Andrew Flattery sits down with Eric Jorgenson, product strategist at Zaarly and author of The Almanac of Naval Ravikant, to explore how a late-night tweet became a two-year labor of love distilling one of Silicon Valley’s sharpest thinkers into a single book. They discuss Naval’s framework for wealth and happiness, the three forms of leverage, the creative constraints that shaped the project, and why Kansas City’s startup scene is far more impressive than it looks.
Buy the book: The Almanac of Naval Ravikant on Amazon
Learn more: navalmanack.com
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All opinions expressed by Andrew Flattery and his guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of Flattery Wealth Management, a registered investment advisor. This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be relied upon as investment, tax, or legal advice. Clients of Flattery Wealth Management may maintain positions in Bitcoin and the securities discussed in this podcast.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Lightly edited for clarity.
THE TWEET THAT STARTED IT ALL
Andrew Flattery: Eric, thanks for joining the podcast. Our connection is a couple of things. We were talking about the O’Shaughnessy clan—our firm is a partner to O’Shaughnessy Asset Management, and then we also have a mutual friend in Ryan O’Connor, who spoke very highly of you. So I thought, if this is going to be a Kansas City financial podcast, I’ve got to get you on here. Thanks for joining.
Eric Jorgenson: Happy to be here.
Andrew Flattery: I want to start by reading a tweet that I think you posted the other day: “You don’t need a company to sell a product. You don’t need a fund to make an investment. You don’t need a diploma to build.” Where did that come from?
Eric Jorgenson: It came from another podcast I’m a fan of, My First Million. Sean was talking about how many investment opportunities he missed because he didn’t have a fund and didn’t think of himself as an investor. And I think there’s a lot of missed opportunities because people have this preconceived notion that they have to have a fund to make even basic angel investments, or that they need a company in order to pilot and build and ship a product. It’s just putting the cart before the horse. If you build a product and it sells, you will make a company out of it. If you make a great investment, you can make a fund out of it if you build that track record. Just take that first minimal step and try to see what it becomes.
Andrew Flattery: I love it. And that’s exactly how it sounds like this book came together. So you’re the author of The Almanac of Naval Ravikant. Tell us where that came from.
Eric Jorgenson: It’s interesting—I’ve kind of had to reconstruct where it came from, because the honest answer is it came from a half-baked tweet. I was listening to Naval do this amazing interview with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project, and it was just full of wisdom. He said some things I had never heard before that I really needed to hear. I listened to it twice, almost in a row, and was thinking: there’s so much here that is just going to get buried instantly in the world of podcasts. It’s so hard to discover some of these nuggets of wisdom. What if I took some of this and turned it into a book, which is a much more timeless medium?
Eric Jorgenson: So it was about ten o’clock one night and I thought of this pun I was very proud of. I tweeted, “If I made the book of Naval, is that something you would want?”—made it a poll and went to bed. I woke up to find that Naval had retweeted it and five thousand people were like, “Yeah, do it. Shut up and let me give you money.” I was like, all right, deal—I guess I’ve got to do this thing now. Naval had replied and said, “I’m happy to provide anything you need. Here’s my Twitter history, interviews—go for it. Good luck, kid.”
Eric Jorgenson: So I kind of spread it all out, and it was instant scope creep—from “Maybe I’ll just collect some of these cool things” to “Oh my God, I’m going to end up building a six-hundred-page Poor Charlie’s Almanac version of this that is truly enormous.” I ended up spending basically two years of my free time transcribing podcasts and interviews, noticing themes, categorizing tweets, pulling it all together, and trying to find the right thread where reading it felt like one solid narrative—Naval just telling you all of his best stuff from the last ten years in one tight, dense book.
DISTILLING A MILLION WORDS
Andrew Flattery: I’ve read it, Eric, and it’s a huge accomplishment. I think that’s exactly what you achieved. So good work on that. After that night when he retweeted it and you woke up, did you know immediately that you had to do it, as hard as it was going to be? I can’t imagine it was an easy project over two years.
