The Pomp Podcast - #391: Eric Jorgenson on Capturing Naval's Knowledge

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

Eric Jorgenson is a startup growth guy, writer, and (rarely) an angel investor. He is on the founding team of Zaarly, and has been publishing online since 2014. His business blog, Evergreen, has educated and entertained over a million readers and he most recently wrote the best seller "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant." In this conversation, we discuss Eric's book, the process he used to write it, the lessons he learned, and what he hopes the impact will be for readers around the world.  ============================== Athletic Greens is an all-in-one daily drink to support better health and peak performance. Even with a balanced diet, it’s difficult to cover all of your nutritional bases. That’s where Athletic Greens will help. Their daily drink is like nutritional insurance for your body that’s delivered straight to your door. You can get yours at https://athleticgreens.com/pomp ============================== Diginex is the first company with a cryptocurrency exchange to be listed in the US. That exchange, EQUOS, has been built to institutional standards, but is available to everyone. You can trade Bitcoin and Ethereum spot, as well as Bitcoin perpetuals, and get a 5% discount on all fees, by signing up using equos.com/pomp ============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy to understand language, while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Eric Jorgensen is a startup growth guy, writer, and rarely an angel investor. He is on the founding team of Zarly and has been publishing online since 2014. His business blog, Evergreen, has educated and entertained over a million readers, and he most recently wrote the bestseller, the almanac of Naval Ravikant. In this conversation, we discuss Eric's book, the process he used to write it, the lessons he learned, and what he hopes the impact will be for readers around the world. I really, really enjoyed this conversation with Eric, and I hope you do as

well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Athletic Greens. These folks are amazing. If you're like me and you're pushing really hard in all aspects of your life, it's not hard to believe that you may not be eating the most balanced diet, then you probably want some sort of extra nutritional support that's going to be an upgrade on your current multivitamin or current regime. Or even if you do have a balanced diet, it's near impossible to eat perfectly every day. That's why I get the peace of mind including athletic greens in my nutritional routine each day and why I'm pumped, not pumped, but pumped. They are sponsors of the show. So this is really important. Athletic Greens is an

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All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Eric here with me. Thanks so much for doing this, man. I'm so excited to be here. Thanks for having me. Bang, bang. Very few people ever hit me back with the bang, bang. That's good. they're not ready for it uh let's just jump into your background i know we're gonna spend a bunch of time talking about the uh the book that you recently released but uh for those that don't know who you are maybe just give us kind of a quick summary of your background uh and then what you do as a a day job and kind of did before the book yeah um i kind of was lucky to grow up in like a small business house so it was kind of normal for like entrepreneur to be a job um for

us like my dad ran a small business and you know my uncle had a pizza joint a newspaper and like stuff was always going around so i was like the kid selling candy out of my locker and uh you know had my first brush with regulators in like seventh grade um but we're uh we got into um startups in college and stuff like that so that was when facebook was really big and started learning more and more about the tech world and have been in startups for the last kind of 10 years or so um actually like half dropped out and then ended up getting a degree um but in the process like joined Zarly. And so I've been there for 10 years, ups and downs and back and forth and couple pivots and different business models. And we're now kind of building a marketplace for home

services, like a managed marketplace vertically integrates kind of all the way through but a true marketplace, rather than just a directory or lead gen site. So that's kind of a day job. I do product strategy there. But I've always been like learning kind of sharing writing in public, doing the best I can to kind of share my lessons learned along the way and I have done it was a blog called evergreen kind of back in 2015 16 was the start of that and that was another kind of curation in a different medium and that got got quite popular and then as that I kind of wasn't sure what to take the next step on with that like this project just came up and so this has been the last like three years for me so it's really interesting because I think that you've got a

job every day that you go to work and you think about technology and product and distribution and kind of building a business there. And then you were also writing on the blog. What was that process like? So before you ever think about doing a book, was it something where the writing made you better at your day job? Your day job kind of gave you content for writing. Talk a little bit just how those two things kind of related to each other. Definitely. Yeah. I think Evergreen was kind of my self-administered MBA, you know, like I looked at, um, what was happening around me in the Valley and was living in San Francisco and watching all these companies kind of take off and just realizing like how much I did not know, um, and what I needed to know in order to kind

of do my job better and build this company. And so I started kind of picking, um, the way evergreen works is I would pick one topic. So I'd say like, all right, this week is network effects. And I'd send out to my mailing list, like, please give me the best thing you've ever read, watch listen to whatever about network effects so i get thousands of responses um over time i got thousands of responses and as a mailing list built up at first it was just like a trickle trickle trickle but the things that you get at the most of um you read and you dive into it's kind of this crowd-sourced amazing material and so i'd read all of that in a week listen to it synthesize it um do my best to write kind of a like 10 to 15 minute synthesis so like here's

the big ideas. Here's the things that conflict that I couldn't quite figure out even and then links back to the original material, and then share that with everybody who contributed and the rest of the mailing list. And so it was just kind of my process for learning in public. And absolutely, that made me better at my day job. You know, I could not possibly have learned as quickly, just kind of like going around running into walls as I could asking all these brilliant people, like, all over the world, like what how they learned about these things and what the best resources they are. And so as I just like, pounded this into my head and had a deadline and an audience that was counting on me to publish something,

it really kind of increased the bar that I held myself to for what I was learning. I was writing book reports on, you know, business concepts and how to build teams and how to build growth strategies and, you know, fundamentals of business, you know, value creation and value capture are still some of the most popular posts. And one of the things that's interesting for what you end up doing with the book is you basically were taking in immense amounts of information, you were synthesizing it into very kind of readable, highly, like with high comprehension, right of like, how do I take all this information, boil it down to the most important parts and then present it in a way that people can take away, you know, actions and lessons, things like that.

