#1082 - Eric Jorgenson - The Wild Psychology of Elon Musk

[0:00] Many copies of the Navalmanac have you sold now? It's tough to know, but I think we're coming up on two million. How's that feel? I'm still, the word I like to use is gobsmacked. Like, I really thought I was doing fan service for a few thousand Naval nerds.

[0:14] And the fact that that's, like, forty languages and millions of people, and we've given away a few million more. Right? Like, I don't even really know. Oh, so that's how many were sold? Because it was available for free through the website.

[0:24] Yeah. Which is another, like, five million plus. Really hard to track. I think it's my most suggested book when people say, where should I start with personal development? *Essentialism* by Greg McKeown or the Navalmanac.

[0:37] That's incredible. And that's—I mean, I had no idea how many people were gonna resonate with it and recommend it. And, you know, I think the highest compliment a gift—the highest compliment a book can receive is to be gifted. Mhmm. And so much of what we read comes from what's recommended.

[0:52] Like, how often do you see an ad for a book and buy it? Like, almost never. Yeah. The bars are too high. Yeah.

[0:57] And the subtitle of this new one is *A Guide to Purpose and Success* about Elon. Why pick that? Why purpose specifically? It was—it's emergent. I mean, when I write these books, I start with millions and millions of words of source material, everything they've ever shared publicly.

[1:12] And I try to figure out, like, what is the essence of the person? What is the thing that is most special about them that anybody can learn from? And we all know that Elon is, like, massively productive. I feel like the question everybody's asking is kind of like, how the hell did this happen? Like, how does he get so much done?

[1:29] But what I didn't realize until way into the process was that purpose was the other pillar. So I knew I wanted to know, like, how does he win, but I didn't know to the extent that purpose was a big part of why he wins. And that is actually—he has some really incredible answers for what do I do? What's important? How do I choose what's important?

[1:50] Mhmm. Yeah. I think everyone looks and just assumes tactics, raw tactics. Yeah. But if there's something bigger driving that, Teal says about Elon, he seems to know something about risk that the rest of us do not.

[2:04] What do you think that thing is? Yeah. I mean, I think Elon is risk-on. Like, he takes risks that he shouldn't take. He's inherently biased towards risk.

[2:13] But the number of times that that pays off, I think, reveals and puts it in Teal's context. Like, Teal is a risk manager, and Elon is a risk taker. And when you combine that with purpose—the fact that Elon is on these missions, he's trying to accomplish something and he almost doesn't care how much risk it takes. He'll just keep taking chances and keep taking chances until he breaks through. And he's got this amazing quote: failure is irrelevant unless it's catastrophic.

[2:41] And I think that's a really good way to sort of explain that attitude towards risk, like, I just don't care how low my chances are. I don't care how long the odds are. I'm just gonna keep going until I die because this is important enough to keep working on. And that explains why the purpose piece is crucial because that's what would keep you pushing through. Yes.

[2:59] There's so many times that he has done things that seem insane from, like, a financial motivation point of view, or I'm trying to build a business. And it's because he's driven by these massive purposes and he has this risk tolerance. And the combination of those things, I think, is what, you know, pushes him. Like, these two opportunities, Tesla and SpaceX, being the biggest, were on nobody's radar. He looked absurd when he undertook them, and he put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to achieve these things because he was purpose-driven even though the odds were long and the risk was high. Is he that singular of an individual?

[3:35] Obviously, SpaceX impressive, Tesla impressive, Doge kinda cool, being on stage, Trump campaign, Twitter, X, rah rah. You know, how just how impressive is he or how singular is he as an individual? I think he's pretty singular. Like, do you not? Yeah.

[3:53] I do. Yeah. But a lot of people that are detractors have found a way to say, actually, it's more to do with leverage and ridiculous risk tolerance and just sort of blowing through the boundaries that other people wouldn't. It's to do with lack of scruples and being able to push through ethics that other people might find squirrely. Where do you see the big competitive advantages for him coming from?

[4:20] I think he's the greatest living entrepreneur, hard stop, and maybe the greatest of all time. The fact that he did Tesla and SpaceX, which would both be singular accomplishments and put him on like top ten, if not Mount Rushmore. The fact that he did them both at the same time is unbelievable. After PayPal and Zip2, as a young guy, and then just sort of on the side, X AI, Boring Company, Neuralink, like Doge—you want to include that as a project—absolutely singular.

[4:58] I mean, and lots of game left, right? Like, he's only fifty-five? Not quite. Like, he might have twenty more years.

[5:06] Like, where does this go in twenty more years? It's unbelievable. I mean, the combination of traits that I think he has—and this is not to like, I know that I will be accused, like through this book and this episode and everything of lionizing and overlooking the bad traits that you listed. And there are plenty. Like, there's dark sides to every advantage.

[5:25] But he's got the intensity of David Goggins. Like, just raw—if not the physique. Yeah. Not quite the physique or the skin tone.

[5:36] There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Goggins. Yep. But he's got the intensity of David Goggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Feynman, and then the—I like Napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just will to win. And when you combine those things, absolutely singular.

[5:57] It would be like if Zuckerberg had also started Google. Like, I feel like that's kind of the order of magnitude thing, if they started Google and Facebook in parallel. I mean, SpaceX, I think when it goes public, this will be more obvious to people, but he will have almost founded, but certainly funded, led, and driven two of the top ten companies in the world, if not two of the most important companies in the world—in parallel at the same time—while doing a bunch of other stuff and having fourteen kids. How? What is—okay.

[6:26] That is pretty singular. After a few million words of looking through his life, what it is that he's said and done, what are the component parts of his success? What are the biggest drivers for how he's been so productive? I think there are a few. And I think the thing that people miss is the combination of those factors.

[6:45] So I think people talk a lot about—and it's correct to talk about—the bias towards, or the intense urgency towards, the limiting factor. Right? He's always looking for the bottleneck and attacking the bottleneck. He works with maniacal urgency. Those are the words he uses and instills in people all around him.

[7:03] There is also this ability to sort of think from first principles—has become this like keyword that he talks about and that he has a bunch of great examples for. But when you combine all of those things, it's not a ten percent or a fifty percent improvement. It is like a two order of magnitude improvement. If you are working on the right thing with the right vision at the right time immediately, all the time, you're not twice as productive. You're a thousand times more productive.

[7:29] And then you do that for thirty years, forty years. And the way that sort of head start accrues and compounds, and the way the leverage builds on itself, and the way the allies show up, and the way that capital piles in behind you, and the way that wins turn into additional wins. And then he has this sort of mystique now that people rightly criticize as a mystique. Like, it feels unreal, and it feels like people don't critique it, but he hasn't lost. Like, and that becomes self-perpetuating.

[8:02] That was when he put the Tesla bonus structure in place for himself. Yeah. The trillion-dollar compensation package. Yeah. Yeah.

[8:13] There's a lot of criticism that was thrown around. Like, this is ridiculous. What an insane amount of money. No one person is supposed to do that. But his pushback was, well, look at what I need to do in order to be able to achieve that.

[8:26] Can you just explain, like, why that was so ridiculous and what it constituted? Yeah. I mean, this is the second time he's done it actually. So he had an insane all-or-nothing: Like, I will make zero dollars unless I ten X Tesla.

[8:40] I don't remember the exact number, but he had some number of years to turn Tesla into a massive unprecedented success. Everybody said it was absurd, but the shareholders were all kind of like, all right, we'll vote for it. What do we have to lose? Like, if he doesn't do it, we don't pay him. Yep.

[8:52] And he achieved this impossible bar. And then the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were suing him trying to retract that money, and it's a whole— that's a whole mess that I'm not qualified to tell the story of in great detail. But it worked, and he did the impossible, and he has been doing the impossible over and over again. So when he comes and says, I think I can take Tesla from a one trillion dollar company to a ten trillion dollar company, and you don't have to pay me anything unless I do, but if I do, maybe throw me a trillion dollars.

[9:24] Like, who is that hurting? Like, it's helping all the shareholders who own it. They agreed to it. It's supposed to be impossible, right?

[9:32] Like, it's all upside, but he's made all these impossible leaps before. Not always right, but like the way he says, he's like, I've lost many battles, but I've never lost a war. He's never lost a company. He's never missed a huge target. He misses deadlines all the time, but almost by design.

[9:51] Because he's pushing the limit so quickly. Yeah. He just articulated this really well, of course, after I finished writing the book because he's always dropping new stuff. But he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks have a fifty percent chance of making. And he's like, I don't want to be making a hundred percent of my deadlines.

[10:08] That means they're way too conservative. That means things will get moved, things will get missed. So I set a deadline that I think we have a fifty-fifty chance of making, and sometimes we'll be wrong. Sometimes we'll miss it, but a lot of the time we will make a deadline that we didn't think was possible because we chose to be really, really aggressive with schedules. You had sixty-nine core Musk methods.

[10:26] So let's go through some of them. Funny how that works out. If we don't make stuff, there is no stuff. He said this on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was one of a few things that hit me so hard.

[10:36] I was like, this book has to happen, actually. And it was in this era where everybody's just going, just print money, just send it out, just like help us, help us. Like looking to sort of the government as big brother to just take care of us no matter what, even though nobody was doing any work during COVID. And he's like, that's not how this works. Like, if we are not making stuff, if we're not building stuff, if we're not providing services, like the whole economy collapses.

[11:01] Like, that is what holds up the money. And he's a great example, I think, of the bias to build and serve and improve things. You know, the example like, Tesla is the only car company trying to drive prices down. Have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last forty years? Tesla's prices have gone down.

[11:21] Yeah. They're actively lowering the price on the models. As they add volume, they lower the price. And as they simplify the car, they lower the price. But I looked this up, Ford F-150.

