SPECIAL EPISODE: Eric Jorgenson with 1729writers on Writing Almanack Series and Building Leverage
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Welcome to the Chiwi Journal podcast. I'm your host Camille Yang. This is a special episode featured a guest speaker Eric Jorgensen at 1729 Writers Cohort 2. 1729 Writers is a group of writers inside of the 1729 online community.

We explore issues related to the network state, seek truth, wealth and health, and share our ideas and thoughts in public. It's a great pleasure to have Eric attend one of our weekly community calls and discuss his process of writing the Almanac of Niveau Revocant and the Almanac of Balaji Srinivasa.

The framework of leverage and productizing oneself, followed by the Q&A session with the community members. I hope you enjoy the show.

Thanks a lot for accepting this invitation to join us today. Many of us know you as the author of the bestseller book, The Omnic of Naval Replicant. In fact, you have so many titles such as investor, podcaster, writer, and sandwiches eater.

I remember when I first subscribed to your newsletter, you asked people to share the best sandwiches you ever had. And I was in Manchester back then. So I sent you the most famous Northern England sandwiches and you replied back. I think that's the beginning of our conversation about two years ago.

And during these two years, you have done so many different things. I wonder how you will introduce yourself to someone you first met in life and what are you currently working on?

Yeah, I have done basically too many things for the last two years and struggled with that. And no, like, don't take my own advice on focusing. So I'm getting better at that. And now I basically introduced myself as a writer and investor. That is at least what I'm going to like stick with for this. I make books and I invest in early stage tech startups.

Cool. So can you walk us through the journey of writing the Omnic of Naval Ravikant? I know you have been following Naval for a decade, way before everybody knows him from his famous Twitter thread. So what's the whole story behind writing this book? Yeah, I mean, I first heard of Naval when I was probably...

19 or 20 and someone was like hey if you want to understand the startup world in Silicon Valley follow Naval and follow Paul Graham and read everything that they write and and they will like steer you the right direction so I had been following him since then and that was I mean he was just

blogging at VentureHacks back then. So nowhere near the Naval scale that we know today. And I'd followed him for a long time. I'd learned a lot from him. And I was between projects in 2017 or so, side projects. And I just tweeted out this kernel of an idea, which was after hearing Naval on the Farnham Street

podcast the knowledge project and I was like man that episode was so good I listened to it like three times there's a few things in there that just like hit me and I was like oh my god that is I want everyone in the world to access that that piece of information that like unlocked that just helps you really understand how the world works or a new way to live and um you know it's clear to me that podcasts and Twitter are both kind of these bizarre subcultures not

accessible to everybody or interesting to everybody. So I just sort of proposed the idea of putting this into a book and compiling some transcripts and

To my surprise, Naval retweeted that and said, happy to support and contribute whatever. But it was really just like a half-assed kernel of an idea before he happened to see that tweet and retweet it. And that sort of, to me, took it. I was like, oh, now this is one, a real project to something that I want him to be.

proud of existing in the world and for it to be high quality enough that he's like, that guy's not an idiot. So it was a really good like forcing function for like, I will complete this project. I will make it excellent. And it took, you know, it was also instant scope creep. I went from like, Oh, maybe I'll like combine a few transcripts to like, Oh, I will make

Port Charlie's Almanac for Naval. I will do the maximum amount possible. And there was actually an early version of the manuscript that was like 600 pages. It was like everything he ever said about anything in one place. And I gave it to some early peer readers and reviewers, and they were like, you want me to read what? This is too much, man. So I trimmed it down a lot to

for what became like the final book, but everything else is still like available online and everything. But yeah, that was like just started the evolutionary process of a few years of work that eventually became that book. So before when you start to write that book,

Did you have the estimate time? Like probably it will take me six months, right? But eventually it takes like years of working. Yeah, I definitely thought it would be, like I thought it would be a short project because I thought it would be a small project. And then when Naval was like, yeah, let's do it. I'll give you everything you need. And I was like,

went and found a bunch of sources. I was like, oh, there's a hundred sources here. It's like a million words. Plus this old Twitter archive. This is gonna take me years to do it right. And I was like, it's more important to do it right than to do it in three months. I was just like totally off on what I thought this thing was. So yeah, I just sort of, I think like the craftsmanship won out over speed.

And so I was like antsy to publish it, but I was more anxious that it'd be excellent. I was like, if it takes three years to make it perfect, then I'll just wait. And it was hard because he kept publishing new stuff, you know, two years into work, he goes on Rogan and I'm like, oh my God, there's a bunch of new content I have to like sort through and sort of weave into everything else that is happening. But yeah, it sort of worked out perfectly and I'm proud of where it ended up and I'm glad I didn't overly rush it.

For a book specifically, I've had the opposite approach with blogs that I've run where it's like you just ship it every week no matter how good it is because you got to ship, but the books are sort of a different game.

Exactly. Yeah. So how do you overcome the obstacles? Do you, have you ever encountered writer's block? Cause there's so many materials you can use, but still when you put it together, how is the process? Yeah. Something that I've found that I thought was an interesting lesson that I didn't anticipate is that there's like two kinds of stuck. There's stuck that is just like, Oh, this part sucks and I just need to slog through it. And there's stuck where you,

You need the dust to settle and you need to see your work with clear eyes and no amount of activity makes that happen faster. And you just need to put it down and go do something else. Learning sort of when you're like, I need to power through and when you're like, I need to

take two weeks off is a really helpful sort of thing because seeing it with fresh eyes really changes. It makes it easier to pick back up and do different things or edit differently or just be honest with yourself. Separating your editing self from your writing self is sometimes really hard. The only way to do it is give it some time so that you're not punishing yourself for

for the work that you just did. True. So how often do you need to chat with Nivold to get his approval or you have the total freedom to do whatever you want?