uh, was that an acquired skill and just kind of trial by fire? Did you, you know, somehow were born with that? Like, like talk through a little bit of just, that's not something that a lot of people can do very well. I think it's, um, it's interesting you say, cause I think we were kind of all doing that to some extent now, right? Like we're all drinking from the fire hose every day. We're following, you know, hundreds or thousands of people. We got new content like jammed in our face all the time. And so there's like ability to curate and figure out what to pay attention to and what not to is something we're all having to learn like really quickly um it's interesting i kind of like fell backwards into this theme of curation you know

i'm a little bit of like a digital hoarder um and so you know my pocket is like if it could overflow it'd be overflowing it's it's enormous it takes two minutes to load and every time i pull it up like um there's there's a lot and i love just kind of like gathering it and swimming around in it categorizing things and kind of seeing how it all connects to each other you know like building those mental models building that map of what's out there and how things have worked and stories of what worked in the past and so we are all kind of curating to an extent um but i found when i had to curate and publish that was a great learning process for me you know like this all starts with how can i get better how can i improve how can i learn um how can i up my skill

set and like become you know better at my job better at writing and so this is part of my my process and having an audience and a product that you're trying to work towards as a final piece that you have to publish and put your name on like really you know it's getting the game like it makes you kind of up your game and work harder at it and put in more reps and um it's funny to see the theme kind of evolve now and i'm like oh i guess this curation from an enormous like pile of digital stuff is like becoming my thing you know that was the theme of evergreen that's kind of what happened, you know, with the Navalman act as well. You know, this thing started with almost a hundred sources and well over a million words. I've been following Naval for 10 years.

I've learned so much from him. He was kind of the first person in the Valley who I got directed to that was like, follow Naval, go read all of angel hacks, you know, venture hacks, sorry. Um, pre, pre angel list. And, um, you know, that'll kind of inculcate you to the culture and like show you what's going on out there. Okay. Awesome. And then, you know, as, as he kind of continued to grow and evolve and share different stuff. I was learning new things and, um, you know, talks that he gave it at Pando daily back in the day and now podcast interviews and stuff. I had learned so much, but it was all kind of slowly over time. And I found myself kind of recommending his resources to people more and more. And, you know, I think Naval would say

this about that, or this is a problem that Naval had talked about before. And that just, I realized how difficult it was to share kind of some of his insights with people because it was it was all in a podcast or it was all in twitter and if they weren't a twitter person or a podcast person like that was just gone to them and those are very both very kind of ephemeral mediums like after a year or even less on twitter it's just it's just gone if you don't know exactly what to search for if you don't know it's there if you didn't pull it into your personal notes or whatever like that's just lost to the world um and this kind of knowledge was so um it was life-changing for me that has been life-changing for others that I thought we should get this into a more evergreen

kind of medium that's going to be easier to hand off. It's going to be easier on-ramp for people who are new to these ideas. So obviously, Naval had a huge impact on you just as he has many, many people. And I think part of the attraction for people to him is it's not just business advice, right? It's kind of this idea of there's business advice, there's life advice, there's kind of self evaluation advice, there's happiness, like there's all these elements to it. At some point, you decide that you're going to take all this information, you're going to synthesize it and distill it down, and you're going to write a book. The book is titled The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, A Guide to Wealth and Happiness. Is Navalmanac, is that a official title

as well? Or is that a easy, easier to remember for people? That's my nickname for it. You can't go around saying the almanac of Naval Ravikant all day, every day. That's just, that's too much. It's a long domain, you know? So, uh, so I just kind of shorthand it to Navalmanac and, you know, people either get it or they don't, but I'm cool with that. I love that. Um, all right. So let's talk just about, uh, at what point do you actually decide, Hey, I'm going to write a book. Uh, was it actually the original idea to do a book? Um, and then kind of let's go through your process, uh, because you took a lot of information and got it down to, uh, to something that's pretty compelling. yeah for sure so i started um started kind of in a whirlwind it was you know i thought of a pun one

night this is the original title for this book was the book of navallage um and i had this tiny little like um it was right after uh involved did the interview with shane parish on the knowledge project it was amazing and it's been downloaded millions of times it's an incredible interview um and there was so much in that that was kind of like then it just really struck me in the face It was like, this is so good. This is all kind of timeless book worthy wisdom, um, that I want more people to kind of make it easier for them to receive. So I tweeted out, uh, if I made the book of Novolage compiling some transcripts and some tweets, like, would you guys be into that? You know, and I, I didn't have a huge following and this was probably, you know, 10,000 people or

whatever. And I, you know, this is 10 o'clock at night. I tweeted that out, went to bed, I woke up and Naval had retweeted it. And 5,000 people replied to this poll and we're like, hell yeah, we want that like here we go um and so it was kind of instant like public commitment instant validation instant um oh my god I have to do this and there's no way out like there's no way I'm letting down Naval and he was kind of very generous to say immediately like happy to provide you with anything you want you know do you need an archive of tweets what do you what do you need to make this a great project and I don't know um what made him trust a stranger from the internet to say like, yeah, go ahead and write a book about me based on the stuff that's already out there.