[11:31] If you just follow inflation, it used to be like five or six grand. And if you just follow inflation, it should be like fifteen thousand today, but they're like forty or fifty grand and feel like yes, there's more features and more safety, but like three, four times more. And I feel like every car company on Earth is just trying to figure out how to charge. And as Jeff Bezos said, like there's two kinds of companies. There's companies that try to charge, work hard to charge more. And there's companies that work hard to charge less.

[11:54] And Amazon is a like, we're driving costs down business. And Tesla is the same. He says like, if we can't figure out how to charge something, it's because we can't figure out how to charge less. Because he's like the mission, the purpose: I want as many people as possible driving an electric car.

[12:08] I want as many people as possible driving an autonomous car. Like that is what solves the climate change problem. That's what makes our cities quieter and cleaner and better. Like, why not lower the price as we increase the volume and make it accessible to more people? Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.

[12:23] Yeah. Isn't that a good one? It's fucking pithy. Is fear of failure the biggest cause of failure, not a lack of skill or understanding or foresight? The way I hear that quote is it's because it kills something in the crib.

[12:39] Like, fear of failure is why people don't even set out. Yeah. Far more people have not attempted anything than have attempted something and failed at it. Yeah. You can't fail due to skill or fail due to stamina if you never even try.

[12:54] Or start it. Yeah. And, you know, if you just think of like how many things any of us have dreamed of doing but never tried. Like, it's ninety-nine to one. Well, lots of things that you dream of, you probably shouldn't try.

[13:06] So, mhmm. Fear of—I guess the interesting small print here is it's not necessarily fear of failure. It's fear of that it is not worth my time. I shouldn't be spending my time on that thing. Not that I could do it and it wouldn't work, but if I did it, it wouldn't be worth it.

[13:24] I think that's a very optimistic and enlightened maybe view of why people rationalize not doing things that they deeply want to do. But for instance, Elon Musk must have lots of dreams that he hasn't pursued, presumably, unless he's also able to program his own dreams. It's like, oh, that would be cool. That would be cool. I mean, he's like the most leveraged man on Earth.

[13:45] And I feel like he does indulge these random impulses. I mean, Boring Company was kind of like sitting in traffic being like, fuck this. And he just picked up the phone and called one of his engineers. He's like, start making a hole. Start researching drilling machines. I'm gonna call you back in two hours.

[14:00] By the way, that was at two AM. Okay. Bye. Like, that was when he did it? Yeah.

[14:04] At two am. Yes. Rang one of his engineers and said—it's the guy who's still running the Boring Company today. He's like, do it. I'll call you back.

[14:12] And then the guy comes back and says, like, alright, I found this and this about the drilling machines. I think they could be improved in this and this way. Then he goes to Tesla headquarters and is like, we're gonna start digging a hole in the parking lot. They're like, cool. We think we can get permits and do it in two weeks.

[14:25] He's like, nope. Move all the cars. Start right now. I want to see a hole in the parking lot at midnight. It's six PM.

[14:32] Go. And like, it is that level of bias to action. Like, think maniacal urgency. The words don't really sink in until you hear story after story after story of him doing something most people take two weeks to do in four hours. What are the most maniacal urgency stories about Elon? I mean, a small one that I think drills at home is like, he was interviewing for his head of machining at SpaceX, at a SpaceX site.

[14:57] And it was like a twenty-minute interview. It's just like, tell me about your work. Tell me about your background. Alright. You're qualified.

[15:04] Come to an agreement. Somebody standing behind him was like, here's a job offer. Fill in the blanks. Sign it. Sign it.

[15:09] Go to work. Like, six PM on Saturday. Like, time just doesn't exist. It's irrelevant. It is like whatever is the most important thing to get done in this hour, get it done immediately and keep going.

[15:21] Like, there is no work-life cell separation. There is no, like, do it later. It's like if it is the most important thing to do, do it immediately, even if it's irrelevant. Like, there are stories in the Isaacson biography of him ordering, you call them, like, surges. Even when they don't need to be done, he just, he loves urgency for urgency's sake.

[15:42] Like, one of these pushes of like, stack the Starship or build that part. And so I was like, we don't, this part is not the bottleneck. He's like, I don't care. I don't feel enough urgency from you. Like, I'm giving you a deadline.

[15:52] I don't care that it's arbitrary. Like, I want you to feel the kind of urgency that I feel. Hard stop. Like, that's how we work. It's basically speed training like you'd give to an athlete but being done out of season.

[16:04] Yeah. And all the time. And this is not always. There are times when this has saved, you know, months or years or weeks or millions of dollars, but there are also times when it's like burning people out and pissing them off and causing good people to quit. I have to imagine that the blast radius of this work rate is pretty huge, that the churn of people working for him is pretty insane. For sure.

[16:26] There are some people who are very long-tenured. But he also—I mean, I think that's part of the strategy. Like churning through relatively young, brilliant engineers, no work-life balance. This is your time in the wild, like, you are gonna be here all the time, here at the drop of a hat. But he's been doing this forever.

[16:47] He did this with PayPal. He decided, before they merged, that he was going to launch X.com on Thanksgiving weekend. And people were like, that doesn't make any sense. Nobody's paying attention. Everybody’s with their families. They don’t care.

[17:02] We're launching on Sunday on Thanksgiving. I want everybody here all the time. People were like, can I go see my family? Nope. You're not dedicated if you're not here working twenty hours a day trying to make this deadline.

[17:16] It is urgency for urgency's sake all the time on everything. And this goes back to purpose. You only get that out of people if you have this incredible mission that people feel like they’re on—that they're like, yes, I want to show up. I want to put the pedal down. I want to be used for all I’m worth. I want to see what I’m capable of.

[17:34] I want to work as hard as I can with other brilliant people on this incredibly powerful mission. And I can't do it for forty years, but I can do it for two or four, ten. Does Elon do any kind of self care? Morning routine, meditation, therapy? Not that there's much evidence of, which I think is interesting.

[17:53] Like the most productive man on earth barely sleeps, lives on his private jet, works maniacally all the time. No discernible good habits from what I can tell. Like, not outstanding. Like, eats donuts. Like, not a lot of meditation. Not a lot of introspection.

[18:16] Just gets up, grabs his phone, draws a knife, and goes to war every single day. Like, that is just—just shiv someone. I got that. That is the—my friend Brent Beshore describes operating a business as a knife fight. And it's like an operator who's in it. You wake up, you have a knife off the bedstand, and you go to work. And that’s actually probably how it feels with Elon.

[18:36] He was asked about his daily routine. He's like, wake up, I check my phone, I look for an emergency. There's always an emergency. And sometimes if there’s not, he creates one. How so?

[18:46] This is also from the Isaacson book. He's like, there were a lot of times when there's not objectively an emergency, but there is sufficient cause to be like, we can increase the pace. We can increase the pace. Like, let's figure out how to create a situation that maybe gets things moving faster, maybe doesn’t, but it is a bias to urgency all the time. But this—and I’m not advocating this.

[19:11] I don't live this way. Even if you can see the recipe and not want to cook the dish. But the takeaway that I think is useful and generalizable for everybody is very David Goggins. It’s like you’re capable of a lot more than you think. And the people who are massively orders of magnitude more productive are working at a pace and intensity that is very foreign to most people.

[19:37] And I think you’re a good example of this. Like, I don’t think people appreciate how hard you work to do the things that you do and cover the amount of ground that you have to cover—eight hundred episodes in five years. Like, you’re an intense motherfucker. You cover a lot of ground. You work really hard to do it.

[19:53] But everybody is capable of ten percent more, fifty percent more. Just give the throttle a push and—mhmm—see what breaks. Might not be anything. So given the lack of self care, does he care about subjective experience?

[20:08] The happiness, fulfillment, joy, things? I just don’t think that’s what he’s optimizing for. Like, I don’t think he’s a particularly happy person. I don’t think he really seems to take joy or pride in his past accomplishments. He’s just always looking forward.

[20:29] And I mean, I feel like it’s a great gift to us and a burden to him. Right? Like, the people around him talk about wishing that he would celebrate his accomplishments, wishing he would take a break, wishing he would be happier. But he’s just onto the next, onto the next. And I think when you have a glimpse into his childhood, that makes a little more sense.

[20:47] You get mean, as David Sunderer says, like the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son. His dad was certainly abusive. Verbally abusive. Imagine standing there as an eight-year-old boy for hours while your dad screamed in your face, drill sergeant style, calling you worthless, calling you useless, calling you stupid. When Elon was young, he got absolutely shit kicked out of him.

[21:16] Like gang stomped, not like losing a fight with one guy. Hospitalized for a while. His brother said he was so swollen he was unrecognizable. And his dad sided with the bullies and called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose. Like, what does that do?

[21:34] Like, that just creates this furnace in you that will never stop. And so I think there's a lot of—he's not comfortable with peace. Like, he is always at war and he's looking for the next war, and that just drives him always. And, you know, that is one part—the debate between clean fuel and dirty fuel, like which is better. You know, if you're mean to yourself internally, you're like, "Such a piece of shit, I gotta get more done."

[22:03] I can do more. I can accomplish more. I can be better versus like, "I'm building this great thing and I can do it, and this is going to be awesome and people are going to love it." Or, "I'm really proud of what I've done. I'm achieving this powerful mission."

[22:13] And Elon does both. Like, he burns clean fuel and dirty fuel, it seems. He's achieving these missions that are important to humanity, that so many people dream of, that everybody thought was impossible. And he's got this incredible string of successes, but he also has this internal angst, I think, that seems to drive him. Definitely a tolerance for pain.