Naval was, he was very like hands off. So every like, I don't know, three to six months, I would send him an update and just be like, hey, here's where the status is. But we never talked live. It was all like email or Twitter DMs. And I think his, you know, knowing him and his high leverage mode, he was kind of like,

do whatever you want while costing me the least amount of time and effort and not like as long as it's like done in good faith and so i was kind of like okay he never said that i was just like i understood enough i was studying a dude for three years so i was like i think i know what you want out of this relationship so let me like try to provide that for you apology the book that i'm working on now is very different apology is like i am invested in making this successful like tell me what you need i'm happy to like fill stuff in we can so two weeks ago we spent

probably six or eight hours on Zoom, like filling in the gaps and expanding ideas and basically conducting my own like somewhat off the record interview so that I can fold that stuff into the book, which is just different than, you know, Naval and I

One, we've been through it. Two, biology reached out after the Naval book and said, I feel like this would be really helpful for people, for me too. I was like, yeah, bro, you need an editor. So we're compiling some of these and filtering down to some of what I think are the most

Timeless and universally applicable ideas. So sort of in the same way, Naval has said a lot of stuff and a lot of interesting things about the blockchain and the future of education or investing or building startups and

it was a really a process to filter down to you know what is the most universally helpful so the most people on the earth can get a benefit from it and also you know it'll be as relevant in 10 years or hopefully 50 as it is today and going through the same exercise with biology is just a little different because he's so a lot of his stuff is contemporary or geopolitical or predictive like for a specific moment in time but i think we're getting there so i i think this will be hopefully a really interesting and hopeful book as well

Yeah, I noticed that Nivou is very good at narrowing down the ideas and sharing the bite-sized wisdom. However, Palaji is...

Almost the opposite. Yeah.

by the time you finish the book, it turns to be wrong or something changes. Yeah. So how do you overcome this kind of challenge? Yeah, I try to filter for those ideas that don't change and that are always going to be useful or interesting to people. So I found the process that I took with both of these books is starting with basically their entire Twitter export. And so I've got 20,000 tweets in a spreadsheet and I

go through and do like zero or one good or you know good quote unquote or bad quote unquote like so just filtering for is this a timeless excellent sort of universal well phrased piece of content idea or not and that takes it to maybe

10 to 20% of the total tweets. So then you've got, you know, you're from 20,000 to like a few, three or 4,000. And then I go through and categorize all those tweets. And so I'm like, oh, that one's about technology. That one's about the blockchain. That one's about this. And so I end up with these kind of like buckets of ideas that he has. And there's a lot of things that are like,

try to come up with an example, like a bunch of our geopolitical and like all the geopolitical stuff pretty much is contemporary. And so there's not a lot of that in there, but there's a little bit about like how he thinks about geopolitics or like the long arc of it. But there's a lot of stuff about, you know, that that's where the main themes. And so you're like, oh, there's like hundreds and hundreds of tweets about technology, hundreds and hundreds of tweets about truth.

hundreds and hundreds of tweets about you know hiring or like just like figuring out sort of what are the things the themes that he keeps returning to and then those become a little bit the big buckets and sometimes they mash together and sometimes they separate and and then you kind of

sort of move that into an outline and pull stuff from the longer pros into the bigger picture and that's sort of how the themes emerge and you try to pick the themes that you think are evergreen and Universal and that you want to put forth anything are true topology sort of core message and so that those are both like truth and technology both kind of jumped out to me early and then it was the process of like finding you know I don't know if he ever said

there are four kinds of truth. Here are the four types. Like, here we go. But like in the book, there are, you know, those are organized into four chapters where it's like scientific truth, political truth, economic truth, and cryptographic truth. Grouping those together, finding the right sort of supporting pieces to make each of those ideas clear. And then

just like threading, you know, I think of this like a jigsaw puzzle, really like part of it is collecting pieces, part of it is sorting the pieces, part of it is finding like the edges where they fit together. And those are kind of different types of work, but that is like how it feels to kind of be in there doing that work. I guess that's how editing is, though I never have been trained to do editing and I don't know how it, I just kind of feel like I just picked up a bunch of puzzle pieces and started trying to like develop the judgment to make something great.

I think I tweeted one time, "If you have enough skin in the game, everyone's a perfectionist." I just have a high bar for making sure that all those pieces really fit together. I know that once we package and publish this thing, it's going to live on in its current form forever and be

be hard to change. So we may as well take the time to get it right now. And especially the second time, like working on the Naval book, I had no idea how far it would go or how many people would read it or like if anybody would give a shit. So I am even like, it is a, I was very motivated by like make something that Naval is proud of. And now I'm kind of like, oh shit, millions of people are going to probably read this over time. Like,

I can have an enormous impact if I do this right. So like, I'm going to do it right. And these are ideas that I deeply believe in. You know, I want, I want people to understand the power of technology to solve problems and create abundance. And I deeply want to evangelize those ideas. And I want people to be able to think independently, determine and develop their own truth, see through the various bullshits that are being peddled intentionally or unintentionally.

and feel agency over how they can contribute to creating a brighter future. And those are kind of the themes of this book. Yeah, good point. So I wonder how's your life changed before publishing Nivou's book? Because I know it turns out to be a very big book. Even in China, there's millions of people who recommend that book. It's very interesting. So how's your life changed after writing that?

I get a lot more emails for better or worse, a little harder to focus on the next book. It's just a different mix of distractions. You know, like I still had a job when I wrote The Almanac of Naval and this like that has set me up to be able to kind of like work on my own stuff full time and given me the like, you know, it covers enough of my costs to be able to start investing, like start a fund instead of just invest my own money. It sets me up to work on this next book a little bit

faster and more intensely than I was able to before just kind of nights and weekends. It is helpful there. It is also like

mediumly distracting and that you also have all of the work you know you handle the translations various requests podcast interviews speaking events just kind of good Karma stuff like that where you're like let me you know let me help and give back and contribute to all the people who are kind of helping to make this thing successful so yeah it's a it's a different mix but it's a it's a really feels really good to have a like there's definitely a little bit of a change in when you have

one specific clear thing that you have done that you are known for, people will like, it's almost like a key. You will get introduced as like, oh, this is Eric. He wrote this book that you have probably heard of. And people are kind of like, oh, okay. I will entertain this conversation or I will respond to this email or let you invest in the company or sort of whatever it is. So I think something that I

I'd had that in small doses before of like I had written a blog that had done moderately well, but the company that I worked at ended up selling for not a good outcome. And so that was never really a big credibility indicator. So I underestimated the impact

on sort of the opportunities that come or the conversations that you can have when there's like one clear sort of, you know, piece of work that you have that is credible unto itself that people are like, oh, that was really good. I'm going to listen to you for

for at least a minute or two. When I look at your website, I see you take Niveau's idea of leverage into a very detailed course and write some blogs about that. Because Niveau labeled and framed these concepts of leverage. I wonder what's your understanding of leverage and why do you think it's so important?

