How Elon Thinks

1. 0:00 – 0:39

   Book Reveal

   1. DSDavid Senra0:00

      [whooshing] All right, so I have an advanced copy of your book, The Book of Elon: Elon Musk's Most Useful Ideas in His Own Words. You just said something that there's only four of these copies in the world. Who has them?

   2. EJEric Jorgenson0:12

      It's a, it's a pretty special list. It's like Naval Ravikant, MrBeast, Ivanka Trump, and you.

   3. DSDavid Senra0:18

      [laughing]

   4. EJEric Jorgenson0:18

      [laughing]

   5. DSDavid Senra0:19

      Okay, so the idea for this is you spent five years, thousands of hours studying Elon. He's been a hero, a personal hero of yours for a very long time. I just wanna, like, I r- obviously read and reread the book. I'm just gonna, like, run through a bunch of highlights and ideas, like, that I thought were interesting, and just kinda throw them to you, and you see, like, what, uh, like, what you find interesting about it-

   6. EJEric Jorgenson0:37

      Yeah

   7. DSDavid Senra0:37

      ... or, like, add additional context.

2. 0:39 – 2:19

   Build Useful Things

   1. DSDavid Senra0:39

      So something we were talking about when we were having coffee this morning is the importance of encouraging as many people as possible. Like, we have enough deal makers. We need people making products and building companies.

   2. EJEric Jorgenson0:48

      Yeah.

   3. DSDavid Senra0:48

      You don't need to be doing deals all day long, and that is, like, a main theme that Elon talks about all the time. And so he says this, right, uh, this quote in the book, which I loved, "I do not start companies with the standpoint of what is the best risk-adjusted rate of return or what I think could be successful. I just find things that need to happen, and I try to make them happen. I thought these things needed to get done. If the money was lost, okay, it was still worth trying." What is his mindset around what he chooses to spend his time and energy on?

   4. EJEric Jorgenson1:16

      He seems to attack problems that nobody else is working on that have a positive impact on the future. That's his philosophy and mindset going into everything he does, which is, I think, unique. A lot of people assume that he's money motivated, or a lot of people are money motivated, and you hear all ent- entrepreneurs all the time talk about, like, oh, like, "This is a great business model. This is a good place to go in. I'm gonna go start self-storage because, like, the failure rate is so low." And it is just not how he thinks in any way, shape, or form. He literally says, "Nobody else is crazy enough to try space, so that's the company I have to go build, 'cause nobody else is working on it, and I can."

   5. DSDavid Senra1:47

      He has a great line in here. He's like, "Don't start a company because you wanna be an entrepreneur or because you wanna make money. It is better to approach from this angle. What is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?"

   6. EJEric Jorgenson1:58

      Yeah. I think there's a paradox there of, like, the thing that you can do that nobody else is working on is actually more likely to be successful. Like, it forces you to try to do something unique that also ends up being more valuable for everybody else, because you're solving a problem, you're adding a capability to humanity. You're not just starting another commodity business of some sort.

3. 2:19 – 4:26

   Engineering Talent Edge

   1. DSDavid Senra2:19

      Yeah, I think it's important to point out the context in which he started, like, SpaceX and Tesla.

   2. EJEric Jorgenson2:24

      He's been thinking about these problems since he was in college, literally. Like, even younger, as a kid. He was very influenced by sci-fi, um, and thinking about things that are possible. He talks about engineering as, as magic. He's like, "If you build something that couldn't previously exist, that's like being a magician." And like, who wouldn't wanna be a magician? Like, there's a whole section, not just a chapter, like a section in this book about the value of engineering and the fact that excellent engineers are the fundamental constraint on building and growing civilization, and the constraint on advancing these companies. He's like, "I have, I have all the money I need. Like, the constraint is not capital, the constraint is truly excellent engineers."

   3. DSDavid Senra3:02

      Does he go into detail how he finds truly excellent engineers?

   4. EJEric Jorgenson3:05

      Yeah, his, like, interview process, I mean, part of it, a lot of it just comes from him being really good engineer himself, right? So y- you can take the questions, like he looks for evidence of exceptional ability, he says. Um, he looks for people who've really solved a specific problem, and he asks detailed questions about a hard technical problem that you've solved in the past. And he's got a good bullshit radar. Like, you could ask those same questions, or I could ask those set of questions and not have the same ability to scrutinize and determine who's truly excellent, but he does because he's so close to all this all the time, but that's his advantage. He really biases towards hiring young, unproven engineers and then giving them, like, a shocking amount of accountability and responsibility, and that's part of the benefit of the iteration rate at these companies is he can figure out who knows what works. You know, it's, it's like in wartime how you get these, like, skip-level promotions. You just find competent people and, like, give them more responsibility as fast as you can. Like, that's how these companies operate.

   5. DSDavid Senra4:02

      I was just talking to Luca Ferrari, who's the founder of Betting Spoons, and he said something that was interesting. He, he wants to hire young, like young interns or young people.

   6. EJEric Jorgenson4:09

      Yeah.

   7. DSDavid Senra4:09

      And he says, "Once you find somebody competent, you just saturate their capacity."

   8. EJEric Jorgenson4:13

      Yeah.

   9. DSDavid Senra4:13

      Which I thought was an interesting description.

   10. EJEric Jorgenson4:14

       Yeah.

   11. DSDavid Senra4:15

       The-- This idea of finding people that it, it's better to have somebody, like, that has no habits than bad habits-

   12. EJEric Jorgenson4:21

       Mm-hmm

   13. DSDavid Senra4:21

       ... so, like, recruiting from existing incumbents.

   14. EJEric Jorgenson4:24

       Yeah.

   15. DSDavid Senra4:24

       Like, that's something that reappears throughout the history of entrepreneurship.

4. 4:26 – 6:47

   Wired for War

   1. DSDavid Senra4:26

      Another thing that reappears throughout the history of entrepreneurship, maybe my favorite maxim of all time from the history of entrepreneurship, is that excellence is the capacity to take pain. Elon has a great way of saying this. He says, "My way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you're doing and take the pain." [laughs]

   2. EJEric Jorgenson4:40

      Yeah. I think it's so funny that the most productive person on Earth does zero, zero, zero of the, like, meditation, journaling, morning routine. Like, he wakes up and picks up his phone and goes to war, like, every day. Like, that's his routine.

   3. DSDavid Senra4:53

      [laughs] He goes to war.

   4. EJEric Jorgenson4:54

      Yeah.

   5. DSDavid Senra4:54

      In, in this book, we have, uh, Isaacson's biography of Elon, which you and I both have read and reread. I've done, uh, an episode on, on that book as well. Yeah, he has this great thing that he would repeat for decades, that he is wired for war. [laughs]

   6. EJEric Jorgenson5:05

      Yeah. Like, we were trying to come up with any sort of analogous founders, and, like, the closest thing we can come to is, like, Napoleon. He's not analogous to other founders or sort of, like, operating companies as though, like, with standard best practices of today. He is, like, moving around constantly, moving people between companies, like, moving the fronts, looking at supply lines. Like, it is a very unique operating situation. He, he has no, uh-- He fired his scheduler because he's like, "I want complete perfect control of my time. I wanna be able to, like, work on the most important thing i- immediately. I wanna be able to move whenever I want to the problem physically." That's, like, one of the big tenets of his productivity. I think there's so much to be said about doing the right work at the right time. It is a multiple order of magnitude productivity increase, not a percentage.

   7. DSDavid Senra5:56

      Say more about moving around resources and people.

   8. EJEric Jorgenson5:59

      I mean, one of the underrated advantages, like, y- all the time you see problems getting solved by people from other companies. And so when there was, like, a, a real constraint on Raptor engine productivity at SpaceX, uh, the guy who-- the engineer who was in charge of that, a young-Really talented engineer, um, brought in the head of production from Model three and that like walked the line with that guy, and he was just like sobbing because like the aerospace best practice, even at SpaceX, was like way, way, way, way behind how they thought about-

   9. DSDavid Senra6:29

      Wait, who was crying?

   10. EJEric Jorgenson6:30

       -volume production. The guy from the Model three.

   11. DSDavid Senra6:32

       Okay.

   12. EJEric Jorgenson6:32

       He was just like, "How is this your most efficient thing?" Like, "We can... There's so much room for improvement," because of what they learned on Model three production, which is like produce or die very, very quickly. Um, and that's why SpaceX has like reached this volume production that nobody in aerospace ever has.

5. 6:47 – 8:47

   Tip of the Spear

   1. DSDavid Senra6:47

      So we have a friend named Max Olson, who's writing a book on SpaceX that is not released yet, but he just did this excellent essay that me and you both love-

   2. EJEric Jorgenson6:54

      Yeah.

