#45: Eric Jorgenson - Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, and Book Marketing

Sup nerds, welcome to the Jason Levin Show. Today I have Eric Jorgensen on. You probably know him from his books, The Almanac of Naval Ravikant and The Anthology of Biology. God, how did he let you name it this? I love the rhyme. Anthology of biology, anthology of biology, anthology of biology. I could say that 5 times and it makes me laugh every time. All right, you probably don't know about Eric is 3 years ago he wrote a book called Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People. He's kept it very on the down low because he's had a lot bigger projects going on. But this book is a treasure trove of information. I read the book 3 years ago when I was just getting into startups, and it put me on the fast track to getting ahead, moving faster, talking to smarter people, working with people that I should never have the chance to get to talk to. I'm a dropout. Here I am talking to Erik Jorgensen, a VC, a CEO, an author of 2 books that have sold millions of copies. And I have him to thank. How crazy is that? All right. I hope you enjoy this interview with Eric Jorgensen. I want to jump in. I feel like everybody asks you about Naval and biology, but 2 or 3 years ago, I read Career Advice for Uniquely Ambitious People. Nice. And I found it very helpful because I didn't know many uniquely ambitious people. And to get advice specifically tailored for me was very nice. It was very helpful. So I've been a fan for a while. A few quotes. The long game has costs and there are always temptations from the path. What's the difference between long-term perspective and long-term plan? That was huge when I was just starting out on Twitter. And then boring is sexy. So I think that's like a good place to start is like, what's your current advice for uniquely ambitious people? Has it changed at all?

I should probably reread that and update it. That was really a snapshot of advice and it may have changed, but I also like to capture those snapshots and see, 'cause what a 40-year-old tells a 28-year-old is not always the same as what a 32-year-old would tell a 28-year-old. And so I always found it really helpful to actually get advice from somebody who was like, just ahead of me on the path. And so I tried to capture that. I think I was about 28 to 30, and I wrote that after having a ton of calls with people who were like 20 to 23 or 24, and they were just trying to get oriented coming out of college or coming out of the service or whatever, and just trying to figure out what mattered, what didn't, how to approach things. Like, so I'd had a bunch of those calls and I find myself saying the same things over and over again and listening to what resonated and what people found helpful. And finally I just like brain dumped it all into this document that turned out to be long enough to be like a mini book. So I just put it out there and yeah, I'm, I never promoted it or published, publicized it or anything. It's just like out there and I feel like the right people find their way to it and hopefully get something out of it.

Yeah, it's the rabbit hole divers who click on your name on the Amazon page and like, who is this guy? It's like, I'm not just buying it for Naval, it's who the hell is Eric Jorgensen, right?

Yeah.

Cool. Back to, you know, talking about books as well as like now you're CEO of Scribe. I'm curious, what are some of the best book marketing tactics that you're seeing with your authors and then also with your books that Naval and Balaji have sold like crazy, right?

Yeah, it's really dependent on the book and the author and the market. These are almost all custom conversations. Jason Levin, there's a standard playbook of things you can do to promote a book within kind of the book industry supply chains. Those tend to not be super unique, but a different mix of them makes sense for every author. The things that really make a book take off in my experience are outgrowths of the unique author or the unique book that they've written. And I think there's nobody better at this actually than James Clear, like when you hear him talk about what he's done to make his books and the, he's a great example of the most important meta rule, I think, which is just don't give up on a book. Most people have to, most people approach it as I have to have a great book launch and then they never think about it again. And this is advice Tucker Max gave me too when I was publishing the Almanac of Allies. Do not give up on it. This is a marathon. Just do one thing to promote this book every week for the next, so that's the approach that I've taken. And I always tell authors to never be discouraged by anything that happens in that first 3 to 6 months. Most people need to hear about it a ton of times, get it recommended to them multiple times before it makes it to the top of their reading list or makes it to the place where they place an order and even get it in their house. And then it takes a while to get the repetitive message before they read it then. And then once they read it, then they start to recommend it. And I always say, I don't know how to market books. I only know how to write books that people market to each other. Like, yes, 90% of the marketing is in the creation of the book itself. That's not to say you should ever give up on it after it comes out, but you can't will a mediocre book into greatness. You just can't do it. Like it's too dependent on word of mouth and reference and quality and recommendation. Every time you are worried that your book won't be like marketed, just write it a little better. You do one more editing pass, cut a few more words, that kind of stuff.

