Smart Friends

Chris says he isn’t the best poker player in the world, but he may be the most profitable. 

Pro poker player Chris Sparks is training for the highest-stakes tournament he has ever played in after a long sabbatical. He says he has already decided he is going to win, and now he is doing the necessary things to create that outcome.

What is the dynamic amongst poker friends? Chris says “frenemies” – all bets are off when the cards are on the table. Chris only plays when he expects to make money, and elaborates on the role of recreational players, stating that if you can’t recognize the fish at the poker table, you are the fish.

In the poker world, the meta skill of finding good games, of getting invited, and staying invited are critical. A good example is how Chris got invited to a famous comedian’s poker parties multiple times. Chris recounts these parties that feature full sets of dealers, cocktail waitresses, and masseuses--and it all ends when the comedian gets tired.

We talk about Chris’s consulting agency, Forcing Function, travel, and living with one of the world’s best pianists. Currently, Chris is coming out of a sabbatical and is preparing to play his largest tournament to date, with the prize pool potentially reaching seven figures. 

For Chris, everything is a bet. But with any bet, the decision should be weighed with the things surrounding it and you go in with eyes wide open.

Links

Chris’ Website - https://www.chrissparks.io/

Forcing Function - https://www.forcingfunction.com/

Chris Spark’s essay on Poker: Play to Win: Meta-Skills in High Stakes Poker

Rounders Movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9r-K5dmt0Rc 

Molly’s Game movie - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vu4UPet8Nyc 

The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron - https://amzn.to/3ljtOIh 

Forcing Function Podcast - https://www.forcingfunction.com/podcast

Forcing Function Performance Library - https://www.forcingfunction.com/library 

Experiment without limits workbook - https://www.forcingfunction.com/workbook 

The Fifth Discipline Field Book by Peter Senge - https://amzn.to/3I5rrCU 

The Systems Bible by John Gall - https://amzn.to/3D3S9bj 

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Kevin Espiritu: Bootstrapping Epic Gardening to 8 figures by mixing Media + D2C Biz models. Oh and Poker, Pink Pineapples, and Male Models

Jason Hitchcock: Your Guide to Web3 (DeFi, NFTs, and The Metaverse)

David Perell: Intellectual Openness & Mental Models for Success

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

This week’s guest is my friend, Kevin Espiritu. Kevin is the founder of Epic Gardening, the world’s biggest gardening education platform. We became good friends over the internet--Kevin and I talked about the trend of parasocial relationships and how you can get to know someone despite having little to no in-person interaction.

We talked about how Kevin transitioned from making a living out of playing poker, to building websites, to marketing and blogging, and finally, working full-time on Epic Gardening. This project went on to garner the biggest gardening audiences on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram and has branched into direct-to-consumer business without any ad spend.

Kevin relates his mistake in scaling the company revenue faster than he built the team, saying he likely left growth on the table. Leveraging people was a challenge at first. He says he thinks of himself more as a content creator and not really as a writer or YouTuber or podcaster, which eventually helped ease the process of trusting new team members to take on such responsibilities as he grew the company.

Kevin is now raising PE money and making an acquisition as an independent entrepreneur. We’ve had such a wonderful conversation that goes beyond Epic Gardening and into fun stuff like how creators can implement web3 tools, Kevin's short career as a male model, pink pineapple piracy, and so much more.

Additional Resources

Epic Gardening - https://www.epicgardening.com/

Epic Gardening on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/EpicGardening

Epic Gardening on Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/epicgardening

Epic Gardening on Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/epicgardening/

Epic Gardening on Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@epicgardening

The Epic Gardening Podcast - https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/epic-gardening-daily-growing-tips-and-advice/id1221085548

Scribe Media - https://scribemedia.com/

Missouri Star Quilt Company - https://www.missouriquiltco.com/

The Fish that Ate the Whale by Rich Cohen - https://www.amazon.com/Fish-That-Ate-Whale-Americas/dp/1250033314

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Jason Hitchcock: Your Guide to Web3 (DeFi, NFTs, and The Metaverse)

Nick Huber: How to Build Leverage, Buy Businesses, and Go Viral on Twitter

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

This week’s guest is David Perell. David is a creator, a writer, and a teacher at his massively successful online writing course, called Write of Passage. The success of his course gave me inspiration for my own course, and gives me fundamental optimism about the future of education. David and I have been friends for years, so this is less of an interview and more of a one-sided hang-session, where I get the pleasure of drawing out new ideas and experiences from David that I haven’t heard before. This is… basically what it’s like to hang out with us in person, and I’ll let you decide if that’s a good thing or not :). David is a man of endless-energy. He is reference-rife and story-stacked. I always have a great time talking with David, and I welcome you to join the conversation. 