   3. DSDavid Senra6:54

      -and we actually printed out. There's a bunch of notes in front of us. It's-- He, he calls this, uh, the- these memes that spread through Elon's companies, and he, at the end of the essay, he has these five memes. Number one was tip of the spear focus. Always identify and attack the biggest limiter. Don't spread effort across secondary problems. Laser in on the single constraint that, if removed, would unlock everything downstream. This is my favorite line from this section. This is true at every level. Each SpaceX site has a single dominating objective, right? To simplify, simplify prioritization. A NASA manager who visited SpaceX observed that when a new problem appears, it looks like a flash mob, uh, appears in the hallway.

   4. EJEric Jorgenson7:33

      Yeah. I-- That essay is excellent, and it asks a really important question, which is, you know, a lot of people have talked about, and this book is really an answer to, like how does Elon get so much done? This essay in this book is really an examination of like why is SpaceX so special? Like how has nobody been able to replicate what they've been able to do? The path that they've been on has been proven for years. Like there's lots of people with more engineers and more money, so like why can't they catch up? Like they're not even really getting closer. Like there's been more mission failures at Boeing since SpaceX. Like this is not, this is not good. And so this is unpacking that, and the answer, the deepest answer is like the culture and the habits and the routines, the selection of the people, and then the memes that spread through the organization, how they work and how they attack problems. And so I think that is a great description of like the whole organization learning to operate like Elon does, which is a combination of two extremely important skills, which is like find the most important thing to work on and then absolutely attack it. Like what's the limiting factor? Go ape shit on it immediately.

   5. DSDavid Senra8:35

      I know he's mission-oriented. He's like, "I have a mission in life. This is what I wanna do." But does he talk about anything other than I'm going to do this and essentially persevere through pain?

6. 8:47 – 13:13

   Burn the Boats

   1. EJEric Jorgenson8:47

      Oh, he's got some absolutely killer lines about this. Like I don't g- I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. Um, the one you just read about, like my way of dealing with mental problems is to just care what I'm-- care about what I'm doing and take the pain. Come hell or high water, we're gonna get this done. Like there's so much unlocked when you have a mission that you know you would never give up on. Like so few entrepreneurs I think would make the bets that Elon has made because they're not truly purely as ideologically and philosophically motivated as he is. Like to think about, you know, on his third company, Tesla and SpaceX, fourth company, to start with two hundred million dollars and put your entire like generational wealth and reputation, maybe even more importantly, on the line is... Like how many entrepreneurs did you know that have risked going back to zero and public humiliation once they reach a nine-figure net worth? Like he's the only one I can name. Uh, and that happened at like the, the lowest of the low point, and he, he was all in before he asked anybody else to put in any money. Two hundred million dollars into these own companies, and that ability to not give up and not even think about giving up and just burn the boats and keep pushing and keep pushing comes from this maniacal devotion to the mission because it is a truly important mission. Like getting us to a new planet could mean the difference between like consciousness continuing or not continuing. Like if you are truly in on that mission, of course it's worth risking public humiliation. Of course it's worth risking two hundred million dollars. Of course it's worth working hundred hour weeks and living in the factory and recruiting anybody that you possibly can and demanding the most of them and firing anybody who's like feels like they're slowing down progress. It's a really incredible test actually to give yourself that, like if you can imagine giving up on what you're doing, would you, like should you even start it? I know you talk like this all the time. You're like, "Death is my exit strategy. You'll pry this mic from the cold, dead hands." Like you are unquestionably on the mission of your life, and that's a really-- I think it's a really interesting question to reflect on.

   2. DSDavid Senra10:58

      He talks about burning the boats constantly.

   3. EJEric Jorgenson10:59

      Yeah.

   4. DSDavid Senra10:59

      And he did this from like day one.

   5. EJEric Jorgenson11:01

      Mm-hmm.

   6. DSDavid Senra11:01

      Like even with like Zip2. Um, I do think there is some kind of like advan- very advanced understanding of human nature that if you truly are putting your back against the wall and not giving yourself any options, like you-

   7. EJEric Jorgenson11:11

      Yeah

   8. DSDavid Senra11:11

      ... will come up with ideas or like push yourself to j- in, in a manner, into an extreme manner in which you just p- can't-

   9. EJEric Jorgenson11:18

      Yeah

   10. DSDavid Senra11:18

       ... if you, if you're optimizing for like optionality or it's like, "Oh, if this doesn't work out, I have like a plan B."

   11. EJEric Jorgenson11:22

       Yeah.

   12. DSDavid Senra11:22

       I love, uh, Jeff Bezos' quote on this. Bezos is like, "The, uh, plan B should be to make plan A work." [laughs]

   13. EJEric Jorgenson11:28

       Yes. I think like, uh, Schwarzenegger says the same thing, and I think it's worth... Like Zip2 is a good example. Most people don't like remember that he started a company at, whatever, twenty, um, and went all in on it unbelievably hard. It was a little-- He was a little older than that actually, but like he was doing these insane like surges and deadlines and things. He set their initial launch date, uh, for PayPal on like Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend, and he's like, "Get your ass in this office." Like, "We have a deadline." They're like, "Why do we have to launch on Thanksgiving?" He says, "Because I said. We're launching on Thanksgiving weekend." Like, "Get in here, work twenty-four hours, like let's get it done." It's been an operating principle that is an outcome of who he is and has been consistent through all of these companies.

   14. DSDavid Senra12:09

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7. 13:13 – 15:16

   Facing Fear

   1. DSDavid Senra13:13

      He talks a lot in the book, or in-- you profiled him in the book about fear. He says, "Feel the fear. Do it anyways. Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear. The nature of fear is that people don't look at it. Look at it directly and it will be gone." These are direct quotes from Elon. "When something's important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear. It is normal to feel fear. If you don't feel fear, you definitely have something mentally wrong. Just feel it and let the importance of your mission drive you to do it anyway."

   2. EJEric Jorgenson13:42

      I think the purpose-driven nature of these businesses is a extremely powerful piece of their success because that's not just Elon. It attracts people who feel the same way about the mission and who want to be pushed. Like, how many people go into their jobs and they're like, "God, I really... I want this company to just wring all of the potential out of me. I wanna give everything possible to this mission." It's not what most people think, um, but it is how the people who go work at these companies think. And that's an incredibly powerful thing for the-- to drive the success of the company, but it's also great for the people who want to opt into that environment. Like, that's why Tesla's kicking the rest of the auto industry's ass, like, and will continue to.

   3. DSDavid Senra14:22

      Yeah, that was interesting when I asked you, like, what, what do you hope people take away f- like-

   4. EJEric Jorgenson14:26

      Yeah

   5. DSDavid Senra14:26

      ... you know, they buy the book, they, they read it or they give it to somebody else. Like, what is the point? Like, what do you want to happen at the end? And what was your answer to that?

   6. EJEric Jorgenson14:34

      I have many hopes for this book, but the overarching one is, like, I hope that this book can generate, like, one million Musks. Like, I, I don't mean go follow his life blueprint. I don't mean start an electric car company, but I mean figure out a unique problem that nobody else is working on and dedicate your life to solving it. Like a, a thing that adds a new capability to humanity. Build a new thing. Biggest lesson of Elon's life to me is, like, we are all capable of so much more than we think.

   7. DSDavid Senra15:01

      That is what you said to me.

   8. EJEric Jorgenson15:02

      He's special-

   9. DSDavid Senra15:02

      Yeah

   10. EJEric Jorgenson15:02

       ... but he's not superhuman. He's just figured out how to get an unbelievable amount out of himself. And, you know, he had a lot of disadvantages. Like a lot of people listening to this are gonna have a lot better hand to start life with than Elon

8. 15:16 – 18:19

   Origin Story Myths

   1. EJEric Jorgenson15:16

      did.

   2. DSDavid Senra15:16

      Explain some of the disadvantages, 'cause a lot of people think that he, like, came-- well, he was, like, privileged, is something you'll hear, like, a lot of his critics say.

   3. EJEric Jorgenson15:23

      Oh, God. Yeah. I don't think that's a particularly, like, well-informed take. Um, his dad was an engineer and an entrepreneur, and he had ups and downs in his career, but the more defining trait of his dad was that he's, uh... I don't know, I've never met the dude, but, like, by all accounts in the Isaacson biography, he did have, like, a lot of surface area with him, and from accounts from Kimbal and Elon, he was like a narcissistic, abusive, manipulative, grandiose-

   4. DSDavid Senra15:51

      I think I was gonna say, like, li-- compulsive liar.

   5. EJEric Jorgenson15:53

      Compulsive liar, fa-- oh, yeah, fabricated a lot of things. Um, he had brilliance, but he was also really dark. Um, he's unreliable, and he would lie to the kids all the time. I mean, Elon at, like, eight would stand in the living room and be berated by his father for hours. It's not just, like, a mean comment. Um, he'd scream in his face and call him worthless and useless and stupid and, like, as a young, young boy. Like, imagine what that-- the fuel that that fills you with as a kid and the... I mean, E-and Elon figured out how to, like, make the demons pull the plow. Like, he turned that into something really productive and really positive for the most part. I mean, there's another case where he got beat up very badly. Like, this is not like lost a fight, like stomped by a gang of kids and was in the hospital for like a week, unrecognizable face, and his dad sided with the bullies and, like, called him stupid for picking a fight, and that is, that is an unbelievably brutal place to start. Um, and so I think some of these rumors about, like, how privileged he was actually come from his dad lying and trying to take credit for some of his success. Um, and they've had a strained relationship, and all kinds of weird stuff has happened over the last couple decades. But Elon arrived and as an immigrant to Canada at seventeen, paid his way through college, graduated with student debt, dropped out of Stanford, uh, graduate school to start his first company in the early internet boom and, like, basically made... I forget the exact first number.