There's a lot of ideas that he has that are complete unto themselves. And to me, leverage was the idea left in that book that I was like, oh, I want so much more about this. He showed us the door, but he didn't map the whole maze. And I was like, there's so much there. It is one of those things that explains a lot of the world that you see. It lets you predict the outcomes of current trends that you see, and it actually should affect your own planning.

um so there's not a lot that is kind of like explanatory and predictive and influential as far as ideas go so when I you know I even when I was working on the book I was like digging digging digging trying to find more stuff on leverage that he had said and like wanting to kind of continue to explore that and then basically as soon as I was done I was like all right I want to like keep writing about this I want to formulate my own kind of frameworks for it I want to

almost first principles and go back to like, all right, what's the actual physics mental model? What is the math behind it? How does it work? What are the other examples? How can I fill out case studies? Once I have this framework, how can I sort of apply it to all of these different people's success stories that I've seen and see if it fits with all of those and just bang that mental model into my head and develop a bunch of ways to think about it. And so I did some of that work and then

in building the course, that was really me teaching myself and recording everything along the way. So it's like, if you want the same stuff in your head that I just put in there, for me, you can go through this. So that idea is probably the most life changing on the wealth side of things. I'm just learning to see the world in leverage and think in leverage. And it drove a lot of my

thinking about investing and reinvesting in my business and how I prioritize different types of work in my world. So yeah, I think that's a really, really interesting one. I'm happy to kind of keep going into that, but I don't want to turn this into a leverage speech unless you guys want that. I think we're very interested to know because for me, for my understanding, the leverage can be the human capital or

code or media can you elaborate more yeah this is so I think Naval's definition of leverage is actually like slightly narrower than mine so I I really tried to like step all the way back and so to me leverage is a model that is like it is very similar to compounding and it like sits right next to it in my head my lattice work so it is like based in math it is one of those things that is like

quite counterintuitive and seems impossible when you do the math. You're like, I should not be able to lift

a hundred thousand pounds under any circumstances like i should not be able to earn a million dollars a year under any circumstances like that that seems impossible and unfair and um basically against the laws of physics but in the same way that compounding gets like mind-bogglingly big at you know at the end of the exponential or the end of the sort of chart leverage is the same way and if you

you know, I can deadlift like 300 pounds with a 10 foot lever or 16 foot lever. I think I can lift like 2000 pounds, uh, which is more than the heaviest deadlifters in the world who have ever lived. Um, but with like

a 300 foot long lever i can lift 10 000 pounds or 50 000 like it gets insane very quickly and so to me the the four buckets of leverage then are tools which naval tends to omit completely product

which i'm happy to distinguish in a second uh pro that is to me that is like a product of your mind um so a tool is like something like an axe a product might be a map to where the trees are like so that other people can do something that only you can do currently so a product is like capturing something that is in your head that only you know that can be through writing that can be through an algorithm that can be through media so to me media and code and even like

directions or standard operating procedures or whatever, all of those are sort of like subsets of a product. And then there's people, which is relatively self-explanatory, although broader than his examples usually show. And then there's capital, which is like

a little bit the loop back to the rest of them, but it's also important in its own right. And it's also tends to be broader than people think. My favorite example of that. So I interviewed Nick Huber who started a self storage business and like his very first, we did a very leverage focused interview and I tried to like walk him through in my framework, which he had never heard before. All of the stuff that we, all of the big leaps of progress in his career came from like reinvesting in specific pieces of leverage. And he got his start when he was in school still

and he had paid for a 12-month lease in his dorm room or apartment or whatever, and he only needed nine months of it. He had prepaid three months of an empty room. He's like, "Well, I don't want to waste it. I will use my leftover print credits from my college library, and I will put up flyers, and I will lease out the space of this room that I have already prepaid as storage." I was like,

oh that is an unconventional use of capital leverage like you have already invested that money in this thing that's no longer recognizable as like a bank balance like you would never say that's cash it's sunk cost from one perspective but it's also an opportunity like a capital opportunity to

sell that and turn it into cash and then reinvest that into whatever comes next so I thought that was um you know all of those are a little bit broader than you hear at first when you hear people you're like people leverage you're like oh I have to hire somebody but also like Fiverr is people leverage also followers on Twitter are people leverage there's sort of fans like voluntary and involuntary there's agencies um there's part-time there's like ladders

sort of up from small, low risk, low cost ways to use each of these types. And you sort of layer on complexity and cost. And as each as you like prove that you it's like a video game, like, as you use each little lever, well, they stack up and enable you to like purchase and apply the next lever and the next lever and the next lever. And if you drastically simplify a business like, like logging is the example I use a lot of like, if you're just a guy standing in a in

in the woods. You can collect sticks.

until and like they barely make a subsistence in existence until you can afford an axe with an axe all of a sudden you can chop down like two trees an hour when you save up enough and invest in a chainsaw you can drop 10 trees an hour you save up enough and invest in a tractor and a helper now you can do 20 trees an hour and then you sort of continually compound leverage and increasing like complexity cost and skill frankly because you need to know what you're doing with it if you just went out there with a tractor but you hadn't

learned the lessons that you learned all the way up through the other pieces of leverage, you can lose more faster by applying more leverage if you don't know what's going on before that. Yeah, true. I forgot who said that compounding is the world wonder, like eighth world wonder. And Warren Buffett in his 60s, he achieved, he makes more because he never stopped the compounding trend. Yeah. So it's super interesting idea. Yeah.

