The Ryan Hanley Show
Mastering Optimism: The Contrarian Lessons Naval, Elon, and Balaji Want You to Know | Eric Jorgenson
Mon, 6 Jan 2025
In this episode, we explore why optimism isn’t just a feel-good mindset but a tactical advantage for leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs navigating an uncertain world. Join 11,000+ Leaders receiving the Finding Peak Newsletter: https://go.ryanhanley.com Inspired by the teachings of Naval Ravikant, Elon Musk, and Balaji Srinivasan, we break down how optimism drives technological progress, reshapes industries, and fosters groundbreaking ideas. Whether you're building a business, advancing in your career, or seeking personal growth, these contrarian principles will challenge conventional thinking and inspire action. What You’ll Learn in This Episode: Why Naval, Elon, and Balaji emphasize optimism as a core trait for success. The role of first principles thinking in solving big problems and unlocking innovation. How optimism can help overcome fear, resistance, and industry inertia. The unexpected connection between technological progress and philosophical optimism. Practical ways to cultivate an optimistic mindset in your business and personal life. Connect with Eric Jorgenson Website: https://www.ejorgenson.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/erjorgenson/ Almanac of Naval Ravikant: https://amzn.to/408kBGz This episode is perfect for entrepreneurs, leaders, and thinkers who want to challenge conventional wisdom, unlock their creative potential, and embrace the future with confidence. Tune in, take notes, and get inspired to master optimism like the greats!
Chapter 1: What makes optimism a core trait for success?
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. 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. The Almanac of Naval Ravikant.
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. Eric is also the author of the anthology of biology and the soon to be released the book of Elon Musk.
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. You're gonna love this conversation.
And because of that, I'm gonna stop right here and get us on to Eric Jorgensen.
In a crude laboratory in the basement of his home.
It's one of my absolute favorite books. It's on the shelves behind me. 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 Ravikant 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. One, what attracted you to Naval to begin with?
I had been following Naval for maybe 10 years. I really resonated with even his very early stuff, writing at Venture Hacks. He was one of the early bloggers about the game theory of venture capital and talking about Silicon Valley back in the 2000s, basically. So I'd followed him for a long time for his startup stuff and watching his following grow as he sort of achieved all of his goals.
like business goals and then turning to a little bit more of a like philosophical.
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Chapter 2: How can first principles thinking unlock innovation?
Yeah. Like Shane Parrish called him the angel philosopher and like that podcast he did on the knowledge project. Uh, I think it's one of the greatest podcast episodes of all time. Um, and that was really the like inspiration for me to write this book cause I was thinking about all the people that I'd learned so much from. And I like Munger, I like Buffett.
And to me, Naval is very much like 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.
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. It's not a tech, his philosophical beliefs are not tech-focused, but they obviously come out of a modern era.
How do you think... Like he so uniquely or authentically is able to bridge that gap 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.
Yeah, I mean, he's an incredible sort of distiller of truth. You know, like he'll get things down to a very principled level. Like when I was writing this book, I really thought, you know, there'd be a thousand of all nerds like me who would really love it.
It blows my mind that we've now sold like a million copies and there's, you know, yoga teachers in Bali and like moms and little brothers reading it. Like that's so awesome. And I think it's a testament to how you know, if you really... articulate a principle. Well, it's universally applicable and it sort of feels right to almost anybody who picks it up.
And like now that I've seen what this book, you know, five years, almost five years on, like seeing what this book has done. Um, I think there's no human on earth who could pick up this book and not take something useful away from it.
Yeah. One of his, one of the things he talks about all the time and like, His influence is so powerful. He's got me reading David Deutsch about physics and time travel and shit. But he always comes back to this idea of first principles. Maybe you could explain a little bit why –
first principle he's for me and i consume i read a ton he's really brought first principles into my life 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 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 what first principles have you taken from his work and
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Chapter 3: What are the practical ways to cultivate optimism?
Yeah. So first principles is a great, um, is one of the common sort of mental models. So if you're somebody who's been reading like Munger or Nassim Taleb maybe, or now Naval, 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
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. 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.
And the way he looks at it, the question that he asked 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? If not, then it's possible to improve it, right? 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?
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? And what is the cost of those things? And he came up with this index. 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 2000 X increase? Um, that's probably off by an order of magnitude, 200. Yeah, whatever. Um, what accounts for that? And so thinking in the limit of 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. Um, you know, first principles might be like, it just opens your lens of problem solving to see a lot of different opportunities that you might not have included.
I, I, when I was thinking about this concept, I, you know, I, I also read I read a lot, I know you do too. The stoic idea and then taking it even farther back to say the Socratic method of this waterfall of whys. So we have this, why are we using these materials? Okay, why do these materials cost so much? Okay, why have we not tried to get these materials at a lower price?
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 And then from there, we can start to reimagine how it could be. Does that feel like a relevant kind of way of thinking through how we get there?
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. Like keep going down. Why is it so expensive? Well, why is it manufactured that way? Well, why is it only – like –
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Chapter 4: How does technological progress relate to philosophical optimism?
