Mastering Optimism: The Contrarian Lessons Naval, Elon, and Balaji Want You to Know | Eric Jorgenson

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Speaker 2 Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the show. We have a tremendous conversation for you today with Eric Jorgensen.
He is the CEO of Scribe Media.

Speaker 2 He's a venture investor, and he's also the author of one of my all-time favorite books. It is one of the most recommended books that I have:

Speaker 2 The Almanac of Naval Ravakant.

Speaker 2 And if you are in business, if you are someone who believes in personal development, who is interested in the mindsets, the ideas, the concepts, the first principles that drive real success, happiness, satisfaction in our lives, it's an absolute must read if you haven't read it.

Speaker 2 Eric is also the author of the anthology of Bology and the soon-to-be-released The Book of Elon Musk.

Speaker 2 This is an incredible conversation where we dig into the idea of first principles and what ultimately ends up being the core through line of this conversation: that optimism is a superpower, and we all must figure out how to harness the power of optimism in our lives if we want to grow and find that place of wealth and satisfaction.

Speaker 2 You're going to love this conversation, and because of that, I'm going to stop right here and get us on to Eric Jorgensen.

Speaker 4 in a crude laboratory in the basement of his home

Speaker 2 I came across your work with one of my absolute favorite books it's on the shelves behind me um it's probably in that stack right there of white books that's like over my left shoulder for those that are watching on YouTube the almanac of Naval Rav Khan is one of like if you want just a punch you in the face over and over again page-turning book that you come out of with more notes, I think I ran out of ink in one of my pens, like underlining things and writing notes.

Speaker 2 Like, like, one, what attracted you to Naval to begin with?

Speaker 4 I had been following Naval for maybe 10 years.

Speaker 4 I really resonated with even his very early stuff

Speaker 4 writing at Venture Hacks. Like, he was one of the early bloggers about the game theory of venture capital and talking about Silicon Valley, like back in the 2000s, basically.

Speaker 4 And so I'd followed him for a long time for like his startup stuff and watching his following grow as he sort of achieved all of his like business goals and then turning to a little bit more of a like philosophical.

Speaker 2 I think he calls himself a philosopher now to a certain extent, like modern day philosopher or has been okay accepting that moniker. That's maybe a better way of putting it.

Speaker 4 Yeah, like Shane Parrish called him the angel philosopher. And like that podcast podcast he did on the Knowledge Project, I think is one of the greatest podcast episodes of all time.

Speaker 4 And that was really the like inspiration for me to write this book because I was thinking about all the people that I'd learned so much from. And

Speaker 4 I like Munger, I like Buffett. And to me, Naval is very much

Speaker 4 in the spirit of Munger. in a lot of ways, but with a really modern sort of like techno-utopian like valley essence to him that like really jived with how I see the world.

Speaker 2 The other thing that I find about him, and this is where all the research and the time you've spent, I'd love to get your insights, is he definitely has that modern tech spin to his take, but I find it is also completely relatable to people who may not live in that space.

Speaker 2 Like, it's not a tech, his philosophy, his philosophical beliefs are not tech-focused, but they obviously come out of a modern era. How do you think like he so

Speaker 2 uniquely or authentically is able to bridge that gap?

Speaker 2 Because very few people who come out of that space can then come back and talk to, say, kind of everyday neophytes who aren't digesting massive amounts of tech information every day.

Speaker 4 Yeah, but he's an incredible sort of distiller of truth. You know, like he'll get things down to a very principled level.

Speaker 4 Like when I was writing this book, I really thought, you know, there'd be a thousand of all nerds like me who who would really love it.

Speaker 4 It blows my mind that we've now sold like a million copies and there's yoga teachers in Bali and like

Speaker 4 moms and little brothers reading it. Like that's so awesome.

Speaker 4 And I think it's a testament to how

Speaker 4 if you really

Speaker 4 articulate a principle well,

Speaker 4 it's universally applicable and it sort of feels right to almost anybody who picks it up. And like now

Speaker 4 that I've seen what this book, you know, five years, almost five years on, like seen what this book has done,

Speaker 4 I think there's like no human on earth who could pick up this book and not take something useful away from it.

Speaker 2 Yeah. One of his one of the things he talks about all the time and like, you know, his influence is so powerful.
He's got me reading David Deutsch about physics and time travel and shit. And

Speaker 2 but he always comes back to

Speaker 2 he always comes back to this idea of first principles. Maybe you could explain a little bit why

Speaker 2 first principle, he's, for me, and I consume I read a ton, he's really brought first principles into my life.

Speaker 2 I think it started a lot with reading your book and then getting more into his work and hearing him talk about bringing everything back to first principles.

Speaker 2 So maybe you could describe for me and the audience, like really, what are first principles? We hear this said, like, what, what are we actually talking about? And then what...

Speaker 2 What first principles have you taken from his work and applied to your own to be so successful and create as much as you do?

Speaker 4 Yeah, so First Principles is a great,

Speaker 4 one of the common sort of mental models. So if you're somebody who's been reading like Munger or

Speaker 4 Nassim Taleb maybe or now Naval,

Speaker 4 I think there's these sort of like tricks you can pick up along the way. And First Principles is a really powerful one that just has a way of clearing out all of the kind of dust and fog and

Speaker 4 getting to the essence of like what is truly possible in this situation. Like one of the most famous kind of stories actually comes from Elon Musk.

Speaker 4 So there's, I'm writing a book on Elon now in the same style, and there will be quite a few sort of first principle stories, and that's one of his most powerful things.

Speaker 4 And the way he looks at it, the question that he asks himself, which is maybe a little more clear than, you know, if you don't know what first principles are, is like, does this break the laws of physics?

