How Elon Achieves the Impossible - Eric Jorgenson

Key Takeaway

Elon Musk's success isn't just about tactics—it's about combining maniacal urgency with unwavering purpose. He operates with 'failure is irrelevant unless it's catastrophic' as his mantra, constantly attacking the limiting factor in any situation. The key lesson: you're capable of far more than you think. Most people never attempt their dreams due to fear of failure, but fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure itself. Push yourself 10-50% harder and see what breaks—it might be nothing.

Episode Overview

This episode explores the core principles behind Elon Musk's extraordinary productivity and success, drawn from Eric Jorgenson's new book analyzing millions of words from Musk's public statements and actions. The conversation reveals how Musk combines intense urgency, first-principles thinking, extreme risk tolerance, and deep purpose to achieve seemingly impossible goals across multiple companies simultaneously. Rather than focusing on tactics alone, the discussion examines the mental frameworks, work habits, and psychological drivers that enable Musk to operate at orders of magnitude higher productivity than most people—while also acknowledging the personal costs and dark sides of this approach.

Full Transcript

Transcript of How Elon Achieves the Impossible - Eric Jorgenson from Modern Wisdom. Auto-generated from episode audio; may contain minor errors.

How many copies of the Naval Manac 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 uh the word I like to use is gobsmacked. Like I really thought I was doing fan service for a few thousand naval nerds. naval nerds. naval nerds. And the fact that that's like 40 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 cuz it was available for free through the website.

website. website. Yeah. Which is another like 5 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 Mchuan or the Nalanac that's incredible and that's I mean I had no idea how many people were going to resonate with it and recommend it and you know I think the highest compliment a gift uh the highest compliment a book can receive is to be gifted. Um and so much of what we read comes from what's recommended.

Like how often do you see an ad for a book and buy it? Like almost never. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The bars are too high. Yeah. And the subtitle of this new one is a guide to purpose and success about Elon. Why pick that? Why purpose specifically? specifically? 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. 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, but what I didn't realize until way into the process is 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 for for what do I do?

What's important? How do I choose what's important? M yeah I think everyone looks and just assumes tactics raw tactics. Yeah, but if there's something bigger driving that uh Teal says about Elon, he seems to know something that the about risk that the rest of us do not. 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, but the number of times that that pays off, I think, reveals and puts 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 like 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 you know, he's got this amazing quote, um, failure is irrelevant unless it's catastrophic. And I think that's a really good way to sort of explain that attitude towards risk of like, I I just don't care how low my chances are. I don't care how long the odds are.

I'm just going to 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. 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 or 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 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? Obviously SpaceX impressive, Tesla impressive, Doge kind of cool being on stage, Trump campaign, Twitter X, rahrh, you know, how just how impressive is he or how singular is he as an individual? I I think he's pretty singular. Like, do you not? you not?

you not? Yeah, I do. 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 uh lack of uh scruples and being able to push through ethics that other people might find squirrely. Uh, where do you see the big competitive advantages for him coming from? coming from? coming from? I think he's the greatest living entrepreneur, hard stop, and maybe the greatest of all time.

Uh, the fact that he did Tesla and SpaceX, which are both would both be singular accomplishments and put him on like top 10 if not Mount Rushmore. The fact that he did them both at the same time is unbelievable. ads after PayPal and after Zip 2 as a young young guy like and then just like sort of on the side XAI boring company Neurolink like Doge if you want to include that as like a project um absolutely singular I mean and and lots of game left right like he's only 55 not quite quite quite like he might have 20 more years like where does this go in 20 more years um 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 like lionizing and overlooking the bad traits that that you listed. And there are plenty like there's dark sides to every advantage. Um but he's got like the intensity of David Gogggins. Like just raw. It's not the physique. Yeah. Not not quite the physique or the skin tone. There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Gogggins. Um, but he's got the intensity of David Gogggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Fineman, and then the like I like Napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just like will to win.

And when you combine those things, absolutely singular. Um, it would be like if Zuckerberg had also started Google. Like I feel like that's kind of the order of magnitude thing. And 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'll he will have almost founded but certainly funded led and driven two of the top 10 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 [ __ ] and having 14 kids.

How what is okay that's that is that is pretty singular after a few million words of looking through his life what it is that he's said and done. what is the what are the component parts of his success? What are the biggest drivers for how he's been so productive? I think there's a few and I think the thing that people miss is the combination of those factors. So, I think people talk a lot about and it's correct to talk about the bias towards or the 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 um and instills in people all around him. There is also this ability to sort of uh think from first principles has become this like this like 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 10% or a 50% 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. And then you do that for 30 years, 40 years. And the the way that sort of head start acru 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 you 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.

Um but he hasn't lost like and that becomes self-perpetuating. That was when he put the uh Tesla bonus structure in place for himself. himself. himself. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The trillion dollar compensation package. package. package. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That 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 push back was, well, look at what I need to do in order to be able to achieve that. Can you just explain like why that was so ridiculous and what it constituted?

Yeah, this is the second time he's done it actually. Um, so he had an insane all or nothing like I will make zero dollars unless I 10x Tesla. I don't remember the exact number, but he had he had some number of years to like turn Tesla into a massive unprecedented success. And 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." Y him." Y him." Y and he achieved this impossible bar.

And then these and then that the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were like suing him because trying to like retract that money and it's a whole that's a whole mess that like 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. And so when he comes and says, "I think I can take Tesla from a $1 trillion company to a $10 trillion company, and you don't have to pay me anything unless I do, but if I do, maybe throw me a trillion dollars." 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? Like, it's all upside. Um, 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." war." war." He's never lost a company. He's never missed a huge target. He misses deadlines all the time, but almost by design because he's pushing the limit so quickly. quickly. quickly. Yeah. He he just articulated this really well, of course, after I finish writing the book because he's always dropping new stuff.

But he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks has a he has a 50% chance of making. And he's like, "I don't want to be making 100% of my deadlines. 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 50/50 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 69 core Musk methods. So, let's go through some of them. Funny how that works out. If we don't make stuff, there is no stuff. stuff. stuff. He said this on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was one of a few things that hit me so hard. I was like this book has to happen actually and it was in this era where everyone would just go like 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 co 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 like that is what holds up the money um and he's a great example I think of the bias to build and serve and improve things.

Um, you know, the like Tesla is the only car company trying to drive prices down. Have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last 40 years? 40 years? 40 years? Tesla's prices have gone down. 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. Um, but I looked this up. Ford F-150. If you just follow inflation, it used to be like five or six grand. And if you just follow inflation, it should be like 15,000 today, but they're like 40 or 50 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 more. 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. And Amazon is a like we're driving cost down business. And Tesla is the same. He says like if we can't figure out if we 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.

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? more people? more people? Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure. failure. failure. Yeah. Isn't that a good one? It's [ __ ] pathy. Uh, 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. Like fear of failure is why people don't even set out. Yeah. The 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 try try or started. or started. or started. Yeah. And and you just think of like how many things you've any of us have dreamed of doing but never tried.

Like it's 99 to1. Well, lots of things that you dream of you probably shouldn't try. So fear of I guess guess guess the interesting the interesting the interesting small print here is it's not necessarily fear of failure. It's fear of that 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. I mean, I think that's a very optimistic and enlightened maybe view of why people rationalize not doing things that they that they do deeply want to do.

Elon must have lots of dreams that he hasn't pursued presumably, unless 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. And I feel like he does indulge in these random I mean, the Boring Company was kind of a like sitting in traffic being like, [ __ ] this. and he just picked the phone and picked up the phone, called one of his engineers. He's like, "Start making a hole.

