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

30:50So there are some things that there's an incompressible amount of 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 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.

31:31And I think there's only some problems that are like, this is the right approach for. And he talked about in PayPal, he's like, we were developing the product and trying to do all these integrations and trying to get like regulatory covered. And it was like, we did all of them all at once. It was fucking chaos, but we launched in a year instead of the three years that would have been conventional wisdom of like, it doesn't make sense to invest in the product until we have the permission and we don't have the integrations until we have the product. He's like, nope, do it all at once. Launch immediately.

31:59Wild, wild. 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 further than that, I think this comes from his study of history in a lot of ways. He says, I think the extended version of that quote is like, if we did, if you never take a risk, the United States wouldn't exist. Every great adventure involves risk and people will die. And we have to accept that. The pendulum has swung too far towards like, oh my God, nobody can ever be harmed in any way. Nobody is allowed to risk their life.

32:39Nobody's allowed to take experimental treatments. We can't make progress like this. Colonizing Mars is a grand adventure. It involves risk. 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 elon'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.

33:44So I think it's actually kind of hard to find a neutral or a well-rounded set of opinions on him. That's a good point. I was thinking about Elon in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg. And sure, there's some people that don't like Mark. People of Kauai aren't massive fans of him buying up a ton of land and there's other bits and pieces. But I don't think people have like insane fervor against him or insane fervor for him. But Elon seems to be much more barbelly, right? If you were to draw a graph, it's just a pair of boobs. Whereas, you know, most people are kind of a bell curve, whereas Elon's managed to completely clear the middle.

34:25Yeah. I don't think that used to be true. Like, do you think that's a byproduct of him having a political chapter? Yeah, I guess so. And then that creates the foundation. And on top of that is wealth huge amounts of wealth this potential ipo thing yeah 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 on 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 thousands maybe tens of thousands of prototypes he said he was looking at james dyson's hands so james dyson's hands were like alex honnold's hands these gnarled you can the sinewy tough thick things these fucking chodes on the end of his 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 live in an LA.

35:55But there's an element to which like 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 fucking awesome. Like that took a lot of repetition. It is meant to think when you roll back the clock that the Prius was like the eminent, preeminent fucking electric car. It was just a hybrid. Like the real electric cars were even worse. Yeah, it was really, I think it's difficult now to understand how stupid and insane it seemed when he started Tesla.

36:37And the same thing with the rocket. Like there were no space startups. Like 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 these were by no means, not just not obvious, but like very consensus, insane things to do. This episode is brought to you by Gymshark. I have tried pretty much every brand of gym wear over the years. Most of it looks good on the website, but very little of it survives real world training, which is why I'm such a massive fan of Gymshark. Their hybrid shorts, especially in Onyx, Grey and Navy, are basically my uniform in the gym at this point.

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37:50That's jim.sh slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom10. A checkout. Talk to me about SpaceX. What do most people not understand about that, that project, how he sort of got it to where it is and his plans? 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 dollars 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 gonna buy a rocket i'm gonna make a little greenhouse i'm gonna ship it to mars and i'm gonna get a photo of a little baby plant on the red planet it'll be the first life on another planet and that'll catalyze this movement and inspire are people this popular that was the 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 fucking expensive he went to russia and tried to buy an intercom ICBM and they laughed at him and spit on him and like fucked him around and he got pissed and so he's like maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high how why are rockets so expensive can't they be done better 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 he's 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 costs such that this would be possible and he realized like the market for space 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 gonna go i'm gonna 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 add 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 them and i started talking to experts and his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was like the the foremost like rocket hobbyist he had built the single largest like rocket engine as just a dude in his garage tom muller and that was his propulsion engineer you're hired yeah you're fucking hired uh okay and then what about now like what obviously the cost has come down by some insane factor i know that 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 are like big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then like oh that's the same lasers 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 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 multi-planetary and this goes back to like zoomed all the way out his just altruistic philanthropic things is like, look, we should all agree that we do not want the only form of life that we know in the universe to die.