Speaker 4 If not, then it's possible to improve it, right?

Speaker 4 It's possible to do something better. So, the example that he tells when he started SpaceX is: you know, why is this rocket $100 million?

Speaker 4 All right, well, let me look at what are the raw components of a rocket, not engine and like flaps, but how much aluminum, how much oxygen, how much carbon? Like, what is this thing made of?

Speaker 4 And what is the cost of those things? And he came up with this index.

Speaker 4 It's like the raw material of stuff in this rocket is, you know, like maybe it's half a million dollars and the rocket is selling for a hundred million dollars so what accounts for that 2000x increase um that's probably off by an order of magnitude 200x yeah whatever um

Speaker 4 what accounts for that and so thinking in the limit of

Speaker 4 how could you approach this problem like how cheaply could you possibly arrange these materials in the shape that they need to be to have a rocket and how much more cheaply could you build it um And this is like a universal thing that you can look at anything in your life through this lens.

Speaker 4 You know, first principles might be like

Speaker 4 it just opens your lens of problem solving to see a lot of different opportunities that you might not have included.

Speaker 2 When I was thinking about this concept, I

Speaker 2 you know, I also read,

Speaker 2 I read a lot. I know you do too, right? Like the Stoic idea and then taking it even farther back to say like the Socratic method of this like waterfall of whys, right?

Speaker 2 So like we have this, you know, why are we using this these materials? Okay, why do these materials cost so much? Okay, why have we not, you know,

Speaker 2 tried to get these materials at a lower price? Right. And we just keep going down until there really isn't another why, and then we have that base principle for this thing we're trying to do.

Speaker 2 And then from there, we can start to

Speaker 2 reimagine how it could be.

Speaker 2 Does that feel like a relevant kind of way of thinking through how we get there?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I think the whys is almost the inverse of first principles. So if you ask enough whys, you can drill down to, and that's why it's not just why, it's like the five whys or the six whys.

Speaker 4 Like, keep going down. Why is this so expensive? Well, why is it manufactured that way? Well, why is it only made, like, maybe it had to travel a really long way.
Why is it only manufactured in China?

Speaker 4 Like, why, why, why, why, why, why?

Speaker 4 But the first principles version just like cuts all of those. And

Speaker 4 if you can make that creative leap to go all the way down from the very beginning,

Speaker 4 you know, like the

Speaker 4 opposite of reasoning from first principles is reasoning by analogy, which is how almost all of us do almost everything, right? If you say, like, oh, I need to get to work, I can't afford a car.

Speaker 4 Like because that's how you see everybody else get to work. You don't necessarily think I need to get to work.
What is is the cheapest possible way for me to get to work?

Speaker 4 Or what is the most efficient way? Or

Speaker 4 you just, by nature, observe what everyone else is doing and that's your starting place rather than starting from

Speaker 4 what are your full set of options because it's exhausting to think that way. Like you can't do that for everything in your life, but for the most important problems,

Speaker 4 either the most important or the most valuable, like that is a really effective way. And it's, you know, they continue to do this.

Speaker 4 I'm just going to keep using elon examples because that's where my head's been at but like that's where the tower came from like they what is the

Speaker 4 best possible

Speaker 4 uh what is the way to get the lightest possible craft and one of the really heavy things are the landing legs and so how do we not have landing legs it's like well put the landing legs outside the vehicle it's like is that even theoretically physically possible it's like sure it's physically possible it seems extremely difficult never been done before but like let's try it because they just run towards trying the

Speaker 4 most

Speaker 4 theoretically beneficial thing, even if it is the most technically difficult. And that's where so many of these breakthroughs have come from.
And I think thinking in

Speaker 4 these

Speaker 4 first principles is actually one of the unlocking things. And it takes a lot of courage and it takes a lot of talent to actually run down those ideas once they've been created.

Speaker 4 But you've got to break the constraint of reasoning by analogy and you've got to run towards

Speaker 4 that like really clean, terrifying idea that emerges when you strip away all the bullshit.

Speaker 2 Do you think the general lack of usage of this, because I completely agree with what you're saying,

Speaker 2 I

Speaker 2 created in 2020, I founded a digital commercial insurance industry agency. And we,

Speaker 2 the way we built it was different than any other agency had been built in the property casualty insurance space before, where our entire mantra from day one was,

Speaker 2 you don't need to share the same air as someone to deliver the same value to them as a customer, which in most other industries would be like a duh, right?

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Speaker 2 In the property casualty insurance industry, there was still this incredibly widespread and entrenched idea that you had to press the flesh. You had to sit across the desk from them.

Speaker 2 You had to go to their business to sell them the thing. And, you know,

Speaker 2 the reason I did that was one, out of necessity, right? Like I was bootstrapping this agency and I didn't have the money or the time in order to scale fast enough to drive to all these places.

Speaker 2 But two, it was kind of thinking back to like this idea of like,

Speaker 2 why do we have to do that? Like what it, what is, is there a cleaner idea, which is

Speaker 2 all an insurance customer wants is a product that serves their need at a price they can afford, right? At the end of the day. And they want to know someone's, I do have a philosophy that

Speaker 2 insurance consumers want to know they can at least drive to a location and punch someone in the face or yell at them if they do something wrong.

Speaker 2 But they don't need to share the same air with them.

Speaker 2 So, you know, but I got so much pushback in my industry for that idea. You're crazy, you're wasting your money.
These people will never retain. They're only price shoppers.

Speaker 2 If they're not willing to meet with you, they're not going to be good customers. I mean, just idea after idea after idea.
And when I was thinking about it, I was like, is it

Speaker 2 is an unwillingness to allow yourself to go to that level, is it naivety? Like you just don't, you're not aware of this concept of first principles. Is it laziness?