Start researching uh drilling machines. I'm going to call you back in 2 hours." By the way, that was at 2 a.m. Okay, bye. Like, that was when he did it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. At 2 a.m. Yes. Yes. Yes. Rang one of his engineers and said, "It's the guy who's still running the boarding company today." He's like, "Do it. I'll call you back." And then the guy comes back and says, "All right, I found this and this about the drilling machines. I think they could be improved in this and this way." And then he goes to Tesla Tesla headquarters and he's like, "We're going to start digging a hole in the parking lot." And they're like, "Cool.

We think we can get permits and do it in 2 weeks." And 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 6 p.m. Go." And like it it is that level of bias to action. Like I think maniacal urgency, the words don't really sink in until you hear story after story after story of him doing something that most people take two weeks to do in four hours. What are the most maniacal urgency stories about Elon?

about Elon? about Elon? I mean, a a small one that I think drills it home is like he was interviewing for his head of machining at a SpaceX uh at a SpaceX site. And it was like a 20-minute interview just like, "Tell me about your work. Tell me about your background. All right, you're qualified. Come to an agreement." Somebody standing behind him was like, "Here's a job offer. Fill in the blanks. Sign it. Sign it. Go to work." Like 6:00 p.m. on Saturday. Like the time just doesn't exist.

It's irrelevant. It is like the whatever is the most important thing to get done in this hour, get it done immediately and keep going. Like there is no work life se separation. There is no like do it later. There is like if it is the most important thing to do, do it immediately even if it's irrelevant. Like there's so there's stories in the the Isacson 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 sake.

s s s like uh one of these pushes of like stack the starship or build that part and someone's like we don't this part is not the bottleneck. He's like I don't care. I don't feel enough urgency for you. Like I'm giving you a deadline. 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. season.

season. Yeah. And all the time. Um, and 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's also times when it's like burned people out and pissed them off and caused good people to quit. I have to imagine that the blast radius of this work rate is pretty huge that the the churn of people working for him is is pretty insane. For sure. There are some people who are who are very long tenured.

Um, but it also I mean I think that's part of the strategy like turnurning through relatively young brilliant engineers, no work life balance. This is this is your time in the wild of like you're going to be here all the time here at the drop of a hat. Um, but he's been doing this forever. He did this PayPal he decided would uh when it was before they merged, but he was going to launch X.com on Thanksgiving weekend like and people were like that doesn't make any sense.

Nobody's being paying attention. Everybody's with their family's like, "Don't care. We're launching on Sunday on Thanksgiving. I want everybody in here all the time." People are like, "Can I go see my family?" Nope. You're not dedicated if you're not in here working 20 hours a day trying to make this deadline. It is, it is urgency for urgency sake all the time on everything. And the people, this goes back to purpose, is like only you only get that out of people if you have this incredible this incredible this incredible mission that people feel like they're on that they're like, "Yes, I want to show up.

I want you to put the pedal down. I want to be used for all I'm worth. I want to see what I'm capable of. 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 40 years, but I can do it for two or four or 10. Does Elon do any kind of self-care, morning routine, meditation, therapy? Not that there's much evidence of, which I think is interesting. like the most productive man on earth, barely sleeps, like lives on his private jet, works maniacally all the time.

Uh, no no discernable good habits from what I can tell. Like uh not staining like it eats donuts like not a lot of meditation, not a lot of introspection. introspection. introspection. Um, just like gets up, grabs his phone, draws a knife and like goes to war every single day. Like that is just just sh someone. Like that is the I had a my friend Brent Bishort describes like operating business as a knife fight and it's like an operator who's in it. Like you wake up, you have a knife off the bedstand and like you go to work and that's actually probably how it feels with Elon.

You ask him his daily routine. He's like, I wake up, I check my phone, I look for an emergency. There's always an emergency. Um and sometimes if there's not, he creates one. one. one. How so? How so? How so? Uh this is also like from the Isaxson book. is like there was 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, like I don't live this way even like you you can see the recipe and not want to cook the dish. Um, but the the takeaway that I think that is useful and generalizable for everybody is very David Gogggins. It's like you're capable of a lot more than you think. And the people who are like massively orders of magnitude more productive are working at a pace and an intensity that is like very foreign to most people. Um, and I think you're a good example of this.

Like I don't think people appreciate how hard you work to like do the things that you do and cover the amount of ground that you have to do 800 episodes in 5 years. like you're an intense [ __ ] Like you cover a lot of ground. Um you work really hard to do it. It's um but everybody is capable of 10% more, 50% more. Just like give the throttle a push and see what breaks might not be anything. So given the lack of self-care, does he care about his subjective experience, experience, experience, happiness, happiness, happiness, fulfillment, joy, things?

It does. um don't think that's what he's optimizing for. optimizing for. optimizing for. Like I don't think he's a particularly happy person. I don't think he he even doesn't really seem to take joy or pride in his past accomplishments. He's just always looking forward. looking forward. looking forward. Um and it's I mean I feel like it's a great gift to us and a burden to him, right? Like I the people around him talk about like wishing that he would celebrate his accomplishments, wishing he would take a break, wishing he would be happier.

Um but he's just on to the next, on to the next. And like I think when you have a glimpse in his childhood that makes a little more sense. Um you so so so I mean his as David Sun says like the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son. Um his dad was certainly abusive. Like there's verbally abusive. Imagine like standing there as an 8-year-old boy for hours while your dad like screams in your face. Drill sergeants out calls you worthless.

Calls you useless. calls you stupid. Um, when Elon was young, he got absolute [ __ ] kicked out of him, like gang stomped, not like lost a fight with one guy, hospitalized for a while. His brother said he was like so swollen, he was unrecognizable, and his dad sided with the bullies and like called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose. Like, what does that do? Like, that just creates this furnace in you that like will never stop. Um, and so I think there's there's a lot of he's not comfortable with peace.

Like he likes he is he is always at war and he's looking for the next war and that just like drives him always. Um, and you know that is one part like you know always the debate between clean fuel and dirty fuel like which is better. You know if you're if you're like mean to yourself internally you're like such a piece of [ __ ] I got to get a piece of [ __ ] I got to get more done. 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. And Elon does both. Like he burns clean fuel and dirty fuel. It seems he's achieving these 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 this like internal angst. Uh I think that that seems to drive him. Definitely a tolerance for pain. It almost seems like he deliberately creates suffering for himself. He did the uh the tiny home thing. He he sold all of his stuff at one point may still have no possessions basically and sleeps on the factory floor.

floor. floor. Yes. Um which I mean the the possessions thing was part like he's like I'm not I'm not like a bad billionaire. Like I'm a billionaire cuz I build valuable companies. Like I'll sell all my stuff. I don't care. I don't need fancy things. Um cuz people were like dragging. He's like, I want I want you to understand that like I'm in it for the right reasons. Um, but I'm glad you asked about sleep, about sleep, about sleep, okay? Because I'm a huge personal fan of eight sleep.

If you struggle to sleep well or just want to further optimize your sleep, eight sleep can help. I got one as a surprise for my wife when we had our first baby and she wept with joy when it arrived on our porch. It goes on your mattress just like a fitted sheet and will automatically learn your preferences to cool or warm your side of the bed up to 20°. It's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, sleep phases, HR buddy, snoring and heart rate. I know enough by heart, dude.