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

42:49And isn't that like one of the grandest missions that we can conceive of? And he puts it on this evolutionary timescale, right? So like there was suddenly single-celled life and then multi-celled life. And then there was fish and then the fish came on land and then the split into like plants and animals, 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. They have essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the planet.

43:33Do not pass go. Do not go to the moon. Give me$200. They could have been one of the greatest companies on Earth, even if they never built Starship, even if they just cash flowed off of Falcon 9 and they were the only reusable rocket company. They would have been an unbelievably successful company. But they are reinvesting into Starship. They're trying to build compute and energy in space. They're trying to build a – I think he's been talking now about a mass driver on the moon that will build these von Neumann probes and all kinds of other crazy stuff. but if 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 is 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, not on Earth.

44:34We 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. 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 innovation. Autonomy is a whole nother one. And so a big question mark is this leap to autonomy.

45:15And then he's already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots. and 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 not a consumer product, but they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries, which is powering the kind of like solar to battery grid conversion, which is going to speed up energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution.

46:07And then there's a whole nother kind of, they are backwards vertically. They're producing, they just built a new lithium refinery. And so they're like we we are supply constrained in many cases and so they're like working backwards um further and further into their supply 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 gonna have a factory on the moon which like i don't know i don't know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what but 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 think it'll be slow adoption just because 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 when you could get one that cracks eggs and one that cleans the dishes and one that etc yeah you might just need like two arms on a rail in your kitchen and that's your kitchen robot yeah you might just 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 no 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 6th 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 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 fucking 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.

48:37Going from driving a F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla, I can kind of see how it works a little bit. People were nervous about full self-driving, but after a while, okay, there we go, there we go. No one's looking at the fact, well, I already have a dishwasher 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.

49:22If you're standing there watching that, this would be very painful. Yeah. But if you just go away and the dishes are done, cool. yeah i mean are they done no no fucking go back dude yeah it's uh there's work to be done i think it's a it's a 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 maybe maybe not maybe washing dishes but not like at the counter making in a lot of days just because yeah just because 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 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 presumably powered by xai in some regards so that is going to have to start to cross over the Tesla to XAI thing.

50:29So that would suggest a natural sort of convergence. Well, Tesla has its own amazing AI team. They're building their own chips. But he does say like Tesla, because of all of the like real world AI stuff that Tesla has done to create self-driving, that's actually very analogous to making really smart humanoid robots. And he talks about having 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. Yeah. Oh, you did it well. You closed it without looking like your academy and congratulations who was i speaking to fuck 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 i go oh it was uh my friend austin um people are gonna 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 fucking blown my mind because obviously that's how tesla's full self driving was trained, right?

51:25They took the top 1%, 10 % of drivers on Tesla and used their driving style to reverse engineer what humans do so that the robots that drive your Tesla can drive in the manner that you wouldn't. It means that you've got more aggressive driving. You've got the ability to overtake and undertake, which if you ever get into a fucking Waymo, it does not have the capacity to do that. It's the most tentative grandma of all time because that's been created from first principles as opposed to the flow of traffic is other humans i as a human i'm 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 to chill drive or like i'm fucking late like let's go okay um this is fun but yeah people are gonna wear fucking cameras that just they're going to crack eggs and iron clothes.

52:21Yeah. Yeah. I mean, training data has already been a huge part of the economy. It's mostly like digital training data and companies are making a ton of money selling training data to models digitally. But yeah, the ability to collect massive, massive, massive amounts of data and train AI and now in the real world train AI to do all these jobs. I mean, if someone's wearing one of those chest harness things with a DJI on it and easier yeah they're going about that 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 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 oh and some some uh like african fucking 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 because this thing doesn't stop recording like you know i'd rather wear it you know on my chest or i I know where it is.

53:43Put it in a lockbox at night. Put it down when I'm not on my... Yeah. Yeah. We'll get back to talking in just one second. But first, tell me if this sounds familiar. You train regularly. 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.

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54:47With 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 are heading to functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's functionhealth.com slash modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout. What's underappreciated about Elon's skillsets, do you think? What are the things that people don't realize? I think the breadth of his skillset is quite interesting.