[22:34] It almost seems like he deliberately creates suffering for himself. Yes. He did the tiny home thing. He'd sold all of his stuff at one point. Yeah.

[22:42] He may still have no possessions basically and sleeps on the factory floor. Yes. Which, I mean, the possessions thing was part like he was like, "I'm not a bad billionaire. Like, I'm a billionaire because I build valuable companies. Like, I'll sell all my stuff."

[22:56] I don't care. I don't need fancy things. Because people were dragging me. He's like, "I want you to understand that I'm in it for the right reasons." But I'm glad you asked about sleep.

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[24:08] Go to the link in the description or eightsleep.com/modernwisdom and use modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T sleep dot com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. That was really great. I really am a huge fan of Eight Sleep. I am too.

[24:24] There's no one that's used it that doesn't get completely fucking insane about it. Did Matteo put you up to that? Because they just got listed for 1.5 billion on the stock exchange. No. Like, is this?

[24:32] I don't know them at all. I just actually love Eight Sleep, I wanted it to, like, I thought it would be really funny to make you go, "Well, he saved us from having to do the ad read." Isn't that nice? That's one fewer ad read that I need to do this week. I feel like you've been working really hard.

[24:43] I just wanted to pick up a little bit of the slack. I feel like the guests just show up and you have to do everything. That's true. You need to pay for yourself now. That's it.

[24:51] Or this isn't cheap to put on. You know? I know. You need to pay for yourself. And I have an authentic, loving relationship with my Eight Sleep, and Elon needs one because, well, he didn't have any possessions.

[25:01] It's gonna be hard. Oh, that is true. I wonder if they could fit it to the factory floor. Just fucking lay an Eight Sleep on the ground. Be like, hey.

[25:09] It just sort of works, I guess. Yeah. You're sleeping on the—what’s that story? It's from the Isaacson book, but I think it's pretty telling. What’s that story about when he needed to do an investor meeting and the COO came in and found him, like, catatonic under his desk and basically had to force him to get up.

[25:28] Yeah. He was supposed to do an earnings call, and I think this is like 2018. This is like the end of a really long stretch of just miserable stuff. And I think he was in a really tough spot psychologically, and he was just lying on the floor. And yeah, this guy, to his credit, like, he has experience with psychological illnesses in his family and challenges.

[25:53] So he kind of knew what to do, and he went in and laid on the floor next to him and was like, “How you doing, buddy?” Just went under the desk. Yeah. Okay. Like laid down next to him and was like, “How you doing?”

[26:03] Like, “I know it's hard. I'm gonna take a couple more minutes, and we gotta get up and we gotta do this, do our best.” And it’s hard. Like, I think— I think he puts himself through a lot. Elon burns the boats and challenges himself.

[26:18] But he does have limits. Yeah. I mean, if you're lying under your desk catatonic, that's a limit. Yeah. Dude, he in the 2008 crisis, Tallulah Riley talks about him having night terrors.

[26:31] He's like sitting up all night. He's throwing up. He's having screaming nightmares. But that goes back to, like, I don’t want to live that experience. But it gives you a sense of how far people can push themselves and how far.

[26:48] I know. Look, the way that I see Elon is not too dissimilar to the way that I see Brian Johnson and also David Goggins, which is there are people who will go to the 99.999th percentile of anything and everything. Yeah. And it’s useful to have them around because they teach you all of the lessons that you learn by going to the absolute edge, but that doesn't mean that you should try to follow what they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that it’s a good strategy for anybody else to do.

[27:15] But if you’re gonna try and say that Brian Johnson going and basically being like a scout in an army—he's essentially the same thing as a scout in an army. Yeah. He goes up to this crazy high ridge, and it’s all treacherous, and maybe he’s gonna fall and oh my god. And then he finds out some stuff about what’s over there then comes back and tells us all. Yeah.

[27:36] I’m like, I don't want to be a scout, and I don't want an army filled with scouts, but it’s fucking useful to have a few. Yeah. Well, in particular, like this scout who is like building so many things that benefit so many people. And I think I mean, all this comes back to like Elon is being authentically himself. Like, who he is, is this insanely driven technical genius boy who is infused with sci-fi and military history, like dreaming of making an impact on the world in part because of this traumatic childhood he had and in part because of like it’s this grand dream and grand adventure.

[28:12] I don’t think it’s an insult to say he’s like a little bit of a hero complex of like, “I can do this. I can make a difference. I can make this huge impact on the world.” And thank God he did, right?

[28:22] Like this type of person in the past would just become like a conqueror. But like thanks to the miracle of modern capitalism and technology, he’s building shit that benefits all of us. And we’re gonna have this huge evolutionary leap hopefully as we go to another planet and we get to live through it. How fucking awesome is that? Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions.

[28:43] Yeah. This one comes from like the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization, but I think it’s a very generalizable rule. This version is like, you want the designers and the engineers and the manufacturers—they all work in the plant so they can see the downstream effects of the decisions they make in the design process. It’s very easy to try to break your feedback loop and not sense when you’re doing something harmful or even miss an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you. I think that the idea of not insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions is probably a good— I mean, there have to be times where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf.

[29:29] But I know that you have to locate, physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately. Yes. Basically, the same rule. Yeah. And on the production line, it’s like walk to the red.

[29:39] There’s like green or red everywhere on the production line. And if something is red, there’s a problem, go there immediately. There’s a couple versions of it. Physically move yourself immediately where the problem is. You should see his like if you track his private jet, it’s like all over the world constantly on the move. And so it’s not just like locally move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately.

[30:00] Call the people, get them in the room, go there. Like, it’s an underrated thing to be physically where the problem is. And whatever the most important—this goes back to the kind of like the original multiplying things of like whatever the most important thing to do is, whatever the limiting factor is, attack it immediately in the most effective way possible, which is usually going physically to where the problem is and seeing it for yourself directly or pulling in all the people that have a handle on it. Do things in parallel. Yeah.

[30:28] George and I were talking about this this morning because I think there's conventionally good wisdom that is focus. And this was one of the things I was surprised by. Warren Buffett's the perfect quote to explain this concept at a high level, which is like, you can’t get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Elon’s tried. So, just there are some things that there's an incompressible amount of time.

[30:54] And if you put those in sequence, now all of a sudden your timeline is this long. But if you can plant all the seeds at the same time and they're growing in parallel, all of a sudden your timeline is shrunk by a third. And I was at the grandest scale, it’s kind of like most normal people would start an electric car company, grow it, make it successful, and then start their space company. And he was like, nah. They can do both at once, so just give it a try.

[31:21] Because we might be able to move the total timeline of success up dramatically, and it's harder and it's riskier, but it also generates returns sooner. And I think there are only some problems that are like, this is the right approach for. And he talked about PayPal like, we were developing the product and trying to do all these integrations and trying to get regulatory coverage. And it was like, we did all of them all at once. It was fucking chaos, but we launched in a year instead of the three years that would have been conventional wisdom of like, it doesn’t make sense to invest in the product until we have the permission and we don’t have the integrations until we have the product.

[31:54] He was like, nope, do it all at once. Launch immediately. Wild. Wild. We should not be afraid of doing something important simply because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur.

[32:07] This is more of that bias for action, this sort of disregard of fear. And even further than that, it’s, I think that comes from his study of history in a lot of ways. He says, I think the extended version of that quote is like, if you never take a risk, the United States wouldn’t exist. Like every great adventure involves risk and people will die. And we have to accept that.

[32:31] We, the pendulum, has swung too far towards like, oh my God, nobody can ever be harmed in any way. Nobody is allowed to risk their life. Nobody’s allowed to take experimental treatments. It’s like we can’t make progress like this, you know?

[32:44] Colonizing Mars is a grand adventure. It involves risk. Like not everything is going to go right, but especially if people choose to take those risks or risk their life to accomplish this great feat for humankind. There’s something inherent about humans sort of feeling fulfilled, sacrificing themselves to further humanity as a whole. And I think to me that quote is like, yeah, damn the torpedoes.

[33:09] Like, let’s do it. What do you think is the most misleading narrative about Elon’s success? It depends which camp you’re coming from. I think there are diehard fanboys that have just, like, total blindfold to the negatives. And I think there’s a lot of people, especially after his sort of political chapter, that have just a whole bunch of ideas that are factually incorrect that they believe as deep truths.

[33:35] I mean, like anybody who is one of the most famous people on earth, right? Like past a certain level of fame, there’s like a derangement syndrome about everybody. So I think it’s actually kind of hard to find a neutral or like a well-rounded set of opinions on him. That’s a good point.

[33:52] I was thinking about Elon in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg. And sure, there’s some people that don’t like Mark. The people of Kauai aren’t massive fans of him buying up a ton of land, and there’s other bits and pieces. But I don’t think people have like insane fervor against him or insane fervor for him. Yeah.

[34:13] But Elon seems to be much more barbell, right? If you were to draw a graph, it’s just a pair of boobs at the end. Whereas most people are kind of a bell curve, Elon’s managed to completely clear the middle. Yeah.

[34:25] I don’t think that used to be true. Like, is that a byproduct of him having a political chapter? Yeah. I guess so. And then that creates the foundation, and on top of that is wealth, huge amounts of wealth, this potential IPO thing.

[34:41] Yeah. He’s spiky. I mean, he has an unrefined sense of humor that he puts out there. What do you think if he’s so concerned about the bias to action, working on the biggest problem, the bottlenecks, etcetera, why have such a public presence? Like, why tweet a lot?

[35:01] Yeah. You’re on the platform or whatever, but podcasts and interviews and stuff like that, if you’re the CEO. I compare him with someone like James Dyson, right, who kind of from some areas of skill set is not massively different. Yeah. Senra told me about when he sat down with James Dyson. James Dyson’s done a thousand, maybe tens of thousands of prototypes.