Don't [ __ ] tell me my own ad read. All right, right, right, with 99% accuracy, eight starts to warm or cool your bed before you even get into it. That's why eight has been clinically proven to increase total sleep up to one hour per night. Best of all, they have a 30-day sleep trial. You can try it for 29 days and if you don't like it, they'll give you all your money back. Plus, they ship internationally. Go to the link in the description or eight.com/modernwisdom eight.com/modernwisdom eight.com/modernwisdom and use modernwisdom at checkout.

That's ei.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. That was really great. I really am a huge fan of Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep. Eight Sleep. I am a tour. There's no one that's used it that doesn't get completely [ __ ] insane about it. Did Matteo put you up to that? Because they've just got listed for 1.5 bill on the stock exchange. Like is this is this is this I don't know them at all. I just actually love eight and I wanted to like I thought it would be really funny to make you make you make you Well, he's saved us from having to do the ad read.

E that's one fewer ad read that I need to do this week. I feel like you've been working really hard. 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. everything. everything. That's true. You need to pay for yourself now. That's it. Well, this isn't cheap to put on. You know, you need to pay for yourself. I know. And I have an authentic, loving relationship with my eightle. And Elon needs one because well, he doesn't have any possessions, so it's going to be hard.

Oh, that is that is true. I wonder if they could fit it to the factory floor. factory floor. factory floor. Just [ __ ] lay an eightle on the ground. Be like, "Ah, sort of works, I guess." guess." guess." Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What's that story? It's from the Isacson 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 under his desk and basically had to like force him to get up.

Yeah. He was doing an earnings call and um I I think this was like 2018. This is like the end of a really long stretch of just like miserable stuff and I think he was in a really tough spot psychologically and he was just like lying on the floor. Um, and yeah, this guy does try to like he's like has experience with psychological psychological psychological illnesses in his family and challenges and so he kind of knew what to do and he like went in and laid on the floor next to him and was like, "How you doing, buddy?" Just went under the desk.

Yeah. Like lay laid down next to him and was like, "How you doing?" Like I know it's hard going to take a couple more minutes and we got to get up and we got to do this and do our best. And um I it's hard like I think I think he puts himself through a lot like Elon burns the boats and challenges himself and but he does have limits. Yeah. I mean I mean if you're lying under your desk catatonic that's a limit. Yeah. He uh in the 2008 crisis he was Tula Riley talks about him like having night terrors.

He's like sitting up all night. Um he's he's throwing up. He's having like screaming nightmares. Um, but that goes back to like 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 I look the way that I see uh Elon is not too dissimilar to the way that I see Brian Johnson and also David Gogggins which is there are people who will go to the 99.999th the 99.999th the 99.999th percentile of anything and everything.

Yeah. Yeah. 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 and follow what it is that they're doing. It doesn't mean that it's a good strategy for anybody else to do. But if you're going to try and say that uh Brian Johnson going and basically being like a scout in a he's he's essentially the same thing as a scout in an army. He goes up to this crazy high ridge and it's all treacherous and maybe he's going to fall and oh my god.

And then he finds out some [ __ ] about what's over there and then comes back and tells us all. I'm like, I don't want to be a scout and I don't want an army filled with scouts, but it's [ __ ] 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. M like who he is is this like insanely driven technical genius boy who is infused with sci-fi and military history like dreaming of making an impact on the world.

Um in part because of this like traumatic childhood he had and in part because of like it's this grand dream and grand adventure and um I don't think it's in an insult to say is like a little bit of a hero complex of like I can I can do this. I can make a difference. I can make this huge impact on the world. And thank God he did, right? 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 [ __ ] that benefit all of us and we're going to have this huge ev evolutionary leap hopefully as we go to another planet and we get to live through it.

How [ __ ] awesome is that? Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions. Yeah, this one is uh comes from like the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization, but I think it's a very generalizable rule. Um, this version is like you want the designers and the engineers and the manufacturers like they all work in the plant so they can see the downstream effects of the decisions that they make in the design process. Um, it's very it's very easy to try to break your feedback loop and not sense when you're doing something harmful or even not missing an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you.

I think that uh the idea of not insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions uh is probably a good I mean there has to be sometimes where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf. But I know what's that you you have to locate physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately. immediately. immediately. Yes. Yes. Yes. Basically the same rule. Yeah. And in the on the production line it's like walk to the red. There's like green or red everywhere on the production line and is like if something is red there's a problem go there immediately.

immediately. immediately. Um there's there's a couple versions like physically move yourself immediately where the product he's you should see his like if you track his private jet it's like all over the world constantly on the move. Um, and so it's not just like locally move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately. 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, is, is, whatever the limiting factor is, attack it immediately it immediately 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 in it.

do things in parallel. Yeah, George and I were talking about this this morning because I think there's like conventionally good wisdom that is focus. And this was one of the things I was surprised by. Um Warren Buffett's the perfect quote to like explain this concept at a high level which is like you can't get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. pregnant. pregnant. Elon stride. So you just there are some things that there's an incompressible amount of time. time. time. 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, parallel, 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, I can do both at once. we just give it a try. Um 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. Um, and I think there's only some problems that are like this is the right approach for and he talked about in PayPal was like we were developing the product and trying to do all these integrations and trying to get um like regulatory coverage and it was like we did all of them all at once and it was [ __ ] 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 the integrations until we have the product.

He's like nope do it all at once launch immediately. Wild. wild uh we should not be afraid of doing something important simply because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur. This is more of that bias for action, this sort of disregard of fear. And even even further than that, it's it's uh I think this comes from his study of history in in a lot of ways. He says, I think the extended version of that quote is like, if we did, if you if you never take a risk, like the the United States wouldn't exist.

Like every great adventure involves a risk and people will die. And we have to accept that we are the pendulum is 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. He's like, we can't make progress like this. You know, 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. Uh like let's do it. What do you think is the most misleading narrative about Elan's success? It depends which camp you're kind of coming from. I think there are diehard fanboys that have just like total blindfold to the the negatives. Um, 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. Um, I mean like anybody who is one of the most famous people on earth, right?

Like and past a certain level of fame, I think there's like a derangement syndrome about everybody. M um so I think it's actually kind of hard to find a neutral or a like well-rounded set of opinions on him. That's a good point. I I was thinking about Elon in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg and um sure there's some people that don't like Mark and people of Kawaii aren't massive fans of him buying 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. Uh but Elon seems to be much more barbelly, right? If you were to draw a graph, it's just a pair of boobs at the end. Uh whereas, you know, most most people are kind of a bell curve, whereas Elon's managed to completely clear the middle. middle. middle. Yeah. I don't think that used to be true. Like, is that is that do you think that's a byproduct of him having a political chapter? political chapter? political chapter? Uh 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. Yeah. Um, Um, Um, he's spiky. I mean, he's he is like he's an unrefined sense of humor that he like puts out there. What do you if he's so concerned about the bias to action working on the biggest problem, the bottlenecks, etc. Why have such a public presence like why tweet a lot? Yeah, you won the platform or whatever, but podcasts and interviews and stuff like that. If you're the I compare him with someone like James Dyson, right, who kind of from some areas of a skill set is not massively different.

Senra told me about when he sat down with James Dyson. James Dyson's done thousand maybe tens of thousands of prototypes. He said he was looking at James Dyson's hands. So James Dyson's hands were like Alex Hnold's hands. these gnled you could the senuey tough thick things these [ __ ] chess on the end of his arms and um I don't know the that that element for instance what's the role that that level of exposure is playing I think is an interesting one yeah he's had a he's had sort of a taste for that for a long time I think um he's like dated actresses and kind of living in LA um but there's an element to which having that personal presence and talking about what you're doing.