But it was, it felt like a great project to take on. I was really excited to kind of do this. And immediately people started kind of checking in on the project and DMing me and saying like, hey, when's this going to be ready? When's this going to be ready? And three months in, I had like collected this huge pile of stuff. I had, you know, this back catalog of his tweets, his 20,000 tweets and a giant spreadsheet. And, you know, just building this list of sources that's going and going and going. And the more you find, the more you're like, oh my God, there's so much gold here,

especially kind of the deeper you go back. And then you start categorizing things. And so I would build kind of, I went through the tweets first and it was really interesting to see 10 years of Twitter history because how people use Twitter has changed so much. And you can see like almost layers of sediment, right?

That Naval was starting VentureHacks and AngelList and there's a lot of startup kind of investing content and here's how to use it and iterating through content and early product and then kind of building hype around it and then it was a little bit more about how to operate a startup you know he's building a team he's hiring um and then it was more about investing and as AngelList became more and more successful and kind of independent you see him kind of shift towards how to live a good life like about philosophy share more of the principles around what he did to build AngelList um it's really

you see this, you know, pattern in a lot of biographies and things that you read of people who kind of change their focus over life. I mean, even, you know, Farnham street started out very, very like business investing focused and kind of transitioned, you know, more into this is how you live a good life. This is how you build strong relationships. This is how you, you know, find peace. Um, and it's, I think a journey that we are all kind of on. And one of the things I like about the final product of this book is that there is something for absolutely everyone, no matter where they kind of are in that journey, you know, 21 year old might be like really hungry and just hit that health with that wealth section, you know, like over and over and over and over

again. Um, but somebody who's kind of later in their life might find one or two principles from the wealth section that they want to apply, but really, you know, use the happiness section as a touchstone to kind of, um, or keep themselves reminded of more of that because that's where their focus is, um, to be more present, to be with their family, something like that. so this book took you uh a pretty long time to write uh and mainly it was it sounds like a lot of uh going through all the material that was there right it was almost like it was there you had to find the stuff and categorize it uh how much of this book is uh things that were already out there versus um you know either interviews with naval or elsewhere and i'm cheating because

i know the answer but uh kind of talk through you know your reliance on naval or people close of all versus just stuff out that was available in public domain yeah that's um a thing that i struggled with actually because of all was it was willing to contribute interviews and things like that um but one of the constraints i put on myself was this has to be entirely built from publicly available material like i wanted that to be a piece of the book um that anyone could have done this or could have found all of these i think it like kind of makes it a very interesting thing i tried to do i did no editorializing like there's not an original word from me in this book past the author's note like i wrote the author's note every other word as close as i could possibly get

it edited for readability is is from naval in his own words um and it was it was really a lot more like doing a jigsaw puzzle than it was writing you know there's there's so many times i was like i wish i could just edit this sentence i wish i could just clarify like i wanted i want to write here i wanted to just change the words um but you can't alter the piece you just have to find the right place for it and uh we were kind of figuring out what the right exact thread is like all of the right pieces are here you can build an amazing kind of reading experience and so much of this comes from interviews the body of the text comes from interviews for the most part that it feels very kind of narrative one-to-one it's almost like a dialogue you know it's it's almost feels

kind of like the courage to be disliked or um you know some of those other kind of dialogue books that like pull you through it's very casually written um it's not super structured but i wanted to give enough categorization so that you could really easily reference it go back for specific ideas you know check in on things um and use it kind of over and over again because you can really power through it in a first read um but but also like once those seeds are planted you're going to want to keep coming back and get refreshed on the ideas and reapply them so uh this past weekend uh I now they ordered the hardcover book, which everyone should go do. And we'll get to that in a second. But also, I downloaded the PDF, and I started reading, I was telling you that I probably 80 85% of the way through, and I basically did it in almost one sitting. And what's crazy is, I've pretty much heard almost all the interviews, I've seen the tweets, like, you know, there's plenty of stuff in there that I hadn't seen before. But for the most part, you know, the general things or the meat of it, I had already consumed, and it still was incredibly valuable. And I think that's like a very interesting component, maybe talk a little bit about kind of how you thought about using the public information, right? So there's plenty of people, obviously, when the vault is a podcast, or those tweets, that have already consumed this stuff, yet, there's still some value here and kind of writing it down the way you did talk about how you thought of like the value for the reader and what they'll get out of this one when they consume the book.

Yeah, I think it's a totally different experience to consume a series of podcasts than it is to go really deep on one specific topic. This is the thesis of Evergreen too. You can read one article a week about network effects and one article a week about value capture. But unless you are actually intensely studying one topic and mapping things to each other and kind of put it all on the table in front of you, it's really hard to see the big picture and see how all the concepts relate. So you've seen tweets from Naval about finding leverage or about how to use leverage. But until you read, you know, 10 pages about leverage, that is every example that he's ever used, that is every specific kind of tool of leverage or every, you know, it starts with the categorization and it goes into how to actually apply it. And then it goes into kind of examples like the real estate industry or contractors about how to apply leverage to your own business that you really start to kind of fully kind of picture the idea and figure out how you start seeing that pattern now in real life. So it's, you know, the confinement idea of like learning the name of something versus really like learning the system of it. My, my goal here was to provide so much context on the key ideas and so much depth and so