Speaker 2 Or is it, and this is the one that may even be the most systemic to me, and I'm very interested in your take, is it the status hit you could potentially take from the risk of going to a first principle and rebuilding out of what you see and not what has always been done?

Speaker 4 There's so many reasons for,

Speaker 4 and usually they're overlapping reasons, for people either letting themselves off the hook or defending the status quo or defending

Speaker 4 the method that they've been using for the last five, 10, or 50 years.

Speaker 4 It's, you know, Bology has a great line, like their incomprehension is your moat.

Speaker 4 Like when there's just an obvious idea that people are refusing to see, and especially if it like agitates them a little and it seems so obvious to you, and they're like attacking you for it, there's probably a good sign that like you're onto something.

Speaker 4 It scares them enough that they're angry about it subconsciously.

Speaker 4 They are unwilling to do the work to see what you see or to change themselves to accommodate, you know, the environmental change that has happened to

Speaker 4 create this new opportunity, which means they're going to be slow to follow or

Speaker 4 not follow at all. And you're going to have a moat and an advantage that just comes from their inability to or unwillingness to think more clearly about the space.

Speaker 2 Aaron Ross Powell, so you've mentioned Bology a couple times. I don't know that the audience will be as familiar with Bology as maybe they are Naval or Elon, obviously.
Can you talk a little bit about

Speaker 2 obviously after the success of the format of the Almanac of Naval, you would really dialed in on something. Your style resonated, easy to consume,

Speaker 2 but very hard-hitting, right? So you had kind of a framework for

Speaker 2 how to craft a narrative that really resonated. Why did you choose Balaji next?

Speaker 4 I think Balaji

Speaker 4 is now where sort of Naval was when I wrote this book about him. It's like, you know, three-quarters of a million followers, well-known inside tech, but not really outside tech.
And I think he's

Speaker 4 brilliant and

Speaker 4 contrarian and interesting and unique as a thinker, but not very

Speaker 4 not followed in the mainstream in the way that he deserves. And I think a lot of people could benefit from, like, this is, it all comes back to, like, what can I do for the reader?

Speaker 4 Like, I followed Naval for 10 years. Everything that I learned from him made my life better.
I followed Navology for 10 years. Like, and everything that I learned from him made my life better.

Speaker 4 And I want to package this knowledge that's sort of lost in tech Twitter that has benefited me for 10 years and put it in a book and get it out to a broader array of people and package it in a format that is accessible to people sort of all over the world and gets translated and gets shared and gets gifted.

Speaker 4 And I think books are really, really powerful in that way. Balaji,

Speaker 4 sorry.

Speaker 2 No, go ahead.

Speaker 4 Bology is kind of

Speaker 4 interestingly parallel to Naval in both sort of American dream stories. Like Balaji is a first-generation immigrant family, clearly a brilliant guy, multiple degrees in biomedical engineering, and

Speaker 4 very successful startup founder in that space.

Speaker 4 Then went to become a great investor at A16Z and his angel invested in hundreds of startups. He wrote a book called The Network State that is about

Speaker 4 some of the challenges that the modern sort of nation states are in and like

Speaker 4 the way bureaucracy really comes to constrain technological advancement.

Speaker 4 And what I think is the most important important idea is like the fundamental moral importance of technology and seeing all of history through this lens of new technologies, unlocking new opportunities, improving lives all over the world, changing the sort of geopolitical moment

Speaker 4 slowly over time. And

Speaker 4 that lens that Bology taught me really is also I think quite a helpful answer to like what you shared before of like why are some people just unwilling to see change or embrace change and working on that biology book and following him for so long showed me that there is a there is a technological frontier in every single industry and those who prosper are almost always always close to that technological frontier um and that there is so much to be gained even in a small business as an individual operator by embracing technology and moving closer to that frontier.

Speaker 4 I mean, technology fundamentally is a way of doing more with less, and there's always opportunities there.

Speaker 2 One of the through lines I see in the three individuals that you've picked here, Naval Ravakant, Balaji, and Elon, is

Speaker 2 technological optimism, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, that's when I think of those three guys, I immediately, you know, what I've been taken by by all three, and I will say I know the least about Balaji, mostly because sometimes he goes down nerd holes that I just simply can't follow.

Speaker 2 I'm listening and I'm engaged, but, you know, he will, he will sometimes, and I love that about, I mean, I love it, right?

Speaker 2 It challenges you, it forces you to research new things, but sometimes I just don't always, I can't always keep up, especially when he goes into the blockchain stuff. Like,

Speaker 2 I'm a huge believer in blockchain, but the tech is a little beyond me. I'm just getting used to AI.
That being said,

Speaker 2 they are all optimists, right? Naval talks about it.

Speaker 2 I mean, he's done a couple podcasts and he publishes podcasts very randomly, but it is worth subscribing to his podcast because every once in a while he'll put something out and he he did an episode with David Deutsch,

Speaker 2 who if you guys are unaware of David Deutsch, he's a physicist, fucking brilliant.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he must have mentioned optimism five to seven times throughout it. And I thought it was incredible because I feel like there's so much fear developing in our world today.

Speaker 2 Obviously, there's a lot of issues and we're recording this after New Year's in 2025 and there's a lot of different factors that are impacting fear but technology is a big one the pace of AI what the heck is blockchain we got these rockets being launched and caught and what how's that going to impact us what does multi-planetary look like you know what should we regulate what should we not there's so much kind of fear and tension and negativity and these three individuals along with others but these three in particular as I think through a through line if we've picked they are so optimistic about the future what where do you fall on that spectrum i'm assuming you're an optimist as well but just just from everything you've learned from these guys and the other individuals that you follow, why should we be optimistic about the technological frontier that we're going to be looking at over the next 10 years, 50 years, et cetera?