Like, he needs to rally support. Like, you need a great team, 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 [ __ ] awesome. Like, that took a lot of repetition. It is meant to think when you when you roll back the clock that the Prius was like the eminent preeeminent [ __ ] electric car. It was just a hybrid. Like the real electric cars were even worse. Yeah. It was it was really um I think it's 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 a space economy was not a thing. And NASA had been on this like slow decline for like 50 years. We were paying Russia to take our astronauts up to the space station. like um these were by no means these not just not obvious but like but like but like very consensus insane things to do. This episode is brought to you by Gym Shark. I have tried pretty much every brand of gymwear over the years.

Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives realworld training, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Gym Shark. They're hybrid shorts, especially in onyx gray and navy, are basically my uniform in the gym at this point. They move properly. They don't bunch. They're super lightweight. You can wash and dry them in an afternoon. The geo seamless t-shirt is what I train in almost every single session. Breathes properly, holds its shape after you wash it. Everything that Gym Shark makes is lightweight and sweat wicking and easy to wash and dries fast.

And if you're still on the fence, they offer a 30-day free return, so you can buy it and try it for 29 days. If you don't like it, just send it back. Plus, they ship internationally. And right now, you can get 10% off everything sitewide by going to the link in the description below or heading to jim.sh. sh/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom10 at checkout. That's jim.sh/modernwisdom jim.sh/modernwisdom jim.sh/modernwisdom and modernwisdom10 a checkout. Talk to me about SpaceX. What's the what do most people not understand about that that project to where how he sort of got it to where it is in his place?

I mean SpaceX I think most people don't realize started as like a pure philanthropy project. He was looking at the NASA website saying when are we going to go to Mars? we went to the moon 50 years ago. Why haven't we been back? And when are we going to go to Mars? Surely there's a plan. And there was no plan. And he was coming off of his first exit with PayPal. Um, so he had $200 million or something in the bank. And he's like, I'll just spend 100 million to like see if I can increase NASA's budget.

It was pure philanthropy. He's like, I'm going to buy a rocket. I'm going to make a little greenhouse. I'm going to ship it to Mars. And I'm going to 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 that was the origin story. that was the origin story. Yeah. It was called Mars Oasis. That was the thing. And to do this he like went around trying to buy a rocket.

He's like why are these rockets so [ __ ] expensive? He went to Russia and tried to buy an intercom ICBM and they laughed at him and spit on him and like [ __ ] 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? And so he gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience at his house. And I think this is a interesting part of the story is like 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 cost such that this would be possible. And he realized like the market for space launch launch launch that was the bottleneck. That was the real problem that like you couldn't get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was space shuttle which is this like massive bloated government program that's not particularly capital efficient. They weren't iterating. They weren't doing volume. Um they were way overspending on basic parts because they were all like aerospace grade or whatever.

And so as soon as the PayPal thing sold, he's like, "All right, I'm going to go I'm going to hire some rocket engineers and like let's see if we can do this." Wasn't the original like the Apollo 11 blueprints available just free online? Wasn't that part of it that you were able to get rocket blueprints? You could just download them, I think. Or maybe he made his available for free. Maybe. I mean, he's like when you he's not a rocket scientist, so he's like, "How did you learn how to do this?" 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 him and I started talking to experts and his his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was like the s the foremost like rocket hobbyist. He had built the single largest like rocket engine as just a dude in his garage, Tom Mueller. And that was his propulsion engineer. engineer. engineer. You're hired. You're hired. You're hired. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, you're [ __ ] hired. Uh okay. And then what about now? Like what obviously the cost has come down by some insane factor.

orders of magnitude which is driven Starlink and is going to drink drive even more. Um, and now he's talking about like building a Dyson sphere which is like solar but in space so we can capture more energy than even hits the the earth from the sun. And hasn't he been talking about putting compute in space as well? Yeah, these like big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then like network together with lasers. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, okay. I didn't realize that the Dyson sphere would power the compute.

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

Like we are the only conscious beings we know. Earth is the only the only the only planet with life that we know of. Can't we all agree that like it would be great to have life move just just next door? Just get some on Mars. just get a couple, you know, maybe a million people, get some plants. Like, if a comet hits Earth or we blow ourselves up or there's a catastrophic pandemic, like we've got another horse in the race. Like, whether you're an environmentalist or a humanist or anything, like this is a thing that we should universally agree is good.

Um, and why not go for it? like he's like this is the window that is for the first time in not just human history but earth's history we have the ability to make life redundant to get it to another planet um and isn't that like one of the grandest missions that we can conceive of and he puts it on this evolutionary time scale right so like there was suddenly single-sellled life then multi-elled life and then there was uh fish and then the fish came on land and then the split into like plants and animals um different forms of life 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 going to be long term? Unbelievably. Unbelievably. Unbelievably. They have a essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the planet and like there there's some 90 if not do not pass go do not go to the moon. Give me $200. They could have been the great 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. company. company. They would have been an unbelievably successful company.

But they are reinvesting into Starship. um they're trying to build compute and a and um energy in space. They're trying to build a I think he's been talking now about like a mass driver on the moon that'll build these like vanoyman probes and all kinds of other crazy stuff. But if you the historical analogy that he talks about is like this is when the new world was discovered. Like we all existed around the Mediterranean for like most of western human history and then all of a sudden Columbus discovered the new world and was like all right we need new shipping technology.

We have a taste for all of the fineries of this new world. So many people want to pay for passage and it's like this economic bonanza and just zoom all the way out again like where are most of the raw materials in the solar system let alone the galaxy like not on Earth? We have this bias to 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 like floating around in space.

Um, and getting the technology, the starship to go access them is going to be an unbelievable boon for humanity. But it does take that like leap of imagination to get there. What about Tesla? Tesla is I think going through like these startups are stacked S-curves, right? And so electric cars was one very fundamental in innovation. Um, autonomy is a whole another one. And so a big question mark is this leap to autonomy. And then he's already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots and all all all that's going under Tesla.

Yeah, humanoid robots are in Tesla. He's he's just shut down um the Model X and the Model S production lines and switch them over to building humanoid robots. So like that is coming quickly. Um he's going from starting to build robo taxis that are like fully autonomous, no steering wheel. Um, 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 Optimus is even bigger. He's also now I think this is underrated because it's a not a consumer product but he's building they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries um which is powering the kind of like solar to battery grid conversion uh which is going to speed up energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution.

Um, and then there's a whole another kind of they they are backwards vertically integral like they're producing they just built a new lithium refinery. And so they're like we we we are supply constrained in many cases. And so they're like working backwards um further and further into their supply. their supply. their supply. I mean literally to the point where they're looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials. Yeah. He does did say he thinks Tesla is going to have a factory on the moon which like I don't know if which like I don't know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what but um he did X is now owned by XAI which is now owned by SpaceX.

So there's some sort of congealing but I don't know if Tesla and and SpaceX will will merge at some point. What about these humanoid robots? I mean I don't know. It's either gonna be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally like breaks the economy and ushers in this crazy era of abundance. Um, but I I think it'll be slow adoption just cuz people are slow to adopt things that are in particular when they're like in the uncanny valley. So commercial uses I think there'll be like a ton of them in factories and stuff like that but also some of the robotics engineers come in and say like humanoid is sure it's generalizable but like there's almost always a better more specific form function robot to use for a use case.