Eric Jorgenson: I think it’s a misnomer that you decide to write a book. I had to decide to write it ten times. You decide, then it gets hard, and you get this creative uncertainty about which direction you’re going to take it. You’ve got to shelve it for a minute because you get frustrated, and then you pick it up a month later and continue on. Having that pressure of Naval supporting it and knowing it was coming helped. And I got a lot of support just from strangers sliding into my DMs from around the world: “Hey, are you still working on that? Is that thing coming? I’m really excited about it.” All right, good—back to work. Got to get this thing done.
Andrew Flattery: The hardest thing must have been taking all of this content from a man who’s been tweeting for a decade or more and figuring out how to distill it into something under two hundred pages. That must have just been exhausting.
Eric Jorgenson: It was a tough project with a lot of tough trade-offs. I had to really rely on other people, because I was interested in every piece of it—his thoughts on education, crypto, investing, how to operate a startup. In building this giant original manuscript and getting it to friends—everyone from my mom to my friend’s sister who’s in college—everybody gravitated toward a different two-thirds of the book. But everyone loved the sections on wealth and happiness. Go figure—these are two of the fundamental human needs and desires.
Eric Jorgenson: Then it was a matter of finding, across all the different interviews and mediums where Naval had talked about his ideas, the very best version of each one, threading them together, and organizing them into the most dense thing you could create. That struggle is what makes the insight density of this book. It started at well over a million words and it’s now less than fifty thousand. That’s the opposite of the process most books go through, where an idea that’s a thousand words gets inflated into fifty thousand to meet requirements. This is just the opposite process, and I think it results in this really dense reading experience that everyone can take something away from.
CREATIVE CROSSROADS AND CONSTRAINTS
Andrew Flattery: Did you ever have the movie scene where you’re frustrated, you don’t know where to take the project, and you throw the manuscript in the garbage—and your girlfriend has to go grab it and tell you to keep going?
Eric Jorgenson: Metaphorically, yes. A few of them. I call them creative crossroads or creative doldrums, where I just wasn’t sure what to do. One was around the medium—I wasn’t sure this was going to be a book when I started. I thought it might be a blog, or some sort of live-updated paid-access thing that lives online so it can constantly be updated. It was Trevor McKendrick, who writes an incredible newsletter—he’s a chief of staff at Lambda School—who told me, “This is a book. Don’t overthink it. Just make it a book and get to work.” I was like, okay, got it. That’s helpful clarity.
Eric Jorgenson: Every time I had one of those creative crossroads, what I found was that the answer was adding a constraint. Another one was around whether there should be any original content from me, or whether it should be a hundred percent Naval’s words as directly as I could make it—or is it me talking about what Naval is saying? I wrote different versions and tested them on people. When I added the constraint that I can only use words as directly from Naval as possible, that pushed me back toward a specific vision. Just as a creativity rule: when you’re confused or lost, the answer is to add a constraint. That was a very helpful lesson for me.
BUILDING IN PUBLIC
Andrew Flattery: Were you intentional about using the Twitter platform to test this idea, or was it more like Twitter’s the place where you put your thoughts and you recognized that people had an interest?
Eric Jorgenson: The product-market fit of this book was pretty obvious to me from the beginning. That initial reception—Naval supports it, five thousand people wanted it, Naval adds a hundred thousand followers every couple of months. People were just randomly DMing me asking for the book. You can’t ask for more fertile soil than that. The doubts I had were all about whether I was doing a good enough job with the material, not whether there was appetite for it.
Andrew Flattery: For someone listening who’s heard of Naval but isn’t quite familiar—how would you describe who he is and why he’s significant?
WHO IS NAVAL RAVIKANT?
Eric Jorgenson: He’s very well known in the Silicon Valley circle. He was a founder in the dot-com era—he started Epinions, which eventually went public as part of another company. He’s an investor in Uber, Twitter, Yammer, a couple hundred other companies. And probably most famously, he’s the founder of AngelList, which is the go-to platform if you’re looking for a job in startups or looking to find investors as a startup. Everyone in Silicon Valley knows his name.
Eric Jorgenson: If you haven’t heard of him, that’s the quick bio. He came to the US when he was nine, grew up with a single mother—a scrappy upbringing. It’s the true American dream story in the sense that he has some natural gifts, he’s clearly a brilliant man, but he’s about as self-made as it comes. He says if he can do it, anyone can. It was interesting to hear how early he started thinking about some of these things. He talks about trying to figure out the formula for wealth when he was fourteen, in the back of a van delivering Indian food and washing dishes. Even back in 2008 he wrote a blog post that was just formulas: wealth equals leverage plus accountability plus specific knowledge—and then spent the next ten years unpacking each of those definitions in more and more detail, which is what makes it into the book.