Love it. Love it. Yeah, I, my book found its first super fan this week, which was cool. Somebody ordered 30 copies. Oh yeah. Their friends who are all meme lords slash techies in that world. And so that was a cool feeling, man. Starting writing it, a lot of people were like, who the hell is the target market for a book about meme marketing? And it's been cool to see there's a lot of people, a lot of marketing nerds in general, just like out there who are looking for weird ways to market.

Yeah. And you were— great branding advice 101 is do something that hasn't been done before, do something remarkable, get far away from the crowd, maximize or minimize a few variables. And those apply to books as well. Like I think yours is a great example of that. Like nobody else has written a book like this before and a lot of people are thinking about it. So it, it is a, it is a great like flag to plant. I think it was super smart move.

Appreciate it, man. Curious, memes are not boring, but why is boring sexy? Because I think I'm starting to believe more and more boring is sexy.

Yeah, I think it's, this came up a bunch of different times. I remember Brett Bishore saying this when he was like early on in his like buying boring businesses thing. From a, like, investment return perspective, he absolutely smashed everybody who was, like, chasing a sexy thing. And I think the same is true of ideas, and the same is true, like, when you find yourself, like, in the middle of a stampeding herd of people, you're, like, you're probably not early enough or late enough to be doing something unique enough to be remarkable or uniquely valuable. And so So like boring is a really good way to be self-effacing about whatever you're working on. If you lean into the fact that it's going to bore other people, like you have to be a super nerd about a thing that other people don't care about in order to be that sort of contrarian and right sort of bet, whether that's a brand or a space or a channel or a product or whatever. And it's uncomfortable to be out of that herd. Like it's much more fun to all be to each other when the numbers go up in the middle of crypto land and everybody feels smart together. And that is a better feeling, like, in your genes, but also it's a really good way to get burned long run and to find yourself chasing stuff that isn't like a truly authentic interest to you. So if you remind yourself that boring is sexy, if you remind yourself that most people shouldn't care about what you're working on for a while, that's okay, that's cool. Like, you're going to you're going to take boring, you're going to start with boring and you're going to make it sexy by how much passion you put into it and how right you were about the thing that you're building and how much conviction and love you put into it. Like, that will make it great over time.

Yeah, we're definitely seeing that with defense right now, which has been a lot of fun to watch and witness. I, uh, crashed a defense tech conference in DC and it was quite fun. The, the video with fucking EDM blasting, andaril missiles, like A-16Z popping up is— this is how defense marketing is done. You know, I was talking to people there because I was, I was, I was thinking, I was like, I would love to be working with a defense company doing marketing. And just like, we're marketing to governments. Like, we don't need, we don't need sexy marketing. And it's like, yes, but you do. Like, you need like, propagandist or like somebody to, I don't know. I think Andrew is doing a great job and maybe that's just Palmer being Palmer, but I don't know.

Yeah. He's a unique one. He definitely is making boring sexy. He's doing that Tony Stark Iron Man move.

Yeah, 100%. How's everything going with the font? Rolling Fun?

It's quite good, actually. This is a really interesting time. I feel so lucky to have be get a job where you get to meet all these founders with insane visions about what the future could look like. And I tell people our one-liner for the fund is like funding obsessive geniuses building utopian technologies. And so I really filter for people who are like pretty far out on the frontiers and have visions that are unique and constructive for humanity and just something that other people consider so far out there or so boring or so impossible. Almost nobody else is even attempting it, but adds this unique like capability to humanity. So the fund is doing well. Venture is tough. Like when you, especially when you invest really early, you never know. It takes 10 years to know if you're doing a good job. You can get some clues at 4 years, but like really it's 10 or 15 before you actually distribute profits and have a track record you could stand on. And that's a crazy game. That's just insane. But I'm finding the work like very rewarding and I love working with founders and learning what they see in the future and, you know, doing the best I can to help them manifest. That's fun as hell.

Yeah. I'm curious, what kind of advice do you give for founders on social media, on Twitter, on that kind of stuff? Because Twitter has been a big part for you, right?