55:22I 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 asshole, depending on like how you went about it. But I think he's like, he's a micromanager, but he's like in the technical details because he has technical expertise and like a strong intuition around the physics of things. He has a deep fluency across not just the physics and the engineering, but also the finance and the economics. Like he double majored in economics and physics in college. 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.

56:01and he does not share power well but there's been many times where he's made like 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 dollars in revenue a day and every day we fuck around like every time you burn a day every time you burn 12 hours you burn half of our future 10 million dollar a day run rate so 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 no and he's like do it anyway like it is possible i i'm telling you it's possible go do it anyway and you're seven out of ten times even like even five out of even one out of ten times because 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 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 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 early in life he like read one of those memory trick books with the guys who like memorize a whole deck of cards.

57:51And so he's been using memory tricks, 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. 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 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 has a direct report who has a direct report and he's like it's like you're the bottleneck what's going on and they're like this this and this he's try this they're gonna like holy shit that worked like how how did you know that you haven't like spent time in here and it's this mix i live with this every single day and you just came in and and had it 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 big skills.

59:09Yeah, he's immersed in it, like absolutely immersed in it. And I think this is a place where kind of the Asperger's can be an advantage, like just lives in it over and over and over again. Lives in what? The details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are. That wouldn't suggest why pain and risk are more palatable. Maybe it would. I don't know. Maybe people who are a little spectrum-y don't have the same detection of risk. They certainly don't have the same detection of other stuff. Well, I think it really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of, right?

59:42Like, 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. It is a huge weakness to want to be liked and I do not have it. He tries to like - Weakness to want to be liked. You don't think that he wants to be liked? I do think he wants to be liked in a general sense. It's a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked. Yeah. the willingness to enter into dislike maybe is the thing like um i think uh you know 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 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 like if you had the chance to like flip the switch and make that decision but the catch is everybody knew it was you like are you willing to make a hundred million enemies 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 it I think I got way deeper in the tactics.

1:01:19My North Star for these books is usefulness to the reader. I try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said. I want to simulate the feeling of being at dinner with Elon Musk. It's written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that doesn't feel like you would be curious about it from a sense of how do I improve my own life and how did this happen? um didn't the nava almanac 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 i don't think kindle will like give me that readwise said it's like in their top whatever yeah but that would be also including distribution probably not per word like what you want is for people who read this book yes how much of the book is highlighted on kindle yes yeah and i want to see like i love when people show me like beat to shit copies of their book like it's been in and out of a sauna their backpack everything it's so satisfying yeah just ring it out yeah uh okay so that like biography miss the tactic 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?

1:02:39Not what's the most useful thing that you would pull out of the biography? Like that, I think that's why like David Senra'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 it's just like what would he teach if he set out to teach all of the ideas that he had the most conviction in.

1:03:59It's an interesting challenge with somebody who is as 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. Almost every conversation I hear people have casually about Elon is them projecting their own opinion. They're using Elon as a foil to be like, I think it's great that we're going to Mars and doing these things. Or I think it's terrible that he made this decision about, you know, the USAID.

1:04:37And 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 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. One of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index. Yeah, the idiot index. He it's kind of an outcropping. It's a it's downstream of the first principles thinking.

1:05:15And so the idiot index applies to a particular part or a particular product. And it's the difference between the raw material cost and the price. And so an example, he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who like didn't know what the stupidest parts in his product were in his composite. Because that shows you where you're massively overpaying. So there's a part that 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 two hundred dollars and so he's like you multiply the price of the raw material or divide that out of the total price and like i don't know what that is other than a big number like that's fucking stupid we're overpaying 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 people outsource and then outsource and outsource and so there's like layers of delegation and profit everyone is arbitraging 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 milled in this place and before that the raw materials are mined out of yeah there's like five subcontracts before you get 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 great we just saved twelve thousand dollars i guess asking the question, why is this so expensive?