Andrew Flattery: The book is split into two major sections on wealth and happiness. There are so many gems, but the most inspiring thing I got out of it was where Naval talks about how we all have uniqueness. It’s a matter of just being you—no one can compete on you being you. He’s not talking to us from a mountaintop. He’s saying, “No, Eric, you have your own unique talents, and Andy does too. There’s room here for everyone to become wealthy.” I found that super inspiring.
Eric Jorgenson: And in your own unique path. I spent a lot of my twenties frantically trying to learn how everybody else was doing it, and you find yourself contorting who you are to follow someone else’s playbook. Naval completely dismisses that. Every human is astonishingly unique—the combination of genetics, experience, talents, and appetites. Figuring out how to apply your uniqueness to the goals you want to achieve is the key. He uses Joe Rogan, Shane Parrish, and Scott Adams as examples—people who are successful because of how much leverage they put behind their unique skills and interests, and how consistently they do it over time.
Eric Jorgenson: The O’Shaughnessys are another incredible example. Patrick is an incredible interviewer and brilliant guy with deep knowledge in finance and incredible connections. They’ve leveraged that into a very successful fund, an event in Capital Camp, and a podcast that no one else on the planet could have done the way he did it. Those personality businesses are starting to make it more and more obvious how the uniqueness of the individual leads to success.
THE THREE FORMS OF LEVERAGE
Andrew Flattery: Let’s talk about that word leverage, because that’s a super important part of the book. When Naval says leverage, is that purely about taking on debt, or is there something more to it?
Eric Jorgenson: Leverage in the financial context—most of us hear “debt” when we’ve got a finance hat on. That’s not the context here. In the book, Naval talks about three broad classes of leverage. One is capital—not necessarily debt, but capital. If you make an investment with a hundred dollars versus ten thousand dollars, the same decision with more capital leverage is going to have a significantly different outcome, even though it was the exact same decision.
Eric Jorgenson: Another form of leverage is labor—people working for you. It’s the oldest and most visible form. We see a business owner as being leveraged to accomplish their goals through the work of others. The third doesn’t have a flashy name yet, but it’s products with no marginal cost of replication. That’s what we’re doing right now: you record one podcast, ten people can listen to it, a million people can listen to it—no difference in cost. You write one program, one song, one book, and it can be replicated millions of times.
Eric Jorgenson: And crucially, these are permissionless. Historically, newspapers had low marginal cost of replication, but there was still a gatekeeper—an editor deciding whether you could be included. Now anyone can publish, anyone can write code, anyone can tweet, anyone can record a podcast. The meritocracy of the internet will take it from there, and people can accomplish truly great things in a very small amount of time.
APPLYING LEVERAGE TO THIS BOOK
Andrew Flattery: Can you use that leverage concept and relate it to this book? You found an idea, you knew there was a market for it, you had talents and connections and a Twitter following—and then you added leverage. Can you expand on that with regard to this project?
Eric Jorgenson: It’s certainly no accident that we’re making the digital versions as available as they possibly can be. I find deep peace in the fact that this book can live on a hundred years. If people find it useful and want to keep reading it and sharing it, its usefulness can outlive Naval, it can outlive me—in the way that we are reading books now that were written a thousand years ago. That’s incredible leverage. Think about how many lives Marcus Aurelius has touched by writing down his Meditations over thousands of years.
Andrew Flattery: And you were able to use the labor of different people who reached out—fans who wanted to read the book and give feedback. And somehow you connected with Tucker Max, the publisher, through that. You got a lot of support on that end.
Eric Jorgenson: Tucker’s been an incredible help. I had this Google Doc that I worked really hard on, and Tucker and the team at Scribe have really helped me turn it into a highly professional book—all the design, page layout, and distribution is thanks to them. I was completely clueless on that stuff. Tucker always says, “I will hurt your feelings before I will let you publish a bad book.” When you’re two years into something and you need to get it to market, but you’re not sure what an excellent final product looks like, you can either general-contract that process yourself and stay insecure, or you can work with Scribe and find great peace because you’ve driven the whole process.
