Eric Jorgensen
speaker
464 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard 17 Jun
Eric Jorgensen’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Eric Jorgensen on X is probably the main place where people find you.
Um, he's also a great follow there.
Thank you for being here.
Thank you for having me.
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.
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.
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. 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.
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 –
maybe it had to travel a really long way why is it only manufactured in china like why why why why but the first principles version just like cuts all of those and if you can make that creative leap to go all the way down from the very beginning um you know like the opposite of reasoning from first principles is reasoning by analogy which is how almost all of us do almost everything
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...
Showing 361–380 of 464 · page 19 of 24
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