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
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
dark and terrible things in our past and a lot of bright and beautiful things in our future. And I think it's very important, like the other through line of these three people is that they are very well studied historically. They are optimistic about the future because they understand the past.
And understanding the past gives them a different 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. Biology talks about this a lot. There's a great whole section on truth and the media's sort of, and the incentives that they have to...
not necessarily be truth-seeking or wide lens historical perspective um to today's information but when you do that and when you follow people like naval apology and elon you become you gain a little broader of a lens you become naturally more optimistic um 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 that perspective with others especially when um you know people feel feel 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
Yeah. I mean this, um, 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. Um, like I feel like insurance is probably often a, um, you know, not treated as like the sexiest, most exciting. No, it's never treated that way.
Well, yeah. But like, 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 wonderful 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. And that is an important and respectable thing that a lot of people don't appreciate the role that it plays, I think. But it also means you have a much better job than basically any other human who ever lived in history, who died either farming or fighting. And there's just so much to be grateful for.
That's the past-looking perspective. 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... that we are participating in building the foundation of cathedrals that we can't even imagine over a few hundred year time span.
There are people who are maybe closer to those sexy places like SpaceX that are very obviously building the future, but we are also all part of the sort of substrate that supports those people and creates the civilization that keeps expanding those frontiers.
It just makes me very proud to like be a human, especially an American human, and continue to move forward with these good ideas about optimism and civilization and engineering and truth seeking. And, you know, how lucky are we to be alive when, you know, these things are getting developed. And I know you're deep down the Deutsch rabbit hole.
Um, but I will like underline that as being, you know, he's also a very interesting read. Uh, you know, probably like if Naval is one Oh one, um, Deutsch is two Oh one or three Oh one. 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. Um, it's a very, um,
philosophically robust approach to optimism uh and over a very long time horizon 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
I just saw a tweet from Naval yesterday in response to someone who was sort of asking about that. Like, hey, 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. And Naval's tweet was like, kids, God, mission. Choose one or more than one, but the meaning of life is the meaning that you give it.
And we as a society, I think the numbers of devout believers in any religion, it just has a trend, seem to be going down, at least in America. That's, I think, one source of multi-generational thinking. I think another is family and specifically the family multi-generational structure, maybe even living together or very near multiple generations of family.
probably particularly if they overlap and you have kids younger, like that, that trend has been, we've had the reverse of that trend recently, but I think that's easier to have this sort of, um, feel a little more insular. The other thing is I think there's, um, a lot of selection around the media.
Like I, I really wish like Marshall McLuhan was still alive and to get like his take on social media, like how extreme this has gotten just like, Not even – every new medium of sort of media like kicks off a new panic of like nobody's reading books anymore. Now they're all reading newspapers.
Like there was a legitimate panic about that when newspapers became like the predominant technology of the day. And so there's some extent to which like there's always alarm about it. But I do – there is some real – the combination of –
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