[35:22] Yeah. He said he was looking at James Dyson’s hands. So James Dyson’s hands were like Alex Honnold’s hands, these gnarled, sinewy, tough, thick things, these fucking choads on the end of his arms. And, I don’t know. That element, for instance, what’s the role that that level of exposure is playing, I think, is an interesting one.

[35:46] Yeah. He's had a sort of a taste for that for a long time, I think. He's dated actresses and kind of lived in LA. But there's an element to which having that personal presence and talking about what you're doing needs to rally support. Like, you need a great team.

[36:05] You need investors. You need popular support. Like, think about how hard it was to convince people that electric cars were not just not stupid, but fucking awesome. Mhmm. Like, that took a lot of repetition. It is nuts.

[36:19] Think when you roll back the clock that the Prius was like the preeminent fucking electric car. It was just a hybrid. Like, yeah. The real electric cars were even worse. Mhmm.

[36:29] Yeah. It was really difficult now to understand how stupid and insane it seemed when he started Tesla. And the same thing with the rocket. Like, there were no space startups. Like, the space economy was not a thing.

[36:42] And NASA had been on this slow decline for like fifty years. We were paying Russia to take our astronauts up to the space station. Like, these were by no means just obvious, but like very consensus insane things to do. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. I've tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years.

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[37:56] What's the what do most people not understand about that project? How he sort of got it to where it is in his place? I mean, SpaceX, I think most people don't realize it started as like a pure philanthropy project. He was looking at the NASA website saying, when are we gonna go to Mars? We went to the moon fifty years ago. Why haven't we been back? And when are we gonna go to Mars?

[38:17] Surely, there's a plan. And there was no plan. And he was coming off of his first exit with PayPal, so he had two hundred million dollars or something in the bank. And he's like, I'll just spend a hundred million to like see if I can increase NASA's budget.

[38:30] It was pure philanthropy. He's like, I'm gonna buy a rocket. I'm gonna make a little greenhouse. I'm gonna ship it to Mars, and I'm gonna get a photo of a little baby plant on the red planet. It'll be the first life on another planet, and that'll catalyze this movement and inspire people this popular. That was the origin story.

[38:47] Yeah. It was called Mars Oasis. That was the thing. And to do this, he went around trying to buy a rocket. He's like, why are these rockets so fucking expensive?

[38:54] He went to Russia and tried to buy an intercontinental ICBM, and they laughed at him, spit on him, and fucked him around, and he got pissed. And so he's like, maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high. How? Why are rockets so expensive? Can't they be done better?

[39:12] And so he gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience at his house. I think this is an interesting part of the story. He did a series of like Saturday sessions of like, first principles. Let's look at all the historical things, but let's also say like how good could good be with all the modern technology, modern design. Like, is there a design that we can come up with that would be a massive improvement in space launch costs such that this would be possible?

[39:35] And he realized like the market for space launch, that was the bottleneck. That was the real problem: you couldn't get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was the space shuttle, which is this massive bloated government program that's not particularly capital efficient. They weren't iterating. They weren't doing volume. They were way overspending on basic parts because they were all aerospace grade or whatever.

[39:58] And so as soon as the PayPal thing sold, he's like, alright. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna hire some rocket engineers and, like, let's see if we can do this. Wasn't the original Apollo 11 blueprints available just free online? Wasn't that part of it—that you were able to get rocket blueprints?

[40:15] You could just download them, I think. Or maybe he made his available for free. Maybe. I mean, he's like, when you add, he's not a rocket scientist. So he's like, how did you learn how to do this?

[40:24] And he's like, I just read books and I talk to people. I read all the textbooks on rocket science that I could find. I borrowed them, and I started talking to experts. And his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was like the foremost rocket hobbyist. He had built the single largest rocket engine as just a dude in his garage, Tom Mueller, and that was his propulsion engineer.

[40:43] You're hired. Yeah. You're fucking hired. Okay. And then what about now?

[40:48] Like, what? Obviously, the cost has come down by some insane factor. You know, like orders of magnitude, which has driven Starlink and is gonna drive even more. And now he's talking about, like, building a Dyson sphere, which is like solar, but in space. We can capture more energy than even hits the earth from the sun. And hasn’t he been talking about putting compute in space as well? Yeah.

[41:13] These, like, big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then, like, lasers. Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't realize that the Dyson sphere would power the compute. Yeah.

[41:24] It's just like a bunch of solar panels with computer chips on the back that can communicate with each other floating all around in space, which is insane and wild. But that's not the mission. Like, that is the cargo that makes Starship economic to build hundreds or thousands of them. But the actual mission is to make life multi-planetary. And this goes back to, like, zoomed all the way out, his altruistic philanthropic thing is like, look, we should all agree that we do not want the only form of life that we know in the universe to die.

[42:03] Like, we are the only conscious beings we know. Earth is the only planet with life that we know of. Can we all agree that it would be great to have life move just next door? Just get some on Mars. Just get a couple, you know, maybe a million people.

[42:18] Get some plants. Like, if a comet hits Earth, or we blow ourselves up, or there's a catastrophic pandemic, we've got another horse in the race. Like, whether you’re an environmentalist or a humanist or anything, like, this is something that we should universally agree is good. And why not go for it? Like, he's like, this is the window that, for the first time in not just human history, but Earth’s history,

[42:43] we have the ability to make life redundant, get it to another planet. And isn’t that one of the grandest missions that we can conceive of? And he puts it on this evolutionary timescale, right? So, like, there was suddenly single-celled life, and then multi-celled life. And then there were fish, and then the fish came on land, and then the split into, like, plants and animals, and different forms of life.

[43:07] And going from Earth to our first new planet is this massive step function in basically how successful life is and its resilience to whatever comes next. How successful do you think SpaceX is gonna be long term? Unbelievably. They have, essentially, a monopoly on the tollbooth off the planet. And like, like, there’s some ninety—if not ninety, no pass go.

[43:35] Do not go to the moon. Give me two hundred dollars. They could have been one of the greatest companies on Earth even if they never built Starship. Even if they just, like, cash flowed off of Falcon 9 and they were the only reusable rocket company. They would have been an unbelievably successful company, but they are reinvesting into Starship.

[43:52] They're trying to build compute and energy in space. They're trying to build— I think he’s been talking now about, like, a mass driver on the moon that'll build these like Von Neumann probes and all kinds of other crazy stuff. But the historical analogy that he talks about is like, this is when the New World was discovered. We all existed around the Mediterranean for most of Western human history. And then all of a sudden Columbus discovered the New World, and it’s like, alright, need new shipping technology.

[44:18] We have a taste for all of the fineries of this New World. So many people wanna pay for passage. And it’s like this economic bonanza. And just zoom all the way out again and, like, where are most of the raw materials in the solar system? Let alone the galaxy, like, not on Earth.

[44:34] We have this bias that the only raw materials that matter are like wood and farmland. But there are raw materials, atomic raw materials, on every other world and in the asteroid belt and just floating around in space. And getting the technology—the Starship—to go access them is going to be an unbelievable boon for humanity. But it does take that leap of imagination to get there. What about Tesla?

[44:59] Tesla is, I think, going through these startup stacked S-curves, right? And so electric cars were one very fundamental innovation. Autonomy is a whole other one. And so a big question mark is this leap to autonomy.

[45:15] And then he's already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots. That's going into Tesla. Yeah. Humanoid robots are in Tesla. He's just shut down the Model X and Model S production lines and switched them over to building humanoid robots.

[45:31] So like that is coming quickly. He's going from starting to build robotaxis that are fully autonomous, no steering wheel. So thinking that the autonomy kind of curve is there. And he talks about this being one of the biggest markets of all time. And that optimism is even bigger.

[45:47] He's also now, I think this is underrated because it's not a consumer product, but they're building— they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries, which is powering the kind of solar to battery grid conversion, which is going to speed up energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution. And then there's a whole other kind of—they are backwards vertically integrated. Like they’re producing, they just built a new lithium refinery. And so they're like, we are supply constrained in many cases. And so they're working backwards, further and further into their supply.

[46:22] Literally to the point where they're looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials. Yeah. He did say he thinks Tesla's going to have a factory on the moon, which, like, I don't know. I don't know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what, but he did. X is now owned by X.AI, which is now owned by SpaceX. So there's some sort of congealing.

[46:39] Mhmm. But I don't know if Tesla and SpaceX will merge at some point. What about these humanoid robots? I mean, I don't know. It's either going to be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally breaks the economy and ushers in this crazy era of abundance.

[46:57] But I think it'll be slow adoption just because people are slow to adopt things, particularly when they're in the uncanny valley. So commercial uses, I think there'll be a ton of them in factories and stuff like that. But also some of the robotics engineers come in and say humanoid is sure, it's generalizable, but there's almost always a better, more specific form-function robot to use for a use case. Right. Yeah.

[47:21] So why would we constrain this general-purpose robot to have our dimensions? Mhmm. When you could get one that cracks eggs, one that cleans the dishes, and one that, etcetera. Yeah. You might just need, like, two arms on a rail in your kitchen — that's your kitchen robot. Yep.

[47:36] You might just need, like, two arms on your washer, and that's your laundry robot. And, like, you might not actually want one that can walk around your house and feel like a person. Have you seen what was the super widely publicized one that kind of had a knitted jumper and a knitted face? I think that was Optimus. No.

[47:52] It wasn't. No? It wasn't. It's already shipped. It's already out and floating around.