Speaker 4 I mean, there are so many reasons to that.

Speaker 4 I think everyone gets to kind of pick their own.

Speaker 4 I think there can be a very selfish reason to be optimistic, which is just it feels good.

Speaker 4 Like, you are happier every day if you walk on the sunny side of the street, if you focus on the opportunities that are new and exciting, and

Speaker 4 find reasons to look forward to the future, of which there are many.

Speaker 4 I think there's a lot of,

Speaker 4 I could also make a pretty strong argument, I think, and this is sort of where we get to David Deutsch that Naval has helped popularize, which is like optimism is a moral imperative.

Speaker 4 You know, there's some extent to which,

Speaker 4 you know, when you're doing rally driving,

Speaker 4 the advice is always like the car will go where you're looking. So even if you're skidding towards a tree, just keep looking down the road and the car will end up there.

Speaker 4 Like your body knows what to do. And I think that's, that applies to like at a civilizational level.

Speaker 4 Like if you remain optimistic with a light dose of paranoia about our real problems and addressing them,

Speaker 4 but if you believe... if you manifest dystopia by focusing on the negative and the tensions and the challenges and the you know, the things that basically make headlines every day,

Speaker 4 you'll miss the fact that things have been getting better steadily for almost all of human history. And everything, I mean, look at what we're doing right now.

Speaker 4 Like we're sitting in a heated and or air-conditioned building, well-fed, well-clothed, recording on the absolute alchemy device that is computer and zero margin digital products and making a podcast that will preserve this hour of our time for

Speaker 4 thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people, like years into the future. It's fucking crazy.

Speaker 4 Like we forget that we are surrounded by miracles that are the fruit of labor and sacrifice of millennia of our ancestors.

Speaker 4 And we are so grateful. We are so lucky to have be alive right now in this moment.
And we owe it to all the future generations to continue that progress. You know, there's

Speaker 4 there are parallel universes where we are all like wearing loincloths and scrabbling around stabbing each other to eat moss off a rock.

Speaker 4 Like there's a lot of dark and terrible things in our past and a lot of bright and beautiful things in our future.

Speaker 4 And I think it's very important. Like the other through line of these three people is that they are very well studied historically.

Speaker 4 They all They are optimistic about the future because they understand the past.

Speaker 4 And understanding the past gives them a different lens lens on the present than the media is going to present or than if you just consume the news or the feed or the social media, what you're going to see.

Speaker 4 Balaji talks about this a lot. There's a great whole section on truth and the media's sort of

Speaker 4 and the incentives that they have to not necessarily be truth-seeking or wide lens historical perspective

Speaker 4 to today's information. But when you do that and when you follow people like Naval, Balaji, and Elon,

Speaker 4 you gain a little broader of a lens. You become naturally more optimistic.

Speaker 4 I've always, I feel like I've been that way. I've been attracted to people and minds who feel that way also.
And I feel like joy and compulsion to share that perspective with others, especially when

Speaker 4 people feel

Speaker 4 stuck or feel trapped or feel like the future is going to be dark. I feel like they're just wearing blinders that they can just take off by focusing on different ideas.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I completely share the optimism. That's a big reason why I do this show:

Speaker 2 bringing people on who have stories, who have insights to say, look, there's so much more to the world. There's so much out here for you to grab onto.

Speaker 2 And, you know, you made reference to how well read

Speaker 2 they are of the past and of history, these particular individuals. And

Speaker 2 I have a theory as I've read more

Speaker 2 into the past as well, you know, back from, you know, right, you can't be a male over 40 in the United States if you haven't read about the Roman Empire.

Speaker 2 So obviously I've gone back that far and, you know, whatever. And all the way through,

Speaker 2 I really like a lot of the Enlightenment

Speaker 2 writers. And, you know, just how different people attack history.
When you understand where we've come from,

Speaker 2 I feel like you almost have to be optimistic.

Speaker 2 And here's the caveat that I put on it, is because you you understand the pain it will take to get there right so i feel like so many people become pessimistic because they feel the smallest little minutiae micro negativity micro pain micro discomfort and they're like my life sucks right i shouldn't have to you know why my my tire's flat god's out to get me the universe hates me why me right we go down this path because we we haven't when you read history and you understand how fucking terrible it was and how these people were still able to live these valuable, fulfilling lives and get through it and perpetuate the species forward and make all these improvements to get us where we are today.

Speaker 2 When you have a little bit of pain in your life, you're like, yeah,

Speaker 2 but like my enemy down the street doesn't have a sword and isn't trying to attack my house.

Speaker 2 Like I'm not currently like defending and, you know, you know, the British aren't invasing my French fort or whatever. Like, like, it's just a tire.
My tire is flat.

Speaker 2 Like, everything's going to be fine, right? Like, we're good. And

Speaker 2 it gives you that perspective to understand the discomfort and fear and pain that will come with getting through these things to actually make more amazing things happen.

Speaker 2 Does that feel like it resonates? Does that work?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean,

Speaker 4 the perspective that you get from studying history, I think, is so useful and valuable. It makes you appreciate every day.
It makes you appreciate what you get to do.

Speaker 4 Like, I feel like insurance is probably often

Speaker 4 you know, not treated as like the sexiest, most exciting.

Speaker 2 No, it's never treated that way. No, it's never treated that way.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 But like

Speaker 4 broadening the lens to be like, if you live in a time and place where you get the privilege to sell insurance, you are in the top fraction of a fraction of a percent of

Speaker 4 wonderful.