If you say, oh, I need to get to work, I can't afford a car. Because that's how you see everybody else get to work. You don't necessarily think, I need to get to work, what is the cheapest possible way for me to get to work? Or what is the most efficient way? You just, by nature, observe what everyone else is doing, and that's your starting place, rather than starting from...
What are your full set of options? Because it's exhausting to think that way. You can't do that for everything in your life. But for the most important problems, either the most important or the most valuable, that is a really effective way. And they continue to do this. I'm just going to keep using Elon examples because that's where my head's been at. But that's where the tower came from.
What is the best possible solution? 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... most 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 these 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. but you've got to break the constraint of reasoning by analogy and you've got to run towards that really clean, terrifying idea that emerges when you strip away all the bullshit.
Do you think the general lack of usage of this, because I completely agree with what you're saying, I created in 2020, I founded a digital commercial insurance agency. And 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,
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? But 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. You had to go to their business to sell them the thing.
And, you know, the reason I did that was one out of necessity, right? Like I was bootstrapping this, this agency and I didn't have the money or the time in order to scale fast enough to drive to all these places. But two, it was kind of thinking back to like this idea of like, why, why do we have to do that? Like what, what is, is there a cleaner idea, which is all an insurance customer wants is
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 uh uh insurance consumers want to know they can at least drive to a location and and punch someone in the face or yell at them if they do something wrong um but they don't need to share the same air with them um so you know but in i got so much pushback in my industry for that idea
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Chapter 5: Why is understanding history important for optimism?
Like you're just don't, you're not aware of this concept of first principles? Is it laziness? 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?
There's so many reasons for, and usually they're overlapping reasons, for people either letting themselves off the hook or defending the status quo or defending the method that they've been using for the last 5, 10, or 50 years. It's, you know, Balaji has a great line, like, their incomprehension is your moat.
um 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 it scares them enough that they're angry about it subconsciously 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 you
create this new opportunity, which means they're going to be slow to follow or not follow at all. And you're going to have a moat and an advantage that just comes from their inability or unwillingness to think more clearly about the space.
So you've mentioned Balji a couple times. I don't know that the audience will be as familiar with Balji as maybe they are Naval or Elon, obviously. Can you talk a little bit about, obviously after the success of the format of the Almanac of Naval, you had really dialed in on something. your style resonated, easy to consume, but very hard hitting, right?
So you had kind of a framework for how to craft a narrative that really resonated. Why did you choose biology next?
I think Balaji 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 brilliant and contrarian and interesting and unique as a thinker, but not very... Not followed in the mainstream in the way that he deserves.
And I think a lot of people could benefit from... It all comes back to what can I do for the reader? I followed Naval for 10 years. Everything that I learned from him made my life better. I followed Bology for 10 years. And everything that I learned from him made my life better. And I want to package this knowledge that 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 range 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. And, um, I think books are really, really powerful in that way. Apology. Sorry. No, go ahead.
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Chapter 6: What unique insights do Naval, Elon, and Balaji offer on optimism?
He wrote a book called The Network State that is like about some of the challenges that the modern sort of nation states are in and like the way bureaucracy really comes to constrain technological advancement.
And what I think is the most 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 slowly over time and That lens that biology taught me really is also, I think, quite a helpful answer to what you shared before.
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 technological frontier in every single industry, and those who prosper are almost always close to that technological frontier.
And that there's so much to be gained, even in a small business as an individual operator, by embracing technology and moving closer to that frontier. I mean, technology fundamentally is a way of doing more with less, and there's always opportunities there.
One of the through lines I see in the three individuals that you've picked here, Naval Ravikant, Balaji, and Elon, is... technological optimism, right? I mean, that's when I look, 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 biology, mostly because sometimes he goes down nerd holes that I just simply can't follow. 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? 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 I'm a huge believer in blockchain, but the tech is a little beyond. I'm just getting used to AI. That being said, they are all optimists, right? Naval talks about it.
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 did an episode with David Deutsch, who, if you guys are unaware of David Deutsch, he's a physicist. Fucking brilliant. And 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. 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.
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Chapter 7: How can we overcome fear and inertia in our industries?
I'm assuming you're an optimist as well. But... 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, etc.?
I mean, there are so many reasons to that. Like, that it's... I think everyone gets to kind of pick their own. I think there can be a very selfish reason to be optimistic, which is just it feels good.
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 find reasons to look forward to the future, of which there are many. I think there's a lot of...
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. You know, there's some extent to which, you know, when you're doing rally driving, the 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. Like your body knows what to do. And I think that's, that applies to like at a civilizational level. Like if you remain optimistic with a light dose of paranoia about our real problems and addressing them.
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, you'll miss the fact that things have been getting better steadily for almost all of human history and everything. I mean, look, look at what we're doing right now.
Like we're sitting in a heated and or air conditioned building, well fed, well clothed, recording on absolute alchemy device that is computer and zero margin digital products and making a podcast that will preserve this hour of our time for thousands, tens of thousands, millions of people like years into the future. It's fucking crazy.
Like we forget that we are surrounded by miracles that are the fruit of labor and sacrifice of life.
millennia of our ancestors um 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 there are parallel universes where we are all like wearing loincloths and scrabbling around stabbing each other to eat moss off a rock like there's a lot of
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