1:06:44100%. It becomes quite a powerful question. And then power ranking the things like, what is most expensive? We're attacking that one. What's the second most expensive? We're attacking that one. And this is how he's able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and more and more available. What have been the biggest cost breakthroughs? What have been the ones that have completely unlocked SpaceX, Tesla? I think it's a million little ones all stacked up. right so like there that that one example like thirteen thousand dollars to two hundred 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 a thousand dollars 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 home depot bought a bathroom stall latch and was like did a little did a little magic magic on it it's like okay did it 50 bucks boom um it's just that scrappiness over every single part every single part every single part and you know it's just this simple things done over and over and over again with like ruthless intensity 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 a hundred dollars and then selling it to 500 like who cares and if the ultimate buyer is the government who like can just have a black box 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 fucking mars then like now the goal the bar is so much higher and you start asking questions like how cheap can it get how cheap can it get can't we do this cheaper do we need that part at all, like simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs.

1:08:29And that's, you know, when it's SpaceX, it feels more abstract because like none of us are consuming rockets. But if we're buying a Tesla, we care a lot, whether it's$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 lowering the idiot index of every part. And now the car is$10 ,000. And it's like an absolute no-brainer. And the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner.

1:09:08As 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 started with you and a microphone, right? Like, what, seven years ago? Eight. Eight years ago? Like a thousand episodes later, there's like an army at your 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. 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.

1:09:43And, you know, a thousand episodes later, like here you are. You just have to start carrying that flag. Do you think, because when people think about Elon, when they talk about him, a lot of the time, it is this, it's quite cantankerous, it's adversarial, there is this super aggression, the bias for action and the urgency. All of this would make you think 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 a hundred hours a week or something like that, let's say.

1:10:19you go 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 people yeah they do permanent permanently people just like fucking exiting the business because i've i can't like you know it's like uh leonardo dicaprio dating someone who's 25 and you're like fucking the day that she yeah exactly Like what? 26, you're out.

1:10:50Like, you know? Yeah. What Elon talks about is like phony and rich of like people have a certain level of success. And then he's like, you got soft. Like I'm not getting, we're not getting enough out of you anymore. You're not dedicated enough. 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 an amazing job of like building that intensity and the decision-making process into the culture such 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 but those allies assembling around you like people have to choose to come work for you and it's because he chose these giant purposes but you know it's easy to forget that he 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.

1:11:49The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist. Yeah. He likens this to school teaches us to solve the problem in front of us. You can't reject a question on a test. 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. So the piece that he, the first step of the algorithm, this is his five-step engineering process, is to question the requirements. Then the second is to try very, very hard to delete the part or process. The best part is no part.

1:12:24The best process is no process. If something can be deleted, the product gets simpler. Simplicity, as he says, delivers both reliability and low cost. I think it is this, we spend so much time doing things or optimizing things that truly don't need to 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 space to show up in the thing.

1:13:11There'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. Oh yeah. I think this was originally a Bill Lee quote, who's a friend of his, and entrepreneurship is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. And the follow-up is like, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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.

1:13:50Your job is to find the biggest problem and to always be at the vanguard of trying to fix that problem. And at no point throughout your entire career will there be no problems. And given that you are ultimately the problem solver, that the buck stops with, 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. Yes. You better fall in love with solving problems. It's a very interesting, he didn't originally set out as CEO of Tesla and he says he didn't want to become CEO of Tesla.

1:14:26And he just felt like compelled to do it at a certain point because if he didn't, he felt like the company would have failed. And the sense of like internalizing responsibility of like the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for comfort or my desire to avoid problems. It's like as CEO, you are dealing with a distillation of the worst problems in the company. 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 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.

1:15:00Yeah, 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 car goes where you look. Yeah. And the company will go where you look and presumably all of the staff that work for you as well. Yeah. 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.

1:15:27Your 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. Yes. You can do it. We are suffering together, like for a good cause. It's worth it. We can do it. Well, also that's the way that he's constructed, right? That's the way that he's built. I do think that's authentic to him. Yes. and he he leans into it and he you know he says I'm like I'm wired for war like I find comfort in like those kind of challenges 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 err on the side of like over overdosing on anxiety overdosing on effort making sure that nothing slips making sure that he's always making as much progress as they possibly can.

