you know, overtly or not, you sort of complying or bolding to their war review or their wishes. And, you know, I think to the extent possible, like you do want to choose authenticity over those attachments that's, you know, easier said than done for one million reasons that are all unique situations.

But I don't think it is a useful belief to go through the world thinking that attachment and authenticity are actually completely at odds with each other. I think you always, you want both. And there are circumstances where you can have both. and you should be seeking those out and striving for that. Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there.

You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this. And I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapeism that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news. You can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple, actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at one you feed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. Staying in the theme of judgment,

Naval says my definition of wisdom is knowing the long-term consequences of your action. Wisdom applied to external problems is judgment. Yeah. Judgment is a very, I think it's a tough thing to pin down, but I like it as a, it's a more precise word, I think, than like smart or clever or not smart or anything like that, because it's, it is implied that it is built over time. I think we all know really young people with really good judgment. We know older people would have a lot of experience but haven't evolved their judgment at all.

And it's a really good distillation of like, what do you trust this person with? Are you willing to like outsource your decision making to them in what domains? But we can all build better judgment through either direct experience or vicarious experience or reading. And it ties in very importantly with, you know, everything that the wall says about building wealth, which is like you will accrue sort of opportunities relative to your, the quality of your judgment. and you want to be paid for your judgment, not your work, right? And the better of the judgment you get, you have the more resources you'll be sort of bestowed with because your judgment multiplied by the resources that you bring to bear sort of creates the output, the total outcome

that you want. And when you see people who are earning like what seems like absurd salaries or outcomes or building really big businesses, you know, we lived in this power law world where there's like some people earn a massive amount because their judgment is truly millions of times better and they're exercising their judgment over massive, massive, massive sets of resources like, you know, $100 billion companies or billion dollar companies or, you know, millions of people, you know, in the case of like politics or war or something like that. And the returns to good judgment in those seats are so massive that it is worth paying that person. incrementally like tremendous amounts of money because they're applying their judgment at such

massive scale and you can work on that you can build your judgment like you will find your judgment I think is correlated with the opportunities presented with you and the amount of trust that you receive and the amount of micromanagement you may receive or or even like opportunities within your family it's a useful thing to sort of evaluate yourself on in an honest way and to try to exert agency over and there's lots of sort of light ways to do that or heavy ways to do it but going after improving that, you know, is, I think, a really high return thing in life. And so how would you think of if wisdom is, you know, sort of knowing the long-term consequences of something, when you apply that to external problems, it's judgment,

is decision sort of the same thing, or is decision like even one level down from that where you're getting more specific? How do you think about that? I think decision making is the exercise of judgment. And so a decision comprises many things, right? It's judgment. It's timing. There's luck. There's like all these things that go into it. It's whether you got the opportunity, how well, how effectively you executed the decision. But it is one of the sort of places where you start to understand the quality of your judgment and see that return.

Another thing that he says in this section that I relate with so much, and I think is so true for all of us, and is really difficult, is that the more desire I have for something to work out a certain way, the less likely I am to see the truth. Ouch. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the human, the natural human tendency towards sort of. wishful thinking and it's tough because I you know I really believe I'm an optimistic person I believe optimism is a moral duty but I think it's very important to be I think the useful sort of way to be specific about this is like optimism about the big picture pessimism about the details I really

believe I can build this business like I believe over the 10 year time frame like this is going to work however I am going to wake up this morning a assume that everything is not going to work and I'm going to get to work on the details of today, like protecting the downside and be triple checking everything and being sure that it's going to work. I'm not going to be optimistic about the details because they are not going to take care of themselves. But if I'm pessimistic about the details, the big picture will resolve. And I will keep the faith even if, you know, I have a bad day or a bad hour or a bad week. And so I think there's like the natural way to battle wishful thinking is to be pessimistic

about the details while remaining optimistic about the big picture. That's super. That is a great, great phrase and framework, actually. I was, you know, thinking it through in my own life and in my own situations and business. And I'm like, that's exactly it. That describes what I'm trying to do, maybe not always successfully, to certain degrees, because certainly sometimes I get pessimistic about the big picture and I overlook certain details but in general i'm really trying to like you said sort of i think this is all going to work

however that might not work right like you know that thing right there needs we need to spend some more time thinking about because that part might not work you know it reminds me a little bit of you've probably heard of it you read so much the stockdale paradox of admiral james stockdale right he uh highest ranking prisoner in in vietnam i'm not going to tell the whole story But his basic idea was, and people who got out lived through that sort of captivity were people who were able to confront the brutal facts of their reality as it was, but never lost the sense that they would find a way through. I'm paraphrasing, but that's the essence of it, which is kind of what you just said in a slightly more concise way. Yeah, I think the tactical version that he said, which is, you know, I use all the time, is like, I will get out of this prison, but it will not be today. Like, I know it won't be today.