[47:56] There was an advert. There was a billboard on, like, East Sixth Street for it, and I thought it was just such a funny place to put it. Anyway, there was this video that someone had put of it trying to load dishes into the dishwasher, and it's got this weird position. It's sort of leaning like this, and somebody had captioned it as, me every time that it's six a.m. at a ketamine after-party. And it literally looks like it's done too much ketamine, and it's all contorted.

[48:23] It's in a really weird position. But yeah, I don't know. You're right to say as soon as you step outside of the existing bucket of what people use things for — like going from driving an F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla — you know, I can kind of see how it works a little bit. Yeah. People were nervous about full self-driving, but after a while, okay.

[48:49] There we go. There we go. No one is looking at the fact, oh, well, I already have a dishwasher. Mhmm. And this robot is basically an on-its-feet multipurpose dishwasher.

[49:01] It's not quite the same thing. Yeah. Here it is. Look at this. It's trying to close the door.

[49:23] If you're standing there watching that, this would be very painful. Yeah. But if you just go away and the dishes are done, cool. Yeah. I mean, are they done?

[49:30] No. No. Fucking go back, dude. Yeah. There's work to be done.

[49:38] I think it's a really interesting question of like where and how humanoid robots are going to show up over the next ten years. I think it's one of the big questions. And like, I would probably go to a laundromat staffed by humanoid robots. Great. Makes total sense.

[49:52] Like a coffee shop, maybe, maybe not. Maybe washing dishes, but not like at the counter or making a latte, just because, yeah, you partly go there for the human interaction. Mhmm. I don't know.

[50:05] I think it'll be really interesting to see how it all plays out. His plan is, what is this, one in every home within basically no time at all. Yeah. I mean, like, tons of demand, especially if it is smart and helpful. It's kind of like Rosie from the Jetsons.

[50:19] Right? Like, do all the stuff I don't want to do. Go get the trash cans, take out the trash. Presume it'd be powered by x AI in some regards. So that is going to have to start to cross over the Tesla to x AI thing.

[50:29] So that would suggest a natural sort of convergence. Well, Tesla has its own amazing AI team. They're building their own chips. But he does say Tesla, because of all the real-world AI stuff that Tesla has done to create self-driving, that's actually very analogous to making really smart humanoid robots. And he talks about having this crazy training center full of humanoid robots basically doing stuff like that, looking like idiots, trying to figure out the training data.

[50:53] And then getting rewards. Yeah. Oh, you did it well. You closed it without looking like your own ketamine. Congratulations.

[50:58] Who was I speaking to? Fuck. I was talking to someone at dinner the other night, and they were saying that basically, they think a lot of people—I go, oh, it's my friend Austin. People are going to have to wear little cameras that show them going about their daily business to train robots. A hundred percent.

[51:17] This is a thing? Yeah. I mean, dude, this has blown my mind because, obviously, that's how Tesla's full self-driving was trained. Right? They took the top one percent, ten percent of drivers on Tesla, yep.

[51:29] And used their driving style to reverse engineer what humans do so that the robots that drive your Tesla can drive in the manner that you would. It means that you've got more aggressive driving. You've got the ability to overtake and undertake, which if you ever get into a Waymo, it does not have the capacity to do that. It's at the most tentative grandma of all time because that's being created from first principles as opposed to the flow of traffic being other humans. I, as a human, am able to detect that and adjust appropriately.

[52:00] Therefore, if I, if you become me, robot, then you can also be kind of a human. Yeah. And it is cool in a Tesla. You can have it set like, you can set like, I want to chill drive or like, I'm fucking late. Like, let's go.

[52:11] Okay. This is fucking very, gonna wear fucking cameras that just, they're gonna crack eggs and iron clothes. And yeah. Yeah. I mean, training data has already been a huge part of the economy.

[52:24] It's mostly like digital training data, and companies are making a ton of money selling training data to models digitally. But yeah, the ability to collect massive, massive, massive amounts of data and train AI, and now in the real world train AI to like do all these—I mean, if someone's wearing one of those chest harness things with a DJI on it and it's easier, yeah. They're going about, they're already working at Starbucks or doing whatever.

[52:48] They're a mechanic. And you go, well, do you want to earn an additional however many dollars per hour? Yeah. To submit your life to our training data? And you need to, you know, it's basically like being an Uber driver but for your own life. And yeah.

[53:01] Then sending that digitally up to whoever needs to be trained. Did you see the thing about the Meta glasses recently? This is like, I'm not sure if this is in the press or I just read this on a tweet, but it's like those are always recording even if they're like not on. Oh, and some African AI labelers were able to see the faces weren't blurred out or something. Somebody just puts the glasses on the nightstand, and then the spouse comes in and starts changing, and there's Nigerians sitting there tagging data like, yep. That's your wife changing clothes because this thing doesn't stop recording.

[53:37] Like, you know, I'd rather wear it, you know, on my chest where I know. Fuck it. Put it in a lockbox when I'm not on my—yeah. Yeah. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly.

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[54:58] Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional twenty-five dollars by going to the link in the description below by heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and using the code MODERNWISDOM at checkout. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and MODERNWISDOM at checkout. What's underappreciated about Elon's skill sets, do you think? Are the things that people don't realize? I think the breadth of his skill set is quite interesting.

[55:23] I think if you try to emulate just one or two of these traits without appreciating how they interconnect, you could either make some mistakes or be an asshole depending on how you went about it. But I think he's a micromanager, but he's in the technical details because he has technical expertise and a strong intuition around the physics of things. He has a deep fluency across not just physics and engineering, but also finance and economics. Like, he double-majored in economics and physics in college. And so from the very beginning, he's been like—he has a gray line.

[55:59] Like, to truly control the product, you have to control the company. And he does not share power well, but there have been many times where he's made a risky or technical decision based on his sort of economic and opportunity cost view of the future of the business. And so even early in SpaceX, he was driving maniacal urgency because he's like, the future of this business is ten million dollars in revenue a day. And every day we fuck around, every time you burn a day, every time you burn twelve hours, you burn half of our future ten million dollars a day run rate. So like, let's go.

[56:31] Let's go. Let's go. So that mix of really big picture and deep in the details, understanding the limiting factor, attacking it, which is a mix of technical skill, economic fluency, a sense of project management actually, and then the ability to know how and when to push people. If really, really smart rocket scientists are telling you that's impossible—

[56:58] No. And he's like, do it anyway. Like, it is possible. I'm telling you it's possible. Go do it anyway.

[57:06] And you're seven out of ten times, even five out of ten, even one out of ten times. Because every time that you're right about that, you've gained a jewel that will pay off for the whole rest of your company. And the nine times that you were wrong, oh, guess you were right. Impossible did mean impossible in that sense. Or maybe we'll revisit it next year, or what made it impossible—

[57:25] Maybe we can break that down further. And so it's this George Bernard Shaw quote, like all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Like, he's unreasonable. The unreasonable man. What about memory?

[57:41] It seems like he's got a pretty good memory. Yeah. That was one of the things he picked up really early in life. He read one of those memory trick books with the guys who memorize a whole deck of cards. And so he's been using memory tricks, which, you know, one of the things is like, how the hell does he do what he does?

[57:57] Like, five companies, many projects, and all of them taking technical reviews. Like, it'd be hard to remember all these people's names, let alone what they're doing week over week and where the bottlenecks are and all this stuff. And he's got, you know, he practiced those as a kid. And so I think he still uses memory palaces and some of these tricks, which are one of those things that seems superhuman if you don't know how it works. And there's a lot of stories of him.

[58:25] One of the ways he builds loyalty with his team actually is people are like, holy shit. When he knows a specific technical detail of somebody's project that has a direct report who has a direct report, and he's like, you're the bottleneck. What's going on? And they're like, this, this, and this.

[58:42] And he's like, try this. They're like, holy shit, that worked. How did you know that? You haven't spent time in here. And it's this mix of, I live with this every single day and you just came in and had it. Yeah.

[58:53] Yeah. Like, that's a mix of memory and intuition and incredible recall and depth and feeling for that, like the physics of the thing. Presumably risk and pain tolerance have to be too. Yeah. Big skills. Immersed in it.

[59:11] Like, absolutely immersed in it. And back, like, I think this is a place where the kind of the Asperger's can be an advantage. Like, just lives in it over and over and over again. Lives in what? The details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are. Like, that would suggest why pain and risk are more palatable.

[59:31] Or maybe it would. I don't know. Maybe people who are a little spectrum-y don't have the same detection of risk. They certainly don't have the same detection of other stuff. Well, I think it really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of.

[59:42] Right? Like, I'm gonna look like a failure. People are gonna think I'm wrong. It's gonna ruin these relationships. Like, doesn't have any of that.

[59:47] And he says, like, it is a huge weakness to want to be liked. I do not have it. He tries to, like— Weakness to want to be liked. You don't think that he wants to be liked? I do think he wants to be liked in a general sense. Huge weakness to think that you want to be liked.

[1:00:04] Yeah. The willingness to enter into dislike maybe is the thing. Like, I think, you know, he tries to coach his managers within the company versus outside the company. Like, are you willing to be misunderstood by the general public? And I—that's an interesting question.

[1:00:21] Like, if you had the chance, pick your divisive opinion, right? Like, are you pro-choice or pro-life? Are you open borders or closed borders, whatever it is. Like, if you had the chance to, like, flip the switch and make that decision, but the catch is everybody knew it was you. Like, are you willing to make a hundred million enemies?

[1:00:42] Who will lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, twist your words, attack your family, do anything because they hate the decision that you made. Like, are you willing to do that? I think most people are not. And agree with or disagree with any particular decision, like, respect the commitment and the courage that it takes to go do that. What do you think you learned about Elon that most biographies miss?