Speaker 4 times and places to live in all of human history because it is an absolute luxury product that is a sign of a very advanced civilization that cares about socializing risks and pain and supporting people who are less fortunate.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 that is, it is an important and respectable thing that

Speaker 4 a lot of people don't appreciate the role that it plays, I think.

Speaker 4 But it also means like you have a much better job than basically any other human who ever lived in history who died either like farming or fighting.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 there's just so much to be grateful for. That's the past-looking perspective.

Speaker 4 The forward-looking perspective is we often lack the imagination to see how much change can happen, even in the rest of our lifetimes, let alone

Speaker 4 that we are participating in building the foundation of cathedrals that we can't even imagine over a few hundred-year time span.

Speaker 4 You know, like there are people who are maybe closer to those like sexy places like SpaceX

Speaker 4 that are very obviously building the future. But we are also all part of the

Speaker 4 sort of substrate that supports those people and

Speaker 4 creates the civilization that keeps expanding those frontiers.

Speaker 4 It just makes me very proud to be a human,

Speaker 4 especially an American human, and continue to move forward with these good ideas about optimism and civilization and engineering and truth seeking. And,

Speaker 4 you know, how lucky are we to be alive when

Speaker 4 these things are getting developed? And I know you're deep down the Deutsch rabbit hole, but I will like underline that as being, you know, he's also

Speaker 4 a very interesting read.

Speaker 4 You know, probably like if Naval is 101,

Speaker 4 Deutsch is 201 or 301. I think it's a little more difficult of a course.
He's much more, he's a little bit more academic of a writer, but his interviews are incredible. His ideas are important.

Speaker 4 It's a very

Speaker 4 philosophically robust approach to optimism and over a very long time horizon.

Speaker 4 And it also will make you very proud to be a human and proud to be an American and proud to be a part of continuing to advance like our understanding of the universe.

Speaker 2 So you brought up cathedrals and this idea that in our past, and for anyone who's read a fictional version of this, Pillars of Earth is an absolutely incredible book.

Speaker 2 But, you know, we used to build, you know, you take some of the largest and longest standing cathedrals that exist today. Some of these took 300, 400 years to create these cathedrals.

Speaker 2 I mean, that's entire

Speaker 2 you know, multiple generations of individuals passing knowledge and building things and putting blocks in place that they would never see completed.

Speaker 2 And, you know, when you read history and when you think about these things, you see this idea of, yeah, there was always, you know, you can pull out stories of selfishness and place for power, etc.

Speaker 2 But there was always, even in some of the most,

Speaker 2 we'll call them like evil aspects, there was always this generational thinking. I'm doing this.

Speaker 2 I might be doing some heinous thing. However, I'm doing it to perpetuate my bloodline, to perpetuate my country or whatever, you know, wherever we're going, or I'm building this thing.

Speaker 2 And it feels like so much of the pessimism that comes out today is from people who've lost this idea of generational thinking. Like

Speaker 2 how, and this is a tough question, so take this wherever you want, but like a big, one of the through lines that I pull through this show is this idea of generational thinking and how we start to recapture it in our lives, even if it's in small ways.

Speaker 2 How do we start stepping outside of just what do I need in this moment to get through this day?

Speaker 2 so I have my stuff to starting to think how our contributions play into the larger scheme of moving our family forward, our community forward, or whatever, you know, however deep that goes.

Speaker 4 I just saw a tweet from Naval yesterday in response to someone who was sort of asking about that, like, hey, like, I'm rich and I'm successful, but I'm miserable and I don't feel like I have a purpose or meaning to my life.

Speaker 4 And Naval's tweet was like, kids, God, mission.

Speaker 4 Choose one or more than one, but like the meaning of life is the meaning that you give it.

Speaker 4 And, you know, we as a society, I think the numbers of like devout believers in any religion, it just has a trend, seem to be going down, at least in America.

Speaker 4 That's, I think, one source of multi-generational thinking. I think another is

Speaker 4 family and specifically like the family multi-generational structure, maybe even living together or very near, you know, multiple generations of family, probably particularly if they overlap and you have kids younger, like that, that trend has been,

Speaker 4 we've had the reverse of that trend recently, but I think that's easier to have this sort of

Speaker 4 feel a little more insular. The other thing is, I think there's

Speaker 4 a lot of selection around

Speaker 4 the media. Like, I really wish Marshall McLuhan was still alive to get his take on social media, like how extreme this has gotten.
Just

Speaker 4 not even every new medium of sort of media kicks off a new panic of like, nobody's reading books anymore. Now they're all reading newspapers.

Speaker 4 Like, there was a legitimate panic about that when newspapers became like the predominant technology of the day.

Speaker 4 And so there's some extent to which like there's always alarm about it, but I do, there is some real, um,

Speaker 4 the combination of

Speaker 4 our natural sort of psychological bias towards the negative with

Speaker 4 really, really high turnover social media and like very just of the moment feeds creates this really both a negativity and sort of a focus on the moment that pulls you out of that the lens that we've been talking about, both the historical and the, you know, what are we contributing to over multiple generations that is

Speaker 4 that gives my life and my work day to day meaning. You know, how do you see yourself in the broader lens of, you know, what you're contributing to?

Speaker 4 I think we get a lot of joy out of service and being useful in our communities and however you want to define community and however you want to define useful.

Speaker 4 But trying to hide from that fact or pursue satisfaction in ways that are not

Speaker 4 utility and community are

Speaker 4 not well proven in history and

Speaker 4 might prove to just be detours or distractions along your way way to finding something satisfying.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I love where you finish there because I think that is the point.