I'm not going to hope that it's going to be today. It probably won't be tomorrow. But one day I will get out of here. And I know that with absolute certainty. And I think that is a really helpful, it's a really helpful frame in a lot of different areas of life. I mean, Naval has a slightly different articulation of this that is even more general, which is impatience with action, patience with results. So like the 10 year picture, you've got to be patient for, but you need to be impatient to wake up and get what you need to get done today. And everything should be happening faster, but you know that.

results are going to take time to compound and manifest. I want to talk about happiness because one of the main things that Naval says pretty clearly is that happiness is what's there when you remove the sense that something is missing in your life. So he's really painting the picture of our desires make us unhappy, which is a fairly straightforward Buddhist take of the world. How does that align with how you think? Yeah, I mean, I had not been deeply read in Buddhism before encountering Naval. So to me, that was like a unique and useful and new sort of set of ideas. And I think we live in a world in time where there's ever been a better, has ever been better tools for creating desire in you? You know, you could not come up with a more evil, genius, mastermind way to create desires over billions of people than Instagram.

Like, that is a desire generation machine. Oh, yeah. Here are all the hottest people in the world. Here's all the richest people in the world. I'm going to show you 30 second clips that may or may not even be real of, you know, peak human experiences that somebody 50 or 100 years ago might have, most people would have never even seen or a hint of in their entire life. And we're just going to bombard your brain with it at a moment's notice.

I know. I mean, I was in trouble the minute they started having like beer commercials with beautiful people on beaches. Like that's about all that my desire meter can sort of handle. I don't need this. You know, now it's like, you know, it's like super nuclear. Yeah, it's, it is an unbelievable like a psychological super weapon. And, you know, I think that's partly why these ideas are so useful right now. Like the understanding that desire is upstream of unhappiness, that your desires, There's no, this is another nebalism. Desire is a contract you make with yourself to be unhappy until you get what you want. Yeah. Right. And we are so, it is so easy to create a new desire in us. You can spend, you know, 10 minutes on Instagram and most people spend hours a day seeing all these different things. And in seconds, form a new desire. Oh, I want, I want that partner. I want to live in that place. I want to take that vacation. I want to eat that meal. I want that career. Like all of these high. incompatible things that are completely untethered from like your tangible reality that all of a sudden you have all these desires and you didn't evaluate them they were just sort of appeared yeah manifest in you instantly and if you don't have a mechanism for like pushing them away ideally avoiding them all together but like or immediately destroying them or pushing them away you can go through your whole life deeply unsatisfied with what is actually one of the best existences humans have ever had in modern times right like most of us are not

not dealing with a great war. We have our material needs satisfied. There's more people who are obese than are starving. We have eons of entertainment at our fingertips for pennies. It is an objectively incredible life. If you've got a roof and a hot shower, like you're doing better than almost every one of the billions of humans who ever lived. But we have subjectively all these really difficult experiences that we're dealing with because we have so many insane desires created. And of all, you know, just says, I find my life. I am happier and my life is better when my desires are few and carefully chosen. And so that, this goes back to judgment. This goes back to authenticity. Like, what are the deep, thick, underlying desires of your life that are actually the most important things to you? And how do you protect, you know, sort of your mind and your attention and your energy to invest in those things and prevent these sort of thin, shallow, harmful desires from taking. over your brain chemistry and that's really like the way to look at it i think it is very um it is a very like drug like relationship that most of us have with with our phones with social media apps

and with like new desires in particular yeah i think all that is turned up the fact that buddhism basically was founded i don't know what now 2 500 years ago and they were talking about exactly the same thing right our natural tendency to always want things to be different i.e. better than they are. I read a couple scientific studies that I found were really interesting is that when you ask people to imagine things being differently, they always imagine them being better, almost always. That's mostly where our mind goes to. Now, I'm not saying we don't have worry and anxiety. I just simply mean that any given moment, we can think of how to improve it. I mean, I could tell you right now, if you just gave me five seconds, I could be like, I want that to be better,

and I'd like that to be better, and what's this buzz in my headphones? and like right instantly and and so i think i was so drawn to buddhism because i saw that so clearly in me it was just so clear like i am never satisfied you know i am never satisfied now this gets tricky and i'm interested in you know your thoughts on how navarre and you navigate this because desire is also the engine, the energy that drives everything that we do. Even if our desires are, quote unquote, better and thicker and all of that, it still is an energy and an engine that if we lose it, we're kind of stuck. And so this is the question I think about all the time.

