Hello and welcome to the North Star. I'm your host David Pharrell. And this is the North Star podcast in each episode. We explore the intersection between different ideas cultures and life philosophies. The guests are diverse, but they share profound similarities. They're Guided by Purpose Driven by curiosity and see the world with a unique lens and in each episode we get to dive into their hard-earned wisdom and apply it to our lives.
What I'm not recording podcasts I write essays on my website / al.com send a weekly email newsletter called Monday musings and run an online writing school called rite of passage. I hope you enjoy the show. My guest today is Eric Jorgensen a product strategist at zaarly and the author of The almanach of Navarre ravikant a guide to wealth and happiness the book.
And curate Sandoval's wisdom from Twitter podcasts and essays over the past decade Nepal is the founder of AngelList an angel investor who has invested in companies like Twitter and Uber and The Man Behind one of the most popular Twitter accounts in the world. He's known for his thoughts on startups investing cryptocurrencies wealth and happiness. This is a conversation about that book which Eric just wrote. We began the conversation talking about
Fly by zero effects which comes from a short ebook that Eric wrote called Career advice for uniquely ambitious people then we spoke about the almanac we talked about the differences between Charlie Munger and Navarra vacant building specific knowledge and how operating companies influence Nepal's philosophy of Life at the end. We also jammed on what navall would say to the owners of Joe's Barbecue Eric's favorite.
In Kansas City, please enjoy this conversation.
So Eric, you have published an e-book and now a full book with the Neva Almanac and in that first ebook which is where we're going to begin. It's called Career advice for uniquely ambitious people and while talking about the importance of working for a good boss, you introduce the concept of multiplying by zero effects talk about
that. Yeah, the X 0 fact is I got this from Peter Kaufman if you think of any kind of math formula if you drop a zero anywhere
They're like the whole thing goes to 0 and it's a practical kind of mental model as an extreme example, like if you look at a restaurant and the food is amazing and the atmosphere is amazing and the bathrooms are overflowing with sewage. Like you're never going to go to that restaurant. The bathrooms is 0 the whole experience isn't worth it. Like if they could even it could be like a little gross and be like a point to bathroom doesn't have to be amazing. But if it's god-awful then you're just not going anywhere near it so as far as looking
looking for career advice like your manager is one of your biggest like x 0 is like if you have a terrible manager who doesn't like you like you could have your dream job at a dream firm and your life is still going to be miserable and you're so kind of a hard time kind of getting from that step to where you want to go next and every day my is going to feel like a slog so looking for those zeros and kind of identifying dead ends as early as you can in your career is a helpful exercise. I think that book in air quotes is
Like the product of a few dozen kind of phone calls from people who like a DM me or like can I have some advice? I'm graduating or I'm taking my first job or trying to get into the startup world. Like what should I be thinking about? How should I be looking? And once you do the same hour-long phone call a few times. You're like, hang on. Let me just like write this down and like put this somewhere that you can go read it and if you have follow-up questions, like holler, so it's been helpful for people and I hear that it is like an Insight dense one hour read basically, so
that that's nice to
hear. What is something that now that you've written that of Almanac you would go and change about the things that you originally thought were true about building a
lucrative career.
I did not focus at all on Leverage in that first book, which I think is like Nepal is focused a lot more on wealth and I think I would maybe even change the premise from like, are you sure you want a career or do you just want money because those are very different things and if you're trying to get to the corner office like here are some things that you want to think about but now I kind of start that conversation with like a kind of draw a triangle and I'm like
In one corner, you're completely self-employed. You work 10 hours a week. Maybe you work a hundred hours a week, but you're completely independent. You might not have a super-strong income. But like you make up yourself on the other hand you are in the corner office. You're well paid but you work your ass off and on the other you're like a bureaucrat who basically can't get fired. And all you need to do is like your minimum job. But like the rest of your life is Rich, you know, you have plenty of time to focus on your family you go on vacation. All you need to do is kind of
Find a place where it's really really easy to tread water like in that triangle. Where do you want to live? Which attracts you most which repels you the most and that kind of gets you somewhere closer to something. That might be a better fit for you like not everyone is going to want to optimize for career. Not everyone is going to want to optimize for freedom and certainly not everyone's going to optimize for like, how can I get the easiest be minus so that I can get in my working life, but knowing what you're going for is kind of like a triaging step that I would take with that book.