1:16:26What do you think the inside of his mind's like to exist in that? He calls it a storm or a nonstop explosion. Those are like the two ways he's described it. And somebody was like, is it a happy storm? I was like, no. I don't know that he's been formally diagnosed, but I think he has talked about either tendencies towards not just Asperger's, but also some bipolar tendencies. And that's a hard hand, especially with a traumatic childhood and the stresses that he deals with, you know, publicly and privately and like he carries a heavy load. Do you think he's actually a genius or is he just someone who's consistently applying a handful of sort of brutal principles over and over again?

1:17:10I think he's both. I think he's, I think there's sufficient evidence that he is certainly above average, if not like way up there in IQ. 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 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 right 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 an interesting paradox where he's like people who criticize him for like being cruel or whatever to people he works with like coming down hard on them or having really high expectations or um being mean or firing people capriciously 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 multi-planetary or electrifying transport, advancing clean energy.

1:19:19If it's Neuralink, it's like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics like control computers or eventually walk again. That also has some AI alignment components to it. There's a chapter in the book of like my companies are philanthropy. 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.

1:19:50One of the other ones that's in there is The Precipice by Toby Ord. And that's all about existential risk, how humanity could go extinct from 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 why is that important i i almost 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 so motivated um as what i'm sure that deep 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 multi-planetary preserve the only form of consciousness that we're aware of that exists in the world in the universe which is ourselves and we're gonna feel pretty stupid if we 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 years civilization but we've got to take this first step um off the planet and into the solar system and if we fuck this up before we get off a planet like big l yeah well i think 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 it's so funny that you 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.

1:21:56Just watch what happens.

1:22:01I don't know, man. It certainly seems like it's the time to have somebody that's like that. Regardless of what is going on personally, what you think about ethics and all the rest of it. I remember he gave this interview, it was probably about three or four years ago, and he said something to the effect of what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. And there are a lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good. They have no interest in that. And it's kind of the move fast, break things. I didn't give a fuck what you think of me type approach. Even if that's untrue in some part, like an ability to be disliked, a preparedness to not care so much about optics in the way that other people do.

1:22:50it's a fucking big unlock. Peter Thiel 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 de-emphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve an outlier success? Have you heard Jonathan B's approach? He says there's only three types of founders that are going to be successful. Number one is megalomaniac. Number two is autist. And number three is revenge fantasy.

1:23:31And megalomaniac Adam Newman from WeWork, autist Elon Musk, and revenge fantasy Palmer Luckey. 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 disregard for the way things are done is completely crucial.

1:24:12Yeah. 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 quote, no matter what it is, without even really ever thinking critically about it. And so most of us, when we hear something like somebody's disrupting and radically innovating something new. We're just kind of like, ah, do we really need that? Isn't it fine the way it is? Especially as we get older or as we get comfortable with that thing. You know, there's a great like Douglas Adams line of like everything invented before you're 30 is like a new miracle.

1:24:46And to be appreciated and everything invented after you're 30 is like a crime against humanity and a sin and should not be 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. There's one about women as well. every girl who's got smaller titties than me is flat-chested, and every girl who's got bigger titties than me is a fatty.

1:25:13That was in your episode about female - Introsexual competition. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Small titties, big titties. It all comes down to titties. So look, dude, coming to the book process, which I think is fascinating, obviously you write The Novelmanac, and then that kind of springboards you into this, pretty much the forefront of the 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.

1:25:57Like it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle to me. And it's much more about removal. Yes. Right? Once you've got everything, this is everything that this person has ever said. Yeah. Now, how much of this block of marble do I need to remove before David's left? Yeah. And just organizing and finding the thread so that it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the previous idea and it's just like a clean read all the way through. Oh yeah, and then weaving, the weaving as well, I suppose. Yeah. It's maybe more akin to clay than it is to marble. Yeah, there's just, it is a weird thing.