How do you balance that? How do you balance what feels to be a natural sort of human desire to create? and strive and improve with this deeper understanding of like and it's just fine the way it is. Yeah, I think it is ideal to hold both of those gently in your head and hands at the same time all the time in practice that's extremely difficult to do. I think there's a few sort of helpful tricks that I've collected, some from Naval, some not, you know, I would not proclaim to be an expert in this at all. Like I'm trying to learn and trying to apply and just like a guy on a journey like everybody else,

know, obviously we covered few and carefully chosen. I think that's a great, you know, category of desires in your life. I think the other is that I hear James Clear talk about a lot, actually, is like, figure out the price of the desire. And if you're not willing to pay the price, get rid of the desire. You know, like, I have these, in my case, I love comedy, I love stand-up comedy. I just appreciate the art form. I enjoy it. I always have. And, Sometimes if I'm watching a lot, I start to, you know, we're memetic creatures. Like, this is a very natural thing. I start to be like, I could be a great comedian.

Like, I could do that. I want to do that. That'll be my next career arc. Like, I'm going to start writing. If I actually look at the price of being a great comedian, I do not want to pay that price. I don't want to leave my family. I don't want to travel around the country and do small bars. I don't want to, you know, put 10 years of obscurity in.

I didn't start when I was 14 in nightclubs like Dave Chappelle. I am not willing to pay the price to materialize that desire. And so it does not make any sense for me to hold that desire. Yeah. Like, I just need to reject it or understand that I'm not willing to pay it. I think a lot of people have this same thing with like, you know, seeing somebody who's, you know, 8% body fat and super jacked. And like, you know, they want to be super jacked. And it's like, do you actually want to like eat at a caloric deficit every single day for 10 years and go to the gym, you know, two hours a day, five times a week for 10 years?

like if not then you don't actually want that desire you don't want to pay the price it takes to get that thing and you should just stop wanting it and that's totally fine nobody told you you have to want that a hundred percent i mean i think that losing these half formed ideas and desires is really valuable sometimes in the coaching work that i've done with people that's sometimes all we accomplish but it's huge because you don't run around all the time thinking all the way you should be doing this and you should be doing that and i wish i was doing this and all these half-baked ideas, and you can actually then take your energy in time and put it on what actually really matters, what you actually really do want, what you are willing to pay the price for. So I think that is so important. I've told this story several times over the history of the show, but I used to play music and bands. And when I started this show, I was in a phase where I really wanted to be in a band again.

It was really bugging me. I was like, I got to be in a band. I got it. And then I just realized that, like, that was fundamentally incompatible with another life, right, which was one where I had a job that paid well, but I was traveling a lot. And all my spare time was going into building this podcast. And I just finally one day looked at it and went, not now, right? Not now. And dropped it. It's not to say it doesn't creep up and occasionally I wish it, but there's not this ongoing narrative. that's sucking energy about, I should be in a band. I'm not doing, I'm not living up my potential. I'm blah, blah, blah, right? You just had to make a choice. And I love that line.

Say it again about choosing. Keep your desires for you and carefully chosen. Yeah. Understand the price, you know, the price of a desire and choose whether or not you're willing to pay it. The other maybe leg of the stool, I'm just making up a framework on the fly here, but is understand where desires come from. and control your environment.

You know, I always like the observation that, like, your environment determines what's in your mind, but the clever mind can control the environment. You know, we are very lucky in that we can do that, but it takes effort to create the environment that creates the mindset that you want. And so, you know, this is, there's a bunch of this in kind of the habits literature of, like, if you don't want to eat candy, throw out all the candy in your house, make it high friction to go get candy. But understanding where your desires are coming from and if you can, eliminating those sources of thin, chaotic desire from your life, obviously number one being social media probably for most people is probably extremely, you know, five seconds to delete an app, extremely well used five seconds.