You know as the title suggests is designed for uniquely ambitious people and if you're going on dming people to get on a phone to like figure out how to climb the ladder faster like you're probably uniquely ambitious already. And so that is kind of where that set of information that set of suggestions comes from
cool moving into your interest with Charlie Munger. What do you think Charlie Munger and Neva would disagree on
Oh man, a lot of stuff, you know Charlie avoids Tech like the plague is a 92 year old man. Now who like doesn't believe that Bitcoin is real and of all is like a partner in a crypto fund Nepal has taken a lot of leadership from longer around like mental models and some of the kind of rules for thought but taken a completely different direction as far as building wealth investment is investment. You know, Charlie Munger is rule. Number one is don't lose money and the Vols
Number one is like don't miss an opportunity, you know, the seed investing thing is kind of like spray and pray the more kind of widespread. You can get you want High upside with 1X downside and Charlie's like I don't even want to lose that 1X just get into great companies at a fair price and never sell, you know, the Costco and Glenn are and like just put the money in let it compound but they're very different men born in very different arrows you no longer was a lawyer and made his first million in real estate years ago and like
Served in the military so it's not surprising but I think that there's a natural kind of bridge between kind of Our Generation who appreciates Monger but doesn't know necessarily how to apply some of what he talks about in in our world. Now, you know, it's really difficult to be like a gram style value investor in the tech world. Like you just would never put any money in play but looking at some of the you know, the mental models and the tools for thought that and sort of
You know, like self-taught kind of polymath that Munger is kind of leads you into Nepal as a kind of a next person to study to kind of say, how do I Bridge these worlds between applying mental models to Tech and learning what you know, the products these are software products and the fact that media is now infinitely scalable at very very minimal costs. Like how does that change the world and that was of the kind of things that Nepal has kind of pushed farther on is closer to the technological Edge.
Some of these things that were there were
applying. Yeah, one of the ideas that Nepal has that I have been grappling with and probably disagree with at this point is that you should really focus on the foundation's I think it's rationally true behaviourally false and what I mean by that is he says that you should just study the basics and every field learn those learn those learn those and then only later begin to work up to the other stuff, but the fact of the matter is
I just don't think that there's a lot of people who can actually follow through on that and I'm not even sure that no Valle is following through on that as much as he implies with that quote. You know, he brings up a good line that you mention in the book where he talks about all the people who have read biology books, but they've never went read Darwin all the people who are familiar with the latest economics papers, but they've never read Adam Smith. That is a good point about the foundational.
Text but there's something about Nepal's insistence of focusing on these foundational books, which I just don't think are practical ways to learn that somebody's actually going to implement and maybe even himself.
Yeah interesting. I have no way of knowing what's on the Vols Kindle, you know or where he reads and spends his time. I know that in the vault like Munger is a fan of the iron prescription.
Like he will tell you the most rigorous thing that you can and should do and if you can do it good for you. You'll be A Cut Above. You don't have to do it. Not everybody does not everybody will no problem. But if you're up for it, that's what you should be doing. Or that is the best thing that he can think of to recommend. You are very right in that like some people is harder to read Darwin than it is to read an article written about Darwin. They like it just is and sometimes you don't have the
The Willpower or the motivation to get through that fund out foundational text it's hard to you know, start at Socrates and and work your way all the way up some translations are garbage, you know, but if you look at some of the people who are the most successful, you'll see that as a pattern that they have like a deep command of the fundamentals, you know, you see to lead going back to like learning languages to read The Originals because he doesn't trust the translations or you know, Elon Musk starting over with
Rocket science from first principles and formulas to see whether or not you know, you can actually just use a missile to get into space. So but tactically I think it is important to understand like it'll take me a year to get through the intelligent investor. I just don't want to read the foundational things, but I want to learn about investing and then your choices. Are you either choose something easier that you'll actually get through and risk not having that fundamental knowledge and being out.
Played by somebody who does or you decide that this really is the most important thing for you to study and I'm going to make it through this thing and it's going to be hard but once I do I'll be much more capable of kind of whatever comes next and you can't do it in every category for every topic and it so it forces you to kind of focus and choose where to apply your will power, but I don't think that's a bad thing
Neva went to Dartmouth where he studied economics and computer science and at the time he thought he was going to go get his PhD in economics.
And what I find interesting about navall Paul Graham Peter teal Balaji service and like a lot of the big names in Silicon Valley is how many of them would have been academics and another life but then decided to come into the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial culture and a non-trivial amount of the intellect of Silicon Valley is Downstream of these academic types.
Yeah, I wonder how much of that is just that they are smart people who got pulled into Smart Systems and their type A enough to be like whatever this room is. I'm going to win at this room who are the winners of this room PhD is great. I'll be that. Oh there's other rooms. All right, I'm gonna go I like that one better. So I mean clearly all of those people are just like brilliant raw horsepower machines, and I know that you know teal story of like I thought I was going to be on the path to become a Supreme Court judge, and then I saw that there were other
It's and so I wanted to take them and there's I think always that period of time between when you're like 17 and 25 where you're like, holy shit. There's a lot of roads out there. I don't have to stay on this one. I know I want to go fast. But like now I get to pick the road. I want to go fast on to cool. So I think that is a helpful kind of Life stage, but always just like looking at the options available to you and not being afraid to change roads, especially early in your in your life.
Hmm you love comedy and what advice wouldn't have all have for your favorite.
Median from a business perspective. Let's go with that one.
Oh interesting.