Yeah, he has had basically two plus entire careers. I mean, you could see Warren Buffett as starting his career when he was like nine years old and doing it until he's 90. Like that's longer than most people work. And if he would have retired at 55 or 60, like he could have financially, like nobody would have ever heard of him. He would have been a totally...

like above average but unremarkable um sort of investor and I think leverage is similar right like people who look at the world or the the outcomes and say like oh that's unfair that person shouldn't have that much or shouldn't have achieved that or don't understand why like you know Joe Rogan is making so much money or Oprah or whatever it's like you're missing

you're missing the leverage. They have accumulated and wisely reinvested in longer and longer levers over and over and over and over again. And the only reason they have those resources to reinvest is because we all collectively

voted with our attention or resources or whatever for them the previous sort of cycle. And then they got that and then they reinvested it and they reinvested. So yeah, I think it's a really interesting sort of way to see the world and see and understand how some people can get so much done, right? Like I always like to say there's

There's one name on the front of the book, but if you go to the back, there's 50. Ray Dalio is a great example of this. You're like, how does Ray Dalio do so much? He's writing a book. He's a philanthropist. He's running a fund. And you go to the back of the book and he's like, I'd like to thank my personal staff of 12 and my wife's personal staff of eight. And my company is like, oh my God, you've got like...

a corporation working for literally just you, not even counting the company that you actually started. And like that is

most people don't shine a light on that very often, but it is usually true that the people that you look up to or see have at least in some form, some enormous leverage. For Naval, it's a bunch of capital. It's a lot of Twitter followers. It is a great reputation that he has sort of built over the years. It's, you know, all of the people at AngelList, you know, for Bology, it's all of us who sort of believe what he says and support him and evangelize those ideas. It's probably a

a bunch of capital also, though he's not as much of an investor-focused person as Naval. But yeah, on and on and on.

the rabbit hole goes and it's a helpful way for me to to look at the world and to sort of plan my my work yeah so how do you invest yourself or productizing yourself yeah I mean the probably the the couple biggest leaps of sort of leverage that in my life have been um one publishing the book was probably the biggest second was probably hiring an assistant which I was sort of I don't

I don't know, against, not against, I just kind of like didn't think of myself as an assistant person until I started thinking in leverage. And I was like,

I am doing a whole lot of 10 to 20 to 30 to $40 an hour tasks that just keep the boat afloat. But I also have all of this $1,000 an hour work that I need to be doing to do the next book or make the next investments or meet with entrepreneurs or raise more money or whatever. And it's just stupid to not get some help to do some of this stuff. And

it was in working through building the course and thinking through this and actually like doing the math and thinking in frameworks and being like what is the next the logical next step to do to take care of this and I was like all right gotta you know gotta get an assistant um so I hired someone full-time through Athena which I'm a big fan of and I have a podcast

podcast episode with the founders of athena um if you want to learn more about that that's a quite a cool service and it that has been a huge sort of step up for me you know to help with research or responding to emails or taking care of some of the life things so that i can spend more time sort of working and doing stuff like this the probably the third thing is is investing um you know that that is

something that I thought of as like, you know, intellectually, that's high leverage at the very end and you kind of like feel it, but it feels just the feedback loops are so slow that it's hard to think of it as a really, really high leverage activity. Getting my head around that more and focusing on and thinking of capital leverage, you know, as like put this money to work for you. It will take a while to come back, but it will. And in the same way, starting a fund is like, okay, it's the same motion

basically to invest 10,000 or to invest 50 or 100,000. So why don't I do the work now that lets me, that basically adds a lever to this thing that I'm already doing and will probably only get better at and do at a higher and higher level over the rest of my life. So no reason to delay sort of starting that fund and adding leverage to that. And it improved the deal flow and the outreach and everything that I got right away too. So that's been a really good sort of

I don't know that that prioritization has been rewarded already, I think. Yeah, that's cool. I'd like to ask you a tricky question before I hand over to the audience. I think people have so many questions. So my question is, when you work on Niveau and the biologist book, because you need to be very objective.

not putting a lot of your thoughts, but just keep their original content. I mean, have you ever found some ideas or opinions you disagree with? Oh, yeah. Yeah. More with biology, actually, than with Naval. But yeah, and it's an interesting thing. And it is not hard. I have like a lot of reverence for these ideas. And so it's a little bit tricky. The hard part is to say like,

is to distinguish between oh that's not interesting or i disagree with it and so if it's not interesting i don't feel i don't have a problem removing it if i disagree with it but i think it's interesting and provocative and other people will strongly agree with it or that it's good to show people then then i'd still include it um an example a good example of apology probably is um he's very

He's focused on transhumanism and eternal youth and life extension, which I think I am pro-science and pro-longer lifespan and things. It is not super obvious to me that we should be figuring out how to double our lifespans until we figure out how to change our mind. We are already seeing government

governments run by 70 and 80 year olds kind of failing us in some ways. And I think we all know some like old racist people that are like, I don't know what would happen if you were around for 80 more years and the world kept moving and you did not. Um, so like, I, I am confident that will work out. I don't know. Uh, like I would love, uh, there's a,

I think it's in the Dark Forest book in the three body problem series. There's something called like the mental seal, which is like this really cool, like you can do a voluntary procedure on your brain where it basically makes you perfectly believe something

like it removes all doubt about like something that you want, whether that's like patriotism or your religion or, you know, love of your spouse or whatever. And I was like, we need the opposite of that before we solve it for like immortality or we are fucked. So I was like, I don't know that that's obviously an objectively good idea as he does, but I think it's really interesting and fun to think about it, talk about it.

about the navals ideas on happiness I actually I'm also like I think there's a philosophical approach and I think there's a practical inner approach that he has that's interesting and I think there's a practical like interpersonal approach that he does not really talk about at all like there's some really good research that says that your relationships are a much better predictor of happiness than anything else in your life like for a man a relationship with his mother if it's high quality is like

the one of the biggest correlates with happiness and another some like very long-term harvard study said like quality of your core or your like five core relationships or something is the biggest predictor of happiness in your life and on the one hand you know there's ancient wisdom and those are very recent studies so i think that's

meaningful or potentially outweighed. But I think there's something about the kind of lonely sage in a mountain cave type of happiness that is just not quite suitable for everybody or incomplete as attractive as it is. So it's not so much that I disagree with it. It's just like, I would love to talk to him about that and tease out the nuance or see how he actually applies

stoicism when his four-year-old kid is crying or wants another cookie or whatever. I can't imagine him dispensing some of his aphorisms to a four-year-old or to his wife in the same way that he does on Twitter. So I'm curious about some of the applications, but that's not a disagreement so much. Cool. Thank you so much. So welcome. People learn more about your work. Follow your Twitter and newsletter.