Andrew Flattery: You sent me the advanced copy, which I printed off on my printer so I could read. But I’m so excited to buy the actual paperback because I know it’s going to be beautiful. You’ve got some wonderful graphics in there.
Eric Jorgenson: The cover design is beautiful. I was lucky that the cover designer knew Naval and had been a fan of his, which is exactly why you go to Scribe. Jack Butcher of Visualize Value—I don’t know if you follow him—he’s been doing incredible work. Every day he takes one quote, sometimes Socrates and sometimes Peter Thiel, and makes a very simple, minimalist, two-color illustration of the idea. Ideas that feel vague through one simple illustration suddenly click and they’re memorable and tangible in ways they never were before.
Eric Jorgenson: Jack reached out and sent me a note: “Hey, I’ve actually already done about eight of Naval’s quotes. Do you want to use some of these for the book? Is there anything we can work together on?” I was like, oh my God, these are incredible. Half the illustrations in the book Jack had already done, and about half are new for the book. The fact that it came from building in public on Twitter is an incredible side story to how it all came together.
Andrew Flattery: You’re like a capitalist in the absolute best sense. You took labor, capital, goods—and you’re also kind of an artist—and put it all together to make something everybody wants but that doesn’t exist yet.
Eric Jorgenson: I’m really excited to get this in people’s hands. And I don’t say this lightly—I’m very proud of the final product. It’s exactly the kind of book I wished I’d had at any point in my life previously. I’m grateful to be able to put it in people’s hands, and I’m excited to see and hear about some of the impacts it can have.
WHAT SOCIETY WANTS BUT DOESN’T HAVE
Andrew Flattery: Let’s go through a couple places in the book that I thought were really significant. One passage I was highlighting like crazy was in the wealth creation section. Naval says society always wants new things, and if you want to be wealthy, figure out which one of those things you can provide that society does not yet know how to get—but it will want—and providing it is natural to you within your skillset and capabilities. What are your thoughts on that?
Eric Jorgenson: I love that, and it’s something so simple it kind of smacks you in the head when you read it. Just keeping your eyes open for something society needs but does not yet know how to get. It’s not hard to figure out what people need. We’re sitting here in a podcast studio that’s rented by the hour—an obvious need. I’ve recorded a bunch of podcasts through my AirPods, hiding in a corner of my living room. These guys set up a studio because they could see the rise of podcasting. They knew more people would be setting up their own podcasts and wouldn’t have to buy all their own equipment.
Eric Jorgenson: It’s just keeping your eyes open for growing trends, pain points, and needs—then finding out: do I have the skills to serve that need? If you don’t know anything about audio equipment or real estate or anyone who wants to start a podcast, even if you see the opportunity, it’s probably not for you. But if you were in a band in high school and you know how to set up mics, and you’ve got a buddy who knows how to get a lease in the West Bottoms—you’ve kind of got the recipe. Maybe this is a thing you should take a chance on.
Eric Jorgenson: One of the things Naval adds there is “at scale.” To get truly rich, you need scale. Maybe you set up a podcast studio and it’s successful and you can pay your bills—but the additional layer of “at scale” puts you in a different category. Scott Adams seeing that cartoons were popular but there was no cartoon about the comedy of business and office politics—that’s a thing society could need. Comedy about business, comics as a medium, not yet explored. He could do it at scale, and he built an incredible career off of Dilbert and everything on top of it.
Andrew Flattery: We’re human beings, so we’re always going to have more things that we want or need. For Carrie here at Barrel of the Bottoms to provide this space, which I think is the only podcast studio in the metro that I’m aware of so far—he’s providing a service I’m glad to pay good money for.
Eric Jorgenson: Bezos says customers are “divinely unsatisfied.” And there’s this incredible stat that every day, fifteen percent of Google searches are brand new and have never been searched before in the history of Google. That’s been true for about twenty years. I can think of no more concrete proof that humanity will always be innovating. There’s always something new happening. It almost quantifies it—fifteen percent of the human experience is new at any given time. Everyone can find their way into finding a problem that has not yet been solved, and some of that fifteen percent of new opportunities is going to match your specific gifts, experience, abilities, and resources in a way that you can leverage.