As always, additional resources to enrich your experience below:

Topics Covered: 

 Additional Resources:

• The Economy is Mind-Bogglingly Huge — Eric Jorgenson

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• Joe Hertler: Tapping Into Creative Genius & Pursuing Joy Through Creativity

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Today, my guest is Dan Reecer. Dan joined the crypto world 3 years ago instead of going to get his MBA, and is now VP of Growth for Acala, the Defi Network launching soon on the Polkadot Blockchain Platform. Don’t worry, all of those words get explained in the podcast. 

In this conversation, I try to bring us all (myself included) from basics to applications of blockchain, and help us all see around the next few corners we’ll all go through together over the next decade. We talk about: Dan’s path to working in crypto, what Polkadot is, where it came from, why it’s different from Bitcoin and Ethereum, and how crypto will benefit people not already in the space.

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

(I encourage you to go play around with some of these tools and technologies. Things start to click when you actually use them and feel them work.) 

Topics Covered: 

 Additional Resources:

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Today my guest is Cliff Kuang, author of a fantastic book called User Friendly: How The Hidden Rules of Design are Reshaping The Way We Live, Work, and Play, which was called a "tour de force" by the New York Times. He was the Design editor of Fast Company, and Editor at Wired Magazine. From there he went on to work at Google as a Senior Staff Designer on an innovations team. Cliff is obsessive about the deepest challenges facing UX design today such as the metaphors that undergird what we do, the future of digital ecosystems, and the future experiences those ecosystems can unlock. Enjoy these topics and many more on this episode of Jorgenson’s Soundbox!

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

Topics Covered: 

 Additional Resources:

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Mitchell Baldridge is an accountant and financial planner who also identifies as a libertarian anarchist crypto-degenerate. We talk through the creation of his firm, everything financial planning entails, and how he flipped a Bored Ape NFT for $250k. A little something for everyone today! Mitchell can’t be everyone’s personal planner and accountant, (though he is mine and I’m very grateful for that!) but he offers expertise that can help anyone. Taxes are likely your single largest expense over your entire life, so it pays to understand them.

Be sure to tweet or email me so I know what you think of the episode, and be well!

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

 Topics Covered: 

 Additional Resources:

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Just me and you today, dear listener -- and I’m going to talk through some ideas that have been fascinating me recently, weaving together authors like Rory Sutherland, Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Nassim Taleb. As I reviewed my highlights from books, blogs and articles that I’ve been collecting over the past 10 years the main ideas that jumped out at me are playing the metagame and feedback loops. Both of these are ways to transcend the muggle world and start playing a different game. 

I hope you enjoy this format -- if you love it (or hate it, actually), please tweet or email me so I know whether to ever do this again. It’s all part of the sandbox experience! 

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

Topics Covered: 

Favorite Quotes:

“In any system where there are norms, there are strengths and weaknesses to those norms. If you follow the norms of the system, the results you get are likely to be the norm. When you play a different game, a metagame, you have the opportunity to outperform.” -fs.blog

“Play the metagame in your domain too, whether you’re head of an organization or just starting out. Blowout the walls of your fish tank and transcend paradigms.” - Eric Jorgenson

“False barriers are accepted because they are the path of least resistance for the ego” -Eric Jorgenson

 Additional Resources:

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Codie Sanchez has been a journalist embedded with cartels, worked fancy-pants finance jobs at Goldman Sachs and Vanguard, and now -- she is an independent investor and entrepreneur.

She owns a direct interest in FORTY FIVE businesses, with more than 25 cash flows. Codie’s interests include boring businesses (like laundromats and property managers), online media companies, and service businesses.