Yeah, ejorgensen.com. I can put this in the chat. That is the links to everything that I do, from Twitter to podcasts to some inconsistent blogging. But that links to the books and the fund if you want. So yeah, and...

I don't know, whatever is interesting to you there. It's kind of all starts there. Great. Okay. If anyone here has a question, please feel free to unmute yourself or put your question in the chat.

Eric, thanks so much for coming on. This is really interesting. I'm curious, as someone who has spent a lot of time studying these people, you know, Naval and Vology, are there things about them, maybe sort of upstream, that are really core to who they are and how they operate that people don't know about from just following them on Twitter or reading their things that you have sort of discerned with your work? Yeah, I think...

neither book really goes super deep into like childhood. It's kind of like addresses it obliquely, but I do think like a lot of personalities are formed relatively early in life and by sort of formative events. And those are, since these aren't biographies, I feel like I really try to focus on like applicable ideas, but I think there's, there are definitely like biographical details about them that are either

very quickly passed over or not in there that I think are really interesting as you say upstream pieces so like you know Naval that talked about like he grew up with his brother he had a mom who loved him a lot but a family that was kind of challenged and like they had a little bit of a hard Scrabble sort of upbringing and so I think he's like I think that he has a core of love but also was very like um felt removed and it's sort of like as an immigrant child is very like let me study how this works and figure out how to

work the system and like that shows a little bit in him I think uh biology had a probably a more economically improved but a similar sort of like immigrant kid sort of challenged in the schoolyard so I think he learned to like be a fighter and like be a little scrappier and more independent almost um

I don't know. I think he just expects a fight and I don't think he cares nearly as much about his inner peace or attending. Naval had a really rough first 10-year career where he was cheated by his VCs and founders and so became very disillusioned with the existing core of VC and startup land, which is I think is what led him to start AngelList and started with

piss and vinegar so that's a that's an interesting one yeah I I think like they don't talk about it much because it's probably not that much fun for a person to like draw like hey let me talk about this super shitty thing I went through and then like how it motivated my life but like if you do the digging you can usually find and at least draw rough correlations between like interesting or perhaps shitty life experiences and like how that manifested in

sort of how that seed sort of grew into some accomplishment later on and I I hope people write you know biographies of them later like I think that would also be a really interesting approach I don't know that either of them would be like yeah great let's do that um but it's certainly doable and there's plenty of like unauthorized biographies in the world of people all the time so um it's it is doable but I think that's an interesting question and something to pursue certainly on the media side when you see that recommended reading you can see

a lot of their influences. And it's interesting to sort of like see who their favorite authors are and then read what is like upstream of them in a media and influence sense. Awesome. Thank you. It's pretty cool to talk to a fire cat. I've never done that before. As you know, biology is really big on pseudonymity. So I really try to lean into that. I was going to say you got a pretty big vocabulary for a Pokemon. Reading this question in the chat, when you're working on such long-term projects, how do you think about setting short-term goals and accountability and getting this published?

That's a good question. I have developed sort of a, in the course I do these like, one of the frameworks we use is a leverage map. And so I do a leverage map every quarter and just kind of like personally chart what my leverage is, like what I've got working for me, whether that's, you know, products or capital or people or tools sort of at work. And so every quarter I sort of check in on that.

Very long term, I have like, I don't know, a little bit of a like life vision that is more about direction than any particular achievement. But I know I want to like do this kind of work with these kind of people with this kind of flexibility.

And I know, and I want to kind of like pick leverage things that help me move in that direction. The more tactical planning stuff every month, I follow this guy, Sebastian Marshall, who runs ultra working, which is like a kind of opinionated specific. Does anybody else do ultra working or heard of it or read any of his stuff? He,

He's a little bit of a nut, but it's kind of perfect for this sort of thing. I'm going to have him on the podcast soon too. So he's got a monthly... I think it's a free monthly planning framework that is like a spreadsheet. And it just kind of takes you through what happened last month? What are your biggest opportunities? What are you worried about? What are your obstacles? What are the buckets of life that you're trying to work on? And just helps you...

triage like a month's worth of work and prioritize it um so i do that every month and then like basically every day i just sit down and like do a you know one two three or one big thing and a few little things that i do in notion um so that is kind of enough like big to small for me um

But some of it is tricky with a thing like a book, because sometimes it's obvious that you're like, all right, for a month, I'm just going to be editing transcripts or combining these things. And it's also actually also ultra working that lets you do work cycles. And so when you're working by yourself, sometimes it's just like,

easy to feel like you worked all day and not actually get anything done um and so they kind of let you say like i'm going to schedule a four hour like work cycle you know 30 minutes on 10 minutes off and just like blow through that and so sometimes i set my to-do list as like

you know do six cycles of work this like today or zero tomorrow or whatever so and sometimes the work is just figuring out what work comes next like especially with a book you're like i'm gonna i'm gonna work on the book and then you like to start writing or whatever and find out you're like actually like i need to be

starting over at the beginning or like rereading it or whatever um and so sometimes you just kind of like start working if it's feeling like you're like i'm doing the wrong kind of work right now i need to like step back or reprioritize or whatever and that's just like part of the maze i think

Yeah, I'll jump in with another question. Eric, thanks so much for taking the time. This was awesome. So I was wondering if you could dive into your investing strategy at all. And what are some of the companies that you look at? And what are some of your criteria? And yeah, I'd love to hear a little bit more about that.