Um right yeah why would we constrain this general purpose robot to have our like dimensions dimensions dimensions when you could get one that cracks eggs and one that cleans the dishes and one that etc. that etc. that etc. Yeah. You might just need like two arms on a rail in your kitchen and that's your kitchen robot. 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 like 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, it wasn't. It wasn't. It's already shipped. It's already out and floating around. Uh there was an advert. There was a billboard on uh like East Sixth Street for it and I thought it was just such a funny place to put it. Anyway, uh 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 uh me every time that it's 6:00 a.m. at a ketamine after party and it literally looks like it's done too much ketamine and it's like all contorted. It's like in a really [ __ ] weird position. Um but yeah, I I don't know. I 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 a F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla. Ah, you know, I can kind of see how it works a little bit and people were nervous about full self-driving, but after a while Okay, there we go.

There we go. we go. we go. There. No one has no one's looking at the fact, oh, well, I already have a dishwasher. dishwasher. dishwasher. Mhm. Mhm. Mhm. And this robot is basically an on its feet multi-purpose dishwasher. It's not quite the same thing. Yeah. Here it is. Look at this. It's trying to close the door. If you're standing there watching that, this would be very painful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. What if you just go away and the dishes are done? Cool. Yeah. I mean, are they done?

No. No. [ __ ] go back, dude. Yeah. It's uh there's work to be done. I think it's a it's it is a really interesting question of like where where and how are humanoid robots going to show up over the next 10 years. I think it's like one of the big questions. Um, and like I would probably go to a laundromat staffed by humanoid robots. Great. Makes total sense. Like a coffee shop. shop. shop. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe washing dishes, but not like at the counter making a logic.

Just cuz Yeah, just cuz like you partly go there for the human interaction. Um I don't know. I think it'll be really interesting to like see how it all plays out. out. out. His plan is what is this? One in every home within the space of basically no time at all. Yeah. I mean, like tons of demand, especially if it is smart and helpful. Um, it's kind of like Rosie from the Jetsons, right? Like do all the stuff I don't want to do. Go get the trash cans, take out the trash.

Presume it powered by X AI in some regard. So, that is going to have to start to cross over the Tesla to XAI thing. So, that would suggest a natural sort of convergence. Well, Tesla has its own amazing AI team. They're building their own chips. U but he does say like Tesla because of all of the like real world AI stuff that Tesla's done to create self-driving that's actually very analogous to making really smart humanoid robots. And he he talks about having like a this crazy training center full of humanoid robots.

Basically doing stuff like that looking like idiots trying to like figure out the training data and then getting rewards. Oh, you did it well. You closed it without looking like you're on ketamine. Congratulations. ketamine. Congratulations. ketamine. Congratulations. Who was I speaking to? [ __ ] I was talking to someone I was talking to someone at dinner the other night and they were saying that basically they think a lot of people are go oh it was uh my friend Austin um people are going to have to wear little cameras that show them going about their daily business to train robots this is a thing yeah I mean dude I've only just this has [ __ ] blown my mind because obviously that's how Tesla's full self-driving was uh trained right they took the top 1% 10% of drivers on Tesla and use 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.

And it means that you've got more aggressive driving. You've got the ability to overtake an undertake, which if you ever get into a [ __ ] Whimo, it does not have the capacity to do that. It's the most tentative grandmar of all time because that's being created from first principles as opposed to the flow of traffic is other humans. I as a human amble able to detect that and adjust appropriately. 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 a chill drive or like I'm [ __ ] late. Like, let's go. Okay. Okay. Okay. Um, which is funny. But yeah, people are going to wear [ __ ] cameras that just they're going to crack eggs and and iron clothes and Yeah. Yeah. I mean, training data has already been a huge like part of the economy. It's mostly like digital training data and companies are making a ton of money like selling training data to models digitally.

But yeah, the the ability to like 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, you know, chest harness things with a DJI on it and yeah, they're going about they're they're already working at Starbucks or doing whatever. 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 then sending that digitally up to whoever needs to be trained.

Did you see the thing about the meta glasses glasses glasses recently? This is like I'm not sure if this is in the press or I just read this in a tweet, but it's like those are always recording even if they're like not not not Oh, and some some uh uh like African [ __ ] AI labelers were able to see the faces weren't blurred out or something. Yeah. I mean, somebody just like puts the glasses on the nightstand and then like, you know, the spouse comes in and starts changing and there's like Nigerians like sitting there tagging data of like, "Yep, that's your wife changing clothes." Um cuz this thing doesn't stop recording like, you know, I'd rather wear it, you know, on my chest where I know put it put it in a lock box when I'm not on my uh Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. We'll get back to talking in just one second, but first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly, you eat reasonably well, maybe you even supplement, you feel fine, but you're just kind of going off vibes. Most people have absolutely no idea what's going on inside of their body, which is why I partnered with Function. function gives you access to more than 160 advanced lab tests spanning hormones, heart health, metabolic markers, inflammation, thyroid, nutrients, liver, and kidney function. It even detects early signals linked to more than 50 types of cancer.

To put that in perspective, your typical annual physical might test about 20 markers and function runs over 160. And this isn't just numbers dumped into your inbox. Every result is reviewed by clinicians. Abnormal markers get flagged and you get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps so you can actually do something about what you learn. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction.

Normally, this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics. With function, it is $365 a year. That's $1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now you can get $25 off, bringing it down to $340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional $25 by going to the link in the description below by heading to functionhealth.com/modernwisdom functionhealth.com/modernwisdom functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's checkout. That's checkout. That's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom functionhealth.com/modernwisdom functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom a checkout.

What's underappreciated about Elon's skill sets, do you think? What are the things that people don't realize? I think the the breadth of his skill set is is quite interesting. Um, I think if you try to emulate just one or two of these traits, like without appreciating how they interconnect, you could either make some mistakes or be an [ __ ] depending on like how you went about it. Um, but I think he's like he's a I don't know micromanager, but he's like in the technical details because he has technical expertise and like a strong intuition around the physics of things.

um he has a deep fluency across not just the the physics and the engineering but also the finance and the economics like he he double majored in economics and physics in college. Um, and so from the very beginning he's been like he has a great line like to truly control the product you have to control the company. And he does not share power well, but there's been many times where he's made like a a risky or a 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 he was driving maniacal urgency because he's like the future of this business is $10 million in revenue a day. And every day we [ __ ] around like every time you burn a day, every time you burn 12 hours, you burn half of our future $10 million a day run rate. So like like like let's go, let's go, let's go. Um, so that mix of like really big picture and deep in the details, understanding the limiting factor, attacking it, which is a mix of like that's technical skill, that's economic fluency, that's like a sense of project management actually.

Um, and the ability to know how and when to like push push people. Like if if really really smart rocket scientists are telling you that's impossible. impossible. impossible. No. And he's like do it anyway. Like it is possible. I I I'm telling you it's possible. Go do it anyway. And you're seven out of 10 times even like even five out of even one out of 10 times. Cuz every time that you're right about that, you've gained like a jewel that will pay off for the whole rest of your company.

and the nine times that you were wrong like, "Oh, oh, I guess you were right. Impossible did mean impossible in that sense." Or maybe we'll revisit it next year or what made it impossible. Maybe we can we can break that down further. Um, and so it's this the George Bernard Shaw quote like all progress depends on the unreasonable man. man. man. Like he's unreasonable. The unreasonable man. What about memory? It seems like he's got a pretty good memory. Yeah, that was one of the things um he he picked up really young early in life.