much clarity that we really kind of showed people the whole system, showed people the whole concept in a way that really stuck with you much more than being like, oh yeah, leverage is important. I get it. And I kind of know what leverage is, but, but you're still not, unless you're seeing it in everyday life and understanding how people are building businesses with leverage or with accountability or with specific knowledge, then you don't really own that idea. And it's not really going to change, you know, your life or your trajectory enough. So getting that really

high bar of understanding is, it was important to me. And I think is what kind of separates this from some of the more casual kind of like dabbling in these ideas. It's really easy to do on social media or podcasts. Talk a little bit about some of your favorite parts of the book, right? And so ultimately, this is kind of the best of the best content from Naval, what sticks out in your mind, if somebody was to say, you know, name your two or three most favorite things, after having spent so much time and really kind of obsessing over every word that he's ever said? Yeah, I think leverage and accountability are my two on the wealth side, I think, to kind of briefly summarize them, like accountability is just a more precise and fair kind of phrasing of the old folk wisdom,

like it takes money to make or it takes wealth it takes risk to make money like you have to kind of put yourself out there entrepreneurs take on risk and what entrepreneurs actually do is take accountability for the risk that exists you know they are willing to put themselves out there you publish this podcast and your newsletters and everything under your own name like that's accountability you have to be willing to take on the downside if you you know take on the debt to start a new business like you are personally taking accountability for that it doesn't mean you have to take risk. It doesn't mean you have to actually like find the riskiest thing that you can do. You know, the advice to go take risk is actually like quite dangerous. Um, the advice

that you are accountable for the risk that you take and you have to very carefully manage that risk. Like that idea is kind of baked into accountability, um, which is like a piece of nuance that I thought, um, was really, really helpful to kind of compliment the folk wisdom of entrepreneurship that's out there on the leverage side of things that he really classified it as capital labor and products with no marginal cost of replication, which is an asterisk, but a little bit of a mouthful, but that's software, that's podcasts, media, you know, these things are all relatively new and we're still seeing how much they kind of change the economics of some of these businesses doesn't cost anyone well maybe youtube but you know more more for to serve

it to 100 million people than it does to 100 and so if you create a great video the meritocracy of the internet will take over and you can have incredibly outsized returns by using this kind of productized leverage that's out there so um those are two on the wealth side on the happiness side you know there's a lot of kind of little habits in there and and things that he recommends ends and pieces of philosophy that he pulls in. But really, that all starts with realizing that we're going to be here a very short time in the scheme of things like life is short. The universe has been here a long time, it'll be here a long time. And realizing that any moment that you are not choosing to be happy and choosing to interpret the inputs of the world in a positive

way, you're not doing anyone any favors, like, you're not making you're not making yourself better off you're not making the people around you better off and you are in control of that like you can choose to be happy you can choose positive interpretations and when you do everyone around you and you are better off for it but no one can choose that for you you have to choose it for yourself um and so it is a you have to kind of zoom all the way out to get back to this tiny little choice and this tiny little thing that we all have but it's kind of a core core piece and just reminding yourself of that as often as you possibly can, can be really transformative thing for your, for your mindset and your mood and everything just kind of comes easier when you

remember that like, it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to be miserable. You're not, you're not more productive because you're unhappy. Like just choose a positive take on all of this and like, keep going. Were there any surprises for you in terms of putting this together, either from the content or the process? Yeah, there were definitely some, I mean, there were a lot of unknowns when i started this project right it came up so fast um kind of out of nowhere that at first my first idea was like hey i put together like a little tiny ebook you know a little thing that's you know 20 pages and then when i had all this material in front of me i was like oh my god this is this is huge i'm gonna make a you know 600 page version of it i'm

gonna cover every category this is gonna be poor charlie's almanac maybe i should just build like a tool that actually allows for live updating and it's more of kind of like a blogs thing that would be have to be like a little transformed because it's not about whatever's newest it's about the best ideas and how you combine them all so there was a lot of kind of creative crossroads along the way I wasn't sure if I should be writing about Naval's ideas or or just kind of getting out of the way and letting them speak for themselves so it was tough to kind of navigate some of those things and find the right mix of constraints that let me keep making progress I'm really really happy with where we ended up there's every chance that that this could have become something totally

different um if someone had given me kind of a different push along the way um trevor mckendrick actually writes like an awesome newsletter um i like brought him a mess of a manuscript early on and i was like i don't even know what this thing is supposed to be like is it gonna be a blog is it gonna be a book like how are we gonna get there from here and he's like don't overthink it it's a book just get back to work um keep making it a book i was okay that actually like clears up a lot it just took the right person to kind of like slap me and and get me back on the road and now all of a sudden i'm making progress again um the other the other kind of big thing was just like how comprehensive should it be you know there was my first draft of this manuscript was 600 pages

it was well over 100 000 words it was huge um the final product for reference is like less than 50 thousand which is like much more of a normal book but this was an encyclopedia for a minute of like everything interesting that I thought Naval had ever said um which included you know sections on blockchain and education and investing and building startups because all like this is such a fun project for me because I'm interested in all of the stuff that Naval has said um I think there's there's thought experiments and you know futurism and there's so much stuff in there that i thought was was important and interesting and helpful um and it took a really kind of broad wide range of peer reviewers kind of after that manuscript who i gave them a 600