   6. DSDavid Senra17:24

      Twenty-two million.

   7. EJEric Jorgenson17:24

      Twenty-two million.

   8. DSDavid Senra17:25

      He says-- it's a great line in the book-

   9. EJEric Jorgenson17:26

      Yeah

   10. DSDavid Senra17:26

       ...'cause they sold for three hundred and seven million in cash to Compact Computer.

   11. EJEric Jorgenson17:30

       Yep.

   12. DSDavid Senra17:30

       And he goes, "My bank account went from-"

   13. EJEric Jorgenson17:33

       Mm

   14. DSDavid Senra17:33

       "... five thousand dollars to twenty-two million and five thousand dollars." [laughs]

   15. EJEric Jorgenson17:36

       Yes, which is just like, he's like standing at the mailbox holding this check being like, "Wow." Um, and he, uh, that, that like paid off his student debt. And so he made his first, like, fortune by himself and in that era was like, he said he couldn't afford an apartment and an office, so he leased an office, and he showered at the YMCA, like, worked constantly. Um, all he had was a laptop and, and, like, some books and student debt. Like, that's his starting place, and he earned his first seed money from... and everything, most of what he made from Zip2 he rolled right back into starting, like, the week later starting X.com, which became PayPal.

   16. DSDavid Senra18:09

       Yeah, there's a great line in the book, I think he might have been in college, where he's like, he figured he's either gonna be broke or wealthy, but nothing in between [laughs] .

   17. EJEric Jorgenson18:16

       Yeah. And he rolled that dice like a bunch of times.

9. 18:19 – 22:17

   Know Business A to Z

   1. DSDavid Senra18:19

      You do a really great job of breaking down the ideas and essentially under like these headings of maxims, and you know I'm a sucker for maxims. Uh, one of them actually came from Founder's podcast-

   2. EJEric Jorgenson18:28

      Yeah

   3. DSDavid Senra18:28

      ... which I appreciate, and it says, "If you know your business from A to Z, there's no problem that you can't solve." Why did you apply that to Elon?

   4. EJEric Jorgenson18:36

      I started with the, the full list of maxims according to me, which is like one hundred and seven, and I checked-- I went down the list, and I checked all the ones that I felt like Elon was a good example of, which is like seventy-five.

   5. DSDavid Senra18:46

      Mm-hmm.

   6. EJEric Jorgenson18:46

      Um, and then I went down again and was like, what are the ones that he's like could be an iconic exemplar of, and it was like fifteen or sixteen. So I think that's a good testament to like the... not just Elon as a well-rounded entrepreneur, but also like the ability of the maxims to describe the traits that become an incredible entrepreneur. Um, the business from A to Z, I think it's Sam Zemurray is the one who like best exemplifies this, like the banana man, uh.

   7. DSDavid Senra19:11

      Yeah, the book so people know-

   8. EJEric Jorgenson19:13

      Yeah

   9. DSDavid Senra19:13

      ... it's called, uh, is it, uh-

   10. EJEric Jorgenson19:14

       The Fish That Ate the Whale.

   11. DSDavid Senra19:15

       The Fish That Ate the Whale. It's, uh, it's one of my favorite books. It's by Rich Cohen. I've read it like three times.

   12. EJEric Jorgenson19:19

       It's an incredible book-

   13. DSDavid Senra19:20

       Yeah

   14. EJEric Jorgenson19:20

       ... of like high agency and deep expertise, and this guy was like running a banana empire from the farms in, you know-

   15. DSDavid Senra19:27

       Honduras or Guatemala

   16. EJEric Jorgenson19:28

       ... Honduras and Guatemala and stuff. And so E-Elon is a like the modern manufacturing example of that. He lives, lived on the line. He goes to the problems. He has a really deep understanding of not just the product, but like the physics behind the product. There's, uh, so many stories of him having this deep intuition for what the materials in a thing can do, where the threshold is, and pushing engineers and designs over and over and over to like get to that failure point and find what the true like most elegant, most simple, most efficient version of the product could be.

   17. DSDavid Senra19:59

       Can you give us some examples of that?

   18. EJEric Jorgenson20:01

       One is the thickness of the stainless steel welds on Starship, right? And so the design engineers gave one number, and then he went and talked to like the guys actually doing the welding, and they were kinda like, "We think maybe like four and a half millimeters would be like getting to sketchy." And he's like, "Let's try four millimeters." And four millimeters worked. Even the move to stainless steel, like most rockets previously had been made with carbon fiber, um, is just really hard to work with and it's big, and he had this intuition and, uh, knew that stainless steel at low temperatures gains strength. And so once a rocket is actually up in orbit, it's stronger, which is an easy thing to forget. And so he's like pushing people over and over again to like use things that are cheaper, use things that are easier to work with, reduce the moving parts. My summary of Elon is, he's David Goggins level like intensity, he's Richard Feynman's level of like unconventional technical brilliance, and he's Napoleon's strategic genius and insane bias to action. Those three traits combined make him just incredibly singular, and the volume of time that he puts in, like even if you put in this mu-amount of time to try to know your business from A to Z as without that deep technical intuition or sense of the fundamentals of the physics and the materials, like you couldn't make the calls that he's making, or you couldn't push on the things that he's pushing. And of course, he's not always right, and of course, the engineers are always the ones like doing the highest volume of the real work. But as you say, like the founder is the guardian of the company's soul, and he is there to raise the bar and push people. And I think he has this really keen sense of... I, I love the line so much, "Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it's catastrophic." And so he pushes these things to the breaking point, pushes the materials, pushes the designs. He wants to reach the point where he knows for sure that it's the most efficient version of the design because the mistake or the failure that reveals that information is gonna pay off a million times. We're gonna make ten thousand of these engines, and I don't want an inefficiency in there that we're gonna replicate ten thousand times. I wanna make the failure, I wanna fail five hundred times on every single design decision so that I know that we have the most elegant thing as we scale up and ramp up.

10. 22:17 – 25:35

    Simplify and Fail Fast

    1. DSDavid Senra22:17

       Yeah, I think one of the things that will surprise people is just how much, uh, like I-I said in the Eisen, uh, the episode I did on the Eisen book, it's like half the book is just him yelling at people to simplify and to delete.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson22:28

       Yes.

    3. DSDavid Senra22:28

       And there's a maxim for this, it's just like genius has the fewest moving parts.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson22:31

       Yes.

    5. DSDavid Senra22:31

       And you see this with the-- there's that meme of like the, I think it's the Raptor engine design-

    6. EJEric Jorgenson22:35

       Yeah

    7. DSDavid Senra22:35

       ... and there's like three different ones over time, and it's like this convoluted mess, and it just gets to like this simple, this beautiful simplicity.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson22:41

       Yeah.

    9. DSDavid Senra22:41

       You just mentioned it, where like, um, I was reading about the, the decision to do stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. And like well, to do carbon fiber, it's more expensive, it's harder to work with, you have to build in like giant, uh, autoclave.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson22:52

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra22:52

        He's like, "We can weld s-stainless steel in a tent." [laughs]

    12. EJEric Jorgenson22:57

        Yeah. Yeah. He's, uh, literally building these rockets in a tent in a parking lot. Um, you know, which is a very, it's a very Elon thing of like, let's do just what we have to do to make progress on the product. I wanna linger on, on failure for a second-

    13. DSDavid Senra23:08

        Please

    14. EJEric Jorgenson23:08

        ... because I think it's a really underrated piece. I think these, uh, some of these maxims and some of these taglines that Elon uses, if you kind of put them next to each other, show this pattern of he's like, he's designing these organizatio-organizations to create small failures as quickly as possible, right? So, um, if you're not adding back in ten percent of the things you removed, you're not taking out enough, right? So like fail. That is, that is a, a mandate to go create something that doesn't work and then figure out why it didn't work and just add that little bit back in so that we know it's the most efficient version of the design. When he sets deadlines, he's like, "I wanna pick a deadline that I'm fifty percent likely to make. We're gonna miss half our deadlines, and I'm totally fine with that because it means we'll be moving as fast as we possibly can, and we're gonna make some deadlines that nobody thought we were gonna make. If we're making a hundred percent of our deadlines, then they're way too far out because we'll always consume at least the amount of time that we give ourselves." And I think people have this inherent bias, especially like if your job is on the line, or if you wanna like look good in front of your peers, or you just want your, your company to work, you don't wantTo be seen as failing. Like you make so many decisions. Engineers in general, like, "I don't want my product to fail. I don't want my part to fail." And he's so much of what these cultures reinforce and these, these sort of maxims reinforce is like you should be failing. He says when he hires people, like, "If you don't, if you can't tell me the four ways you fucked something up, then you weren't the one doing the real work." Um [laughs]

    15. DSDavid Senra24:38

        I was literally searching for that quote right now. [laughs]

    16. EJEric Jorgenson24:40

        Yeah. It's a, it is a great one, but it, it... all of those kind of line up behind, like if you're not engineering your organization to have these small failures, you're creating... This is the antifragile idea, like you're creating this sort of fragility and this inefficiency in the global thing if you don't learn to fail along the way and iterate extremely quickly towards a better product.