He like read one of those memory trick books with the guys who like memorize a whole deck of cards. Um and so he's been using memory tricks um which you know one of the things of like how the hell does he do what he does like five companies many projects in all of them taking technical reviews like it'd be hard to remember all these people's names let alone like 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.

Um, and so I think he still uses like memory palaces and some of these tricks which are one of those things that like that seems superhuman if if you don't know how it works. Um, and there's a lot of stories of him of him of him one of the ways he builds loyalty with his team actually is people are like, "Holy shit." When he he knows a specific technical detail like of somebody's project that is like, you know, a a has a direct report who has a direct report and he like is like, "You're the bottleneck.

What's going on?" on and they're like this, this, and this. He's like, "Try this." They're kind of like, "Holy [ __ ] that worked." Like, "How how did you know that? You haven't like spent time in here." And it's this mix of of of I live with this every single day and you just came in and and had it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's a mix of memory and intuition and incredible like uh recall and and depth and feeling for that like the physics of the thing. Presumably risk and pain tolerance have to be two Yeah.

is immersed in it like absolutely immersed in it and and back like I think this is a place where the kind of the asperers is can be an advantage like just lives in it over and over and over again again again lives in what the details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are like like like that wouldn't suggest why pain and risk are more are more are more palatable or maybe it would I don't know maybe people who are a little spectrumy don't have the same detection of risk they certainly don't have the same detection of other stuff well I think it It really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of, right?

Like I'm going to look like a failure. People are going to think I'm wrong. It's going to ruin these relationships. Like he doesn't have any of that. And he says like it is a huge weakness to want to be liked and I do not have it. Um Um Um it is a huge weakness to want to be liked and I do not have it. He 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 in a general sense.

It's a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked. Yeah. the the willingness to enter into dislike I maybe is the thing like um I think uh you he tries to coach his managers and 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 like if you had the chance pick your pick your divisive opinion right like are you pro-choice or pro-life or you open borders or closed borders whatever it like if you had the chance to like flip the switch and make that decision but But the catch is everybody knew it was you.

Like are you willing to make a 100 million enemies million enemies million enemies who will do like lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, twist your words, like attack your family, do anything because like 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 the commitment and the courage that it takes to go do that. What do you think you learned about Elon that most biographies miss? What did doing this kind of a book teach you that biographies don't get at?

I think I got way deeper in the tactics. Like I I try to my northstar for these books is usefulness to the reader. Like I try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said. And the I want to simulate the feeling of being at dinner with Elon Musk. Like it's it's written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that's doesn't feel like you would be curious about it from a sense of like how do I improve my own life and how did how did this happen?

Um didn't the Nalmanac isn't that per word the most highlighted book in Kindle history or something? Is that a stat that I made up? Maybe I was trying to make it that. I don't I don't think Kindle will like give me that. Readwise said it's like in their their their top whatever, top whatever, top whatever, but that would be also including distribution probably not per word. Like what you want is for people who read this book, how much of the book is highlighted on Kindle. Yes.

And I want I want to see like I love when people show me like beat to [ __ ] copies of their book. Like it's been in and out of the sauna, their backpack, everything. It's so satisfying. Yeah. satisfying. Yeah. satisfying. Yeah. Just ring it out. Yeah. Uh okay. So that like biography miss the Yeah, I think I I just go deeper into how like how does that person accomplish what they do? What are their 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 like that.

I think that's why like David Sunro's episodes are amazing because he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down. And that is like my approach is like take a million words and turn it into 50,000 of the most useful ones. Um, and to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is like actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through and 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 kind of sift it through that filter. It's like 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 would they want to say of their own words that they've already said. What would they what would their top 50,000 be out of this million and a half if they were trying to be as helpful as possible like their best selves, right?

So that's the other the other difference is like 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 I don't dwell on any of the personal stuff, any of the political stuff. Like we don't talk about his family. family. 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? Yeah, it's an interesting challenge with somebody who is as uh widely regarded and hated as Elon because 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. It's to do with the ethics and the scruples. And 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 US aid. And that's fine. Like you can agree or disagree with anything that this person does, but like you're using that to project your values.

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 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. useful. useful. One of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index. idiot index. idiot index. What's that? What's that? What's that? The idiot index he uh it's kind of an outcropping uh it's a it's downstream of the first principal's 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 he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who like didn't know what the stupidest parts in his product were in his composite cuz that shows you where you're massively overpaying. So there's a part um that was they were paying $13,000 for that was like one piece of steel and if you just weight it, the weight of that steel was worth like $200.

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. I have a big number. Like that's [ __ ] stupid. We're overpaying by like by like by like 50x 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 outsource and then outsource and so there's like layers of delegation and profit.

is arbiting their profit off the top of this final thing that ends up coming down. There's Rolls-Royce that make the engine, but before that, the turbine is mil in this place. And before that, the raw materials are mined out of Yeah, there's like five subcontracts, which you got like one guy who's like welding a thing together and you're like, "Oh, just bring that guy over here." And then the part is like 400 bucks. bucks. bucks. Great. Great. Great. We just saved $12,000. I guess asking the question, why is this so expensive?

so expensive? so expensive? 100% 100% 100% becomes quite a powerful question. 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 this is how he's able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and more and more available. more available. more available. What have been the biggest cost breakthroughs? What have been the ones that have completely unlocked SpaceX, Tesla? Tesla? Tesla? I I think it's a million little ones all stacked up, right?

So like there that that one example like $13,000 to 200 is like more than two orders of magnitude, you know? 500x or something. Um there's there's a story about like a latch that was supposed to be $1,000 or something and a guy just like looked at it and was like kind of looks like a bathroom stall latch and so he like went to Home Depot, bought a bathroom stall latch and was like did a little m magic like did a little m magic on it. He's like, "Okay, did it 50 bucks.

Boom." Um and so just that scrainess over every single part, every single part. Every single part. And you know, it's it's just this simple things done over and over and over again with like ruthless intensity. And And And really, it goes back to the the kind of the quote that you brought up about like 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 $100 and then selling it to $500, like who cares?

And if the ultimate buyer is the government who like can just have a blackbox budget, like fine, 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 [ __ ] 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?

Can't we do this cheaper? Do we need that part at all? Like simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs. Um, and and that's, you know, when when it's SpaceX, it feels more abstract because like none of us are consuming rockets, but we're buying a Tesla, we care a lot whether it's $20,000 or $30,000, that's massive. 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 10 more years we keep doing these things, we keep eliminating parts, we keep increasing scale, we keep uh lowering the idiot idiot index of every part, then like now the car is $10,000 and it's like an absolute no-brainer.

Um and the the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner. cleaner. cleaner. 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. I mean, think this like this started with you and a microphone, right? Like what, seven years ago? Eight Eight Eight eight years ago. Like a thousand episodes later. episodes later. episodes later. There's there's like an army at your back. back. back. You got an incredible team here. You got millions of listeners.

You got people all around the world who are like excited to see you tour. Um, but you didn't wait for a million people to like 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 thousand episodes later like here you are. You just have to start carrying that flag. that flag. 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 canankerous it's adversarial there is this superaggression the bias for action and the urgency all of this would make you think difficult to work for hiring and firing 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 and I get nine months out of people but I get nine months of 100 hours a week or something like that let's say you okay well that and 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 as per people yeah permanent permanent ly people just like [ __ ] exiting the business because I I can't like it's like a Leonardo DiCaprio dating someone who's 25 and you're like [ __ ] the day that she Yeah, exactly.