page thing they're like you're gonna be fucking kidding me um and they all read like a different 60 percent um but that all all all of them loved wealth and happiness and so i was kind of go figure right like everybody wants to be wealthy and happy um and so those became like the foundation of it and figuring out what to put around that to give it the right context make it like a fast engaging kind of awesome read i really want people to power through the end of the book and be like oh my god i wish this was longer like that's the best compliment a book can receive um and all of the sections are now kind of published on on the ballman act.com so there's no reason not to have them on the website and put them out there for people who are interested in it but i really

wanted them to power through the book and then find their way to kind of different rabbit holes based on what they were interested in. But that early kind of feedback on the first manuscript was so key to get me through some of the things that was hard to see past what I was interested in and learn kind of what other people would want to see in it. Yeah, it feels like you've had this very intimate experience where you're like spending all day with the thoughts of somebody.

And obviously it being Naval is cool and valuable, but how do you think you've changed just from spending that much time kind of rereading so much of this kind of high quality content uh and i've got to imagine almost like searing it in your brain to the point where like you can literally call it back like a database right of just like hey i know exactly what the thoughts are on this topic or that topic like how have you changed or maybe just your perspective changed yeah it's it's actually um i think you know when you've changed when it's hard to pinpoint how you've changed you know um i definitely i mean i read this book and some of the source material like more than 20 times in the course of building

this thing over three years like there's hundreds and hundreds of hours into this um of just sitting with this material and picking up a piece and trying to kind of totally figure out totally understand it and figure out what else it relates to um so i almost feel guilty at like how many things i'm sure i adopted as my own in this process that i'm like this is now my idea but like it definitely came from from this process in this book um but i think you know we are we are all doing that we are all standing on many layers of shoulders of giants um so it has been kind of part of that process but the the this kind of crucible of editing that i've been going through the reward for that is that i now have like a little like naval who sits on my shoulder

Like he is on my mental board of directors. I have like a Hogwarts portrait in my head that to such an extent that like I can almost ask it questions and know what it would say back. And that is a really high bar. You know, you don't have time to do that with very many people in your life to study an idea that deeply or a person that deeply. and i'm very kind of grateful that you know it was a very kind of a luck-based thing that like this became the book that i was working on like i tweet dumb stuff all the time this one just happened to turn into a book and i'm very lucky that like this agreed with so much of what i wanted to know and what i wanted to learn like i'm um it would have been hard to sit with three years of just anybody so like picking who to study and who to kind of whose idea is to let this deeply into your head I think is is important and I'm really glad that um that we're over that threshold and that like this is the bar that I reached in working on this book

and you know for me personally it was it was transformative to a point where like I don't I would love everyone in the world to read it and get something out of it but I don't need that to feel good about having spent this time working on it like this was this is a project for me from the beginning um and I hope everyone gets something out of it and I think many people love it, but I'm also would not be disappointed in the time invested if all it did was change me and teach me things. So that leads me to one of the more interesting decisions that you made is everything is available for free unless you want a hardcover version. And so this is my plug for you in that everyone listening should go read it for free on the internet, but also buy a

hardcover version like I did simply just as a thank you. I think really just to spend so much time to put it together. But talk a little bit about the decision to actually kind of open source or provide without cost, you know, kind of all this work that you've done over a number of years. What drove that? Yeah, that's, I wish I could take full credit for that. That was actually an important kind of piece that Naval wanted in the book that I was very, very happy to about, you know, all of my writing forever has been free. You know, Evergreen was totally free and all my blog posts are out there and stuff. So that totally agreed with my ethos. I didn't understand exactly all of the reasons why that was so important until actually this week. So publishing

this week and getting hundreds of tweets and DMs and emails from people all over the world who don't have access to Amazon or to the Kindle store or whatever. I didn't even realize how difficult it was for them to get their hands on some of these things like pay pay like aside um but to pay you know u.s dollars for a book of ideas that could change somebody's life in you know the philippines like that's a higher bar for them um not everyone has you know amazon service or a kindle or a device to download a kindle on but so putting it out there as a pdf and free on the website, like there are people who are very, very grateful for that. And it's kind of a transformative thing. I think it is also, you know, I mean, it's been downloaded tens of

thousands of times already. So it is clear that it adds value to people. I think enough people are going to kind of share this and appreciate it. And there's a lot more to kind of do around these ideas. But really, Naval has given all of this, you know, these lessons away. I'm very happy to kind of add my, um, curatorial efforts to it and, and pay that forward, you know, the best I can. And, um, plenty of people are going to want to buy the book or, um, we made it as cheap as we can on Amazon, um, in the Kindle store, but Amazon does not want to do free hosting and distribution. It turns out. So, um, they set, they set price floors, but everything, um, we made it available for free on the website, the volman act.com. You can read the whole thing. You can

download EPUB, Moby, PDF, put it in your Kindle, print it out, whatever you want to do. It's all out there. Got it. Are you going to write another one? Maybe. Who do you want to see the almanac of next? Oh, I'd have to think hard. If you're going to go spend three years of your life, it would have to be somebody that meets that same quality bar. I'm not going to just throw a random name out there and then you go do it. If you think of it, you send it to me. I'm not going to rule it out but i'm also not gonna just go you know kind of crank them out to crank them out um there's there's actually i think a lot to do around around this book for for application and tools and services and things like that like this book i think is just the beginning of the

