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
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.
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.
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.
Biology is kind of interestingly parallel to Naval in both sort of American dream stories, like biology is a first generation immigrant family, clearly a brilliant guy, multiple degrees in like biomedical engineering and biology. Very successful startup founder in that space. Then went to become a great investor at A16Z and is angel invested in hundreds of startups.
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.
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.
Showing 381–400 of 464 · page 20 of 24
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