So one of my favorite comedians right now is Bert Kreischer. He's been like in the game for a long time but kind of known only to Comedians and is just now kind of like having big sets and Netflix specials and stuff like that and he's like best friends with Tom Segura and Joe Rogan, but just now is kind of like becoming a big name on his own. He is constantly on Instagram and he is getting much much better at I think he's got like three or four podcasts like all at once.
I think he's just trying to kind of like maximize surface area. But I think that as far as leverage goes like I don't know that he was particularly leveraged and I don't know that he is as focused as he could be on creating like Evergreen content that lives beyond like as a comedian your podcast is like pretty engaging and like you kind of get a cult following out of it. But especially when you have three or four like comedy podcasts are often like pretty low quality.
Polity compared to like comedy sets and it takes a long time and a lot of hours to like get a set done and a full special like that is a year-and-a-half of writing and touring and you know small rooms and drafting but I think and I could be I don't know the economics of the comedy business particularly well, but I would guess that most of the Returns come from those big kind of tent pole specials and that really focusing on getting like one of those out every year.
Would probably be a much higher return than doing like three or four podcasts at once but almost all comedians are operating like under their own name. So they have accountability. They have specific knowledge. I think it took Bert Kreischer a little while to kind of find his way into the like Dad who parties like specific knowledge kind of Niche and he just, you know, I've listened to some of his earlier stuff and it just wasn't quite as crisp as to like who he was and what he was speaking to.
To but he even though he was around it just took him a little while to kind of find his voice and those years were largely like he honed his craft. He's an amazing Storyteller. His timing is amazing. He's unique in that. He laughs at his own jokes on stage, which I can I find funny purists are kind of like that's not how you're supposed to do it, but I he's got this adorable little giggle and he comes out with his shirt off and it's just like memorable little things that kind of make it a more fun experience, even though they break some of the rules of Comedy.
What do you think that
Neva all specific knowledge is
Hmm, that's a good question. He is and this has been probably like clear since he was writing Venture hacks like 10 years ago with navy may be the most deeply studied in like the deal structure between early stage companies and Venture capitalists and that came from kind of a challenging chapter in his life where there was like a lawsuit between him and some of his co-founders and their Venture capitalists around epinions is
In 2000 and it was eventually settled out of court, but it forced of all to get like really really deep understanding of every little term of these agreements and all of the controls that venture capitalist had and what the backstops were. And so that Venture hacks really came from trying to educate entrepreneurs about this huge asymmetry about you know, Venture capitalists are running 10 deal sheets a year and entrepreneurs may be raised two or three rounds of funding in their whole lives for even
the average and so there's this huge asymmetry of information instead of always trying to educate entrepreneurs about like hey, here's what this means and here's what this does it mean and so it was conversations became blog posts became a mailing list became Angel list just as you kind of like put the pieces together of like, I know all these people I vouch for these investors. I know all these startups I vouch for these startups. Let's just kind of try to matchmake and in doing like kind of got himself this amazing seat like over all
All of this valuable information that was kind of getting exchange of what deals are getting done. What startups are hot, which was oversubscribed which aren't and now of course, he's kind of pushing spearhead and getting pretty deep and Angel list is now like a few organizations all under that kind of parent company that's coin list. Its Republic It's is really pushing on democratizing the returns of Technology Innovation. And how many people can get involved in them as investments in Rolling funds are a piece of that icos are a piece of that all of which are kind of like now lie
Eagle thanks to the work that he did to get the jobs Act passed back when Obama was in office talk about that. So how did that go?
This was a few years into Angel list and it was still technically illegal to publicly solicit for investment. So if you tweeted like hey, I'm starting a company and I'm open for investment. Like that's illegal. The SEC can shut you down and like prevent you from fundraising for enough of a period of time that would significantly harm or kill your company and the jobs act did a lot of things. I'm like far from an expert on it. But one of the things is to make it legal to publicly
Solicit for investment so now when YZ Founders get on stage and say like I'm raising X @a Y like that's now legal instead of illegal. And so now non-accredited investors can even be in that room. I think it did some work to broaden who the accredited investors are. We still see more of that going on now which is good because that widened the accessibility to more normal people of who can get returns from some of these technology Investments. So it's a really interesting thing to see
Happen and as more money comes in the Investments get more and more competitive and so terms get more entrepreneur friendly. So we see more and more Founders kind of Going the Distance with their companies and staying on for longer, which is a very different from the early days of venture
capital.
So what Nepal says is that you want to arm specific knowledge with leverage and know Vol says that he's gotten really good at finding the point of Maximum leverage with the intersection of both value creation and value capture. What do you think? He has done to become so good at that.