And I find generally that like the longer form the content is that I'm consuming the happier I am. I'm happier if I'm reading a book, then listening to a podcast. I'm happy if I'm listed a long podcast, then a short podcast. I'm happy to read a blog post, then a tweet. I don't always live by it, but like that sort of stretches time. And when you're choosing to read a book rather than, you know, read a tweet, you're making much more deliberate decisions about like, I want to change this part of my life. I want to, you know, this aligns with a thick desire. And when I look, pick up and look at this book that helps me, you know, achieve wealth, achieve purpose, achieve meaning, improve my relationships, have hard conversations, whatever it is.

And I'm going to invest the, you know, five to 10 hours to learn this subject. for this big desire, that's just a much more deliberate motion that helps you kind of use your time intentionally and have bigger memories of bigger steps in your life. Yeah. In my upcoming book, I have a line, like if you gather all the behavioral scientists in the world together and you ask them to agree on one thing, the one thing I think they could all agree on is rely on willpower as little as possible, set up your environment, right, in a way that you're more likely to succeed. Now, DoorDash and these alcohol and weed delivery services have made this even harder. It used to be pretty easy.

Like, just get the junk out of your house. And as long as you don't get in your car and drive somewhere. And then I was like, oh, wait, you know, actually now we need to get rid of your home internet connection. And, you know, sometimes all it takes is a little bit of friction. You know, your phone just out, you know, throw your phone into the other room. Yeah. Like delete the app. If you have to download the app and recreate it.

account you know just just that like enough time to observe yourself doing something that you know you don't actually want to be doing i agree i mean users have heard me talk about this a lot but i use apps to block things on my phone or computer um my main way to sort of like if i'm working and it gets hard and i'm uncertain or i'm tired i'll hop out and start playing solitaire so i block the solitaire website now there are a million solitaire websites. Just go to Google and type Solitaire. It'll give you a game literally right there. But that's enough

that I go, oh yeah, I don't want to do that. The best part of me decided I don't want to do that. The tired part of me thinks it's a good idea, but that doesn't mean it is. And just that sort of thing, like you said, friction, you know, increase friction if you don't want to do something and decrease it if

you want to do more of it. It's a pretty straightforward equation. I'd like to back up a second here and talk a little bit more about some of your views on different things. You've now compiled an almanac of Naval, someone named Bology. I believe you're working on one of Elon Musk's thoughts. What are some like first principles that you can decode from each of them that are similar? Like where, you know, if I look at different religious traditions, I kind of can start to hone in on some

really core ideas like love your neighbor, right? It kind of shows up everywhere. There's some of these things. What do you find when you go through all these different people, some ideas that really converge? Some of this will be selection bias on my part because they're the people that I'm drawn to. So caveat with that. But I think one that we talked about already that I think is really important is just high agency, like kind of a broader scope of what they think is possible in life. Another that we also touched on is optimism. I think Elon Musk, Balaji, Naval, are all like fundamentally extremely optimistic, not just like that the future can be better, but that they are working on manifesting that optimism. Like they're working at the frontiers of technology.

They're building things that most people would consider impossible. I think the desire and ability to collect incredibly talented people is certainly a commonality among them. like A players want to work with A players. And so just like find yourself, try to get into that stream of really, really talented people by any means necessary, you know, joining, joining those teams working on those projects. You know, they all live in the future a little bit. They use the past to inform the future, but they don't live in the past.

And they barely live in the present. You know, they're very like future focused. And I think they all share that kind of like long term optimism, short term, incredibly focused diligent execution. They all focus on speed and really shortening timelines, questioning assumptions and driving things forward in ways that most people may not see as possible or take no for an answer, I think, on timelines in ways that they don't. But I'm drawn also to people that I have not written books on, but I read a lot.

Charlie Munger and David Deutsch, both, I think, are the combination of like wisdom and very optimistic and provide this sort of holistic full spectrum kind of life philosophy that like if you if you embody this like you are better off your family is better off your community is better off humanity is better off there's not there's not the sense of you know good versus evil tribalism there's really like just progress that we are all to some extent responsible for primarily and first first and foremost in our own lives but like how that weaves into the broader fabric. I think all those people have a sense of it, and I think that's really powerful.

Do you see any areas or have you noticed areas where there is difference where you're like, wait a second, so-and-so thinks X, but so-and-so someone else to say, you know, and again, I'm primarily talking about the people that you've spent a lot of time compiling their wisdom or people you've spent a lot of time with, not the fact that people have different opinions, because of course they do. I'm more mean within this collection of people. Are there areas where you're like, well, okay, geez, they look at that very differently. Yeah, the biggest, I mean, Elon was just an outlier of outliers for lots of reasons, right?