journey for many people on figuring out how to find their specific knowledge right like it takes many many years and not everybody has the kind of advantages of people around them who can help them distill it or kind of make prescriptive recommendations on what they should be doing or even have healthy relationships, business relationships with them to kind of coach them through some of these things. You know, there's definitely a lot to learn about the tools of leverage and, you know, how many ways there are to kind of buy back your own time and work on high leverage tasks and things like that. Like this is something I think you have done incredibly well but you know with no playbook that i can see just kind of like intuiting your

way forward to figure out like what you are uniquely really good at how to find kind of tools that help you get you know more reach and find more audience and serve the people who follow you better um so that that is something that i think you know there's a lot to kind of do and unpack there and and you know i don't know that i'm done with um with these ideas just yet One of the things that's really interesting to me, and you'll know I won't where he said it, but I think it was in like the how to be rich kind of series of audio clips. Basically, this idea of leverage, right, to me is, we know that compounding kind of was misunderstood to those now who look at building wealth that's kind of, you know, now a discovered truth, if you will, right, and everyone kind of talks about it. leverage seems to be kind of in that phase that compounding used to be, right? Where there's definitely people who understand it, but kind of the general mass audience doesn't

understand with any level of mastery or really kind of application why that's so important, right? And so do you think that this is something where simply hearing the ideas, right, kind of the way he articulates it is enough for people? Or do you think that there is this element of like, this is almost the top of the funnel, right, where you got to kind of hear an idea, hear somebody explain it, that you, you know, trust and have legitimacy and kind of all that stuff. And then they've got to kind of walk through it, but you actually don't kind of internalize it until you actually put it into application. So kind of how do you separate ideas versus action here? And kind of where do you think this book fits? Yeah, I mean, I think I'm always a proponent of the like,

you don't actually understand it until you've you've tested it against reality until you've heard the echo of what you've put out there and see it work and see it in action. I totally agree. Leverage is really, I think, pretty tangled up with compounding in some ways. The gap between you doing your most high value tasks is another thing that compounds. Getting leverage through capital, getting leverage through labor. This is why you see the business owners pretty consistently become the wealthiest people because they are leveraged and they're leveraged through capital, through labor and through products and all of these things kind of the leverage itself compounds um and gets bigger and bigger and all you know the capital is compounding the labor is compounding

and that the profits are coming back and getting reinvested and so i think there's a lot to kind of um continue to unpack there i think you know to your point like people definitely everyone parrots compounding and everyone understands that it's important but it is still so counterintuitive and so difficult for us to you know even people who've spent their whole lives with with compounding and studying it still have to like go look at the tables and be like oh holy shit that is so much more than i thought it would like the mental math is still counterintuitive and still surprisingly high um i think leverage is is i completely agree with you that it is kind of like in the same uh lane but lagging the understanding of compounding and it's just less a little less um studied and

understood and a little less like mathematically quantified yet in the way that compounding is productized leverage probably in particular. And people are seeing like, you know, breakout successes like Joe Rogan, or this kind of phenomenon of companies getting smaller, or headcount getting smaller and companies getting bigger. And so, you know, Instagram at a billion with 10 people and WhatsApp, and, you know, Bitcoin, even like these things are that that is all productized leverage that people are still not quite seeing as like the support beam that it is for the outcomes that we're seeing i think it's absolutely huge i think it's a really interesting thing to kind of continue to study and involves um broad classification of it as leverage and

just labeling it leverage really helps us kind of think about it you know we think of labor as so different from capital and so different from product until it's all under the same umbrella you're kind of oh holy shit how can i like mix and match these two is this a problem that needs to be solved with labor is it a problem that can be solved with capital is it a problem that can be solved with product how do i mix these together um which actually is the most expensive or the most uh the highest margin form of leverage for this particular challenge that i'm taking on like there's a lot to explore there um and i'm actually like it's one of the concepts that i'm most excited to kind of keep diving into and kind of do my own research on and keep writing on hopefully

and see where that takes me. To me, one of the aspects as you're reading through it and kind of really, really like looking at the words on a page, right? Not just hearing a podcast, et cetera, it's very obvious that his command of these ideas is due to his application of them, right? And so it's like the idea of leverage,

like even the way that he describes the various types of leverages, he specifically highlights not just software, right? Not just human capital. He also talks about blogs and podcasts and like, like he really, really understands that when you kind of take a step back, like, because he's done all of it. Right. And so did you get the sense that he has this ability to articulate these ideas, because of his specific experience? Or do you think that this is something where anyone who sat and just thought about this stuff for a long time could kind of come to the same conclusions and have the same command of the descriptions in these ideas? yeah i think it i think it takes some experience with reality some operating experience to kind of get um not just fluent with these concepts but to have them distilled so powerfully you know um it is a very non-academic thing right it's not a guy who studied a bunch of different things and wrote

a big paper with a bunch of confusing words about you know how leverage applies it is like a man who has built and invested in, you know, he's built a few successful businesses, he's invested in hundreds of successful businesses. And he has this kind of like mental model of how these things come about and what he's looking for. And that is just, you know, and in a few kind of simple words can explain that. And now, he's been studying these things, he says he formulated some of these things when he was 14. And just like, you know, a poor immigrant kid in New York, looking around trying to figure out how the world works and how people get money and how to become successful so he's been distilling these principles for decades and applying them and learning them and so um you know