It's clear. He's been studying it for a very long time and I think in the technology business and especially as an investor like things change so quickly that you get a lot of reps at seeing is this business going to work why or why not wear in the value chain is the value going to crew like is this, you know, you read more and more Ben Thompson you start to like see the value chains in different Industries. So like is this a piece of this particular value chain that's going to be completely
Is and you're going to be competing against each other and this would be no profit or is this going to be somewhere where everything is going to aggregate in? You're going to be able to control the price of you know, your five forces and actually like a crew profit and Peter teal talks about this in a little bit of a different way than Ben Thompson talks about it. Then, you know Nathan bushes talks about it, but like everyone is kind of trying to get to this understanding of like there's all these companies supporting each other and all these companies competing against each other and who actually has the
defensible position and for what period of time to have a defensible position because all of these things are changing constantly and so it is very tricky problem. Navall, I think has kind of figured out a lot of things around identifying early stage and and it may be even less about identifying like important early stage companies than it is about being the preferred partner for early-stage companies. So a lot of people want to work with them of all a lot of people trust him to support the on
You are a lot of people believe that they will be more successful with him on their team as an advisor. He'll be low maintenance money. You know, he's just here's my investment like you go run and so, you know, unlike the stock market like entrepreneurs decide who to sell stock to and if a deal is oversubscribed all the sudden your credential like counts for a lot as an investor and you know, the more the entrepreneur trust you or wants to work with you the more allocation you get so your reputation kind of matters a lot and your ability to help
help future fundraise matters a lot and Nepal has built quite a reputation in Silicon Valley that benefits him for all of these things. Let alone that he's you know been in Twitter been an Uber been in you know Postmates and has quite a kind of successful track record already.
What do you think Duvall likes Rick and Morty so much.
Rick and Morty this is wild speculation. I don't know. It's a very like philosophical kind of like break the fourth wall sort of cartoon.
I don't know. It shakes you out of kind of the normal like first person mode that we all go through life in and does a pretty good job of reminding you like how small of a spec we are in the Multiverse and how short our lives are and how you know fragile our existence is and that's it like kind of a theme that you see through the Philosopher's that he studies and the like habits that he uses the mental habits to like train himself into happiness. Like Rick and Morty is kind of a strange.
Support beam for that architecture, but I think it is in some way right it reminds you how small and weak we are at the same time. It's constantly reinforcing kind of the power of Science and Technology and really it venerates intelligence and it mocks people who don't have high agency. And so if you see yourself as that kind of person it's a very rewarding like thing to watch I think
I don't know. I enjoy it too. But it's is an acquired taste. I would say like not everyone's Gonna Love Rick and Morty but it definitely makes you think
that's a great answer. When at the end of the book you say that you're grateful to be back nivi who works with the Vol for the most succinct and precise writing advice. You've ever received. What do you mean by that? What is it about nivi that makes him so
good. I mean the man does not waste words.
If you read Venture hacks, you read anything nivi has written. He's just so meticulous about like, how can I get a novel idea communicated clearly?
Quickly and just be done. Like I don't know if there's a post on Venture hacks. That's more than 500 Words and for the value that is in those words. It is a very incredible resource. They I think they started updating it a little bit more recently. It is still like absolutely gettable. But go check out some of those posts. There's a few that come to mind that our startups are here to save the world is one that Navy wrote I believe in it.
Kind of broke most of the stuff on Venture hacks. There's another one what defines startups is a thing that a lot of people kind of bat around like what's a tech company? What's a start-up what's just a small business and maybe says that startups are where quality and scale meet and so it has to be massively High scale and massively high quality. And if you have massive scale without high quality, you have McDonald's if you have massive quality without scale you have Ritz-Carlton or
Donna pick your premium brand, but when you have a company that is completely determined to deliver higher quality at higher scale than anyone has ever done anything before now all the sudden you have Amazon. Now, you have Netflix. Now you have Google right? These are companies that we're doing something better than it was ever done before at higher scale than it has ever been done before and that almost can't be done without an improvement in technology. And so it is not necessary that startups have to be technology startups, but the
You can't deliver massive quality at massive scale without having a fundamental technological
innovation. If you were to summarize the Vols Twitter strategy, what would it be?
Because I like the reason why I think that question is so important is because no Vols big Financial import is what you're talking about with investing but his big intellectual export is through
Twitter.
Yeah and his podcast I would say I think he would say his Twitter strategy is like notes to him making notes to himself. He's reading he's observing. He's studying and as kind of something new clicks into place or gets codified you just tweet it out and shares it and when you have an audience, like he has that's kind of throwing an idea into the forge and seeing you know, and it comes out hard and on the other side you see
Will disagree with it you see people rail against it and you decide whether or not you agree with them if anybody points out, like helpful dissenting opinions. That's an interesting thing. A lot of people add-on, you know specific things that kind of help you develop the idea. And so I think that that is probably what he would say, the strategy is I think like what he reads kind of
Ends up and Twitter like the format kind of forces you to distill and distill and distill and he's reading philosophy. You know, it kind of comes out like when you distill philosophy as deeply as you can you come out kind of Fortune Cookie and when you just still like startups and technology and investing and crypto or politics it comes out. It is almost impossible not to feel extreme in a tweet like new Watts Nuance in one tweet is very difficult. And so of course, there's a million exceptions to point out with
a particular tweet, but only if you actually like are helpful and generous interpretations of the original idea work on a build upon it but I think that's an interesting way to think about it and I it's the only way I can think of one thing the reason that I can think of what for why he continues to do it, you know if you think about
Who he is and why he's tweeting your kind of like what are you getting out of this? It doesn't it doesn't look like that much fun to me. You know, this isn't your this isn't your business the podcast isn't your business? Like you don't need to build a bigger reputation like everyone in Silicon Valley already knows you you're already the CEO and founder of Angel list anybody who you probably want to work with has already knows how to find you. Although now that like Silicon Valley is moving to the cloud as he would say like that is less.