Yeah, it has, but I'm playing a different game than most of these founders are, right? I think the thing that I tell them most commonly I think a lot of founders put something in the way that doesn't need to be in the way. They like tackle a small opportunity that is offline with their like main 20 or 30-year vision. And usually the answer is go. If it's a small detour that helps you like get the financing to leap the lily pads, that can make sense. And there's versions of that happened at Tesla and SpaceX and all kinds of other big tech companies that needed like crazy amounts of capital to ladder up. But anytime you hear somebody like say, if we build this, then we can do this, and it's okay, why don't we just do the thing? If that's what you really want to go after, is there a reason we can't go after that from the very beginning and then work backwards into finding what the right steps are there? I think there can be some advantages to building in public. There's definitely to just being like sharing what in a lot of ways and just building like a small coalition of support. But I've got founders that are being incredibly successful, like investing time in Twitter and social and some that aren't at all. And I think both approaches are totally fine. Just depends on the personality and the company.

Yeah. Greg Eisenberg has a cool line, which is either build in private completely and be secretive as hell or totally build in public, but don't do in between. I like that. Especially, I feel like you gotta do that with some of the defense, some of the science stuff that you invest in. Yeah. Are you, have you been to—

No, actually, I really want to go visit. We've invested in some of the kind of companies affiliated there. I don't want to be specific. We, no, we invested in Ethan is from Oros, is actually based in Miami, but he's in that squad. Matt Palmer of General Fabrication is in that squad. Looked at quite a few. I'm like, If I had infinite money, they would all have money. Like, I love every one of those visions and people. And I think there's something so interesting about these like extreme small scenes where people like extreme environments, like generate extreme behavior and extreme behaviors or leads to extreme outcomes. And I think there's something so awesome about an echo chamber of just fucking build. Like it is so hard to do that if you're living in an average neighborhood and an average people. So go get. Surround yourself with the people who are just as crazy as you want to be, and you'll all egg each other on to like more and more extreme places and you'll build some incredible things. I think that's— that place has the potential to be a scene that has repercussions that are felt like around the world and for decades or centuries to come, right? That is what we— the Renaissance was act— it was a period, but it was also like 20 dudes in a few square miles. Yeah. And that's an extreme example, but Silicon Valley kind of feels the same way. I don't think it's out of the question for LA or El Segundo specifically to have something similar happen there.

Damn, I got to get out there. John Coogan's video is amazing on it. So I'm curious, spending so much time with the words, minds of a naval biology, right? Because not all of us could go fly out to El Segundo, right? And not all of us. Did you find—

but to your point that a lot of that's happening on social media, right? Like you can be a supporter of the scene without being there physically. You know, definitely would help to be there physically if you want to be all in. But a lot of these scenes happen online now in a way that is, is pretty awesome. Yeah.

Yeah. I've talked to plenty of the guys and I'm here in New York, but I'm curious. Do you think, I don't, do you think your book tactic of partnering with the Malin Biology, do you think that's a repeatable formula? That somebody could do.

Yeah. I see, like from my seat at Scribe, I see people write books that define their careers or their categories all the time. You know, like that is—

I'm saying, but your position in it.

What do you mean?

Say a young writer wants to go write Peter Thiel's thing.

Mm-hmm.

Do you think that is an entire world in itself kind of thing?

I think it could be. Yeah. There's, there's a lot of people out there sharing a ton of valuable things but aren't going to write a book. I think Peter Thiel's probably not a great place to start because Zero to One is— maybe he's done a ton of work since Zero to One. Like I benefited personally just from the process of writing these books. And then when you see what pushing them and the people that it collects and the good that it does for readers and stuff like that. Yeah. I think a lot more books should exist and I think the process of writing them is transformative. Yeah. Like the no reason not to. This thing started as like just me trying to take notes, just trying to learn from a guy that I appreciated and looked up to. And it helps me smash those ideas permanently into my own head, but it's also helped millions of other people. So yeah, it's an unqualified like win all around, really.

Yeah. Yeah. I was really surprised too, writing the memes book, Memes Make Millions. I had not, I'd grown my page pretty decent. I'd done some social media work, but it was by interviewing the meme lords who were a lot further along than me that I learned the strategies. And then I went and stole them and blew up my Instagram and, and literally stole a strategy from one of the people in my book and like just did, basically made my own version and did it.

What was the, what was the strategy?