    17. DSDavid Senra25:02

        I had a conversation with Michael Dell. It's one of the first episodes of this show, and he, he was talking about that too. He's like, "Listen, when you're inventing a new business using new technology and a new business model, there's no playbook. You can't go read a book that says here's how you do it." And he's like, "And you can't even hire people from adjacent industries 'cause they're just gonna do it the way they used to do it."

    18. EJEric Jorgenson25:17

        Yeah.

    19. DSDavid Senra25:18

        So he's like, "The only way to do it is to experiment it into..." I think he used the word into it-

    20. EJEric Jorgenson25:21

        Yeah

    21. DSDavid Senra25:21

        ... uh, yourself. He's like, "You have a hypothesis, and then you test the hypothesis." And the point he was making is like, so therefore you want mistakes. You actually wanna make mistakes-

    22. EJEric Jorgenson25:29

        Yeah

    23. DSDavid Senra25:29

        ... 'cause that's the way you learn, but you wanna make them small, and you don't wanna make the same mistake over and over again, which I, again, is like an echo of what you were just saying

11. 25:35 – 28:18

    Reality and Physics

    1. DSDavid Senra25:35

       about Elon. I guess this ties to the part of the book that's right in front of me, where it's clear that Elon's companies, he wants to use reality as-

    2. EJEric Jorgenson25:42

       Mm-hmm

    3. DSDavid Senra25:42

       ... a validation tool. So he talks about... He's like, "Getting to the truth is really important." So he says, "In business and personal life, wishful thinking causes a lot of mistakes. You have to ask whether something is true or not. Wishful thinking is a natural human tendency." Again, these are direct quotes from Elon. "It is a challenge to tell the difference between believing in a new idea and persevering or pursuing an unrealistic dream. The real test of any startup is how well it responds to adversity and adapts. When most things start out, they don't make much sense, but as long as you adapt quickly, you can make the company work. Being tenacious and super focused on the truth is extremely important. You should look for feedback from all sources."

    4. EJEric Jorgenson26:20

       The iteration towards reality as the teacher is... It, it was another, like, great element of Max Olson's essay. Um, and, and Naval is super articulate about this as, like, applying David Deutsch's ideas to company building. He's like, "Your goal as a company is to discover new knowledge," which means interact with reality, and then instantiate it into a product. And this cycle of iteration and experimentation is how you check against reality, right? This is how all knowledge is created. It's, it's gene mutation and selection. It's scientific hypothesis and testing. Um, but people don't usually think about their organization in terms of, like, how much new knowledge is being created, how many experiments are we running, how quickly and how cheaply can the failures be created.

    5. DSDavid Senra27:04

       Here's another great line: "If you have beliefs that are incompatible with the rocket getting to orbit, the rocket will not get to orbit. Physics is a harsh judge." Then I laugh myself. He repeats over and over again, like-

    6. EJEric Jorgenson27:12

       Yeah

    7. DSDavid Senra27:12

       ... "Physics is a law. Everything else is a recommendation."

    8. EJEric Jorgenson27:15

       Another branch off of that is like physics doesn't care about your feelings. Um, and so that is a line that he repeats over and over again with people who are like, "How can you be, you know, so quick to, to judge people or to fire people or to, like, get the team?" And he's like, "We have, we have one test. We have one bar to clear, like does the rocket fly, and how much payload can we get to orbit?" Like, there is one metric that we're optimizing for, and I will do what I have to do to march us towards that piece to clear that bar. I mean, this is where the Asperger's comes out, you know, like in a truly advantaged way. Like he says, being... the need to be liked is like this huge disadvantage that so many people have, and I do not have that. He straight up says like, "I do not have that weakness." And Peter Thiel has an interesting observation about that. He's just like, "Why are so many of the successful tech founders, like, seem to be somewhere on the spectrum?" Like, why do they all have this sort of biological advantage in dismissing the opinions of others? What does that say about, like, our society that that's a skill that you need to have in order to be an innovator and build something new and build a great organization?

12. 28:18 – 30:34

    The Algorithm Begins

    1. DSDavid Senra28:18

       So I guess that leads into the next thing I was gonna ask you about, which is the algorithm.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson28:22

       Mm.

    3. DSDavid Senra28:22

       Which is the first step of the algorithm. Algorithm is what?

    4. EJEric Jorgenson28:24

       Question requirements. Make your requirements less dumb is, is, like, specifically how he says it a lot, and there are so many requirements. I think it's a really... that was a hard-earned first step.

    5. DSDavid Senra28:36

       Yeah. Explain what he had to go, like how he learned.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson28:38

       The, the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn't exist, and there are many places that requirements come from, right? Sometimes they come from inter-inside the organization, sometimes they came from a team, sometimes they came from legal, sometimes they came from a design partner, like NASA. Like, if you're gonna shoot up a rocket and the capsule, the vehicle is gonna, like, dock with the space station, they have all kinds of requirements about your latches and, like, how things go in. If you're gonna launch from a specific pad, you've got requirements around sound or timing or all these things, and he, he's like so much money and time and effort is wasted trying to accommodate requirements that don't make any fucking sense in the first place. So the first thing to do is, like, shorten your list of design requirements so that you've got the maximum possible space to play in. And there's so many times, uh, many stories and, and the latch is like a, a true one that's in Max's essay, which is like the requirement said you gotta buy this specific, like, omni latch from an aerospace company made of these materials, and it was, like, super expensive, and they sort of questioned that requirement, and they were like, "All right. Well, it's fine. As, as long as it, like, does this and this, it's fine." And so they bought off-the-shelf parts from, like, McMaster-Carr, and they did the job just fine, which were, like, two orders of magnitude cheaper. There's also times when the requirement is legal or regulatory, and he'll s-assign somebody. He's like, "Go." It, it'll take a year or a, a year and a half to, like, get this permit, and he's like assign somebody. He's like, "Go fly to this office and sit in this office until you get permission, like sign on this sheet. Come back. Don't come back without a signed sheet or you're fired." Like that is a way to question a requirement or a, or a dismissal or a waiver of this requirement 'cause it doesn't make any sense, and there's, there's things that he's like, we are forced to comply with so many regulations from20 years ago, 50 years ago, they just don't make any damn sense, and they're not helping the consumer. So let's remove as many of them as we can so that we can design the best possible product or the for the cheapest possible price.

13. 30:34 – 34:25

    Delete and Simplify

    1. DSDavid Senra30:34

       What's the second?

    2. EJEric Jorgenson30:35

       Delete, delete, delete, simplify. Um, there's a-- I mean, the canonical line about this is like the best part is no part, the best process is no process. And I don't know exactly the number, but the, the, the number of times combining parts has happened over the course of the Model 3 or eliminating them. Like, I think when he started, there were over ten thousand parts, and that has come down steadily as he's combined parts, because every time two things need to be attached, not only are there two things that need to be attached, but maybe they need to be glued, maybe they need to be screwed, bolted, riveted, whatever, the, the way the metals interact needs to happen. They need to be actually assembled. And then there's like a tolerance that could change whether other things fit. It's like the number of expenses, changes, and risks that come from additional parts or additional attachments is so, so, so high. Simplicity gets you both reliability and low cost. That is the best part is no part. Simplicity delivers both reliability and low cost. And so between those two things, you have to delete as much as humanly possible. And so he goes to great lengths to combine parts, simplify things. He says go ultra-hardcore on deletion and simplification. That's how you see that like raptor meme where things get more and more and more simple. And that's how the Model 3 has gotten simpler, more reliable, cheaper to produce, and better. Uh, and the maybe the most famous example of this is his, um, decision to cast entire the front third and the back third, and he got that idea from toy cars. Like, toys are cheap, reliable, scale quickly. How do they make them? Like, let me, let me steal an idea from this industry. And it turned out that nobody had ever made casting machines that big. And so he-

    3. DSDavid Senra32:12

       Okay, so th-this is an important part.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson32:14

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra32:15

       Because then he combines these ideas together.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson32:17

       Yeah.

    7. DSDavid Senra32:17

       So we just talked about first principles thinking, which-

    8. EJEric Jorgenson32:19

       Yep

    9. DSDavid Senra32:19

       ... you know, I think he was the one basically popularized it. Now everybody talks about it. Very few people actually do it. But in that book, and I actually made a, a clip, this from one of my episodes-

    10. EJEric Jorgenson32:27

        Yeah

    11. DSDavid Senra32:27

        ... 'cause I thought it was so interesting, where he's like at Tesla, he's just playing with like a little toy Tesla.