sure yeah um so our fund we do a rolling fund um i've got two other partners in it um who are both friends of mine and experienced angel investors al and beau we are all kind of like i don't know founder operators who have been angel investing um and this is kind of like a slightly scaled up and professionalized version of that so our process um we have a very broad thesis

like there's almost no technology or industry or market that we wouldn't invest in if we felt like we found the right the right founders and something could get big enough i don't know criteria or something like it almost always comes from our network or one degree of our network it is it is especially with like being a smaller fund not having any staff we don't have and doing other projects like we we do we are not like sequoia and we're like oh okay like

let's go do all the due diligence and dispatch all the associates to go check everything out. And so having that pre-diligence done by the network and the people that we already know and trust is really, really helpful to enable the type of investing that we do, which is earlier stage sometimes

there's not a ton of stuff to go on. You don't always are like, "Oh, there's 20 customers who are all really happy and we can talk to some of them." Sometimes there's not even quite a completed product yet. So often starts in the network. The most common reasons that we pass, which I actually think is maybe the most helpful way to answer the question is either the technology is not

new enough, or we cannot figure out how the company could get big enough. There's a lot of companies out there that are like, this would be a great 10 or 20x, the founders would probably do really well, I think they have high odds of success to that level. But we are looking for 100x outcomes, not 10x outcomes. And like, even if the founders do well, there is a scenario where like, we don't do well by our LPs and investors, even if we get a 10x here, because it's

It's just not enough to kind of like move the needle for the whole fund. So I hate it when I say move the needle. Sometimes it's involuntary. I just, I'm better than that, I promise. So those are the most common reasons to pass aside from just kind of being like,

I don't have enough information about this market or these founders or whatever else to go through. But to me, the more sci-fi, the better. My favorite investment company we've invested in so far is doing these enormous six-rotor helicopter drones that are flown by AI and designed to build...

like arbitrary structures out of Adobe. So like they can build an entire house by like picking and placing like bricks of mud and then flying over with an impact hammer to like hammer it all together and smooth it out. And it looks like star Wars. It is absolutely awesome. Um, it's early stage like there, but when you kind of, it turns what is like currently a four vendor, like drywall, the framing, insulating drywall, like spackle and painting process into

a one vendor robotics only sort of like pure electricity way cheaper cost of materials building that is more eco-friendly captures more carbon um is built faster and less labor and more sort of like uh location independent uh like it is it is kind of really crazy what they what they can do it is

you know very early but there's really scrappy super smart founders um so i think they'll figure it out and hopefully like you know we will all buy houses built by drones in the future but that makes way more sense to me than like a factory approach or a gigantic like capital intensive like 3d printer that you have to like go put on a perfectly flat plot of land that like does concrete i don't know um so that one's kind of out there but i like it a lot

Awesome. Thank very solar punk. I love it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. So like, yeah, I love solar punk shit. So like any, you, you gotta find any like solar punk thesis companies like hook me up. I'm in.

Awesome. That's actually, I'm going to do the almanac of Elon after this. I'm excited to get to work on that one. And after that, I actually think I'm going to attempt to write some solar punk fiction, but I haven't really written fiction seriously before. So we'll see how that goes. Awesome. Research. Any other examples where personal assistant has made a big difference in how you spend your time? Yes.

though highly sort of dependent on your personal circumstances. So I'm happy to share mine, but by no means like a panacea for everybody in the last year or 18 months. I know we're recording, but I'm going to say off the record anyway, like my father passed away. My aunt had a stroke. I got married.

my then fiance like moved across the country um there's just been like an enormous number of life things that have happened um like new rental properties to take care of like all that in addition to transitioning the career publishing the new book starting another another book starting a fund like some part accidentally partly on purpose I just went from like

two and a half jobs, which is kind of my normal to five and a half jobs, which is just fucking way too much. And so he was really helpful in some of those things where it's like, we need to replace a window at a rental house. Can you go give me some quotes? Find the companies, call them, tell them the thing, give me the quotes. And that is three or four hours of very annoying work that he can just go do for me and then I can make the decision.

We started through Athena. Actually, they have somebody there who is using their EA to run their whole kitchen and grocery process. So they pick a few recipes they want to make that week, and then they're like staples and they just give that to their assistants. Their assistant does all of the grocery shopping through Instacart and the groceries are just delivered twice a week after a short conversation. That was pretty cool.

a ton of help in like planning travel and honeymoon like we're doing a honeymoon and so like um there's research for the book there's research for life there's um

it's helpful writing sometimes too like um Athena has a pretty cool voice app so I can just like pull up a voice thing and be like hey um you know Fabian asked a great question I'd love to send him this book do you mind like drafting an email um that says this this and this or hey I'm gonna talk for five minutes will you turn this into a rough very rough draft of a blog post um and then like share the Google Doc with me and I'll go through and edit later so there's just um

I mean, it could be a long list. For me, the podcast, like the podcast literally would not get published without, you know, I record and then I say, hey, I'm good. And like a combination of Ivan, Ivan is my EA and Johnny, who's the podcast editor, like basically take everything from there. And I go from complete conversation to published episode with like just a quick review of like the show notes and email.

The podcast would be impossible without him. I just wouldn't have even attempted including it in my life. A bunch of good stuff has come from the podcast. In some ways, that has enabled the fund. In some ways, it's enabled conversations with authors that I really liked. It might have an impact on how well the book does in the future. It might become a business unto itself, though it is currently roughly break-even. Stuff like that.

when I was in the... And I still am in the mindset of compounding leverage. I'm not going to have less of those $10 to $20 an hour things that simply must get done to enable the other stuff. This is the right move. And it absolutely has been for me. There's a bunch of other ways to do it. You don't have to go full-time dedicated. But for me, that was, I think, the right choice.

Awesome. Thanks Eric. Thanks for sharing that. That's super helpful. Any follow-up questions on that? Well, I do have one. Just how long have you been with this Ivan assistant? It's been like a lot of months. Did it take a bunch of time to train him to work well with you and what you need and things like that? And how would you also feel about the private stuff that you're sharing with him?

all those yeah yeah yeah we just um so we just had our one year anniversary it's very exciting so we've been we've been going about a year he uh so athena what i like about they hired they

aggressive. I think they had 8,000 applications per week for a while. And they hire 50 or something. So very, very high bar for who they hire. And then they train them on how to be an EA for at least three or four weeks. And then they ask me what tools I use. I'm like, "All right, I use Google Docs. I use Notion. I use Airtable." And they're like, "All right, cool. We'll do another week or two of just training him on these tools."