So do you know, you've probably seen him around, Eric Zhu. He's like that young VC who always did like the bathroom bit and he's always working in the bathroom because he's 16 and runs a venture fund. And so I just took mine and I was like, oh, I'm going to do a funny bit. And then it became me reading funny books on the subway and popped the fuck off. And it's sometimes you just need that one thing. And then something Eric said, which was like so wise for a 16-year-old. I flew out to hang out with him in SF and he's explaining, he's like, this isn't going to last forever. Like, Once the bathroom thing is like saturated, I need to find a new one. And I was like, you are 15, you are 16 right now. This is genius. And it's, I don't know, I think it's a very accessible way for a younger writer to, to do something is like interview people or work with somebody a lot higher up and you've learned so much while doing it. I don't know. I, I, everybody thinks you need to be an expert, but you could interview experts and then just be the commentary and that's a book. Yeah. Yeah, I guess that's what I'm thinking. Cool. And I'm curious, how does, how do, how does Scribe fit into everything that you're doing with the fund? Are you, and who are like Scribe's ideal customers? We have a lot of founders in our community, like also a lot of creators, like some big ones. So I'm curious, like who would be best fits? Who are you guys, who is like your ideal customer?

Yeah, there's a few different sort of types of people we work with that come to us for different reasons. But so there's the David Goggins type, right? Which is they've written a book, they want full creative control and the full upside of their book. Like they don't care who the publisher is. They don't need a traditional publisher to put their stamp on it and take the majority share and creative control. And that, that's what happens. You go to a traditional publisher, a lot of times they take like at least 50, maybe 90%. I'm sure you know this, but most people really underestimate how much like control and money they take from authors. So somebody like Ogins who's, I know I've got a banger. I know I'm going to spend my whole life promoting this book. I want my whole upside works with somebody like Scribe because we're a professional service firm, basically. Like we do all the work of a traditional publisher at a really high level, extremely professional. But at the end of the day, the author owns 100% of their rights, their royalties, and all their final creative decisions. So that's one for people who've already written their book. And then For a lot of others, they know they have a book in them, but they don't want to sit down and spend 1,000 hours at a keyboard, or they've meant to write a book for 5 years, but they keep putting it off, or they know that a book could help them own their category or increase their speaking fees or appearance fees or help them like bring business into their main, whether their main business or service or consulting. And we help them write that book. Some people want to write it themselves and we'll do, do a private coaching process where We show you exactly what to do. We give you the structure. We help you position the book. We give you feedback as we go so that at the end you've got a really solid written book that's full of your ideas. If you've got no time, which is the case for most people listening and most people who are in that position for a book being able to do them a huge world of good, we will do the same thing to position the book and structure it, but we'll interview you and then in your own voice, in your words, fill that book with your ideas. And we go through this whole process of matching you with a scribe and interviewing you and doing like voice checks and tone checks and chapter edits and stuff like that. So we can build a whole book out of your ideas and your voice over the course of about a year for a total 50 hours. It's basically if you just blacked out and worked on your book for one week, you could get it done, which is amazing. It just, we do all that work for you to give you that leverage over the course of a year. And then Same deal, right? Like you own all your IP, you own all your royalties, you can do whatever you want with your book, whether that's give it away or tweet the whole thing one sentence at a time. That, that was important for me. We gave away all the digital copies of the Almanac and the Vault. We've given away, I think, 3 or 4 million copies for free digitally, people all over the world. That's not a thing a traditional publisher would ever let me do, but it definitely helped me sell more books and reach more people, grow awareness. And it just, so yeah, I think of Scribe, we're like the pirates of publishing, right? All this stuff that traditional pub— won't do or can't do, we offer and we are absolutely like bringing the top talent to do it and help people like just use a book to move their lives forward, whatever they're trying to accomplish. That's what we're here to help them do.

Yeah, I was really excited when I saw you took over Scribe because before I went with Allan, I looked at Scribe, I talked to Scribe, and I had to follow up a lot of times. I, I wasn't impressed.

With, they dropped the ball, but I, I think, so there's a bit of a backstory there. So like Tucker and Zach, Tucker Max and Zach Obraun started this company and they were gangsters, started this company about 10 years ago and then they brought in a CEO and sold it to him and that guy did not run the business well. And so there's like a dark chapter of Scribe for basically 2022 and 2023 where they were like, They were losing money. They were hiring people that they didn't need to be hiring, who they eventually had to lay off. They, the service dipped a little bit. So we, we were getting like, and they went through a, a acquisition, but right before they hired me, like the old company went bankrupt and this new guy's Enduring Ventures bought the assets and then hired me and we're like back to basics. And there's a really solid foundation under there of what Tucker and Zach built, like The team is amazing. The dedication is there. There's so many authors who are super fans who had great experiences before. But yeah, we were like, the ship is sailing much better now. So I'm sorry you had that experience. I hope you write another book. I hope we get to, I hope we get to do it with you. That would be super fun. But I'm also a huge fan of Ellen and I think your book turned out amazing. So yeah.

