Eric Jorgenson on 'The Book of Elon' and the Naval Almanack hitting 2 million copies sold

GitHub ship higher quality software faster. And without further ado, we have Eric Jorgensson, good friend of mine. He is the author, the publisher of the book of Elon.

Thank you so much for sending these. It looks fantastic. And I was particularly I want to get into the the book, but I I I think partnering up with Jack Butcher on this deeply underrated. Uh he is uh an incredibly special illustrator, designer. I don't even know what you call Jack Butcher, but obviously he was helpful in this, but uh thank you so much for taking the time to join the show. How are you doing?

Thank you for having me. I'm I'm honored to be here. Uh and extremely excited to put this thing out into the world.

Yeah, listen to that voice. You got a voice for live streaming. Let's go. The microphone's helping. You got a good setup. It's great.

Am I about to get discovered right now?

I think so. No, of course you've been online a million times. We Everyone knows you. But uh uh maybe maybe take me back to uh a little bit of like how you got into publishing, your business overall, the the the Naval book, and then we can go into the Elon book.

Yeah, that's an amazing setup because then I get to shout out Jack Butcher again. Um, basically like I was tweeting and blogging happily uh in like 2017 and I had been following Nal. I learned so much from him over the years

and I felt like he was putting out this timeless wisdom that was just dissolving into the the stream every day and it just broke my heart that it was going to

get lost, get buried so quickly.

Yeah. Yeah. This is the thing with Twitter. It's it's it's ephemeral which is amazing but there's no rediscoverability. We actually put out this account once, Banger Archive, where we would just share screenshots of old tweets and they would go viral again. But Twitter doesn't X isn't set up to resurface stuff like that like YouTube is, like Netflix is, and so the back catalog really goes stale, but you were able to obviously repurpose it.

Yeah. I I think um so many of the great books have this like long fat tale of timeless wisdom that we keep needing to revisit. and Naval was was um you know obviously has done an incredible job distilling that wisdom and articulating it for sort of our era and I wanted to preserve that in a permanent format and that side project that I did on nights and weekends um and published you know hoping to sell a few thousand copies has gone on to sell I think we're coming up on two million I've given away 5 million more digital versions and 40 languages

crazy such a huge number I feel like it's hard to sell a thousand books and you've sold 2 million.

That is a that is an unbelievable number for those that don't have like inside context in the book industry. Like I think the median outcome is like a few hundred and like 10,000 is top fraction of a percent.

Yeah, absolutely incredible. Uh what was the strategy? I mean Naval has a big audience but I don't see him pumping this book constantly on his Twitter feed or his X feed. Like how did this book actually get in the hands of customers? Is it like top of Amazon? Is it on the New York Times bestseller list? Like how do you even sell that many books?

I cannot explain it other than to say it has become like a word of mouth phenomenon. I think it is just so many people tell me they buy it as gifts or they recommend it or they give it to you know I know teachers they give it to every class that comes through and it's just sort of um it's un who doesn't the subtitle of the book is

a guide to wealth and happiness like big TAM right like universal human desires and new people graduate into like trying to figure that out for themselves

every day and uh I I think it is

you know this really rich dense collection of

Naval who's a really really gifted sort of uh distiller and articul some of the most important principles that

make life make lives successful.

What what principles from that book either stick out to you are timeless or maybe even underrated uh that you keep coming back to you?

I think uh I mean the on the wealth side like leverage um is is still an underrated one. I mean you guys are living examples of this. Uh authenticity is another one that like that word is thrown around so much that it becomes sort of a cliche. Uh but the people that we tend to admire the most or that are doing the best are a really interesting combination of like excellent, authentic, and leveraged, right? Like Jack Butcher is an incredible example. You don't even really know how to describe him. He's like he's an artist, but he's a contemporary artist in the digital era and he's a really gifted designer and he's kind of like inventing this category of worked art, but whatever he is is him and it's awesome and it's massively leveraged and you know, he's doing things that nobody else is is doing in the art game.

Do you think that being controversial is correlated with authenticity? Because if you're not authentic, you can be this very polished one side, you know, me manyfaced thing. You interact with one person in a certain way, another person in another way. You make everyone happy. You're less controversial. As soon as you start wearing your heart on your sleeve, being authentic, you're going to attract some people that don't like what you're showing them because you're showing them the true self. Is there anything there?

Is a great question. I bet there's two opposing archetypes. I bet there is a type of person that is extremely inauthentic in how they

court controversy for the benefit of, you know, the algorithm or just being elevated by being attacked. And I bet there's another PE set of people that

are authentic despite

any headwinds uh or controversy that might come up. And I think the only way to probably tell the difference is just zoom out and see who's been doing what for how long and in under what context. Mhm. So, uh, how obvious was it that Elon was going to be the next subject? I imagine that the playbook that you ran, the process that you ran with the Naval book could apply to a lot of entrepreneurs. It's very it's a very interesting style where it's it it it's it's it's high leverage. I I can only think I can only describe as high leverage because you're you're standing on the shoulders of giants which is like all of the work that they've produced all of the podcasts that they've done everything that they have written. There's a lot of primary uh research there that doesn't necessarily require the same you know access and permission and you can do a lot of pre-work uh independent before you actually go in. Whereas some other books it's like okay this author didn't even get the interview with the person that they're writing about like they sort of you know no one wanted this book to happen and that's a lot harder right um so so so I imagine that the list was pretty long how did you narrow it down uh how did you land on Elon why this person why this time

yeah this is an interesting it's an interesting type of book because as you point out like I'm not writing about someone I'm trying to get out of the way it's not about my opinion of them my northstar are with these books is to just be as for the book to be as useful as possible to the reader. I want the reader on every single page to be like,

"Oh my god, this is a great use of time. I got a highlight on every page. I'm getting so much out of this. I feel like I'm getting personally mentored by Elon Musk through a few hours of reading about his most valuable and timeless ideas." Right?