through and so I think he has a tweet that's actually like
Twitter is a great way to broadcast a signal kind of all over the world and you in doing so you find the 50 or a hundred people that you most want to talk to buy kind of seeing how they react and play with your ideas and who builds upon them and who points out helpful exceptions instead of obvious exceptions who knit picks and who suggest, you know, that that's kind of the game. Like are you here to prove that you're smarter? Are you here to leverage my
Shouldn't to build your own or are you here to kind of contribute to the ideas in service of like building this public comments that we can all kind of take something from the end of the day
in what must have been a Herculean effort? You got Tim Ferriss to write the forward and I opened it up. It was a total surprise to me. I was one of the first people to read the finished product of the book and I opened it up and he basically says I don't write for words, but I'm going to write.
This one and he says that navall is a world-class operator instead of an armchair philosopher. And so why don't we start with that idea that the fact that he is an operator. I think leads into the philosophy that he's able to get to it's very different kind of philosophy. Like when I was studying with a PhD at Columbia and philosophy earlier this year. We pursued a very different kind of more academic philosophy.
Of people who they can do that kind of philosophy because they are divorced from society. Navall can do his kind of philosophy because he's in the trenches. He is getting punched in the face and he is going out and throwing the punches himself. So what about Duvall's action-oriented mindset? How do you think that informs his view of the world?
Yeah. I think it's hard for operators to take
Seriously, the philosophizing of people who aren't operators, you know, it's easy to have a plans easy to have ideals. But if they're not tested, how do you know how real they are? How do you know how they hold up? I think there's it's not a coincidence that all these people who are incredibly stressed and high performing like turn to stoicism, you know, as their default philosophy. There's a lot of philosophies out there. There's a lot of people with much Rosier philosophies than stoicism that may be happier on a daily.
Basis, you know, I don't imagine that the Dalai Lama is like super stoic in the sense that Marcus Aurelius was stoic. And so I think it appeals to those of us who are also operators and also working and also, you know trying to accomplish something and do something new. It's you get a little bit allergic to the armchair version or to the untested version and you just kind of find yourself attracted to people who clearly have also have some scars and some experience to stand on.
When they you know say they've you know been through some things or tested some
ideas on the topic of being an operator. What if you learned about Nepal's philosophy of hard work when you were growing up you were a really passionate rower and there was one time where an Olympian said to you Christmas Day is my favorite work out of the year because I know none of my competitors are working out. What do you think Duvall would say to
that?
Yeah, I don't know of all. I don't know if he's working out on Christmas Day and I think probably twenty six-year-old. Navall would have said like fuck. Yeah get back to work and I think probably current day and of all would say, you know
My money's working on Christmas day. My software is working on Christmas day. My Twitter is going on Christmas day, but I'm not doing anything. So, you know, he worked hard for 20 or 30 years and now the stove snowball kind of runs itself. There's a lot of nuance around the like hard work topic and it would probably be an interesting exercise to pull out all of the pieces. It kind of pops up in different spots of the book and would probably be an interesting exercise to pull it all out and kind of like layout just the hard work pieces.
Things that seem conflicting and I countered this a few different times on different topics things that seem conflicting on first read of like hey hard work doesn't matter only your direction matters hard work matters and you can't skimp on it. Like those are two off the top of my head, but probably pretty close to direct quotes that seem conflicting at first view, but if you are interpreting generously and you actually like earnestly look for the Nuance in between those things you start to see that
that hard work isn't necessarily the most important thing. There's a lot of people who are very very hardworking who aren't building leverage aren't taking accountability. They're working very hard at digging a trench and they're going to be working just as hard to accomplish the same thing in 10 hours or in a thousand hours. But if you are building leverage and building, you know it taking accountability and applying some of the if you have a more carefully chosen Direction You and Your clone
And one of them is working 10% harder or 50% harder like you're going to go your hard work is going to take you farther faster. And so it is not that hard work doesn't matter. This is the wrong place to start. It's maybe item 8 on the to-do list right almost after be patient and understand that it's going to take a long time hard work can change some things urgency can change some things. One of my favorite sweets is impatience with action patients with results. Yeah, and is one of those things that
I tell myself all the time because I get impatient with results and it's feels so different than being impatient with action. And so hard work is being patient with your inputs. Like don't skip your workout today like published the Tweet publish the blog post like do the thing that you need to do, but you don't have to score all the runs in the first inning. You don't have to get everything in the world done today. You just have to do today's work today and do tomorrow's work tomorrow and be patient and let the results compound and so there's a lot
Nuance around it and hard work matters, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is to understand and build your direction and be sure you are you have an intelligent kind of plan or you're just working hard, you know to go in circles.