[1:01:09] What did doing this kind of a book teach you that biographies don't get? I think I got way deeper in the tactics. I try to—my North Star for these books is usefulness to the reader. I try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said. And I want to simulate the feeling of being at dinner with Elon Musk.

[1:01:29] It's written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that doesn't feel like you would be curious about from a sense of like, how do I improve my own life and how did this happen? Didn't the Navalmanac, isn't that per word the most highlighted book in Kindle history or something? Is that a stat that I made up?

[1:01:50] Maybe. I was trying to make it that. I don't know. I—I don't think Kindle will, like, give me that. Readwise said it's, like, in their top whatever.

[1:01:56] Yeah. Yeah. But that would be also including distribution, probably not per word. Like, what you want is for people who read this book—yes—how much of the book is highlighted on Kindle.

[1:02:06] Yes. Yeah. And I want to see, like, I love when people show me, like, beat-to-shit copies of their book. Like, it's been in and out of a sauna, their backpack, their everything. It's so satisfying.

[1:02:15] Yeah. Just ring it out. Yeah. Okay. So that, like, biography misses, the tactic.

[1:02:24] I just go deeper into how. Like, how does that person accomplish what they do? What is their secret sauce? I feel like biographers kind of come at this from like, how comprehensive and correct can I be about their whole history, not what's the most useful thing that you would pull out of the biography?

[1:02:43] Like that. I think that's why David Sunra’s episodes are amazing, because he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down. And that is like my approach: take a million words and turn it into fifty thousand of the most useful ones. And to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through — how timeless can it be and how universally can it be applied. Like, I think anybody on earth can take something useful out of this. And I over and over again sift it through that filter.

[1:03:17] It's almost like a version of writing fiction, because in fiction, you're trying to bring a character to life. And in this, you're trying to be that person briefly to try and condense down what they would want to say in their own words that they've already said. What would their top fifty thousand be out of this million and a half if they were trying to be as helpful as possible, like their best selves? Right?

[1:03:39] So that's the other difference: I'm not trying to build a comprehensive view of the person. I'm not trying to put them in historical context. I'm trying to be as useful as possible, and I don't dwell on any of the personal stuff, any of the political stuff. Like, we don't talk about his family. It's just like, what would he teach if he set out to teach all of the ideas that he had the most conviction in?

[1:03:59] Yeah. It's an interesting challenge with somebody who is as widely regarded and hated as Elon, because yeah, almost everything that everybody wants to talk about is not to do with the tactics and the principles and the purpose. It’s to do with the intention. It’s to do with the drive.

[1:04:18] It’s to do with the ethics and the scruples. Almost every conversation I hear people have casually about Elon is them projecting their own opinion. They're using Elon as a foil to be like, I think it’s great that we’re going to Mars and doing these things, or I think it’s terrible that he made this decision about, you know, the USAID. And that’s fine. Like, you can agree or disagree with anything that this person does, but you’re using that to project your values.

[1:04:45] You’re not asking, like, what can I learn from this person? And to pick somebody as an exemplar is not to say that everything they do is correct. Like, I very much believe in model traits, not people. And so my aspiration is to collect the most useful traits of some of the most accomplished people and make them accessible and useful. Mhmm.

[1:05:05] One of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index. What’s that? The idiot index, it’s kind of an outcropping; it’s downstream of first-principles thinking. And so the idiot index applies to a particular part or a particular product, and it’s the difference between the raw material cost and the price. And so an example: he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who didn’t know what the stupidest parts in his product were, in his composite.

[1:05:35] Because that shows you where you’re massively overpaying. So there’s a part they were paying thirteen thousand dollars for that was like one piece of steel. And if you just weigh it, the weight of that steel was worth like two hundred dollars. And so he’s like, you multiply the price of the raw material or divide that out of the total price, and like, I don’t know what that is all the time. A big number.

[1:05:58] Mhmm. Like, that’s fucking stupid. We’re overpaying by like fifty times for that thing. So like, how cheaply can you get the steel and then get it into that shape? And you get those insane idiot indexes, especially in aerospace, because people outsource and then outsource and then outsource.

[1:06:14] And so there are layers of delegation and profit. Everyone is arbitraging their profit off the top of this final thing that ends up coming down. There’s a Rolls Royce that makes the engine, but before that, the turbine is milled in this place. And before that, the raw materials are mined out of—yeah. There’s like five subcontractors before you get one guy who’s welding a thing together.

[1:06:33] And you’re like, oh, just bring that guy over here, and then the part is like four hundred bucks. Great. We just saved twelve thousand dollars. I guess asking the question, why is this so expensive? One hundred percent. Becomes quite a powerful question.

[1:06:45] And then power-ranking the things—like, what is most expensive? Like, we’re attacking that one. What’s the second most expensive? We’re attacking that one. And this is how I mean, is how he’s able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and more and more available.

[1:06:58] What have been the biggest cost breakthroughs? What have been the ones that have completely unlocked SpaceX, Tesla? I think it’s a million little ones all stacked up. Right? So like, that one example, like thirteen thousand dollars to two hundred is more than two orders of magnitude.

[1:07:14] You know? It’s like five hundred times or something. There’s a story about a latch that was supposed to be a thousand dollars or something. And a guy just looked at it and was like, kind of looks like a bathroom stall latch. And so he went to Home Depot, bought a bathroom stall latch and did a little magic on it.

[1:07:32] It’s like, okay, did it for fifty bucks, boom. And so he does that scrappiness over every single part, every single part, every single part. And you know, it’s just the simple things done over and over and over again with ruthless intensity. And it really goes back to the kind of quote that you brought up about feeling the pain of your decisions. Like, if there’s a company making money by selling a part that they bought from a subcontractor for a hundred dollars and then selling it for five hundred, like, who cares?

[1:08:00] And if the ultimate buyer is the government who, like, can just have a black box budget, like, fine. It doesn't matter. But if Elon comes in and says, like, I need to drop the cost of space launch by two orders of magnitude in order to accomplish this thing and then two more orders of magnitude because we need to get to fucking Mars, then like, now the goal, the bar is so much higher. And you start asking questions like, how cheap can it get? How cheap can it get?

[1:08:23] Can't we do this cheaper? Do we need that part at all? Like, simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs. And that's, you know, when it's SpaceX, it feels more abstract because like none of us are consuming rockets. But if we're buying a Tesla, we care a lot, whether it's twenty thousand dollars or thirty thousand dollars. That's massive.

[1:08:42] And that changes by a huge number the number of people who can access a nice car that's safe, that doesn't pollute. Right? And so like if in five or ten more years we keep doing these things, we keep eliminating parts, we keep increasing scale, we keep lowering the idiot index of every part. And like, now the car's ten thousand dollars, and it's like an absolute no-brainer. And the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner.

[1:09:08] As you move forward, allies will assemble around you. Yeah. I mean, there's no better example than Chris Williamson. Because of all of my allies? Yeah.

[1:09:18] I mean, think this, like, this started with you and a microphone. Mhmm. Right? Like, what, seven years ago? Eight.

[1:09:23] Eight years ago? Yep. Like a thousand episodes later, there's an army at your back. You got an incredible team here. You got millions of listeners.

[1:09:32] You got people all around the world who are excited to see you tour. But you didn't wait for a million people to demand for you to create a podcast. You started. And you had one fan and then two and then four and then eight. And, you know, a thousand episodes later, here you are.

[1:09:46] You just have to start carrying that flag. Do you think because when people think about Elon, when they talk about him, a lot of the time, it is this. It's quite cantankerous. It's adversarial. There is this super aggression, the bias for action, and the urgency. All of this would make you think he's difficult to work for, hiring and firing.

[1:10:05] Maybe there is a runway for each individual member of staff. I reckon I can get on average, I would love to know what the average tenure is. You know? And I get nine months out of people, but I get nine months of a hundred hours a week or something like that, let's say. You go, okay.

[1:10:20] Well, that is just the cost of doing business. In order to push people at the pace that I want to, I need to have a bigger staff base in order to do that. Have you got any idea about how he hires, about what his hiring process is like? He must have just the most insane HR department that is constantly trying to put out fires. People, yeah.

[1:10:37] They're permanently people just, like, fucking exiting the business because I can't, like, you know, it's like Leonardo DiCaprio dating someone who's twenty-five. You know, like fucking the day that she—yeah. Exactly. Like, twenty-six, you're out. Like, you know?

[1:10:51] Yeah. But Elon talks about it as phony and rich of people who have a certain level of success. And then he's like, you, you unsolved. Like, I'm not getting—we're not getting enough out of you anymore. You're not dedicated enough.

[1:11:00] And people exit. His hiring process, you know, at least he speaks about it very simply. He's like, I'm looking for evidence of exceptional ability. And he wants to hire young brilliant engineers, even if they're not necessarily super trained, but they have the capability to solve problems in this really quick way. And the culture, I think, is such.

[1:11:19] He's done an amazing job of building that intensity and the decision-making process into the culture such that people who come in are kind of brought along and swept up in it and carried through. Like, they do go through that machine. But those allies assembling around you, people have to choose to come work for you, and it's because he chose these giant purposes. But, you know, it's easy to forget that these started really small and really crazy, and he had to paint these big pictures to get people to be excited and show up and give their all for it. The most common mistake at smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist.

[1:11:53] Yeah. He likens us to like school teaches us to solve the problem in front of us. Like you can't reject a question on a test. But actually, oh, this is a stupid question. I don't want to answer it.

[1:12:05] Yeah. Dumb. Don’t like it. Take it back. Oh, hundred percent.

[1:12:08] Yeah. Congratulations. Here’s your A. It doesn’t happen. So the piece that he—the first step of the algorithm, this is his like five-step engineering process—is to question the requirements.