even there's a blog post from 2008 that is like surprised me with how far back it was there was some of these kind of basic equations you know your income equals your specific knowledge plus accountability plus leverage you know very basic formula doesn't mean anything to you until you've You can unpack all those words into the things that he's been thinking about for 10 years, which is kind of what this book does. But it really surprised me how long he's been thinking about it. And it shows you like, you know, this clarity comes from years of distillation and practice and application and receiving kind of feedback from the universe that these theories are correct. And once they're in your head, you're looking around at other people seeing how, you know, you see this formula everywhere and you start to see how people take accountability, how they use specific knowledge, how they use leverage. And it almost becomes a formula for kind of understanding how they became successful or how they continue to grow. And that's really where you start to see how you can apply it for yourself. You know, that's where you get to the 301, 401, like, oh, I see the world differently now. And now I understand if I push this button, this thing can happen. Now I understand if I start this business, it can become profitable with the use of these tools, these pieces of leverage, instead of just, you know, trying to do everything manually.

And you understand the difference between, you know, the level of accountability that an hourly worker has versus their manager versus the owner of the business like these are things that not everyone is lucky enough to ever see how the world works and how, why some people are successful and why others are getting wealthy and some aren't. that is, I find that to be a very valuable thing to just understand the truths of some of these things and see the forces that are at work. Yeah, it's really, really interesting to kind of hear you navigate that balance between just thinking and doing. What happens next? Will you continue to update this and kind of on an annual or every few year basis? I'm assuming that Naval is not going to stop doing or thinking, nor putting more information out there? How do you think about the evolution of his thoughts in regards to the book? Yeah, I think it depends a little bit on many things, but what he does, what he shares. I worked very hard to ensure that

everything in the book is evergreen. So I hope that the book itself will never go out of date or become non-applicable. Naval, I'm sure we'll continue to share many great insights and new things. If we needed an updated version in 10 years or something, we can talk about that. I definitely will continue

to kind of update the site and write more there. I've got a mailing list. When Naval comes out with great new stuff, I'll share it. I may continue to kind of try to expand on some of these ideas on the blog, share more about how the book came about

and what is happening as a result of the book um you know some of the stuff we talked about around how to help people you know go further with these ideas how to get more you know in tune with their specific knowledge how to apply leverage um might be something that we we do um i don't know the whole last section of the book is recommended reading uh so there's all these kind of great books across philosophy and you know non-fiction you know there's a bunch of matt ridley and talib and one of the things um that i've heard is that a reading group might be really interesting for people who want to kind of get together and study naval's recommendations and his ideas and create a you know kind of a little like naval university if you want to swim

deeper into these ideas let's go into the source material together let's really you know ask each other some of the hard questions let's hold each other accountable for for doing the hard work of studying some of these kind of basic you know the source texts you know it's not easy work to read the origin of species or, you know, go all the way back to some of the early philosophers. But if that's, you know, what you want to hold yourself to, like, it's easier to do that as part of a group. Yeah, makes makes a lot of sense. If anyone wants to buy the book, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, a guide to wealth and happiness, they can go to navalmanac.com is the best place to buy the hardcover. And then you can also download the PDF or other versions

for uh for free there uh before i let you go i ask everyone the same two questions then you'll get to ask me one uh first is what is your favorite book or most important book you've ever read and you cannot answer uh with this one so you have to choose something else but what's what's the most important book you've ever read uh poor charlie's almanac for sure um i picked that up off my dad's bookshelf at like 21 and it totally changed the next five or ten years of what i read and what i thought um absolutely loved it and i actually think it's interesting like looking back at how that decision contributed to the decision to like, create this book, like it was in, you know, the, the curation and distillation was in me from how much I appreciated

Port Charlie's Almanac. So I absolutely love that book. I love Munger. And I hope that, you know, I've done the Almanac tradition proud with this. How much of the impact that book had on you is the content in the book versus when you read it? Because I actually, same for me, like when I was 20, 21 years old, I read three books. And I always go back and forth, like, was it the content? Or was it just I was 20, 21 years old, and like, perfect age to mold my opinions and viewpoints on the world? Yeah, I mean, I think every, every book that you stack on, you know, that might have been 10%, or 1% of the books you've read. But by now, when you read a new one, it's like a fraction of a percent of the books that you've read. And so you know, you're just you just swing so much

more with any new big influence on your life at that age um I definitely and I also you know deeply respected my dad and knew that he loved Munger and you know we Warren Buffett had been a topic of conversation in our house for some time so um I had reason to kind of buy into that already but it was definitely a mix of you know um he Munger fit my my personality and worldview and irreverence you know uh kind of bang bang bang like alignment perfectly um so I loved him just kind of is curmudgeonly intelligence, um, and just dismissive of experts and, um, just all of those idiosyncrasies, idiosyncrasies, um, I loved. And, uh, it was, it was hugely impactful for me. And then I went into, you know, Benjamin Franklin and all this stuff that he

recommends and, um, yeah, he's still, still a huge influence on me. That's awesome. Uh, second question a little bit more fun which is uh aliens believer or non-believer believer why the universe is a huge place and i know it's like so staggeringly big that you can't actually do the math but if you could it just seems extremely unlikely that somewhere in infinity there's not other other beings so uh i never realized i've asked a lot of people almost 400 people this question uh and i always ask it the exact way i just did and somebody uh over the weekend told me they're like you can't ask a question that relies on math and categorize it as believer or non-believer like math is either true or not and i was like that's that's pretty good point