What are what's another idea that you saw differently as you wrote the book where when you first looked at something of always saying you didn't see a Nuance you didn't see how different ideas hinged together.
together at the belt
I think the thing that kind of keeps unfolding for me is the summary of the how to get rich tweet storm, which is just two words. It's just productize
yourself.
That's one that at first the first five times I read it. I was kind of like I don't see the leap. Like I can't quite fold all of these Concepts into these two words, and I'm getting closer to it and it's actually not
Of read this book 20 times in the course of creating it and so it is not so much reading more of the material that's helping me to unfold that concept, but seeing more and more of the patterns in real life and seeing how people are productizing themselves and seeing more and more of those examples. Then I can apply the specific knowledge and the accountability and the leverage and understand how those people are productizing themselves and how that kind of wealth.
Earth creation those with Christian principles are applied and that's kind of helping me connect the dots on that side of things.
I'm asking a really tough question, but it's it's it's deep in the right way. So you said that you read it 20 times and I know what it's like to read writing over and over and over again and at times you begin to resent the project that you're working on and my question for you is in what ways did you hate this project at a time you
To the end.
I had some real creative doldrums along the way and this is almost 3 years in progress. So there were some Crossroads that I was I was just really unsure of which road to take it probably two or three of them one was just a format like a knew. I wanted a compilation of no Vols material, but I didn't know if I should live on a website only so that it could be live update. I didn't know if we should be trying to build a new medium. That's kind of like, okay. How do you organize?
As this information, how do you synthesize it? How do you categorize it? But how do you keep it live updated in such a way that like as he continues to put out new material it continues to improve and continue to grow and I struggled without I had to shelve the product project for a little bit and I was just like it was one of those questions that until I answered I wasn't sure how to keep making progress and finally Trevor mckendrick. Actually. There's an amazing newsletter and is a brilliant guy.
Just kind of like verbally slap me in the face. It was like it's a book like cyber thinking it just it's about keep going. Oh,
Okay, like I slept on that and that sounded right and it helps me make progress again. And so that's the direction that I kept going. The next one was whether I should editorialize anything whether I should you know Bridge gaps. So it's like is what you see in most books like this, you know in Peter bevel in and try and Griffin and like so many of these are kind of the book is built of excerpts, but it's the author interpreting the excerpts and trying to explain them and I wasn't really didn't think I had that
Much to add there are some sections that seem to really beg for it but not enough to make me feel like the whole book needed it and so once I added the constraint that I only wanted to use original words from Nepal that were publicly available. That kind of was another one that like, I was just at this intersection. I wasn't sure where to go. Once I chose that direction and added that constraint all the sudden I was able to start moving again. So I didn't know I didn't have a vision for the final product when I started I just wanted to solve the problem and so I ran into some of those really kind of confusing intersections along the way but I'm
I'm really really happy with where we ended up and I think this almost resembles kind of a new type of medium and new kind of book, you know, most books are one idea expanded into 50,000 words and the source material for this book was well over a million words and it just I kept a silly and kept a silly and even the first draft was like 600 pages and over a hundred thousand words. I think that's the first time I sent you a copy and everyone is like
Buy it here like dude. I don't know what to do with this. It was kind of a porch always Almanac take that was like here's everything interesting that Duvall has ever said, right and that was the wrong approach as I kept distilling it and kept pulling it down and got great feedback from a lot of people and it got to this really kind of tight Normal book size 50,000 words. That is as Insight dense as I can possibly make it from all of kind of the most pertinent, you know, widely applicable life-changing lessons that Neville has distilled
Kind of over the last you know, 10 or 20
years. Yeah, I think that you did the very Diwali thing in order to distill it into its essence. You know, you're talking about nivi you're talking about Neva on Twitter that distillation is very Duvall ask and it's a very right of passage e idea to one of the things we talked about is how it takes 50 gallons of sap to make one gallon of maple syrup and that you're always trying to distill that sap.
To create this really sugary syrup. What did you learn about? How a message changes as you begin to compress an idea down to its Essence.