Speaker 2 So have kids,

Speaker 2 believer in God, I'm a Christian, and

Speaker 2 feel like I have a strong mission.

Speaker 2 I see so many individuals, you know,

Speaker 2 the secularist movement that has really taken place, I think,

Speaker 2 that's come with social media,

Speaker 2 whether that's coincidence or impacted, I'm sure there's both.

Speaker 2 It really, and I'm not saying you have to believe in God, right? Or believe in God the same way that I do.

Speaker 2 My core take on what the founding fathers were trying to do and we've completely lost in our American experiment is like, you get to do whatever the hell you want and I get to do whatever the hell I want.

Speaker 2 And as long as my shit doesn't impact your shit, we're all good. Like that, that was like the original vision.
It's like, I want to go farm. I want to go kill beavers.
Great.

Speaker 2 Like, just don't like mess up my farm and don't like steal my beavers and we're going to be all great. You know what I mean?

Speaker 2 And, you know, and like, you know, that's the part that I think, you know, and not to get like,

Speaker 2 not to get

Speaker 2 political, but I guess it is to a certain extent. Like with, you know, how the whole trans movement has been handled, I felt like I really, you know, I know people who, who.

Speaker 2 cross-dress or that's what we used to call it or you know trans whatever and you know i talked to them and, you know, so much of it has been lost. And like, no one cared.

Speaker 2 No one cared that you wanted to live that lifestyle, right?

Speaker 2 Maybe there's always going to be some bigots and some assholes that may call whatever, but those people have always existed and always will exist.

Speaker 2 And, you know, frankly, the more outspoken they are, they tend to get cut out of the herd, you know, and in general, communities in America seem to be very accepting.

Speaker 2 But it was when that movement started pressing its values upon everyone else. Now, look, I say the same thing about Christians.

Speaker 2 It drives me crazy when, you know, someone, when a Christian is like, well, you know, Eric, if you're not a believer, then you're going to, and it's like, dude, that's your belief. That's you.

Speaker 2 And it's perfectly fine for you to have that belief, but you can't put that on this person over here. So it's like coming back to like live that life, build things, grow things.

Speaker 2 But if we do not have a higher cause, and I think kids are a great higher cause, I think, you know, God in some relationship to a higher power, however you want to believe, that's a great, and the mission, I think you outlined that freaking perfectly, man.

Speaker 2 I love it. And

Speaker 2 these are important things that we're not talking about enough, in my opinion.

Speaker 4 Yeah, there's a,

Speaker 4 it's a great book that we just published at Scribe by a leader who's been the CEO of two different Fortune 500 companies. And he started, you know, a very self-made man,

Speaker 4 incredible

Speaker 4 sort of lessons. This is his like, I'm going to give my lessons back to the community book.

Speaker 4 And he spends the whole first half of the book book talking about the inner game and how to not just, yes, obviously pay attention to your health, sleep well, like

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Speaker 4 To perform at a high level in the world of business, you have to understand your inner game. And going in...

Speaker 4 to that book, I thought it was going to be like, yeah, drink water, you know, exercise, sleep well. It's actually, there is that.
There is also a lot of

Speaker 4 finding a positive relationship to your work, finding meaning, not just for yourself, but also creating it for the others around you.

Speaker 4 And it was a huge part of his philosophy as a leader. And the stories that he told about successfully leading organizations were about

Speaker 4 imbuing the things that this company or this team was already doing with a new sense of meaning and a positive emotional relationship with that work.

Speaker 4 And they're incredible stories, and he's a visionary in that way.

Speaker 4 But I share this to say, like, this does not mean that you have to, like, flip the table, have a midlife crisis, and like go join the clergy or the Peace Corps or whatever.

Speaker 4 You can find a meaningful significance in what you are already doing if you just change the context around it, if you change your relationship to it.

Speaker 4 If you, you know, the old parable about there's two brick layers and one is just laying bricks and one is building a cathedral. And

Speaker 4 all of the work that almost all of us are doing,

Speaker 4 some bureaucrats excluded and grifters excluded,

Speaker 4 is part of building this incredible future for humanity. And that's

Speaker 4 how I've started to see my work and my wide variety of projects is just

Speaker 4 contributing to a brighter future for humanity and our civilization.

Speaker 4 Seeing

Speaker 4 humanity as this gift, this is the only consciousness we're aware of in the universe to date and doing everything that we can to perpetuate that. Are we inherently like good? Yes.

Speaker 4 Like I think humanity is inherently good. And if

Speaker 4 we expand our understanding of ourselves, our understanding of the universe and continue to do

Speaker 4 grow ourselves like that is an inherently good pursuit and a mission that we are all a part of, whether

Speaker 4 intentionally or not. We can use that to sort of shape our relationship with the things that we do.

Speaker 2 You mentioned Scribe Media. You're not only an author yourself, but you also help people publish books through Scribe Media.
Can you give us just a little bit of what Scribe Media is?

Speaker 2 And then, and I know you could probably do three hours on the backstory of Scribe.

Speaker 2 As much as it makes sense in the context of the time and what we've been talking about, maybe just tell us a little bit about how Scribe got to where it is today.

Speaker 4 Sure, yeah. So Scribe is the leading professional publisher.
So it's kind of a new breed that basically does the opposite of what traditional publishing does.

Speaker 4 Our belief is that authors should have complete control over their book, their rights, their royalties, and all the final creative decisions.

Speaker 4 And a lot of people don't realize that like when you enter the machine of traditional publishing, you actually give up all of your rights and all your creative decisions. You sort of become

Speaker 4 You don't even own your IP anymore. You don't control your pricing.
You don't control any of those things.