so i think i might have to call the new phrasing for it because to your point like the math equation is what most people rely on uh but i don't know if we can really call do we believe math is basically the question right well maybe the people that yeah not everyone might agree that it's a math i don't know who that would be but in this audience it's probably a pretty pretty math heavy bigfoot believer or non-believer yeah i don't know maybe that's what i started i think it's bigfoot the loch ness monster i'm sure there's a couple others that we can come up with um all right you could ask me one question to finish up what uh what one question you got for me i want to know uh what you would consider your specific knowledge

yeah so um you know this but for those that are listening uh specific knowledge can be uh kind of captured a couple different ways and one of that i think a lot about is like when you stack three or four things on top of each other uh so you know an easy example would be if you understand business if you understand finance if you understand content and you understand investing like there's just not that many people you're competing against at the intersection of those four things right and so i constantly think about like well what else can you add like how do you go from four things to like 10 things right um and in some weird world uh i actually think the specific knowledge is more like intangible things for me so what i mean by that is like one uh there's not

very many people who are willing to kind of be curious publicly right so this idea of like there's a lot of people who i think are very guarded and they only want to uh put things out there when they feel like this is the finished product and like i look my best whereas for me like you know people come on all the time on the podcast especially and they're telling me things that i'm like completely wrong on my thoughts before they came on um so i think that's one piece related to that is this idea that uh i pretty regularly don't care what other people think i mean you know i'm human and like i've got an ego and like all that kind of stuff so there's definitely some people that it's important uh but when it comes to uh most people i don't really

care and so by not caring uh it allows me to be i think a little bit more honest in that like intellectual exploration um and then the other piece that i think is really hard for people to layer into you know business and finance and content and all that kind of stuff uh is the psychology aspect so in college you know if college was helpful type argument like i say economics and sociology which are like two things that are related but not very popular in terms of somebody getting a degree and if you think about content in general it's just psychology right and so when you start to think of everything i do through like just understanding people and how they react to things uh it becomes much clearer like okay that's why it's working at the same

time like i think that's pretty hard to replicate because it kind of falls in the creative bucket right of like you can teach a machine to do a lot of things but like can you teach a machine how to react to people and how they change and i don't know maybe right there's somebody smart out there who can do it uh i haven't seen too many of them yet and so like that's generally how i think about it but at the same time like that's a pretty shitty answer and like not very concrete so it's like i'm still figuring it out right no i think that's i think that's huge i think the you know not caring whether what other people think having fun with the stuff that you're interested in like that is um it is a very intangible but actually much more rare than people think you know yeah

and it's funny because uh i joke all the time that i'm only like this because i grew up in a family of five boys and like we were like ruthless to each i mean you know you can imagine anything that anyone had dirt on the other one like it was coming out at the worst time right and so like eventually you just get this like really thick skin um but having thick skin i think is a little bit different than just like i don't care what people think and so at some point uh i do think that some of naval's ideas around just like if you're genuinely happy like internally you're happy and you're enjoying your life it makes it much easier not to care what anybody else thinks right and so like i always think back and like i've never thought about it i've never been like

am I a happy person, you know, or anything like that. But I don't know, it's just, it's an interesting way to view the world of like, if you take care of yourself, everything else falls into place. Right. And I think that's kind of his message. And obviously, you did a great job in the book of kind of like hammering that home, and the way that you structured it. And so I think that like, there's a lot of truth there that people should go, you know, explore. Yeah, I think that's, you know, it's funny how, at least in my life, the whole my whole life has been a process of finding out how wise my parents were slowly. Um, and so, you know, one of my mom's famous lines is like, who can you control? And you've got to be like me. And he was like, you

can't control anything else. You can control yourself. Like, and you were responsible for yourself. And at the end of the day, not for too much else, you know? Um, but just, just do your best for yourself and take care of your family. And like, you're, you're in good shape. I'll leave you with this. Cause it's right along these lines. My father tells people all the time, whenever, you know, I see him, you know, a couple of times a year or whatever. And if there's anybody over there, he goes, Oh yeah, my kids, they're realizing I'm getting smarter as I get older. Like kind of like, you know, Hey idiots, nothing's changed. I've been saying the same thing for years, right? You guys are just now wising up to it. Yeah. Ultimate vindication,

long game, the parental long game. Oh yeah. And trust me, if, if the internet had been around when we were kids, right, there would be some documentation of all the times where we were like, dad, you don't know what you're talking about. Right. But, uh, as, uh, as it happens for everybody, they tend to know what they're talking about. And so it's cool to kind of experience that now. Awesome. Eric, uh, where can people go find the book or find you on the internet? Yeah. Navalman x.com has all the book stuff. Um, it's got a CK at the end. That's the only weird part of it. Uh, I'm most active on Twitter at Eric Jorgensen. Um, I had some random writing on my site, ejorgensen.com. But DM, email, whatever I'm easy to get ahold of.

Awesome, man. Well, listen, from everybody else, just thank you for taking the time to write this. I know that it was valuable to you, but I think that there's a lot more people who are going to benefit from it. And it's the ultimate leverage. So you are practicing what you were consuming there. So thanks so much for doing it. I appreciate that. Thanks a lot.