[1:12:19] And then the second is to try very, very hard to delete the part or process. You know, the best part is no part, the best process is no process. So if something can be deleted, the product gets simpler. And simplicity, as he says, delivers both reliability and low cost. And so I think it is this. We spend so much time doing things or optimizing things that truly don’t need to exist.

[1:12:44] And if you look at, you know, the complexity of plenty of products around us, it’s like, did nobody try to put these parts together? But when you’re trying to build a car out of ten thousand different parts, you’re like, alright, every time I can put—I can combine these two things, it’s one less thing to attach to another. And then it’s four less parts because I don’t need these two screws to connect these two parts together. And it’s less tolerance. Like, it’s less things that can space to show up in the thing.

[1:13:11] Was less things that can fall apart if they’re one unit instead of two. So it is part of the process to just revisit and revisit and revisit. If you don’t eat the glass, you’re not going to be successful. Oh yeah. His—I think this is originally a Bill Lee quote, who’s a friend of his, and entrepreneurship is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.

[1:13:30] And I think the follow-up is like, eventually you start to like the taste of it and blood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think that it is a sad lesson for people who are on the outside of business that like the idea of running a business, that at some point, all of the problems will go away, but you are the person in charge of the problems.

[1:13:50] Yeah. Like, that’s your—your job is to find the biggest problem and to always be at the vanguard of trying to fix that problem. And at no point throughout your entire career will there be no problems. And given that you are ultimately the problem solver—that the buck stops with—you know. Guess what?

[1:14:05] It’s gonna be on you, and it’s gonna be on you for the rest of time. And if the business is in decline, that is a problem. And if the business is in ascendancy, you will have new bigger problems as you push new frontiers. Yes. You better fall in love with solving problems.

[1:14:17] Yeah. It’s very interesting. He didn’t originally set out as CEO of Tesla and he didn’t—he says he didn’t want to become CEO of Tesla. And he just felt compelled to do it at a certain point because if he didn’t, he felt like the company would have failed. And the sense of internalizing responsibility of the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for comfort or my desire to avoid problems. It’s like, as CEO, you are dealing with a distillation of the worst problems in the company.

[1:14:45] And that’s the eating glass piece. Like if you’re not going the hard part, if you’re not tackling the hardest thing, then you know, that denial or that lack of urgency or that willful blindness is going to catch up with you and the company is going to suffer. Well, yeah, because ultimately that is the biggest bottleneck. Right? That is the thing that is holding everything else up.

[1:15:05] And if you’re the leader, where you direct that attention is where the organization sort of chooses to focus. What’s that thing that Formula One drivers talk about? Don’t look at the wall. Like, the car goes where you’re where you look. Yeah.

[1:15:16] And the bit—the company will go where you look and presumably all of the staff that work for you as well. Yep. Yeah. Which I think is another part of like his—this comes from the military history of like being a battlefield general, always being at the front. Your troops fight harder when you’re there.

[1:15:29] This is why he sleeps in the factory. This is why he physically goes to wherever the problem is immediately. Like, that leading from the front is a part of how he gets so much out of the people that he works with. I’m doing it. I’m in the trenches.

[1:15:43] I’m sleeping on the factory floor. Yes. You can do it. We are suffering together. Like for a good cause, it’s worth it. We can do it.

[1:15:49] But also that’s the way that he’s constructed. Right? That’s the way that he’s built. I do think that’s authentic to him. Yes.

[1:15:55] And he leans into it, and he, you know, he says, I'm like, I'm wired for war. Like, I find comfort in those kinds of challenges, those kinds of... So much so that you construct wars that don't even exist. You create chaos and discomfort when you don't need to. Yeah. But I think he would rather be on the side of, like, overdosing on anxiety, overdosing on effort, making sure that nothing slips, making sure that he's always making as much progress as he possibly can.

[1:16:26] What do you think the inside of his mind's like to exist in that? He calls it a storm or a nonstop explosion. Those are like the two ways he's described it. And then somebody was like, is it a happy storm? No.

[1:16:40] I don't know that he's been formally diagnosed, but I think he has talked about tendencies towards not just Asperger's, but also some bipolar tendencies. And that's a hard hand, especially with, you know, a traumatic childhood, and the stresses that he deals with, you know, publicly and privately. Like, he carries a heavy load. Do you think he's actually a genius, or is he just someone who's consistently applying a handful of brutal principles over and over again? I think it's both. I think there's sufficient evidence that he is certainly above average, if not, like, way up there in IQ.

[1:17:21] You know, he was precocious. He was, like, the head of his class as a kid and coding video games when he was twelve and had a patent, his name on a patent when he was like twenty. So I think people who go around being like, Elon's an idiot, everybody else does all the work, that's just not an informed opinion at all. But I don't think he's a thousand times smarter than any other human who's ever lived. And so the difference between, like, alright, he's smart.

[1:17:46] He's probably, you know, certainly smarter than me. But like, that does not explain the difference in order-of-magnitude outcomes. It seems like level of smarts, tolerance for risk, bias for action, and work rate, at least from what we've been talking about, those seem to be four of the big drivers and grand quests, I think.

[1:18:15] I think that's a key piece of actually what makes him special. I think if he applied massive work ethic and first principles and ingenuity to reinventing insurance, it just wouldn't have the same zest and zeal, and it wouldn't have the same level of outlier results. What is the purpose piece? How does that sort of factor in? I think it's interesting. I think he cares very deeply about humanity as a whole.

[1:18:44] I think it's an interesting paradox where he's like, people who criticize him for being cruel or whatever to people he works with and coming down hard on them or having really high expectations or being mean or firing people capriciously, or whatever. But as he explains, it's like, "Yes, I push people really hard. I sometimes step on toes, but I do that in service of this mission that serves all of us," which is making life multi-planetary or electrifying transport, advancing clean energy. If it's Neuralink, it's like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics control computers or eventually walk again. That also has some AI alignment components to it.

[1:19:28] There's a chapter in the book: my companies are philanthropy. Everything that he starts or all the technologies that he tries to advance come from this inherent love of humanity and the desire to solve problems that collectively make our lives better or preserve consciousness itself. So your first book is on my list of a hundred books to read, and there's a top five at the top, which are the ones that everybody should start with, and it's in that. One of the other ones that's in there is *The Precipice* by Toby Ord, and that's all about existential risk—how humanity could go extinct from supervolcanoes to supernova explosions to nanotechnology and engineered pandemics and natural pandemics and AI and all the rest of it. But you did a section on x-risk as well.

[1:20:10] Yeah. Why is that important? I almost, in the early stages of this book, didn't have it in there. And it wasn't until the purpose piece kind of clarified itself that I was like, "Oh, this is actually the frame through which he is so motivated." I'm sure that book goes into great detail about it.

[1:20:30] Like, there have been many extinction events in Earth's history. Many species, most species, were wiped out multiple times, entire continents destroyed. Asteroids have hit Earth in the past. We don't know if things have evolved and then been killed. But his big motivation is to make life multi-planetary, preserve the only form of consciousness that we're aware of that exists in the world, in the universe, which is ourselves. And we're going to feel pretty stupid if we destroy ourselves before we back ourselves up, like back up the hard drive.

[1:21:05] And his point is, you know, we've been around, Earth has been around a really long time. Humanity has not been around that long. Civilization is very young. We're only ten thousand years into what could be a million-year civilization. But we've got to take this first step, off the planet and into the solar system.

[1:21:23] And if we fuck this up before we get off the planet, like, big yikes. Yeah. Well, I think what’s fascinating to me is I wonder about people who are very singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times. Yeah. I think it's so funny, assuming that you weren't born a slave and you couldn't have risen out of anything, if there's some sort of egalitarian meritocracy, and you can just toss them into the Roman Empire or toss them into the middle of the War of the Roses or something.

[1:21:56] And just watch what happens. Yeah. I don't know, man. It certainly seems like it's the time to have somebody like that. Regardless of what is going on personally, what you think about ethics and all the rest of it.

[1:22:12] I remember he gave this interview. It was probably about three or four years ago, and he said something to the effect of, "What I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it." Yeah. And there are a lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good. They have no interest in that.

[1:22:31] And it's kind of the "move fast, break things, I don't give a fuck what you think of me" type approach. Even if that's untrue in some part, like an ability to be disliked, a preparedness to not care so much about optics in the way that other people do, it's a fucking big unlock. Peter Thiel has a very interesting observation of how high a percent of successful founders, especially in tech, seem to be somewhere on the spectrum. And he's like, what does it say about our society that the people who have a biological advantage in deemphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve outlier success.

[1:23:17] Have you heard Jonathan B's approach? He says there's only three types of founders that are going to be successful. Number one is megalomaniac, number two is autist, and number three is revenge fantasy. And megalomaniac, Adam Neumann from WeWork, autist, Elon Musk, and revenge fantasy, Palmer Lucky.

[1:23:38] Although I think Palmer actually kind of has a bit of all three, and I think Elon probably has a bit of all three as well. Like, you know, trying to alchemize some slights that occurred earlier on. But, hey. Look. I think in order to do different things, in order to make changes and to push the limits in ways that people haven't seen before, obviously, you're going to need, but by design, you're going to have to get comfortable with people doubting you and making judgments about it.

[1:24:06] The disregard for the way things are done, yes, is completely crucial. Yeah. And I think so many of us forget that we, you know, it's almost like we're in the Matrix unless we make the willful effort to break out of it. And we have this bias to defend the status quo no matter what it is without even really ever thinking critically about it.