    12. EJEric Jorgenson32:32

        Mm-hmm.

    13. DSDavid Senra32:32

        And he's-- and he talked about like learning from Legos and like how precise it has to be, and they're like, "Why can't we just cast the entire, I think, underbody?"

    14. EJEric Jorgenson32:41

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra32:41

        And he was like, " 'Cause there's no casting machine that's that big." He said, "Well, how many comp--" He breaks down, "How many companies make casting machines?" I think there was like something like six in the world.

    16. EJEric Jorgenson32:49

        Yeah.

    17. DSDavid Senra32:50

        Five. They... He's like, "Well, let's go talk to them about it."

    18. EJEric Jorgenson32:52

        Yep.

    19. DSDavid Senra32:52

        Five said no. One said maybe. And Elon goes, "I took that maybe as a yes."

    20. EJEric Jorgenson32:58

        Yeah.

    21. DSDavid Senra32:58

        And it greatly simplify-uh, simplified like the production. There's another story, uh, from the books, and I think he talked about this on a couple podcasts too, where it's like the-- they, they had a, uh, when they were trying to solve production hell at Tesla-

    22. EJEric Jorgenson33:10

        Mm-hmm

    23. DSDavid Senra33:10

        ... uh, they had to literally knock a wall. They were throwing out so many robots and disposing them so fast, they knocked a huge wall in the side of the factory and just threw out like I, I forgot how many. He-- hundreds of robots.

    24. EJEric Jorgenson33:23

        Yeah.

    25. DSDavid Senra33:23

        'Cause he found weird, weird shit like, "Hey, this one robot picks up this piece, hands it to another robot. That robot then turns around and hands it to another one." He's like-

    26. EJEric Jorgenson33:32

        Yeah

    27. DSDavid Senra33:32

        ... "Why don't this robot just hand it to that robot? Why is this guy in the middle?" [chuckles] And it adds complexity. He's like, "Just rip it out of there."

    28. EJEric Jorgenson33:38

        Yeah. And that's in the production system. Yeah, I mean, he-- th-this is why automate is the last step of the algorithm.

    29. DSDavid Senra33:43

        'Cause he did-- he used to do that first, right?

    30. EJEric Jorgenson33:45

        Yeah. He, he-- his original vision for Tesla is like, we're gonna automate everything. This is gonna be like a pure robot, you know, dreadnought autonomous line. And he's like, "That was a huge mistake. We didn't, we didn't have it refined. Like we, we didn't have the design refined. We didn't have the manufacturing design. We hadn't questioned the requirements. We hadn't deleted enough parts. We should not have automated until all of these other steps had been gone through." Uh, and he said there's many times where he did every step in exactly reverse order. Something was like automated and then tried to done faster and then optimized, and then ended up getting deleted because nobody had questioned the requirements. He's like, "That's why we do these things in this order over and over and over and over again."

14. 34:25 – 36:52

    Starlink War Room

    1. EJEric Jorgenson34:25

       And oh, there's a great story of the taking, uh, Starlink was like a, a mess, right? It was ten X too expensive, and they were building one tenth of how many they needed. So like two orders of magnitude off success. He's, he's like, "I've had it. I'm fixing this. This is now the bottleneck." He grabs, uh, Mark Juncosa, which is one of his like super talented early hires from SpaceX. This is a rocket scientist. This is not a guy who's ever worked on satellites. He grabs a team that of engineers that he trusts, and they fly up to Seattle. They fire the entire Starship leadership, uh, or Starlink leadership team, and they sit down in a war room, which I think is an underrated like tactic, and they start running the algorithm. What is the first principles of like satellite design? How simple can we make this thing? Why, why, why, why? Why does this exist? Why are these two things so far apart? Why do we need this much energy? Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of like a few months, they make this two order of magnitude leap. Like Mark Juncosa and his people who had never encountered this design before, but just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now, you know, if it was a standalone business, it would be worth tens of billions of dollars.

    2. DSDavid Senra35:32

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    3. EJEric Jorgenson36:42

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15. 36:52 – 38:18

    Repetition as OS

    1. DSDavid Senra36:52

       I did this episode of Founders, uh, uh, called How Elon Works, and I think in the description, maybe even in the intro, I was like, "Listen, I can usually... I've read four hundred of these fucking biographies. Like, I can usually find an historical analogy to an entrepreneur living today where, like, that person was very similar to this person maybe fifty years ago, a hundred years ago." I think Elon's singular, and I think I said he was, like, singular living or dead.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson37:13

       Yep.

    3. DSDavid Senra37:13

       I can't really find a historical analogy to him. But it's like, if that's the case, and he repeats, he says... This is a direct quote. Well, not... It's a paraphrase of a quote from Elon in that book where he's just like, "I would say the algorithm so much, and I repeat it so many times that people in the meeting would start to be able to predict what's coming out of my goddamn mouth."

    4. EJEric Jorgenson37:31

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra37:32

       So why don't we think about this guy doesn't have... He, he's a singular character in the, the history of entrepreneurship, and he's- repeats this over and over again. Like, maybe we should spend a little bit more time, and we should think about this over and over again to the point that, that, that was a great illustration of the story. Um, I think the, the, the maxim here is, like, repetition is persuasive.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson37:50

       Yes.

    7. DSDavid Senra37:50

       It's like you have to repeat... O-one thing that's, that's, that i- that is reoccurring throughout a lot of these founders is like they have a-- they id-identify a handful of principles. If we go through all the notes, all the books, everything we have in front of us, it's not twenty-five ideas. He's got a handful of principles that he uses over and over and over again, and I love this idea that he built, like, this, almost like this, it's almost like an-another form of a meme.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson38:09

       Yeah.

    9. DSDavid Senra38:09

       It's like this operating system-

    10. EJEric Jorgenson38:11

        Yeah

    11. DSDavid Senra38:11

        ... where there's these four steps, and we can apply it in space, in cars, in tunnels, and everything

16. 38:18 – 38:43

    Step Three Simplify Optimize

    1. DSDavid Senra38:18

       else.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson38:18

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra38:18

       Let's go to step number three.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson38:21

       Step number three is simplify and optimize, um, which is... I think that's what most engineers just, like, do as a standard, um, but that is the thing that, like, you should only do after you know for sure that the thing exists and you know for sure you've got your requirements as clean and short as you possibly can. The other thing that's actually really important about the requirements is that a single individual's name has to be attached to every one of them.

17. 38:43 – 39:13

    Question Every Requirement

    1. EJEric Jorgenson38:43

       He's huge on direct individual accountability, and so there's no such thing as, like, a d- a requirement from legal. There's, like, a requirement from Jan in legal so that you can go ask her and be like, "Why does this requirement exist? Please explain it very thoroughly. Can we throw it out?" Et cetera, right? And so, so many times he found requirements that were, like, created by an intern who left the company two years ago or a department where nobody in the department actually agrees with the requirement. Um, so once you get there, it's, like, the, the very normal engineering work of, like, let's figure out the trade-offs. Let's optimize this thing.

18. 39:13 – 40:43

    Tesla Battery Pack Delete

    1. DSDavid Senra39:13

       Yeah. There was a great, um, story from Tesla where you had the battery pack, and then it had something like, like a layer on top of it. This was for sound and one p-p- one part of Tesla thought it was for sound, and the other thought it was for, like, fire prevention. Am I remembering this correctly?

    2. EJEric Jorgenson39:26

       Yeah, like the fire prevention team thought it was for sound, uh, baffling, and the sound team thought it was for fire protection. Um, and, like, once that was established, they actually... They tested it. They put a mic in the car, and, like, nobody could tell the difference. They're like, "Delete." [laughs]

    3. DSDavid Senra39:39

       Okay, so-

    4. EJEric Jorgenson39:39

       But it was the bottleneck at that particular time.

    5. DSDavid Senra39:41

       But l-l-like, again, it's like this department said this-

    6. EJEric Jorgenson39:44

       Yeah

    7. DSDavid Senra39:44

       ... and this department said that. They're not agreeing.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson39:46

       Yeah.

    9. DSDavid Senra39:46

       But then I think, not to skip over this part 'cause I think it's the most important part, Elon's solution was very, like, simple. It's like, well, does it reduce the... Inside the cabin, is it louder if this thing's not here? How are we gonna figure that out?

    10. EJEric Jorgenson39:59

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra39:59

        Well, let's just put a fucking microphone-

    12. EJEric Jorgenson40:00

        Yeah

    13. DSDavid Senra40:01

        ... and we'll test it.