Like what 26 you're out like you know. Yeah. But Elon talks about is like phoning in rich of like people have a certain level of success and then he's like you you gone soft like I'm not getting we're not getting enough out of you anymore. You're not dedicated enough. Um and people exit. His hiring process is 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 like super trained, but they have the capability to solve problems in this really quick way.

And the culture, I think, is such he's done a amazing job of like building that intensity and the decision-m process into the culture such that like people who come in are kind of brought along and swept up in it and carried through like you do go through that machine. Um, but those allies are stumbling around you. Like people have to choose to come work for you and it's because he chose these giant purposes. Um, 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. Yeah, this is uh he likens this 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, but actually, but actually, oh, this is a stupid question. I don't want to answer it. Yeah, dumb. Don't like it. Take it back. Oh, 100%. Yeah, congratulations. Here's your A. It doesn't happen. Um, so the piece that he the first step of the algorithm, this is his like five-step engineering process, is to question the requirements.

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 that truly don't need to exist. Um exist. Um exist. Um 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?

Um, but when you're trying to build a car out of 10,000 different parts, you're like, "All right, 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. Um, and it's less tolerance like it's it's less things that can space to show up in the thing. There's 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. be successful. be successful. Oh, yeah. His uh 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. And I the followup is like eventually you start to like the taste of of of your own blood. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I think I think 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. Yeah. problems. Yeah. problems. 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 the buck stops with. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Guess what? It's going to be on you and it's going to 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. frontiers. frontiers. Yes. So you better fall in love with solving problems. solving problems. solving problems. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um it's a very interesting uh he 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 like compelled to do it at a certain point because if he didn't he felt like it the company would have failed failed failed and that the sense of like internalizing responsibility of like the the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for for comfort or my desire to avoid problems.

Like as CEO, you are dealing with a a distillation of the worst problems in the company. And that's the chewing glass piece. Like if you're not going to 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. Oh yeah. Because ultimately that is the biggest bottleneck, right? That is the thing that is holding everything else up. 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 look. The The The car goes where you look. Yeah. And the the company will go where you look and presumably all of the staff that work for you as well. Yep. Yep. 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. 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. I'm sleeping on the factory floor. You can do it. do it. do it. We are We are suffering together like for a good cause. It's worth it. We can do it. do it. do it. Well, also that's the way that he's constructed, right? That's the way that he's built.

he's built. he's built. I do think that's authentic to him. Yes. Um and he he leans into it and he you know he says like I'm wired for war. Like I find comfort in like those kind of challenges, those kind 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 heir on the side of like over over dosing on anxiety, overdosing on effort, making sure that nothing slips, making sure he's always making as much progress as they possibly can.

can. can. What do you think the inside of his mind's like to exist in that? He calls it a a storm or a non-stop explosion. Those are like the two ways he's described it. And someone was like, "Is it a happy storm?" I was like, "No." I I don't know that he's been formally diagnosed, but I think he has talked about either tendencies towards not just asperers, but also um some bipolar tendencies. And tendencies. And tendencies. And that's a hard hand with especially with, you know, a traumatic childhood.

Um, and the the stresses that he deals with, you know, publicly and privately and like he's carries heavy load. Do you think he's actually a genius or is he just someone who's consistently applying a handful of sort of brutal principles over and over again? I think he's both. Um I think he's I think there's sufficient evidence that he is certainly above average if not like way up there in in IQ. Um you know he was precocious. He was like the head of his class as a kid and um coding video games when he was 12 and like you know had a patent his name on a patent when he was like 20.

So like I think people who go around being like Elon's an idiot everybody else does all the work is like that is 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, all right, he's smart. He's probably, you know, certainly smarter than me, but like he's not not not that does not explain the difference in order of magnitudes of the outcome. It seems like level of smart, 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 I think that's a that is a key piece of actually like what makes him special. I think if he if he applied like you know massive work ethic and first principles and ingenuity to like reinventing insurance, it just like wouldn't wouldn't have the same zest and zeal and it wouldn't have the same like level of outlier results. What is the purpose piece? How does that sort of factor in?

I think it's an interesting I think he cares very deeply about humanity as a whole. Um, I think it's it's an interesting paradox where he's like people who criticize him for like being cruel or whatever to people he works with and like coming down hard on them or having really high expectations or um being mean or firing people capricciously or whatever. But as he explains, it's like I am, 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 multilanetary or electrifying transport, um, advancing clean energy.

clean energy. clean energy. If it's neurolink, it's like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics like control computers or eventually walk again. That also has some AI alignment components to it. Um, there's a chapter in the book of like my company's are philanthropy. every everything that he starts, all the technologies that he tries to advance come from this inherent love of humanity and the desire to solve problems that make collectively our lives better or preserve consciousness itself. So your first book is on my list of 100 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 or And that's all about existential risk. How humanity could go extinct from super volcanoes 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. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Why is that important? I I early stages of this book I didn't have it in there. Um, and it wasn't until the purpose piece kind of clarified itself that I was like, "Oh, this is actually like the frame through which he is is so motivated." Um, as as what I'm sure that that book goes into great detail about it, but like there's been many extinction events in human history or not in human history but in Earth's history like many species most species were wiped out multiple times.

Entire continents destroyed like asteroids have hit Earth in the past. We don't know if things have like evolved and then been killed. But his big motivation is like make life multilanetary, preserve the only form of consciousness that we're aware of that exists in the world in the universe, which is ourselves. And And And we're going to feel pretty stupid if we destroy ourselves destroy ourselves destroy ourselves before we before we back ourselves up, like back up the hard drive. And his point is like, you know, we've been around Earth has been around a really long time.

Humanity has not been around so long. Civilization is very young. like we're only 10,000 years into what could be a million-year civilization. But we've got to take this first step um off the planet and into the solar system. And system. And system. And if we [ __ ] this up before we get off the planet, like big L. big L. big L. Yeah. Well, I think I what what's fascinating to me is I wonder about uh people who are very singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times.

I think this so funny so funny so funny assuming that you weren't born a slave and you couldn't have raised out of anything. If there's some sort of egalitarian meritocracy and you can just like toss them into the Roman Empire or toss them into the middle of the War of the Roses or something and just watch what happens. what happens. what happens. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know, man. It it certainly seems like it's the time to have somebody that's like that. Um, regardless of what is going on personally, what you think about ethics and all the rest of it.

Um, I remember he gave this interview, it was probably about 3 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. Yeah. Yeah. And there are a lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good. I have no interest in that. And um it's kind of the move fast, break things, I don't give a [ __ ] 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.

Um it's a [ __ ] big unlock. Peter Teal has a very interesting observation of like how high a percent of the 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 are like have a biological advantage in deemphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve an outlier success. Have you heard Jonathan Bee's approach? She says there's only three types of founders that are going to be successful.

Number one is megalomaniac. Uh number two is autist and number three is revenge fantasy and megalomaniac Adam Newman from Weiwork. Uh autist Elon Musk and revenge fantasy Palmer. Um 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 uh 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 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.

The the disregard for the way things are done Yes. Yes. 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. it. it. Um, 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 that great like Douglas Adams line of like everything invented before you're 30 is like a new miracle and to be appreciated and everything invented after you're 30 is like a crime against humanity and a sin and should be not created. not created. not created. I swear there's a line about driving. Everybody driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

Yeah. Uh every there's one about women as well. Every girl who's got smaller titties than me is flatchested and every girl who's got bigger titties than me is a fatty. That was in your episode about uh female interexual competition. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Small titties, big titties. That was It all comes down to titties. So look, dude, this coming to the book process, which I think is fascinating. Obviously, you write the Nalmanac and then that kind of springboards you into this pretty much the forefront of the self-published self-published self-published like pioneer space.