Yeah. I think there's a really is a tough trade-off you make as you keep distilling where you start to lose people the more precise you get so you know, one of the decisions is like there's a lot of terms in here and a lot of words that if you haven't read it, you know,
if you are unfamiliar with mental models, or if you don't have some of the Silicon Valley jargon, or if you haven't read, you know any to leave or even you know her to talk by him, it kind of goes over your head and I had some editors really press me to Define things are like you need to add a paragraph a definition of antifragile and I'm like
I don't know that's really going to slow people down who already do know about it. And I don't mind forcing people to go look that up or get curious about it if they see it again. And so the more you just still a lot of times, you know, like if you distill all the way down to productize yourself and you say only productize yourself. Nobody knows what you're talking about. If you have this tweet storm, some people are going to understand some of those tweets, but if you don't have kind of an intuitive
understanding of what accountability means and how it relates to risk or how the power of compounding like actually derives incredible returns over time. Like if you don't if you can't unfold the word compounding into two pages of how important this idea is and what it is when you distill it all the sudden you're losing millions of people who don't understand that and who can't kind of like open up that subfolder in their head and appreciate the importance of that concept. And so I'm hoping
With this book that I don't think Duvall has the patience to go like right out the two pages of compounding and like, you know, Define every little thing and so I'm hoping that this book kind of takes a step a little bit above the Tweet storm that like if you can't quite read the Tweet storm and expand all of that in your head to be like, oh my God, I know how to have to live my life. Now that this blows out some of those Concepts and defines them better but not so much that they are that a first grader could understand them certainly like there are people
for this book will still go over their head. They'll still need to Google things. Like that's perfectly fine. Like I want it to be a reference a high density like high value reference for people who like want to keep unfolding it and keep de cilia and see a few more examples and see a few more applications really bridge that gap between like hey, I read the Tweet storm and like I can apply this to my own business and my own life like today and that and that's the difference between distilling too far and an expanding too far. I hope
We thread that needle
appropriately besides going out with a tweet that you just sort of threw off the cuff and said hey would anyone be interested and one of the answers was take my money. That was the one I clicked and I still remember hitting that button. I was like that's a great idea. But like at a deep spiritual level what compelled you to write this book and do give it your heart and your soul and hours of going through more than a million words of
Of transcripts and tweets and
articles. Yeah, I mean you can't get through something like this unless you are personally loving it and getting something out of it. So I think you know in the course of this work. I kind of built a little like mental of all that like sits on my shoulder and I kind of feel like he's on my mental board of directors now and I can like ask his Hogwarts portrait what he would think about something and like kind of get an answer back.
Which is is a high bar, you know if I was listen to podcasts and taking notes. I might remember some things but like when you read the book 20 times and when you do this giant conceptual jigsaw puzzle where you have to like pick up a idea and completely grok it and figure out where in the categorization sort of hierarchy it goes and you're moving things around and your recontextualizing things constantly, you really get a good kind of mental representation of like all of the different rules and all the different thoughts.
It's so the other thing I would say about that is the pressure to deliver like it started with a tweet. It was a public project from the minute. It was conceived and 5,000 people said they wanted it and Duvall was like here's the resources like go for it. Like well, I'm definitely not going to let down the hall and I definitely want to let down 5,000 internet strangers. That wouldn't be the first time. So it really kind of pushed me to keep going and I
Had kind of the same intuition that this is going to be a widely appreciated project and I had people who popped into my DMs every month basically and we're like once again be done what they could be done really excited for it. Hurry up, please and what I'm going I'm going I appreciate your like thank you very much. But it you know, one of the things I learned in this that I would not have known going in and I'm curious how I'm sure you have some similar model for Rite of Passage, but like you don't decide
Side to write a book. Once you decide to write a book a hundred times like you continuously read decide to stay committed to this project and to get it through and I would have thought that like, oh once you decide you decide to fit it, but like that's not how anything in life works and articulating it that way is really helpful. Like if you decide you're going to go do a hundred pull-ups like you don't decide that once you decide you have to decide every day to keep training and keep training keep learning and like you have to decide to keep working on the book and struggle through that kind.
Of creative Crossroads that you reach keep editing that sa keep investing in this project, you know, this is time and money for years to kind of bring this to fruition and it took a lot of confidence that this is going to be beneficial for a lot of people. It's really really exciting to kind of finally share this and see some of that like potential energy coming back around.
So what is it Joe's Barbecue in Kansas City that you really like, so what Joe
Barbecue talk about it. Talk about the the the long line at Joe's They're famous for their burnt ends. What advice do you think Neva would give as a consultant to Joe's Barbecue.
I remember taking either Jose feeding. You burnt ends. It's so good. It's so good josuke. See it's one of I mean it started with a guy with a smoker out back of a gas station and he won I think back in the 80s or 90s who won the American Royal in Kansas City, which is the world's biggest.
You competition and it just started getting a longer and longer line and he started taking over more and more of this gas station. And now this barbecue restaurant is basically engulf this gas station that you're still pumps out front, but it's like one rack of drinks and it's one of the top 10 grossing restaurants in the country. It is absolutely huge. Jose is an institution Bourdain picked it as like one of the ten places to eat before you die. I mean, it's delicious like ribs.