    14. EJEric Jorgenson40:01

        We'll test it, and six hours later, the part is deleted, and, like, this whole thing that was slowing down... You know, they, they pulled m-more robots off the line, and it sped up, and that increased the throughput of the entire production line. Then it was a millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars worth of decision. Like, he, he says there are times when a single half-hour meeting has added a hundred million dollars to the enterprise value of Tesla. Every single minute of thinking is, like, worth a million dollars, a high-quality minute of thinking. And these tools are the things that he does in those minutes that actually have that kind of effect, which is, to your point of, like, this is a singular greatest entrepreneur of our generation, this is the thing that he talks about most often. Maybe it's useful.

19. 40:43 – 42:02

    Repetition Installs Ideas

    1. DSDavid Senra40:43

       Well, I, I hadn't made that episode in probably, like, six months, and I was listening to it again to prepare for this conversation with you, and I'm like, "I should listen to this every month." Like-

    2. EJEric Jorgenson40:51

       Yeah

    3. DSDavid Senra40:52

       ... it's just like, it's an hour and a half. You can listen at one point f- it's an hour if you're at one point five X speed or whatever it is. It's just like, oh, I forgot, like, some of these ideas, and-

    4. EJEric Jorgenson40:59

       Yeah

    5. DSDavid Senra40:59

       ... I, I think that's where the repetition is so important.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson41:01

       Yeah. I mean, that's why I, I really design all my books to be read and reread. Like, I want them to be handbooks and reference guides, and I love when I see, like, a, just a beat to shit copy that's been in and out of somebody's backpack, like, every day for years and is, like, dog-eared and flagged and all the highlight on every page. Like, these ideas, repetition doesn't poi- spoil the prayer. Repetition is persuasive. Like, you have to work to install these ideas in your head so that they're there when you need them, so that you ask the right question or have the right instinct as an operator when you're confronted with one of these decisions.

    7. DSDavid Senra41:32

       Are there any other interesting stories that you can think of that come from the third step of the algorithm?

    8. EJEric Jorgenson41:36

       I think the third step is the least interesting, honestly.

    9. DSDavid Senra41:38

       Okay.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson41:38

        Um, I think the, like, question requirements and delete are probably eighty percent of the lift. I think the simplify and optimize, the accelerate, and the automate are the things that people leap to naturally, and the algorithm is really designed to get them to, you know, sharpen the ax before they start chopping down the tree or be sure you're chopping down the right tree. Um, be sure chopping down the tree is the right next step at all anyway.

20. 42:02 – 43:26

    Step Four Accelerate

    1. DSDavid Senra42:02

       What's step four in the algorithm?

    2. EJEric Jorgenson42:03

       Accelerate. Go faster. However faster you're going, you can go faster.

    3. DSDavid Senra42:07

       Is there anything else to it?

    4. EJEric Jorgenson42:09

       Not really.

    5. DSDavid Senra42:10

       So [laughs]

    6. EJEric Jorgenson42:11

       [laughs]

    7. DSDavid Senra42:12

       Just go faster.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson42:12

       Accelerate.

    9. DSDavid Senra42:12

       He has that line where we, uh... What'd he say? A maniacal sense of urgency is gonna be our operating principle.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson42:17

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra42:18

        Yeah.

    12. EJEric Jorgenson42:18

        But, but the, like, the example here I would use is probably going to the tunneling machines. He's like, "If you wanna accelerate tunnel," like, the machines that are currently tunneling, even in state-of-the-art tunneling, are nowhere near their power or thermal limits, so just, like, crank them up. Go put it... Make them go as fast as they can. Like, can the rope... The interesting thing about when everything is actually automatedIs like how fast can the robots move is a way higher limit on that than how fast can humans move. And so if you actually do accelerate everything, he's been talking about this a bunch with AI, like if you can remove the heal-- the human element and then you can automate everything, you can do it to a degree that is like superhuman level of speed.

    13. DSDavid Senra42:55

        You have a great way to describe this in the book. I'm just gonna read... This is Elon's description of step four-

    14. EJEric Jorgenson43:00

        Mm-hmm

    15. DSDavid Senra43:00

        ... from the book, which I th- I love. And so he's talking, he's like, "Then and only then, step four, accelerate cycle time. Once you're moving in the right direction and moving efficiently, you're moving too slow. Go faster. You can always make things go faster. But do not go faster [chuckles] until you've worked on the other three things first. I mistakenly spent a lot of time accelerating processes that I re- later realized should have been deleted. Speeding," this is hilarious, "Speeding up something that shouldn't exist is absurd. If you're digging your grave, don't dig it faster. Stop digging." [laughs]

21. 43:26 – 46:06

    Design Org for Speed

    1. EJEric Jorgenson43:26

       Yeah. This is in the designing the organization section of the book, and I feel like it is really underrated that he applies the algorithm to his own companies. Like, he minimizes the distance between, like, the designers, the engineers, the manufacturing engineers, and gets rid of as much stuff in his companies as he possibly can. He makes the companies go faster. He questions the requirements of, of the, the companies and the structure themselves. And you can-- he talks about it, you can see the flaws in the organization in the product. So if there's a, a battery team building a box for the battery, but a chassis in the car right above it, like, they'll put a lid on the battery because it makes sense to design a complete battery with a lid. There's a car on top of it, so you don't actually need a lid on the battery case. You end up with, like, a box in a box, where the most efficient thing to do is, like, have enough interactions between all those people that you are not duplicating parts or responsibilities or materials, 'cause if you allow individual pockets to make too many optimization decisions, they'll optimize for their own tiny unit, but not how the unit exists in part of the broader system. You'll have, like, a bunch of disparate metals that have to come together or a bunch of insane design decisions that don't make the full system optimal as a whole product.

    2. DSDavid Senra44:42

       Yeah, he talks about the opposite of that. He, I think he calls it ivory tower engineering.

    3. EJEric Jorgenson44:46

       Yeah.

    4. DSDavid Senra44:46

       He's like, "I'm gonna design a product, uh, uh, or process. I'm gonna throw it over the wall-

    5. EJEric Jorgenson44:51

       Yeah

    6. DSDavid Senra44:51

       ... and you can engineer or manufacture it." And he's like, "No, y- you have to be able to... The, the engineer and the manufacturer should be able to call our designer, like, 'Why did you do it this way?'"

    7. EJEric Jorgenson44:59

       Yeah. Going back to the iteration speed and the number of failures that you can correct and identify, um, you know, moving the, the Raptor production. He had their whole team move their desks to the Raptor production line. So the... As they're, like, sitting there designing or working on it, whatever they're working on, they're, like, watching the machine, the engine get manufactured, like, right next to them, and they're, like, dialoguing. There's, like, the feedback, the bandwidth between the people actually moving the atoms and the people designing the product are super, super, super high. I mean, he-- I think he talks about traditional aerospace is like designing a file that then gets parted out, that gets-- goes to subcontractors, and those subcontractors delegate it to subcontractors, and you have to go five companies down before you find a guy who's actually, like, cutting metal or touching the material, and then it kinda goes all the way back up and everybody's adding, like, complexity and confusion and overhead and cost and profit, and that's part of the reason why SpaceX is able to do something that's, like, orders of magnitude more efficient and cost-effective, um, and that's before you even get to the fact that they're, like, iterating so quickly on the design that they're removing all this unnecessary stuff.

22. 46:06 – 46:29

    Step Five Automate

    1. DSDavid Senra46:06

       All right. Let's go to step five. I think I mistakenly said there's four steps. I've done ten episodes on this guy.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson46:11

       [laughs]

    3. DSDavid Senra46:11

       I should know this by now. So let's go to step five.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson46:14

       Step five is automate. It is the holy grail, but you wanna be sure you're automating the right thing, 'cause automation itself, the process of creating the automation is expensive, um, and difficult to adapt. So yes, things should be automated, but they should only be automated after you've rigorously applied the other steps to the algorithm

23. 46:29 – 48:54

    Control and Clean Sheet

    1. EJEric Jorgenson46:29

       all the way through.

    2. DSDavid Senra46:29

       Uh, you just mentioned something I think is a, a huge, like, theme that runs throughout, like, his entire career-

    3. EJEric Jorgenson46:33

       Yeah

    4. DSDavid Senra46:34

       ... that he wants to control everything always.

    5. EJEric Jorgenson46:36

       Yes.

    6. DSDavid Senra46:37

       Can you talk about, like, why that is so important?

    7. EJEric Jorgenson46:39

       Well, he had a tough experience in the early days of Tesla, I think, like, sharing responsibility or power over this, over this company. And the beginning of Tesla was kind of a messy experience. Like, he was the main investor and chairman, but he wasn't actually CEO, but he spent so much time, like, getting deeply involved in the product and, like, trying to drive a good outcome there that reached the bar that he had for his vision for electric cars that it just didn't really work in the long term, and the, the company was heading down this, this tough path and wasn't really making the kind of progress that it needed to. And so he talks about his, like, reluctance to step in as CEO of Tesla, but he's like, "If I didn't do that, the company would've died. I provided most of the money. I've been as involved as you could be, uh, in creating the actual, like, uh, contributing to the product." But eventually, he's like, "If this is gonna work, I've gotta, I've gotta take control of it, and I've gotta go all in on it."