Speaker 4 And that may have made sense 100, 150 years ago, but given where we are now with Amazon and print on demand and social media, it's so many authors having direct control of their own audience or direct connections with their own audience.

Speaker 4 What authors really want is control over their book and the full upside of their work that they've spent years in many cases creating this community around.

Speaker 4 So we help entrepreneurs, executives, creators, speakers, coaches, for the most part, write, publish, and market their books.

Speaker 4 And our model is the opposite of what the sort of traditional publishers do.

Speaker 4 We get paid for our work and our expertise, a flat rate, and then authors make all the final creative decisions, keep 100% of their rights and royalties, and get to do whatever they want with their book forever.

Speaker 4 And it keeps books from getting trapped in that kind of

Speaker 4 nether world of, oh, they didn't earn out your advance, been going out of print, and you don't really have control, but you can't buy your rights back.

Speaker 4 It's just this whole messy thing that a lot of people don't talk about.

Speaker 4 But this company was started maybe 10 years ago by Tucker, Tucker Max, and Zach O'Bront, who Tucker was an incredible author, and Zach's an incredible operator.

Speaker 4 And they built this up into a great company.

Speaker 4 I mean, they really pioneered this category, and I think especially 10 years ago, seeing where publishing was going and that this was the future of it, I think it was absolutely visionary. And about

Speaker 4 two, a couple of years ago, two, three years ago now, they stepped back. And the person who took over that company

Speaker 4 did not run it at the standard that the founders did, sort of to put it lightly. Tucker's written a lot about this.
And

Speaker 4 there's some amazing,

Speaker 4 I mean, like nobody writes a business postmortem like Tucker Max.

Speaker 4 He really writes about some of the

Speaker 4 emotional journeys that the... people involved go on in a way that I think is like incredibly fascinating.
It just makes for an interesting, interesting story.

Speaker 4 But I I was an author who got caught up in sort of the turbulent times that Scribe went through in 2023. And I'm a huge believer in this company.
I think this is the future of publishing.

Speaker 4 I published both of my books with them, and I've been a fan of the company. And so, when they went through hard times, I was like, oh man, I know people who buy companies.

Speaker 4 This is an interesting one. I love the team.

Speaker 4 I had a life-changing experience as a customer. Maybe I can help out.

Speaker 4 So I started making some phone calls and I found a team with the right experience to basically buy the IP from the company and hire over the team and restart a new company that just ensured that

Speaker 4 the good that Scribe did didn't get drugged down by the bad of this interim leader.

Speaker 4 And so, we're a year and a half after that transition now.

Speaker 4 So, I kind of took a strange side door into becoming CEO of this publishing company.

Speaker 4 But it's such a dream to work with authors and get to, you know, help shape books and ensure that people reach their visions. And

Speaker 4 that this, we have this sort of meritocratic approach to like who's publishing books and what ideas are getting out there, and that people can really control their message and use their book to achieve whatever their goals are.

Speaker 4 You know, a lot of people come in trying to impact a very specific issue or reach a specific community or just grow their business. You know, for some people, it's a

Speaker 4 it is very explicitly like a credibility and authority, and like, I want to own this space, I want to be this guy or girl, and I want to be known for this thing.

Speaker 4 And there's no better way to do that than to like write the definitive great book on the topic. And so we

Speaker 4 we do a lot of that with with a wide variety of people.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I

Speaker 2 I followed it for a while when I was I self-published a book back in 2015 and that's when Tucker was doing a lot of writing about I don't know if he had actually created Scribe at that time, but he was creating a lot of content around the idea of what Scribe would become if he hadn't.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I used a lot of his philosophy, his, his, you know, what he was talking about at that time

Speaker 2 in putting that book together.

Speaker 2 You know, Tucker's another guy who actually, you could almost do an almanac of Tucker Max someday on him.

Speaker 2 I mean, his, some of the podcasts that he's done, like with James Alticher and stuff, are just, I mean, it is as real deal.

Speaker 2 Like

Speaker 2 you, you, you believe every word that he's, he's one of those individuals, much like the other three that you're writing, have written about,

Speaker 2 that when they speak,

Speaker 2 whether you agree or not, you know that's exactly what this individual feels. Like, there's no, he's not bullshitting you, and the way that he delivers the message, you can tell.

Speaker 2 And I think what's so interesting about those people and just the authors you've worked with, the individuals you've been around, and the people that you follow seem to have this way. Like,

Speaker 2 why is it that

Speaker 2 that type type of individual,

Speaker 2 they reap so much benefit from being authentic, not playing an algorithm game. Yet, you know, they also tend to get the most vitriol in return for that, right?

Speaker 2 I mean, and it keeps so many people from being exactly who they are because they don't want to take the status hit or that the negativity that comes with it.

Speaker 2 Like when you're working with an author and they're really trying to get their message out,

Speaker 2 how does the team, how do you specifically pull out that, that,

Speaker 2 how do you give yourself permission to say exactly what you want to say,

Speaker 2 understanding that there may be consequences, and I don't necessarily mean dire, but there are consequences to any time you are exactly who you are.

Speaker 4 Yeah, the fear is a good indicator. Like learning to see and feel fear as a, as just like a meter on the dashboard, I think is a good mental frame.

Speaker 4 And Tucker's got a great way of putting this: like, fear and excitement are the same, like biologically.

Speaker 4 And so you have to just sort of reframe fear as excitement that you are getting close to the truth.

Speaker 4 There's so many writing quotes. I think it's a Hemingwayism, but like writing is easy.
Just write one true sentence, now write another one. Like

Speaker 4 the things that make, I think you hit correctly, like Tucker is

Speaker 4 so uniquely honest. Like, his superpower is just blunt, straight honesty.
And so few people can actually

Speaker 4 do that.