OWNING EQUITY IN A BUSINESS
Andrew Flattery: Another quote I was highlighting like crazy: “Owning equity in a business is important to becoming rich.” I talk about this with my younger clients all the time, both in the context of the stock market and the fact that most wealthy people I’ve met got there through owning a business. I know there was a bit of a Twitter spat recently—did you see Nick Maggiulli? He wrote a blog post about Naval, arguing that Naval overemphasizes business ownership at the expense of doctors, lawyers, and credentialed professionals.
Eric Jorgenson: The obvious rebuttal is, “What about people with giant salaries?” I don’t know the exact math, but the practicalities of hedonic adaptation mean that pretty much everyone adjusts to their salary and the spending habits of their peers. There are a lot of people with very high salaries who are still in debt or living paycheck to paycheck. The difference between living a lifestyle with expensive things versus accumulating wealth is very different. People conflate those.
Eric Jorgenson: What I like about Naval pinpointing “own equity in a business” is that it’s achievable for anybody at any level in a ton of different ways. You can buy an index fund—that’s owning equity in a business through the stock market. You can go work at a startup and get granted options. You can start a painting company and own a hundred percent of it on day one.
Eric Jorgenson: The thought experiment I like to give people is: assume that you already are a company. You’ve incorporated. You are the hundred-percent owner of all the shares. What are you going to do to generate revenue, to generate profit, and to make the value of those shares go up? There’s no magical threshold of being granted equity. There’s no permission to be given. Anyone can start a company. Anyone can think of themselves as a company with their own personal P&L and just start working on it.
KNOWING WHEN TO QUIT THE GAME
Andrew Flattery: What do you hope people take away from this book?
Eric Jorgenson: I don’t know what they’re going to take away, but I know that everyone is going to take something. I have a metric around this—the guys at Readwise import everybody’s Kindle highlights, and I hope this will become one of the most highlighted books in the Kindle store because of the density of insights. I can’t imagine a human who reads this and doesn’t walk away with some seed planted in their head that they will never shake. Naval has such a gift for clear, concise pinpointing of a complex concept in one sentence that sits in your head forever and changes how you behave and make decisions.
Andrew Flattery: I saw on the Rogan video, one of the YouTube comments was, “This guy speaks in quotes.”
Eric Jorgenson: Especially the way he’s learned to write for Twitter—it really encourages that density of insight, how much wisdom you can pack into a few hundred characters. I used the tweets as aphorisms in the book. They’re formatted in large font and you can flip through and scan for them. You can treat it like a book of aphorisms. If you find something that grabs your attention, you can look into the prose around it. The test I love to give people is: flip open to any random page, read one of the tweets, and that’s enough food for thought for a long walk. Just unpack it and figure out how to apply it. And there’s one on every page.
Andrew Flattery: All right, I’m going to do it right now. Here we go—just me pulling the book up and reading the first thing I see: “The problem with getting good at a game, especially one with big rewards, is that you continue playing it long after you should have outgrown it.”
Eric Jorgenson: Can you imagine people who are playing a game they love even though it’s destructive to them? They don’t know how to leave the game, but it’s no longer serving them. How many people are wealthy beyond any amount they could possibly need, but they’re still fighting the fight of their business every day instead of hanging out with their kids, turning to charity, giving back—just because they don’t know what else to do? They can’t give up that feeling of winning. That’s their ego now. It’s their sense of self.
Andrew Flattery: So he’s saying the game is maybe the rat race, or someone spinning their wheels doing something that isn’t moving them forward in any way, but they continue the same behavior they’ve been doing forever.
Eric Jorgenson: I have huge admiration for people who have been enormously successful in multiple areas, because they’ve figured out how to leap from one game to another. We all do it. When we’re going through high school, it’s a very social-status game. In our twenties, it’s a wealth-building game. Then we turn toward family, and other games become important at different points in life.
Andrew Flattery: Right now we’re in the kid-pictures-on-Facebook game. My wife just got outbid by a mom in Johnson County who was selling the Rolls-Royce of strollers for five hundred bucks. It’s a thousand-dollar stroller and somebody offered six hundred. My wife got outbid and I was proud of her for walking away from the deal. But anyway, that’s the game we’re playing right now.