Like, Elon does not care about his happiness. He doesn't, I don't think cares about other people's happiness. He just wants to get important shit done. And that is like his North Star in life. And I don't think he's like a great example of a balanced life. I mean, he's one of the most extreme people alive. And in that sense, I don't think he's a good, you know, full spectrum model for most people. I think Naval, I appreciate what Naval has to say about almost every topic.

Like, I think his thoughts on family and politics and education and business building and investing, I think they're almost all interesting and almost all correct. He's very thoughtful and like cross references a lot of those things more often than, and I think Elon is like spikeier. Like, he's got more extreme beliefs. He's more all over the place. He has a much broader sort of technological preview and, like, is trying to execute on a lot more things in parallel, certainly than Bologi or Naval. I think Bology and Elon share a lot of thoughts about media, share a lot of thoughts about technology. Like technology is a fundamental moral good. Like by pushing technology forward, we create more for less for more people.

that is the sort of the fundamental driver of value creation in the world. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the six saboteurs of self-control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them. If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes,

download your copy now at one you feed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. Oneefeed.net slash ebook. So if somebody were going to compile the almanac of Eric Jorgensen, what would be a couple of the key? elements of that. I mean, you've given some, you've given some good ones already, but are there some things that would be like very fundamental to your worldview? And they may be restatements of the things, you know, you've obviously been influenced by these people. Yeah. Please wait

50 years before attempting that. I've got a long way to go to, you know, build this thing up and try to align and truly correct and well-supported worldviews and cross-reference everything. I think partly what I'm doing is I don't really seek a spotlight for myself here. I think if I have any talent at all, it is in recognizing the genius of others. And I'm very happy to build useful things for readers out of the building blocks that other people who I think are more articulate, wiser, more experienced, more accomplished, have created. for us. And so I think, you know, in a way you can see my values in the blocks that I choose and the puzzle that I choose to put together. Somebody else could create a compilation of anybody

on earth and they would impose different values. They might choose somebody else. But even if they chose the same people, they would emphasize different ideas. They would organize them different ways. And they would build a different mosaic out of the same raw material. And that's, you know, that's a beautiful thing. I think at least the three books I've written now, and Elon's not out yet, but it will be next year, hopefully early next year, you know, you see technology, you see optimism, you see wisdom, you see progress, a desire for like human thriving, you see an appreciation of the builders, the engineers.

I do think in the like David Deutsch, because. of infinity sense, there's something really unique and special about humans. I think that's something that really only a fraction of people truly appreciate today, that is something really, really important that I wish and hope to sort of share that idea with more people and for them to see the truth of it, that like, as far as we're aware, we are the only conscious beings that exist. And there's a lot of, I don't know if it's misguided environmentalism or sort of an unhealthy the personal psychology that is just spread to like a species scale and feels like it's part of the water. But there's a lot of people that don't actually, they're not proud of being human.

They're not proud of humanity. They're not proud of our progress. They don't appreciate how far we've come. They don't understand that they are part of this big, beautiful story of a bunch of hairless monkeys that sort of spontaneously developed consciousness through this millions of evolutionary process, and we're now at the cusp of like setting foot on another planet and expanding from, you know, this beautiful garden that we were born in that is inevitably eventually doomed and all life on Earth that we're aware of in the galaxy will die unless we get out of the solar system in the next, you know, whatever, a couple thousand years. But that this civilization that we're a few thousand years into may go on for millions more

years. We are just the acorn that is like starting at the very barest edge to sprout and that we are part of this incredible epic thing that we're all an important part of and can be proud to advance in our in our hundred years here on earth. But it doesn't feel day to day like we are all sort of rowing in the same boat in the same direction. But we are. I believe ultimately that we are. And the more time you spend sort of in that headspace, again, back to the more people you love, the more of the world you understand. You're really, you're in a healthier, more generous, more optimistic, more excited mindset to be part of this really grand story instead of this really small one that's sort of squabbling over, you know, some words on a page or some lines on a map. And I find that

to be a really exciting place to spend time. And I hope to sort of bring more people into that worldview through my work. Well, that is a beautiful and optimistic and hopeful place to wrap up. Eric, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. Appreciate you. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget and I'm certainly not a celebrity but we have something even better and that's you just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might

enjoy it your support means the world and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time thank you for being part of the one you feed community