You’ll hear us drop “leverage” a few times in this interview, and though it wasn’t what I’d planned on talking about, I think Codie is a living example of the power of methodically applying leverage. If you want to build an independent career like Codie’s, you’ll love my course+community, called Building a Mountain of Leverage. Check it out at EJorgenson.com/Leverage

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

Topics Covered: 

Favorite Quotes:

“Civilize the mind, make savage the body, grow the revenue sheet” -Codie Sanchez

“Money is just a tool. The more tools I have the more ability I have to construct the world I want and the world that I think is best for all and for me and for the people that are around me.” -Codie Sanchez

“I think plans are normally for fairy tales. I truly believe that if people can follow their curiosity they're gonna end up exactly where they're supposed to be. The only thing you should be focused on is what is interesting to you, what you can get lost in.” -Codie Sanchez

Additional Resources:

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Today, we’re kicking off a new long-term segment, called Track Zach -- my buddy Zach Marshall just founded a company called Conterra, and is about 3 months into the journey. I plan to have a conversation with him every 3 months or so to get a real-time, much more honest, interesting look at startup life. Zach, now in his second career after the Navy SEALs, is setting his considerable will against a new challenge -- starting a venture-backed company to fix today’s outdated, broken system for hiring private security around the world. Enjoy the ride!

If you’re not on my email list, fix that asap by going to ejorgenson.com -- I share weekly blog posts, podcast highlights, and new exciting new projects! 

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

Topics Covered: 

Favorite Quotes:

• “In the military you have to learn things extremely fast and not just to pass a test, now you are responsible for these things. For example a skydiver in charge of a civilian drop in a stadium is coordinating all sorts of things and he has 10,000, maybe 5,000 jumps. Meanwhile I had to do the same thing in the service and I had around 65 jumps.” - Zach

• “In the military you’re just given this massive amount of responsibility so you have to actually pay attention to every detail. Attention to detail is one of those phrases said thousands and thousands of times in the spec ops community and it really is true.” - Zach

Additional Resources:

Additional Episodes If You Enjoyed:

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support! 

Today, I’m talking with my new Capital Camp buddy Andrew Finn. He is the co-founder of the blog Wait But Why. Since age 25 he’s been patiently building, buying, and operating small businesses. Now, he and Tim Urban share a portfolio of cash-flowing small businesses. Together we discuss how to get a free company, why it is often easier to buy a company than build it, and when to eat a shitburger. Enjoy these topics and countless others on this episode of Jorgenson’s Soundbox. 

Additional resources to help enrich your experience below:

Topics Covered: 

Favorite Quotes:

• “If I do all this maneuvering, find this company, sell at this price, sell some debt and get some money. In 5 years it’ll be like poof here’s a free company and I get my money back.” - Andrew Finn

• “Your job is not to win the SMB game, it’s to win the game. It’s to win the game of money in a way that will benefit your life. Like, we’re invested in crypto, and the stock market too.”

• “All service businesses are chicken, just as much as software. You pay someone $X. Resell their time for $X + $Y. And the entirety of the business is justifying and expanding Y to both customers and workers. Y comes from well managed opex, capex, and organization structure. To do it well, you have to just laser focus on what you're providing in exchange for Y. The market gets pissed long-term if it doesn't feel like you're providing enough, and every day it conspires to ask you the question.” - Andrew’s Twitter

Additional Resources:

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If you enjoy podcasts with Brent Beshore of Permanent Equity or Patrick O’Shaughnessy, you’re going to love this one! 

Huge thanks to Modern Stoa (modernstoa.co) for their help on creating and growing this very podcast you’re listening to now. If you need help with podcast growth or monetization, go to modernstoa.co or hit the founder up on Twitter (@consumersky) or Instagram (@iamaskyking).   

If you want to support the podcast, here are a few ways you can: 

>> Buy a copy of the Navalmanak: www.navalmanack.com/ 

>> Share the podcast with your friends and on social media 

>> Give the podcast a positive review to help us reach new listeners 

>> Make a weekly, monthly, or one-time donation: https://app.omella.com/o/9Bufa 

>> Follow me on Twitter: @ericjorgenson

>> Follow @FirstsFamous on Twitter 

>> Learn more and sign up for the “Building a Mountain of Levers” course and community: https://www.ejorgenson.com/leverage 

I appreciate your support!