And z-man and like I everybody who comes to town like I pick up a box of Jose and we Feast the advice that Neva would give them is an interesting question. I don't know what like game Jose is trying to play they have like three or four restaurants, but they are all local to Kansas City. There is a hundred person line at every one of them at every meal time. I don't know of a more obvious kind of like franchise candidate maybe every city has their restaurant that like, oh man if they franchise like,
They would absolutely kill everywhere. And I think you know Joe's could certainly get more scale and more leverage out of out of growing. They do have a credible mail-order business that they're on gold belly. I think and you can order from them directly. And so that is an area where like they're getting more sales and more reach out of you know, not particularly changing much but they are they are thriving in their Niche like they are the king of barbecue even in a city that is has the best barbecue in the world like it.
It's a very interesting kind of thing and their reputation is just always up like to serve.
High-quality, like barbecue to thousands of people every single day in a at a blistering Pace like you see people in that they have the speak their own special language their hands are like never they never stop moving. It is absolutely incredible kind of what those places
accomplish.
I'm going to ask you one question about zaarly you once said to me that owning a home is a constant battle against water. I've never forgotten that point. What do you mean by that
owning a home is a struggle and water is the source of many of your struggles. So water always wins is a general rule. It just finds a way into everywhere. It erodes things away. It causes mold. It causes Frost damage. It's what overflows our gutters is Will pools on your roof.
It's where you know mosquitoes breed. It's it gives life even in places that you don't want it to floods your basement warps your boards. It causes would rot. So like almost every problem that you have is caused in some way by water getting where you don't want it. And so when you talk to a bunch of different service providers, you know, they're like are you want to have your roof graded at least to hear you want to have your gutters guarded and cleaned? You want to have your siding see?
Sealed so that water can't get in here. You want to have your lawn graded? So that water doesn't pool new your foundation. You want to have the sump pump always working. So the water doesn't stay in the basement. And so it is just all of these kind of tricks almost for like luring nature away from the things that you are trying to prevent water water from doing permanent damage to and yeah, it's a you're never going to win. It's just how quickly you know, do you do you move backwards and where can you kind of invest to protect protect the expensive?
And keep everything running
smoothly last question. You have a line that says creating. This book has changed me. I feel more clarity confidence and peace through all aspects of Life. Why don't you and the conversation with unpacking that sentence?
Yeah, you can't really spend this much time with these ideas and not kind of take them in for better or worse. So you kind of have to I'm glad I
what carefully chose who to study in which book to write and it's funny that you can I can spend too much time thinking about the wealth building section and like stress myself out or I can spend too much time focus on kind of the aspects of happiness and get like really chill and stop accomplishing things and actually like when I finished editing the happiness section, you know for I think the first or second time I just kind of like shelf the book for a month or two just because I like didn't feel any pressure to
Contador change anything about my situation anymore, which is like kind of earned myself a mental vacation is like deeply peaceful and then I got a little like Nancy again and like started working on it and picked it back up. And so you finally kind of you internalize all these things that are like habits of peace and you develop this contentedness and it changes a little bit how much you try to change the things that are going on around you which is perfectly fine. Like, you know,
Animals tweets is like we see ourselves as fixed in the world is malleable, but it's mostly that. The world is fixed and we are malleable. Wow. So if you learn to kind of adjust your expectations to meet reality like nothing bothers you and that's and that's fine and you're happy and you're a piece if you choose to try to change the world.
You are all the sudden what you wish to be true isn't true until you accomplish this thing. And that is a tumultuous place to be like that's an uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to hold that desire and to work on that all the time and to decide that you are not going to be happy until this. You know what you see as this way that the world needs to be malleable is resolved and I think the struggle and the core kind of tension of this book is like, how do you do both at the same time? How do you
Use your desires very very carefully. How do you choose as few as possible? How do you assume responsibility for yourself? How do you kind of accept yourself and grow yourself at the same time? Like that is a tremendous challenge that all of us face every day and to be to fall kind of on either side of that infinitely thin line is psychologically difficult and emotionally difficult, but you can't stay on it, you know perfectly all the time and so
So just learning to understand that that's the just attitudes of life. And that's the scale that we exist on and that we all exist on everybody around us is is going through the same thing of trying to stay on this line, you know, some people understanding and seeing it for what it is more than others. Some people being far from the line in one way or another at any given time and just accepting all of those things about each other and understanding all those things about each
other. That's that's a beautiful place to close Eric Jorgensen. Thank you very much Steve.
Hey again, it's David here. One more time before you leave. I want to tell you about my online writing school called rite of passage. Now. It's nothing like the boring writing classes. You took in school. It's made for Curious people just like you who want to write more think better and use the internet to spark incredible friendships and don't tell your English teacher. I said this but there's no talks of adverbs or
Conjunctions, none of that boring stuff right if passage is way more practical than that. See I've taken everything. I've learned from interviewing some of the world's most effective people on this podcast, and I've asked them how they write and then I distilled those lessons into a powerful set of principles for helping you write better. If you want to start writing online rite of passage is the best place to begin. That's all for today and thanks so much for
listening