And I think for those of us in tech, Elon's been interesting for a very long time. And over the last, you know, five, six years, uh, he's become more controversial. But inside tech, he was before he was a household name, he was the most ambitious person in tech. And nobody knew how that story was going to end, right? He was running on a very thin tight rope for a really long time with both Tesla and SpaceX.

And more recently, people have started, I mean, Mark Andre and Brian Armstrong maybe most famously have started asking the question like, how does Elon do it? Like what is this? Why is he an outlier among outliers? And I wanted to answer that question. And I think this book does that in more ways than I anticipated at the outset, right? Like I there was some interesting stuff that everybody kind of knew would come in and there's like the greatest hits and then there's the back catalog and then how it all comes together is actually like what's really interesting.

Yeah. I remember in college someone called me and was like, "Oh, I heard about this this entrepreneur named Elon Musk and he runs two companies. SpaceX and Tesla and I was like, "Of course I know about that. I'd learned about it like three months earlier." Um, but but it really was a very uh a very controversial thing to do. The you know the the timeless wisdom is like focus focus focus. How have you perceived Elon's ability to be like the exception that proves the rule versus a pattern that might actually be more replicable than people think if they just adopt a particular stance in how they leverage what they're capable of to build multiple companies simultaneously.

Yeah, there's a couple there was a period where Jack Dorsey was running two companies period where Steve Jobs was running two companies. Uh, and there's plenty of companies that are collections of meaningfully different companies kind of in one under one name. Um, I think it's kind of hard to extricate like what does run the company mean?

Yeah.

Really on a day-to-day basis. And who is around and who's running different functions like Elon running a company probably looks a lot different than Steve Jobs running a company or than, you know, Bill Gates running a company or Mark Benny off, right? the the motions that he dives deeply into are very different kind of on a per leader basis.

Yeah.

And there's an element of this that like NAL points this out. I think it's super interesting. He's like you are probably working harder on your company than NAL is or than Elon is working on any one of his companies just because he has this divided attention. So let's just say he's working 80 hours a week but he's only working 30 hours a week on SpaceX.

Yeah. like how is he able to have orders of magnitude more impact uh in those 30 hours than you're having with your 70? Well, it is sort of it is sort of interesting like maybe ironic that uh his main competitor over the last two decades has been Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin who's also running two companies and so like retired and

yeah I mean now now maybe more focused you know he's retired but there was a long time like a full decade where Jeff Bezos was running Amazon full-time and then you know Blue Origin was the halftime or side project and and Elon sort of didn't have a direct like full-time you by the book entrepreneur just building a direct competitor in that one space fully focused. So I don't know maybe maybe that's luck maybe maybe things play out differently if if there was someone in that space but it's clearly it's clearly worked out. Um yeah,

we kind of end up conflating like Elon the person. Yeah. Like Elon the core team around him and Elon the the symbol frankly. Um and especially at this point in his

career. He's one of the most leveraged people alive, right? So

we are ascribing to like quote unquote Elon what is actually the effort of tens of thousands of engineers and you know on plenty of other employees and fans and supporters. Um and there's there's beauty to that, right? like we are humans. We rally around people um kind of better than we do with symbols. Um but that becomes this rallying like this uh this rallying point for people to like organize around the values exemplified by this person. And I think that's uh that's beautiful and magical and part of

the formula. Uh but it does tend to like if you conflate the conversation about the guy with the conversation about the symbol, you end up in this really weird

Yeah. kind of arguments with people, you're not even really talking about the same thing.

How how do you think about the the thinking in decades concept? You know, it's something that everyone in Silicon Valley says, "Oh, you got to think in decades." And then Elon comes out with something that's like 20, 30, 40 years away. And everyone's like, "No, we didn't actually want thinking in decades. I want to know something that's going to happen for sure in like five years tops." Uh, and I'm thinking about this mass driver uh question and I'm wondering like now that you've you've written this book, you've you've studied Elon, like h is this a departure? Is he thinking even farther in the future or has he always been thinking around this time horizon? Like how similar is this crazy mass driver on the moon pitch compared to previous eras? I think it's difficult to predict as are many things but the if his theory and his acting principle is that the future is arriving ever faster

right and so things that at our previous growth rate or technology trajectory seemed like they were 30 years away are actually now maybe 10.

Uh and it's really difficult to adjust for that like recursion factor.

Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Um, well, where can people find the book?

Uh, anywhere you buy books. Amazon, Barnes &Oble.com. Yeah,

Target. Uh, it just came out like yesterday.

Are you going to do an audio book?

Yeah, the audio book's out.

I didn't read it.

Oh, you got to read. You got this. We'll be those pipes. Put them to work. Well, uh, Eric Jorgensson, thank you for joining. The the the book is The Book of Elon. You can go find it everywhere. Books are sold. And we will talk to you soon, Eric. Thank you so much for to join the show. Uh let me tell you about Figma agents. Meet the canvas. Your AI agents can now create and modify your