Speaker 4 Like, it is because it is, it is valuable because it is so rare.

Speaker 4 And it's scary, you know, it's you never know how people are going to react.

Speaker 4 But watching him sort of live his life that way, good and bad that comes of it, I think is incredible.

Speaker 4 I mean, the value that you get when Tucker tells you something is good because you've watched him or you've heard him tell you the last five versions were bad is

Speaker 4 remarkable.

Speaker 4 Because as you point out, you know, a lot of people

Speaker 4 default to a kind of appeasing bullshit.

Speaker 4 by nature and

Speaker 4 just don't choose to live their life willing to fight about any idea all the time.

Speaker 4 And it's so easy to let that slip away and just feel like you're being shaped by the hands of the opinions of the people around you rather than holding your shape almost no matter what kind of comes your way.

Speaker 2 Do you think that plays back into our conversation around the pessimism when we're unwilling to be our authentic self, when we're unwilling to say, you know, that one true sentence, write that one true sentence as it pertains to our world.

Speaker 2 Do you think that

Speaker 2 gap, like it almost feels like that gap between what I want to say and what I'm willing to say, that's where

Speaker 2 pessimism lives in that place. We start to feel like, you know, I can't be who I am.
It's because of this world. It's because of this outside circumstance.
I can't say this thing I want.

Speaker 2 Do you think that's another factor that plays into that?

Speaker 4 This is a complicated question because I think

Speaker 4 there's a lot of yous.

Speaker 4 Learning to define you as precisely as possible, I think, is a really helpful exercise. And Naval has talked about this.

Speaker 4 Not just like, you know, there's a few ways to visualize. I think one is like, you are not the voice in your head.

Speaker 4 You are the one hearing the voice in your head. And the second level to that is recognizing that you can control the voice in your head.
You can program it. You can teach it.

Speaker 4 And so I think on the one hand, you know, the naive, to go back to sort of your example or the question that you asked, like the naive

Speaker 4 view or the first order view of my truth is pessimism is like, that's just the voice in your head that says, like, oh, fuck, my tire popped. Like, today is terrible.

Speaker 4 The recognition that you aren't the one saying that, you're the one hearing that, and you can choose how to react to it and how to interpret it and whether to agree with it is sort of the second level.

Speaker 4 The third is to sort of recognize, oh, I didn't want to hear that voice, and I I need to like hammer on that because I don't want that to be my reaction to events like this.

Speaker 4 I want to be a person who says, well, at least it wasn't two, or at least it wasn't my engine, or I'm still so lucky to have a car, or glad thing I've got a cell phone and there's a towing company right here and I've got enough money to pay for, you know, the tow.

Speaker 4 No big deal, 20 minutes out of my day.

Speaker 4 Back to it. Really looking forward to, you know, having a cup of coffee when I get through with this.
Like all of those things are

Speaker 4 the the meta lesson that naval teaches that i think is the most important is that like is basically skill issue right like if you are not wealthy you can develop the skill to become so if you are not happy you can develop the skill to become so if you are not optimistic you can develop the skill to become so and so learning to

Speaker 4 see that and control create the environment that makes you into the person that you want to be like if you want to have an optimistic reaction to things,

Speaker 4 surround yourselves with people with optimistic reactions to things. Follow people who are optimistic.
Read people who are optimistic.

Speaker 4 Train yourself out of those pessimistic reactions.

Speaker 4 Like pay attention. Do this exercise for a week.
If you're listening to this and you want to start this,

Speaker 4 everybody that I've noticed in my life tends to

Speaker 4 start their like when you ask, how are you? Or what's going on? There are people who will always, always, always start with a negative observation. Hey, how was your flight? Good to see you.

Speaker 4 Oh, it was, it was fine. There was a baby behind me that was crying.

Speaker 4 Or they'll say, it was great. No issues.
Everything was on time. Like there, there are people who 80, 20, 90, 10, or 10 out of 10 will always start with a negative versus always start with a positive.

Speaker 4 And I at least try to always be a person who starts with a positive, who observes or shares something positive about whatever I just went through and,

Speaker 4 you know, help other people see that. If you see, you know, your, your partner, your business partner or whatever, like

Speaker 4 always starting with a negative, be like, do you mean to do that? Like the last five times, like, I wrote them down. I've been deep in tallies.
Like, do you want that?

Speaker 2 Yeah. You know, I think optimism is a superpower.

Speaker 2 I think Elon said on Rogan's podcast, the future belongs to the optimistic. And to your point about developing the skills, what's funny is people think they're going to be happy

Speaker 2 when they master the skill. It's in that process of developing it that you all of a sudden wake up and you find yourself happy, you know?

Speaker 2 And for those of you listening who maybe haven't clearly defined your relationship to that voice in your head, The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer is a book that'll change your life.

Speaker 2 Eric, this has been fantastic.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much for your time. Where can people learn more about you, get into your world, get your books, et cetera? We'll have links, guys, in the show notes.

Speaker 2 So either YouTube, wherever you're listening, just scroll down and I'll have links and everything.

Speaker 4 Yeah, all my personal stuff is at ejorgenson.com. There's a podcast, a newsletter,

Speaker 4 both links to all my books and my little investment fund.

Speaker 4 And then, Scribe Media is where to go if you're interested.

Speaker 4 If you think you've got a book in you, if you've got an Apple Note somewhere with like book outline, book ideas, book notes, or if you just have a sense that one would help you grow your business, we'd love to chat with you.

Speaker 4 Scribe Media.com.

Speaker 2 Thank you so much, my friend.

Speaker 4 Thank you.

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