And then at the same time, they're training me on like, you must use one password, you must use this, you must use this. And like getting me set up and like sort of prepared to hand over some of the control and some of the playbooks. And then they introduce us and sort of merge us together and then like guide us

both they like train him to onboard me and like prepare me to actually like sort of share the reins we do a fair bit of this in the podcast um so I totally if you're if you're at all considering it like I recommend listening to that it is a little difficult at first to like I'm very like I'm from the Midwest in the U.S that is very like we are very like self-sufficient sort of like independent I can do it all myself kind of culture um and it was very difficult for me to like

delicate you know feel like I can like assign work and he's like you know so we went through a lot of that he's like you like give me work like I work for you I want to feel useful I want to do hard stuff I want to be like maximum impact for you so like don't be afraid to challenge me and so we work through like handing off bigger and bigger and bigger stuff um to the point now where I can you know pretty large-scale projects and hey migrate my blog from you know medium to Squarespace I don't know how to do it I expect you to go learn and he's like okay cool I got you

So that was an early project that we did. And starting with a big project like that, I think really helped because he always had something to work on. I didn't have to think really hard about what to assign him every day or every week. But yeah, Athena does quite a good job with that. There's a bunch of other services out there. Some do part time, some do just matching some, but he's got a community now. So he's part of a cohort that got hired together. There's hundreds of EAs that all sort of know each other. And so he's got a work social life outside of

of me and friends and managers and like sort of a feedback loop or like you know i tell his like his coach will email me every once in a while i'll be like you know how we doing what's the feedback what do i need to teach him so like that all that kind of stuff is very really very cool nice i want to do a quick time check um we're four minutes past the hour i want to respect eric's time and so um i'm sure there's a couple other questions but should we should we cut it now for you eric are you gonna take one um i'm i'm okay

Yeah, I'm okay for another little while if anybody else wants to hang out. Okay, maybe we'll go to the 15. As long as the host is okay keeping the Zoom open. Yeah, sure. Okay. I think Vibe had one, had unmuted earlier. Yeah, it's Vibe. Yeah, it's Vibe. Ah, the only pronunciation I didn't guess. It's all good. That's not my real name. That's one third of my name. The real one is too long for people to get right, so it's Vibe. Vibe master. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. It's three-fourths of what I introduced myself. I'm curious to know, how would you say, how Twitter has changed your life or how important would you say a Twitter following has been in your career? You mentioned that followers is a form of leverage, but would you rather have subscribers or both? How do you view Twitter as a tool, I guess?

I'm gonna give you two equally true answers. Twitter has been instrumental in my life and career, I think. I got on Twitter in 2008 or 2009 maybe and have very slowly built the following over a long period of time. I have been able to meet

and travel and get to know amazing, amazing people through it. It was a little bit of early sort of like proof of work, proof of not an idiot, proof of interested in the same stuff that you are. And some of my closest friends now I have met through Twitter. It's how I became friends with like

I don't know, like a lot of people and I don't think, you know, I have no idea to what extent Naval just like looked at my Twitter and was like, yeah, this kid's legit. Like he's been working a long time. Like he's not a dummy. Like I'm fine giving him my Twitter archive and saying and providing encouragement. Like I don't know that he would have done that for somebody with 40 followers and a goose egg, but maybe he would have.

or the Twitter egg or whatever. Yeah. Bird egg. I don't think that's still the default photo, but you know what I mean? I, so I think that's, I think it has been really meaningful in some of those ways. And I don't want to discount it or say that it was unimportant. I think it's in some ways it is like easier than ever to start now. And like, I've seen friends start and go to a hundred thousand followers immediately by doing like

crazy copywriting hacky maximally like fully Mr Beast moding it and like make careers out of it and I still think there's great people on there I think it's uh its impact has

probably diminished slightly in the context of other things. I don't think a Twitter follower is equal to an email subscriber. I think email subscriber is worth a lot more. But I think one of the best ways to get an email subscriber is to be on Twitter. So it is a little bit of a dance there. But I know plenty of people with wildly successful, happy careers that don't spend all day on Twitter. And I actually find myself spending a little less time on there now that I kind of am like,

found my groove it's it's a very like it's a great explore mode um you find like-minded people you can get connected you see crazy new ideas and like I don't know that like I don't want to understate it but I don't want to overstate it like if that if that if that like makes sense it's been instrumental

it's yeah it's been instrumental um but you can also waste a shitload of time and it is um it is like the definition of like play stupid games win stupid prizes like i guess i would say like it's important but don't let it be the only thing that you focus on or that you do um because you can still get like platform rugged incredibly hard you can build the wrong kind of following you can

build a following that isn't very valuable. But you don't even need to build a following to be successful on Twitter. You can be a consumer and just get the best out of Twitter, but be very intentional about how you do it because Twitter does not have your best interests at heart, particularly. And it's getting increasingly opinionated about the shit that shows you and who and how.

i mostly follow lists and read that that are pretty well curated i use the latest only feeds so i don't just see whatever twitter wants me to see um through like the home feed um and i use it to try to i literally try to make friends with it like i want to find people that i want to be friends with i want to go offline have one-on-one conversations with them like it is uh it is the beginning it is not the whole of the of the work if that makes sense

Kind of in line with my experience. I don't use the app. I use the mobile browser, but I force myself to spend less time on Twitter. I do too. Yeah, I only use Twitter on my phone through Safari now because I'm like, this is terrible. I'm going to close it and go do something else. I am almost happier the less time I spend on Twitter these days, which is why I'm a little cautious to be like, yeah, it changed my life. You should go spend all day on it because that may have been more true six years ago than it is now.

Nice. I have a question about, you were talking about leverage and continuing to reinvesting in longer and longer levers and how that's led to tremendous success for a lot of people. And it makes me think about the discipline that's required and actually to do that. And so I'm curious of your thoughts about the interrelationship between discipline and leverage and how you kind of stay disciplined and motivated. Yeah. That's a good question because leverage is, I always hesitate to like be like, yeah, leverage, go great. This is all

because it increases...