Eric Jorgenson: There’s always a game. Learning to see it for a game and treat it like that—knowing when to quit different games, or move on, and how to have fun playing them instead of feeling like that’s all there is.
ZAARLY AND THE KANSAS CITY STARTUP SCENE
Andrew Flattery: I should have mentioned right off the bat that you’re not some full-time New York Times bestselling author. You’re also a product strategist at Zaarly. Share with us what you do there and what that company is all about here in Kansas City.
Eric Jorgenson: Zaarly is what brought me to Kansas City. We were in San Francisco for about six years, and I think 2016 made sense to move—the founders are from here, and we got some awesome local investors. Reese Nichols was our biggest partner. Bo Fishback is the founder, a wonderful guy who’s helped a lot of the local KC startups.
Eric Jorgenson: Zaarly is building a marketplace for homeowners to help learn about and manage their homes. We do all the research to vet home service providers—plumbers, electricians, lawn care, house cleaning, anything you need. We’ve found that homeowners are divinely dissatisfied with their options for finding great service providers, holding them accountable, learning what’s a good price, and having recourse if someone doesn’t live up to expectations. None of the other platforms actually uphold a guarantee of quality or take accountability. We partner with a small number of companies, but they’re all excellent people and excellent craftsmen, and we stand behind their work a hundred percent.
Andrew Flattery: That’s a frontier. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen the Facebook message: “Hey, does anybody know a handyman or a roofer?” People are just a voice crying out into the wilderness trying to figure out how to make that decision. You’re trying to solve that problem—that’s huge.
Eric Jorgenson: It’s a huge problem. It’s a trillion-dollar market. Every time I hear somebody complain about a contractor or a lawn-care guy, I’m like, yep, that’s our market. That problem exists and we’re tackling it. It’s a Kansas City-founded company, so if you’re local, go try it out. Z-A-A-R-L-Y.
Andrew Flattery: Tell me about the startup culture here in Kansas City. It sounds like there’s a small number of founders who’ve decided to make their home here. Is that through the Kauffman Foundation?
Eric Jorgenson: The Kauffman Foundation is incredible, but there are also startups everywhere—great startups, particularly in Kansas City. I think the misconception comes up because Kansas City doesn’t have a lot of consumer-facing startups. But we’re an incredible place for B2B startups, insurance startups, finance startups. We have all these “boring”—in air quotes—businesses that are incredibly successful, but they serve governments or large businesses, so people don’t know about them. C2FO, FP360, Payit, Bloom—these are wildly successful B2B companies. Triple Blind I think is going to be absolutely huge. iVerify everybody knows about because they had an exit, but nobody knew about them beforehand.
Eric Jorgenson: There’s also a ton of incredible remote employees who happen to live in Kansas City but work for companies elsewhere. There’s a lot of talent here, just not quite as visible. The old Midwest humility—nobody’s running around with a Lamborghini just because they can. But there are a lot of successful companies here.
Andrew Flattery: I lived in Denver for six years, and even compared to Denver, Kansas City is livable. It’s dads in the suburbs and baseball practice—which I love—but that’s the culture here.
Eric Jorgenson: You wouldn’t know, but you see a dad go by with a stroller, and if you’re with a buddy who knows, he’ll say, “That guy started a hundred-million-dollar tech company.” And you’re like, “Huh. Awesome.”
Andrew Flattery: Cool, man. This has been absolutely wonderful. I’m getting a lot from hearing your wisdom, Eric, and I’m really excited to hear what the reception of the book has been. I think it’s going to be huge. How can people connect with you and follow the work you’re doing?
Eric Jorgenson: I’m easy to find on Twitter—Eric Jorgenson, just first and last name. And the book has its own website: navalmanack.com. Everything will be there—all the links, a bunch of bonus content, blog posts about how I wrote the book, and all kinds of other stuff. Tweet me—open DMs. I’m easy to reach.
Andrew Flattery: Thanks, man.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, thanks. Appreciate it.
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Eric Jorgenson’s book, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant: A Guide to Wealth and Happiness, is available wherever books are sold and as a free digital download at navalmanack.com. Follow Eric on Twitter at @ericjorgenson.
Gentleman Speculator is produced by Flattery Wealth Management.