What What is this book? like what are these books? Is it a new kind of biography? Is it a compendium? It's 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 I I truly don't know what to call it. Like, it's kind of weird. I even feel weird saying like I write this book because I feel like I build it. Like, it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle to me. And it's much more about removal.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Right. Once you've got everything, this is everything that this person has ever said. said. said. Yeah. Now, how much of this block of marble do I need to remove before David's left? David's left? David's left? Yeah. And just organizing and finding the thread so that it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the the previous idea and it's just like a clean re and then weaving the weaving as well, I suppose. I suppose. I suppose. Yeah. It's maybe more akin to clay than it is to marble.

Yeah. There's just um it is a weird thing and like it came out of loving I mean I'm I'm a big fan of Charlie Mer 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 material is out there and I've been lucky to get you know permission from Naval and Bology and Elon to like build these things.

Um, 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 [ __ ] awesome is what you can call it, dude. I think it's really really good. Um, what what have you learned about the scale of the internet since obviously the Nal Manac was a 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. What's it taught you about leverage online and that experience?

experience? experience? Yeah, it's easy. I feel like um anybody's into podcasting, YouTube, social media knows intellectually that like the internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think. Um but it sometimes takes a like palpable human experience to be like, "Oh [ __ ] no really like they are much bigger than you think." you think." you think." And I was really um I was 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 I thought I was writing a book is like building a lighthouse where you're like it has this ability to kind of like attract your people. And a podcast I'm sure is the same. You're like you you kind of put your values out there and people who resonate with it are like man I really like that. I was like then we probably get along great. Like that's super cool and fun. Um and it's a great it's a great life on the other side of that creating something like that.

Um and the relationships that come out of it, right? right? right? The thing the scale still blows me away. Like I I can't believe that we're you know this sells so well in China and India and all around the world and across so many demographics. India India makes a little more sense. That's fair. Um but yeah, I just I didn't it was not on my like vision board that like yoga instructors in Bali were going to be like reading the almanac of Naval and that like that like that like you know it was going to be so popular among like high school and college students.

students. students. Well, we've been talking about that. Me and George have been talking about this a lot and obviously we spoke about it last night that 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. So again, it's the boobies on the on the like popularity graph, right? Lots of people that go, "Ah, I've got to." And then lots of people who go never as opposed I don't know how many people have a fervent dislike of Naval.

Most people probably didn't know. You should really read this. No one's going to go Yeah. Exactly. No one's going to go you should really read this and someone say who is the book about? Yeah. Yeah. So I I'm prepared. I sp did spend a lot of time be like answering the question who is Naval? Um but I think once it's there it was just such a weird book. Like it's a weird title. It's a weird book that was like crafted for a niche and just like broke out.

But Elon is one of the most famous people on earth, right? like um and I think he's he's not a polished presenter the way Steve Jobs is. I don't think people necessarily think of him as a like font of wisdom or like deep introspection, but he has [ __ ] incredible ideas like when you can really access them like and he's his life story is just so so many ups and downs, so many hard lessons. And he is a really good communicator actually like he's he's got a gift for distilling things and bringing people along and finding a key metric and like honing a team organizing people around a mission and you know some of these ideas in this book you know about being multiplaners he's been talking for 20 years years years but we still there's still so much to learn from them um these are just they're battle tested ideas I think in a lot of cases.

What are the tactical principles or 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. Each grab-and-go stick pack contains a science packed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium. and magnesium. and magnesium. No artificial ingredients or any other BS. Free shipping in the US for a sample pack by going to drinklnt.com/modernwisdom.

If you don't like it for any reason, they will return your money and you can keep the box. That's drinklnt.com/modern wisdom. wisdom. wisdom. Oh my god, he didn't even Is he doing all four? Is he doing all of them? Okay. Yeah, there you go. Oh, wow. Showing the product as well. Holy [ __ ] Thank you, dude. That's a That's a wonderful gift. wonderful That's a wonderful gift. 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 f how [ __ ] fantastic. fantastic. fantastic. I am also a deep personal fan of Element. I drink it after every workout and every session. It's [ __ ] great. U I don't know who the other sponsors are. You're off the hook. That was the ref. Thank [ __ ] for that. Beyond I feel I'm getting getting jump scared by my own ad reads. Um what have you applied to your life beyond eight sleep and development? What have you applied to your life after learning about Elon? about Elon? about Elon?

I think it is uh the most meta is this sense that I'm capable of more than I think. Um it has encouraged me to do more things in parallel. Back to that like parallel adjustation thing. Like I'm trying to run Scribe Media, which is a publishing company, and write a book, actually work on three at the same time, and podcast and invest. So like there's it gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, "No, this is this is doable and sane." And if these things are all sort of like stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long period of time.

um the bias to urgency. I'm not working 100 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? How 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? Um I think like the idea of a war room is kind of underrated of like what's the bottleneck? Gather the people, like attack it, the rest will kind of take care of itself.

um is not how a lot of companies are run frankly. Like a lot of them are like a weekly meeting, do this, do that, like standard schedule schedule schedule procedural as opposed to tactical. Yeah. What is the issue? Let's go after that. Is let's go through. You know, when I I think about this, it makes me think about the difference between watching a UFC and boxing. When you watch boxing, there's it's this weird it's almost ceremonial. This sort of monarch like weird vestage of people do their caps.

we must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th anniversary and you're like what the [ __ ] whereas it's just at the UFC it's rock music and the guys in the middle of the octagon they start hitting each other um and it kind of feels a little bit like that that when you have why do we have an agenda why why do we have an agenda 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 part or person or department or whatever it might be.

And if you continue to open those up, the total like capacity of the pipeline increases. Yeah. 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. who. who. Well, also by doing that, by delegating by it not being them, even if they're not purposefully delegating it or whatever, they're off the hook. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I don't need to be moving that fast. I don't, you know, 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 McConnA with your feet up on 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 like what you're optimizing for. Again, like I'm this is not a blueprint that like everybody should follow. It is a like explanation of how one person who is unique and special happens to operate and take whatever works for you and leave the rest. [ __ ] yeah.

Eric Jorgensson, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go to check out everything you've got going on? on? on? Uh, ejorgansson.com is my personal site. Elon Muskbook.org has everything for this book. Um, 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. Um, check out the Naval book and the Naval episode. We did 800 episodes five years ago. years ago. years ago. Wow, that is a good one. I saw that you just released on Smart Friends the 4hour conversation on your YouTube.

Yeah, we just updated Naval and I updated the audio book. So, I got to like spend a day deep conversation and kind of be like, "All right, which of these ideas hold? Which are refined? Which have you changed?" Um, it was a really cool like full circle kind of experience. experience. experience. Unreal. Uh, what are you doing next? Can you say you say you say I'm I the one I can say is I'm doing a book with David Sunra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories from the like founders archive that will [ __ ] rip which I think will be is so fun to work on and I think will be amazing.

Um the other one I don't have like a thumbs up yet so I don't want to say that one publicly. publicly. publicly. Uh well I'm looking forward to getting you in the center in here and we can have a chat. That would be amazing. [ __ ] yeah. Appreciate you man. Thank you.