1:26:28And it came out of loving, I mean, I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. And like, they never wrote books. But a lot of people built books out of their talks, their lectures, their letters. And I never knew what to call those either. But I just found myself asking, like, who do I wish had written books? And then realizing that the raw 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. and I don't know what to call them and I don't know how to talk about it but I like well it's fucking awesome is what you can call it dude I think it's really really good what have you learned about the scale of the internet since obviously the Navalman Act 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 yeah it's easy I feel like anybody's into podcasting YouTube social media knows intellectually that like the internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think.

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

1:27:55I 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? The thing, the scale still blows me away. Like I just, I can't believe that we're, you know, there's sells so well in China and India and all around the world and across so many different demographics. India makes a little more sense. That's fair. But yeah, it was not on my vision board that yoga instructors in Bali were going to be reading the Almanac of Naval and that it was going to be so popular among high school and college students.

1:28:35We've been talking about that. Me and George have been talking about this a lot. And obviously, we spoke about it last night. The TAM for the Book of Elon is way bigger than it is for Naval, but the potential hurdle of ideological disagreement is also greater. So again, it's the boobies on the popularity graph. Lots of people that go, ah, I've got to. And then lots of people who go, never. 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'm prepared i did spend a lot of time be like answering the question who is nival um but i think once it's it's just such a weird book like it's a weird title it's a weird book it 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 fucking incredible ideas.

1:29:43Like 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 his book, you know, about being multi-planer, He's been talking about it for 20 years, but there's still so much to learn from them. They're battle-tested ideas, I think, in a lot of cases. What are the tactical principles? What are the ways that you've changed your life having gone through the process of writing this book?

1:30:28I 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 you don't. Each grab-and-go stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients, or any other BS. Free shipping in the U.S. for a sample pack by going to drinklmnt.com slash modernwisdom. If you don't like it for any reason, they will return your money and you can keep the box.

1:31:06That's drinklmnt.com. Oh my God, he did it again. Is he doing all four? Is he doing all of them? Okay, yeah, there you go. Oh, wow. Showing the product as well. Holy shit. Thank you, dude. 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 fucking fantastic. I am also a deep personal fan of Element. I drink it after every workout and every sweat session. It's fucking great. I don't know who the other sponsors are. You're off the hook. That was the rest. Thank fuck for that. I'm getting jump scared by my own ad reads.

1:31:43What have you applied to your life beyond eight sleep and element? What have you applied to your life after learning about Elon? I think it is the most meta is this sense that I'm capable of more than I think. It has encouraged me to do more things in parallel back to the like parallel gestation thing. Like I'm trying to run Scrap Media, which is a publishing company, and write a book, actually work on three at the same time, and podcast, and invest. It gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, no, this is doable and sane. And if these things are all sort of stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long period of time.

1:32:24um 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 procedural as opposed to tactical yeah what is the issue let's go after that is let's go through it you know when i think about this it makes me think about the difference between watching a ufc and boxing when you watch boxing does it's this we it's almost ceremonial this sort of monarch like Like, we had vestige of people dotting their caps.

1:33:19We must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th anniversary. And you're like, what the fuck? 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. And it kind of feels a little bit like that. That when you have, 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 capacity of the pipeline increases.

1:33:55Yeah. 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. hmm well also by doing that by delegate by it not being them even if they're not purposefully delegating it or whatever they're off the hook yeah i don't need to be moving that fast i don't you know and it's a really good point to say if you've worked super hard for a good while like that's the point at which you get to kick back and matthew mcconaughey with your feet upon the table 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 fuck yeah eric jorgensen ladies and gentlemen why should people go to check out everything you've got gonna uh ejorgensen.com is my personal site elonmuskbook.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 wow that is a good one i saw that you just released on smart friends the four hour conversation on your youtube yeah we just updated naval and i updated the 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.

1:35:29Unreal. What are you doing next, can you say? The one I can say is I'm doing a book with David Senra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories from the, like, Founders Archive. That will fucking rip. Which I think will be, it's so fun to work on. Yeah. I think it will be amazing. The other one, I don't have, like, a thumbs up yet, so I don't want to say that one publicly. Well, I'm looking forward to getting you and Senra in here and we can have a chat. That would be amazing. Fuck yeah. Appreciate you, man. Thank you.