Yeah. I'm trying to figure out what, what comes next on the book. I'm curious as well, how do you see the future of that market? I don't know. I think people don't, people want like the prestige, but that prestige is like slowly, it just doesn't matter anymore. If you have an audience, fuck it. Right. I don't know. At least that's my mindset.

Here's what I like to ask people. What's your favorite book? I think give them a second and be like, who's the publisher of your favorite book?

No one.

Nobody knows. Nobody has any idea. And the reality of these traditional publishers are priced like gatekeepers. The business model 100 years ago. Meant that you needed them to front the capital to do a print run. You needed their physical distribution network. You need their access to bookstores. You needed them, their connections to newspapers to get book reviews written about you. And like, none of that is true anymore. All the books are sold on Amazon. All the books are print on demand. People recommend it to each other on social media and it doesn't take any capital to get it going upfront. Like, it's crazy that people are giving up 80, 90% of their books to have the honor of a sticker that like to impress their author friends that no reader is gonna care about and doesn't change the outcome of the, the readers' books. And the more and more people who write books are creators who already have a newsletter, an audience. They have a direct relationship with their audience. They know that their book is going to be successful because they've been talking about these messages for years that attracted the audience in the first place. So I think more and more of them are going to be like, whoa, whoa, you're taking how much? Like 80, 90%? Like, no thank you. And it's not that expensive to publish a book. If you do it yourself, honestly, it will— like, Scribe is very open about this. If you do it yourself, It's like, like building your own house. It's if you want to be your own GC, or if you want to spend a long time on YouTube and learn how to do all the trades yourself, you can build your own house. It's going to come with a lot of effort and learning, and you might not nail everything the first time, but you can absolutely do it. If you come to Scribe, we'll take care of all of it for you. It'll all be done at an incredibly, like, professional level. We'll hold your hand through the whole thing. You'll have a great service experience and the whole thing. You know, if you already wrote the manuscript and you come to us, it's $18,000. To do all of the different trades, the COVID design, the page layout, the proofreading, the publishing and distribution. It's not a crazy expense for something that could be worth $50,000, $100,000, like $500,000. If you look at your book like a total value of the cash flow and the royalties and the freedom to use it to drive business, and like, it's a huge asset and it's not that expensive to create one. I talk to a lot of people who are like, whoa, whoa, you'll write a book and publish it for me for $50 grand? Like, all I need to do is get one customer. I was like, yeah, this thing will bring you 10 customers. They'll be like, oh my God, that's the best investment I've ever made in marketing. I was like, yeah, exactly. Come write a book. This is not a hard sell.

Yeah. Yeah. That's really interesting. I, when I was writing the book, I was just thinking about book sales, right? Yeah. And it was like, oh shit, man. Like I've gotten a good amount of clients now because of it. I started a course because of it that I could sell for 5 times the price. Like I've done all this different kind of stuff and built businesses on top of it that I did not think about actually. And maybe I'm, I imagine somebody who's, yeah, if you have, if you're a CEO or CMO and you have $50 grand and you're a giant company, like why not?

It's so, it's difficult to know exactly what's going to happen on the other side of writing a book, right? Everybody focuses on book sales and it is hard to make money, like a bunch of money purely on book sales. And so people look at that, oh, it's a bad business, it's a bad ROI. In my one-liner, I've said this a thousand times, I'll say it 10 million more. A book does not have to make money to make you money.

Yeah, I like that. I like that. That's facts. Yeah, it's definitely been surprising the ways that money comes with this stuff. And definitely just in Twitter in general, man, like I pay my bills off Twitter and it's not how I started. It was me reading Naval stuff, me reading your stuff and, and writing tweets and writing threads. And so it's been pretty cool.

It's sexy, baby.

Boring is sexy. Yeah, to me there's nothing more fun than writing tweets.

It's a crazy video game. Yeah, and it's super fun.

It is.