    8. DSDavid Senra47:37

       Yeah, he, he talked about the mistake of trying to... May- 'cause originally, they used-

    9. EJEric Jorgenson47:40

       That mistake

    10. DSDavid Senra47:40

        ... like, the Lotus, right?

    11. EJEric Jorgenson47:42

        Yeah.

    12. DSDavid Senra47:42

        The Lotus chassis, I think-

    13. EJEric Jorgenson47:43

        Yep

    14. DSDavid Senra47:44

        ... is what it was. And he's like, "We should just design this from a blank sheet of paper."

    15. EJEric Jorgenson47:46

        Yeah.

    16. DSDavid Senra47:46

        It's always better if you're gonna do something new, like, just design from a blank sheet of paper.

    17. EJEric Jorgenson47:50

        It is a really good lesson and, and actually a big, uh, theme of his is, like, go for the strong form of the technology. Don't try to adapt what came before. Try to, like, think in limits, go to first principles, and build, like, a, a true leap in technology that t- totally leaves behind the constraints of, of the past. Not just the past sort of designs, but the past entire supply chain. Like, even if you're counting on the existing suppliers in the industry, it's gonna be really tough to, like, fully innovate in the way that is possible if you start with a truly clean sheet of paper, you question every requirement, you start with, like, the platonic limit of, like, what is the maximum ideal possible product, and then work backwards from that. How do-- how close can we get to that? Not start with an analogy of, like, how can we be ten percent better than what exists in the field? How can we do twenty percent better? Like...What does perfection look like? What is the absolute ideal, and how close can we get to that? And if anybody gives you a reason why you can't do that, start asking why. Start drilling down. Start question requirements. Start pushing on those assumptions.

24. 48:54 – 50:47

    Vertical Integration and Costs

    1. DSDavid Senra48:54

       Well, I think it's important to like hammer on this point, though, because it's obvious if you read, like if you just study history's greatest entrepreneurs, like they're all-- they all wind up in the same place.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson49:03

       Mm-hmm.

    3. DSDavid Senra49:03

       It's like as vertically integrated as possible.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson49:05

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra49:05

       They're going to control as much of their business, their raw materials and everything. And what I couldn't help but notice is this is how the car industry started.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson49:14

       Mm-hmm.

    7. DSDavid Senra49:15

       Like Henry Ford, they made almost all their parts themselves. Obviously, they were making it by hand. This is before he figured out how to mass produce a, a car, and that was like his, his main idea.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson49:24

       There was no auto supply chain. [laughs]

    9. DSDavid Senra49:26

       No. Like you start doing it, and then you have control. He's also obsessed-

    10. EJEric Jorgenson49:29

        Yeah

    11. DSDavid Senra49:29

        ...with control.

    12. EJEric Jorgenson49:30

        Yeah.

    13. DSDavid Senra49:30

        He wound up buying out his investors, I think in nineteen nineteen. Henry Ford owned a hundred... By nineteen nineteen he owned a hundred percent of Ford Motor Company. It was just like the equivalent of you owning a hundred percent of like a twenty to forty billion dollar company today. He was so obsessed with control. He, [sighs] he bought a railroad. [laughs] Like, he bought a rail-- it's like not only do I wanna like control all e-every single like design and part that goes into the Model T and all of my cars, it's like I wanna make sure that all those parts get to me, and I wanna control the logistics of them getting to me.

    14. EJEric Jorgenson49:58

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra49:58

        And what's fascinating about Elon is like he just went and like bucked the trend of the American automobile industry at that time, which was like subcontractor, subcontractor after subcontractor. He talks about this over and over again. Like, they're just not even making their own shit.

    16. EJEric Jorgenson50:09

        Yeah.

    17. DSDavid Senra50:10

        And he's like, "I'm just gonna go back and do it the way it used to be done." But I think the reason that is so important is like not only do you have control, but it's like how you make a cost-efficient product because if you're having subcontractor after subcontractor... I think when he, he did the initial calculation, he wasn't calling it the idiot index, which we could talk about.

    18. EJEric Jorgenson50:27

        Yeah.

    19. DSDavid Senra50:27

        But at the time with the rockets, he realized that like ninety-eight percent of the cost of a rocket was not from what it was made out of. He's like, "Where the hell is the money going?" And he's like, "Oh, it's going from this contractor who's... This subcontractor actually hired another subcontractor who hired another subcontractor who hired another subcontractor before I get to the actual person," like you said-

    20. EJEric Jorgenson50:45

        Yeah

    21. DSDavid Senra50:45

        ...bending the metal or making

25. 50:47 – 57:11

    SpaceX Incentives and Mars

    1. DSDavid Senra50:47

       the thing.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson50:47

       There's actually a very important like meta to that, which is he has a completely different vision and set of incentives. So the whole aerospace industry to date had basically been supported by cost plus contracts from the government. And so what is their incentive? Their incentive is to spend as much fucking money as they can because they make a percentage of the budget, and they're not actually incentivized to s-to succeed. They're not incentivized... Well, maybe they're incentivized to succeed, but they're not incentivized to succeed economically, and they're not necessarily exce-incentivized to succeed on the original deadline. What Elon did is went to the people actually awarding these contracts and said, like, "We want an outcome-based contract. I want to be incentivized to drive down the cost. I wanna be incentivized to hit the deadlines." Like, he wanted to compete on low costs. Like, for all the, the talk that happens about him doing things that have never been done before, he is all-- the things that he's doing that have never been done before are because he drives costs down, and he drives costs down because the vision is not make as much money as I can. It wasn't start a new aerospace company that's as profitable as possible. It was get us to Mars, which means drive down the cost of getting a payload off Earth as low as possible, which means I wanna be incentivized to build a system that is as low cost as possible. And once he did that, he did start winning all these contracts and winning these, like out-- get actual outcome-based things. Which by the way, better for the government, better for taxpayers. That is a heroic thing to go in and say, "I know I could get paid X to be-- to do mediocre work or to do marginally better work, but I actually wanna take the risk. I wanna burn the boats. I want my back to the wall. I wanna know that we have to clear this threshold that nobody has ever crossed before, and I wanna go tell my team that because that's how we're actually going to achieve this objective that everybody thinks I'm crazy for setting, which is get us to Mars, which is make this very massive orders of magnitude leap in the efficiency of, like, the human engineering system." It is such a different approach, and that goes all the way back to his, like, his sci-fi dream and his purpose-driven nature. It's the same thing with Tesla, that he didn't go out and say, "I wanna make a profitable electric car company." He's like, "I want as many human beings as possible driving electric cars because that's how we're gonna solve climate change. That's how we're gonna put a dent in this." And so all of his decisions are not, "How do I maximize profits while making electric cars?" It is, "How can I get as many people as possible driving electric cars? They have to be as cheap as possible. I have to drive that down. I need to simplify the product. I need to get a massive volume so that the scale of the manufacturing supports a really, really, really low price point." And so he just keeps making these, like, principle-driven decisions from a very long-term view. Like his, his view is so zoomed out that it's actually really difficult to relate to, and he keeps doing these things that seem crazy or stupid or, um, visionary or counterproductive, but isn't, uh, uh, counter to the prevailing wisdom of the industry. But it's not from a sense of like, "They're doing this, so I'm gonna do this." It's not even from a sense of like, "This is a strategically optimal local thing." It is like, "I am working on this gigantic mission, and I will make every decision possible through the service of this gigantic mission." And that's why he's so strategically differentiated. Like it, it is, it is back to the paradox of like when you're doing something that n- uh, shooting for a target that nobody else is even shooting for, um, you are incentivized by these completely different set of systems, and those incentives drive all of these decisions. And that's why Tesla and SpaceX both have the same dynamic, where they're doing things that nobody else is doing.

    3. DSDavid Senra54:24

       There's two things that come to mind, uh, when you're talking about that. One, I wanna talk about that I think people should heavily invest and maybe practice on their ability to, like, distill ideas and communicate, like, something complex in a simple way.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson54:36

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra54:36

       And I think Elon's, you know, maybe arguably one of the best people in the world at doing that. The second part, which is a theme throughout everything especially, and I think it's most not-notable in SpaceX, is like-Cost-- making cost control an obsession is not something you like graft onto the organization after. It was there before the organization even started.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson54:53

       Yes.

    7. DSDavid Senra54:53

       When he has this idea where he's just like, "Why the hell are these Russian ICBMs so expensive?" And he starts doing the fi-first principles, first principle thinking, uh, which is, you know, everybody knows this story, which is interesting, but then him describing it in another way, which I found was way more memorable. He's like, "Why would Russia be the only way that can make a cost-effective rocket?" And you go... And it's in your book, and he goes, "Do we drive Russian cars? Do we use Russian appliances?" Like, there's just no way that they, this country, figured out how to make the most cost-effective launch vehicle. And he goes, "America's a pretty competitive place."

    8. EJEric Jorgenson55:28

       Yeah.