[1:24:26] And so most of us, when we hear something like somebody's disrupting and radically innovating something new, we're just kind of like, ah, do we really need that? Isn't it fine the way it is? Especially as we get older or as we get comfortable with that thing. You know, there's a great Douglas Adams line of like everything invented before you're thirty is like a new miracle, and to be appreciated, and everything invented after you're thirty is like a crime against humanity and a sin and should not be created. I swear there's a line about driving.

[1:24:54] Everybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac. Yeah. There's one about women as well. Every girl who's got smaller titties than me is flat-chested, and every girl who's got bigger titties than me is a fatty. That was in your episode about female intrasexual competition.

[1:25:17] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Small titties, big titties. That was it. It all comes down to titties.

[1:25:20] So, look, dude. This coming to the book process, which I think is fascinating. Obviously, you write the Navalmanac, and then that kind of springboards you into this pretty much the forefront of the self-published pioneer space. What is this book? Like, what are these books?

[1:25:38] Is it a new kind of biography? Is it a compendium? It's a very strange type of book to read, even though it's obviously been super popular. So is it a new genre? I truly don't know what to call it.

[1:25:53] It's kind of weird. I even feel weird saying like I write this book because I feel like I build it. It feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle to me. And it's much more about removal, yes.

[1:26:01] Right? Once you've got everything, this is everything that this person has ever said. Yeah. Now how much of this block of marble do I need to remove before David's left? Yeah.

[1:26:10] And just organizing and finding the thread so that it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the previous idea, and it just like clean, yeah. Then weave it through. The weaving as well, I suppose. Yeah. That's maybe more akin to clay than it is to marble.

[1:26:25] Yeah. There's just, it is a weird thing. And like it came out of loving, I mean, I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, and like they never wrote books, but a lot of people built books out of their talks, their lectures, their letters, and I never knew what to call those either. But I just found myself asking like, who do I wish had written books? And then realizing that the raw materials are out there and I've been lucky to get, you know, permission from Naval and Balaji and Elon to, like, build these things.

[1:26:54] And I don't know what to call them, and I don't know how to talk about it, but I like, "Well, it's fucking awesome." Here's what you can call it, dude. I think it's really, really good. What have you learned about the scale of the Internet since, obviously, the Navalmanac was a huge rip-roaring success and really sort of catapulted you? You weren't already that small before, but that really sort of put you at the forefront.

[1:27:14] What's it taught you about leverage online and that experience? Yeah. It's easy. I feel like anybody into podcasting, YouTube, social media knows intellectually that the Internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think. Mhmm.

[1:27:27] But it sometimes takes a palpable human experience to be like, oh shit, no, really. Like they are much bigger than you think. And I was really, I'm just surprised and delighted to like see that book take on a life of its own and see how many people recommended it and see how many people resonated. Like I thought I was writing a book as like building a lighthouse where you're like, it has this ability to kind of like attract your people.

[1:27:48] And a podcast, I'm sure, is the same. You're like, you kind of put your values out there, and people who resonate with it are like, man, I really like that. I'm like, then we probably get along great. Like, that's super cool and fun. And it's a great, it's a great life on the other side of that, creating something like that, and the relationships that come out of it.

[1:28:06] Right? The thing, the scale still blows me away. Like, I can't believe that, you know, this sells so well in China and India and all around the world and across some media demographics. India makes a little more sense. That's fair.

[1:28:21] But, yeah, I just, it was not on my, like, vision board that, like, yoga instructors in Bali were gonna be, like, reading *The Almanack of Naval*, and that, mhmm. You know, it was gonna be so popular among, like, high school and college students. We've been talking about that. Me and George have been talking about this a lot, and, obviously, we spoke about it last night. The TAM for *The Book of Elon* is way bigger than it is for Naval, but the potential hurdle of ideological disagreement is also greater.

[1:28:50] So, again, it's the boobies on the popularity graph. Right? Lots of people that go, oh, I've got to, and then lots of people who go, never, as opposed to I don't know how many people have a fervent dislike of Naval. Most people probably didn’t know.

[1:29:05] And it's like, you should really read this. One's gonna go, yeah, exactly. No one's gonna go, you should really read this, and someone say, is the book about? Yeah. Yeah.

[1:29:13] So I spent, I did spend a lot of time, like, answering the question, who is Naval? But I think once it’s—there's just such a weird book. Like, it's a weird title. It's a weird book. It was crafted for a niche and just broke out.

[1:29:27] Yeah. But Elon is one of the most famous people on earth. Right? And I think he's not a polished presenter the way Steve Jobs is. I don't think people necessarily think of him as a font of wisdom or like deep introspection, but he has fucking incredible ideas.

[1:29:43] Like, when you can really access them, his life story is just so many ups and downs, so many hard lessons. And he is a really good communicator, actually. He's got a gift for distilling things and bringing people along and finding a key metric and honing a team, organizing people around a mission. Some of these ideas in his book about being multi-planners, he's been talking about for twenty years, but we still—there's still so much to learn from them. They're just battle-tested ideas, I think, in a lot of cases.

[1:30:18] What are the tactical principles? What are the ways that you've changed your life having gone through the process of writing this book? I think the first would be my focus on hydration. Hydration makes a massive difference in how you perform, and hydration is more than just drinking water. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing that you don't.

[1:30:43] Each grab-and-go stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other BS. Free shipping in the US for a sample pack by going to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. If you don't like it for any reason, they will return your money, and you can keep the box. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. Oh my god. He didn't ignore it.

[1:31:10] Is he doing all four? Is he doing all of them? Okay. Yep. There you go.

[1:31:15] Oh, wow. Showing the product as well. Holy shit. Thank you, dude. That's a, that's a wonderful, that's a wonderful gift.

[1:31:22] That's the best gift that you could have given me, is a free ad read, because now I don't need to do it. How fun. How fucking fantastic. I am also a deep personal fan of Element. I drink it after every workout and every session. It's fucking great.

[1:31:33] I don't know who the other sponsors are. You're off the hook. That was rough. Thank fuck for that. Beyond, I feel like I'm getting jump-scared by my own ad reads.

[1:31:42] What have you applied to your life beyond Eight Sleep and Daleman? What have you applied to your life after learning about Elon? I think it is the most meta: this sense that I'm capable of more than I think. It has encouraged me to do more things in parallel, back to the parallel gestation thing. Like, I'm trying to run Scrab Media, which is a publishing company, and write a book, actually work on three at the same time, and podcast, and invest.

[1:32:09] So like, it gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, no, this is doable and sane. And if these things are all sort of stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long period of time. The bias to urgency. I'm not working hundred-hour weeks and running around the world on my private jet, but I do have a much stronger discipline around like, where is the bottleneck? What's the most important problem to solve?

[1:32:38] What is the most effective way to solve it? How can I physically go to the problem? How can I pull in the right people? I think the idea of a war room is kind of underrated, like, what's the bottleneck? Gather the people, attack it. The rest will kind of take care of itself.

[1:32:51] It's not how a lot of companies are run, frankly. Like, a lot of them are like, oh, weekly meeting. Do this. Do that. Like, standard schedule.

[1:32:58] As opposed to tactical. Yeah. What is the issue? Let's go after that. Let's go through, you know, when I think about this, it makes me think about the difference between watching UFC and boxing.

[1:33:09] When you watch boxing, it's almost ceremonial, this sort of monarch-like weird vestige of the people dotting their caps. We must remember that today is a grand entry for the forty-fifth anniversary. And you're like, what the fuck? Whereas at the UFC, it's rock music, and the guys in the middle of the octagon, they start hitting each other. And it kinda feels a little bit like that, that when you have—why do we, why do we have an agenda?

[1:33:37] Why do we always have the same agenda for each of these meetings? Why can't it just be what is the problem, given that the rate limit is constrained by the slowest moving heart or person or department or whatever it might be? Yeah. And if you continue to open those up, the total capacity of the pipeline increases. Yeah.

[1:33:55] I think most leaders are by default delegating the pace of the entire organization to someone or something, but they don't exactly know who. But also by doing that, by delegating it—not being them—even if they're not purposefully delegating it or whatever, they're off the hook. Yeah. I don't need to be moving that fast. I don't, you know?

[1:34:18] And it's a really good point to say if you've worked super hard for a good while, like, that's the point at which you get to kick back and Matthew McConaughey with your feet upon the table. Like, that's the point. The point of working that hard was to get to escape velocity. Which is perfectly fine, depending on what you're optimizing for. Again, like, this is not a blueprint that everybody should follow.

[1:34:38] It is an explanation of how one person who is unique and special happens to operate, and take whatever works for you and leave the rest. Fuck yeah. Eric Jorgenson, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go to check out everything you've got going on? EJorgenson.com is my personal site.

[1:34:55] ElonMuskBook.org has everything for this book. You can read it for free or listen to it for free if you want to. If you want to buy it on Amazon, rock on. Check out the Naval book and the Naval episode. We did eight hundred episodes five years ago.

[1:35:10] Wow. That is a good one. I saw that you just released on Smart Friends the four-hour conversation on your YouTube. Yeah. We just updated Naval, and I updated the audiobook.

[1:35:19] So I got to spend a day deep in conversation and kind of be like, alright. Which of these ideas hold? Which are refined? Which have you changed? It was a really cool full-circle kind of experience.

[1:35:29] Unrealm. What are you doing next? Can you say? The one I can say is I'm doing a book with David Senra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories from the founders archive. That will fucking rip.

[1:35:42] Which I think will be so fun to work on. I think it'll be amazing. Mhmm. The other one, don't have like a thumbs up yet, so I don't want to say that one publicly. Well, I'm looking forward to getting you and Senra in here. We can have a chat.

[1:35:52] That'll be amazing. Fuck yeah. Appreciate you, man. Thank you.