It increases the danger mode of the game that you're playing. You can fail harder and faster. And if you reinvest in leverage without successfully increasing your earnings, like you buy the tractor and then don't use it as a lumberjack or buy it and then crash it, depending on your margin of error and how much you reinvested and how successful you needed to be over what time horizon to stay liquid as a business owner. There are times when you can reinvest in leverage and sort of

get more leisure out of it. But there's also times and ways that you can reinvest in leverage and you better work your ass off or you have made your situation worse, not better. You have doubled down and you need to perform and achieve and have this outcome in order to reach that new level. It is definitely a double-edged sword and you can hurt yourself

more playing with more leverage than you can without it. And that is true of financial leverage for sure. If you're taking debt in the traditional Wall Street phrase of the word leverage, that is definitely true. But it is also true with what is the impact if you tweet something that people do not like that is an off color opinion with 100 followers versus 100,000 followers.

you can get socially wrecked with a big following way, way quicker than you can with a small following because nobody cares. And if you have a big team and you fire the wrong people or just like life can fall apart way faster in some cases, or it gets harder to manage. So I think

maintaining some discipline around the right ratio of leverage to your skill or your confidence or the capital that you have stashed to weather and watch that leverage compound.

I would not spend my last dollar on hiring an EA because that might take six months to pay off unless you're putting them to work immediately so that you can book more hours as an agency that you're running and that turns into immediate cash flow. There's so much to these contexts and every individual decision that it's very difficult to have a prescription other than be slightly careful and try to really understand

the investment that you're making or the risk that you're taking and know when you're making the kind of bet that you need to run faster and when you're making the kind of bet that you can slack up the pace. Those are different things.

I have a friend who took on, he bought, he was in the private equity thing and he had a bunch of jobs, but he took on debt, a big loan, a personally guaranteed loan to buy, I think it was a countertop creation business. He moved his whole family across the country, took a personal line of debt, built this business. And so he had huge capital leverage

suddenly had a team of 20 people that he had just met and all the customers and the seller. He was in the maximum. He had added a ton of leverage, but he had also exposed himself to a massive downside really quickly. And he's like, this is the hardest year I've ever worked in my life. I have never had more on the line. I spent 20 years preparing for this moment and getting ready to make this bet. But this is like, I have never worked harder with more at stake. That's a little different than...

I worked really hard for a few months to get into an angel investment that you're like, okay, the founders are taking this money and running with it. I would work hard to save the money and to put it in. But now I'm fine. Or I published this, I created this course, I worked really hard to sell it. Now I sold this course and now I have all this capital. And now I can take a step back and figure out how to apply this capital to the next thing. But I'm not having to sprint to keep alive the leverage that I just invested.

like i'm at a point where i can stop so yeah that's i don't know is that the best answer i have for that for that question i think does that speak to the thing that you're hoping to hear it does well we're at the 15 mark so i don't want to keep you too much longer but i will i'll give you just like kind of a hyphenated thing part of that question is just like i'm curious from the tactical perspective just like how do you stay motivated because when you identify what the high leverage action is

then you have to actually take it on. You have to, in a disciplined manner, kind of go after all this stuff. And it seems like you're somebody who's got the discipline to actually remain on point with all of these things. Do you know what I'm saying? And it takes some sort of a motivation to actually be properly pursuing all of these things in their proper order. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. I would say there's like trade-offs between

It's also trade-offs between lifestyle. There's high leverage stuff that you may not want to do and that's totally fine. There is definitely like, I can't not work and I also don't want to not work, especially at this stage in my life. I'm very and increasingly picky about the kind of work that I want to do.

what I that I think is good it's good for my lifestyle and my happiness and you know I have a long list of projects that I think are good ideas and some of them are potentially even higher leverage like companies to start that are like oh that would probably be successful but like what I is it better for the world or better for me that I do that then go like write this next book like

Probably not. I wouldn't be happier trying to start that company. And even if I think it would make more money or whatever, it wouldn't have the impact or it wouldn't have the personal day to day rewarding this for me of doing this other thing instead. So I think it is important to not always there's a stage of your life where and I went through this, you're totally optimized for income over almost everything. I think it's

hopefully not super, super long, depending on what else you're doing. But also, if you don't feel like you have to do that, great. You can make way better lifestyle decisions as soon as you're out of that. So I don't think the pursuit of leverage is the pursuit of the biggest financial outcome that you can. And I don't think any of the people that we're following or talking about or studying would say that that's what they did at any point. But

To me, I want to add, I could hire more assistants, but I don't know what they would do aside from ask me more questions and not have enough work to do. That is not... And I probably could go get a high paying job or sell more stuff. There's just use leverage in a way that suits you.

in the lifestyle that you want like i wanted on friday a friend called me and was like i'm going to costa rica tomorrow i have a spare room in the house like do you want to come with and i was like sure like i can leave the country on 24 hours notice and like come hang with you in costa rica for the week and still do what i need to do or push everything from that week out of that week uh that's a that's a great life there's a lot of stuff that you there's a lot of decisions that like

or a lot of paths that are potentially optimal paths that you can't take if you want to maintain like sort of that optionality and to me like that is a good use of leverage is like everything stays on the rails but i am still free to kind of do what i want but i'm still having an impact and still hopefully like doing good and creating that positive things and supporting all the ideas that i believe in while i while i do all that nice so it's kind of relative to the aspirational lifestyle that you have you've thought through

For sure. Love it. Okay, great. So we've kept you, uh, we've kept you 20 minutes past the hour. Thank you for being generous with your time. Of course. Um, yeah, because, uh,

know how to get a hold of me. I'm relatively easy to email or Twitter DM. So if you have questions that I didn't answer here or whatever, feel free to holler at me and I'm happy to kind of do my best and I hope it was interesting and helpful. And I think we're all carrying the biology flag to some extent or another. So I hope you're interested to see the book when that comes out and can help get some new people to drink the Kool-Aid.

Definitely. We'll all be reviewing it when it comes out for sure. Guaranteed. Perfect. We did it. Yeah. It's an honor to have you here and thank you Cam for bringing Eric as well. It was excellent. Awesome. Thanks guys. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it. Catch you later. Keep writing those essays. Dig them. Perfect. Thank you.