    9. DSDavid Senra55:28

       "We should have the most cost-effective launch vehicle," which obviously now he's like absolutely dominated in that.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson55:33

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra55:34

        But the... And again, it's like speaking in that manner, it's like you could say, "Okay. Well, I broke down, you know, from first principles taking all the, uh, the parts and looked up what it was on the commodities exchange," or you could say, "Why aren't we driving Russian cars?"

    12. EJEric Jorgenson55:46

        Yeah.

    13. DSDavid Senra55:46

        Why-- is your dishwasher at home, is your fridge Russian? No.

    14. EJEric Jorgenson55:50

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra55:50

        It's like America makes great shit-

    16. EJEric Jorgenson55:51

        Yeah.

    17. DSDavid Senra55:51

        -and we make it great and cheap. Why can't we do the same thing for this like domain that I wanna operate in?

    18. EJEric Jorgenson55:56

        The answer is because it had been like a government contract driven oligopoly for the last like couple decades basically. Um, and, and NASA was a, a like amazing and pioneering, but hadn't been, hadn't like really applied themselves to this, to this project. And like that is a, a thing that people forget is like the original vision for SpaceX was not start a launch company. Elon's original goal was to increase NASA's budget, and he was willing to just burn a hundred million dollars on a philanthropic mission to display a greenhouse on Mars. So like shooting a greenhouse to Mars with existing rocket technology, get this photo on the front page of every paper. There was like a little plant on the red planet, the first time life had trans-uh, transferred to another planet, and he's like, "That'll probably increase NASA's budget and like spur this wave of exploration and interest in space." And when he tried to do that, he discovered that the, the space launch market was so expensive and uninnovative and hadn't been moving forward, and that's actually how he discovered the opportunity to start SpaceX. It was like that's what's actually gonna move this market forward. And then he sort of ended up almost accidentally, but as a byproduct of making that progress, moving into Starlink and now moving into like, uh, solar compute in space.

26. 57:11 – 1:00:26

    Frontier Unlocks Starlink

    1. DSDavid Senra57:12

       So the Starlink thing is interesting. It, it's in the book, and it's also in the, the Max Olen essay that you and I keep, uh, referencing, which like if you're not on the frontier, like-

    2. EJEric Jorgenson57:20

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra57:20

       Elon obviously wants to operate on the frontier in the domains that he's operating in, and the reason that it's important is not only because he's-he wants to push his, his missions forward, but you also unlock opportunities you can't see unless you're on the actual frontier.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson57:32

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra57:33

       And if they didn't have, uh, you know, the, the ability to put up the, the idea to have... I think there's like nine thousand satellites in the Starlink constellation now, somewhere around there. It's like an insane number and obviously increasing. Like that couldn't have happened when you're launching at the time and when he-

    6. EJEric Jorgenson57:47

       Yeah.

    7. DSDavid Senra57:48

       -founded SpaceX. I think they said they were launching what? Like two, four-

    8. EJEric Jorgenson57:51

       Yeah.

    9. DSDavid Senra57:51

       -launches a year or something like that, and I think there's now a SpaceX launch every like two days.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson57:56

        Yeah. Th-this is a concept of like induced demand of like people have this perception that like the demand, the size of a market is always gonna be the size of the market. And he's like, "Well, if you lower the cost like two orders of magnitude, there's a lot more use cases that are suddenly valid." And a-as Max talks about in the essay, like r-reaching volume production of rockets is actually a core part of SpaceX's strategy. Like you need iteration and volume to cover the fixed cost, and so you come up with new use cases to drive the volumes. What are you gonna do with, you know, new tons of launch capacity every year? And the first thing, most obvious thing, was like, all right, Starlink. And now the next most obvious thing is, yeah, this solar compute, like build a Dyson sphere, build a moon base. Like all kinds of crazy stuff is gonna happen. Like there's, there's stacks of S curves here that are gonna continue, and that... Elon deserves a lot of credit for not sitting on his laurel. He could have sat on Falcon 9 and just absolutely raked in cash for decades. Like there's nobody else who can do it, and it's a super profitable business, but he is like all aggress. As soon as that was even beginning to be obvious, and probably before, he was [laughs] already like on to Starship. Again, back to this like purpose-driven nature of like we are going, this is the business and the technology and the team that's gonna get us to multi-planetary.

    11. DSDavid Senra59:15

        I found one of my all-time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, "The single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas." That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their new advertising platform, Axon. Axon is the most powerful advertising platform in a generation. Axon allows you to capture undivided attention. Axon ads are full-screen videos that are watched for an average of thirty-five seconds, retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water, and you can launch in minutes. You set the goal, and Axon achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. And Axon scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results, scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day, and increased their revenue by millions. And most advertisers aren't even thinking about this channel yet. Less than one percent of advertisers have access to Axon, so you wanna get started quickly, and you can do that by going to axon.ai. That is axon.ai.

27. 1:00:26 – 1:03:58

    Time as True Currency

    1. DSDavid Senra1:00:26

       I wanna go to some more ideas directly from Elon. A-again, the subtitle of your book I think is super important.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:00:32

       Yep.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:00:32

       Elon Musk's Most Useful Ideas: In His Own Words.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:00:34

       Yep.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:00:34

       It's like wh-when I was describing to friends like what I was reading, uh, I was like, "It's two hundred pages, two hundred pages of just Elon talking to, directly to you."

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:00:42

       Yep.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:00:42

       And like you're gonna be able to... Like you can read it straight through if you want, or you can just go to a certain chapter, and like I think keeping this book on your desk and reading, you know, a few pages every few days is like a great idea, like a tool for your career.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:00:53

       It's set up as a like dialogue. I want it to feel like you're out to dinner with Elon Musk, actually.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:00:58

       A-again, I, I, like I wanna ha-hammer on this idea like he's just completely, you know-He, he came to the same conclusion that most of his generation's entrepreneurs did-

    10. EJEric Jorgenson1:01:05

        Yeah

    11. DSDavid Senra1:01:05

        ... which is, like, vertically integrate, vertically integrate, control much as your business as possible.

    12. EJEric Jorgenson1:01:09

        Yep.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:01:09

        That also ties in, and, and they said it wasn't, like, a philosophical thing for him. It was these other companies move too goddamn slow.

    14. EJEric Jorgenson1:01:16

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:01:17

        And I'm in the section of your book where he talks about time, and this sh-

    16. EJEric Jorgenson1:01:20

        Yeah

    17. DSDavid Senra1:01:20

        ... this was fascinating to me. The reason I invited you and I wanted to have this conversation with you is, like I said, I've read every book I could find on Elon. I've read countless books on the history of SpaceX. I've done 10 episodes on the guy, and yet I found stuff in your book that I've never found anywhere else, which again goes to, I think, how thorough you are. But I wanna go to just read a couple things and throw it at you and see if it has any thoughts. We already mentioned this. "A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle." And he s- his whole thing is like, "Don't waste time."

    18. EJEric Jorgenson1:01:47

        Yep.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:01:47

        "Get rid of all large meetings unless you are certain they're providing value to the whole audience, in which case, keep them short."

    20. EJEric Jorgenson1:01:53

        Yep.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:01:53

        "Also, get rid of frequent meetings unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting fre..." This is so good, such a good observation by Elon. "Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved." That makes me think of the observation by the guy at NASA who's observing, uh, SpaceX. He's like, "Wait, there's a problem. It looks like a, a flash mob."

    22. EJEric Jorgenson1:02:11

        Yep.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:02:11

        Like, flash mobs don't stay there forever. Why are you having this reoccurring meeting? "Walk out of a meeting or drop out of a call as soon as obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone else stay and waste their time." This is-- I've double underlined several things in your book. This is one of them. "The only true currency is time." And then he tells this story 'cause he talks about that speed is both offense and defense.

    24. EJEric Jorgenson1:02:35

        Yeah.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:02:35

        And this was a fascinating, uh, story that I didn't hear-- I haven't heard anybody else talk about. He says, "The best offense and defense is speed. The SR-71 Blackbird is a military plane with almost no defense except acceleration. It was never shot down, not even once. Over three thousand missiles were shot at the SR-71 Blackbird and none hit. All it did was go faster. The power of speed is an underappreciated as a competitive factor."

    26. EJEric Jorgenson1:03:03

        This is actually, I think, both Tesla and SpaceX's core advantage is, like, how quickly they iterate and design new technologies. Like, he open sourced the patents for Tesla. Go ahead. Go, go copy it. Like, good luck.

    27. DSDavid Senra1:03:16

        Yeah.

    28. EJEric Jorgenson1:03:17

        Um, because by the time you're producing the things that they've open sourced, like, they're gonna be five, 10 years ahead, and there's a bunch of stuff in that book about what he's learned from, from military history. And he's like, the decisive factor in most, certainly every modern war, but many wars, is the speed of technological innovation, not tactics, not size, but this technology asymmetry, and the longer the war, the more important the speed of iteration becomes, not where you started, but how quickly you're developing something new.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:03:50

        He continues, "A factory moving twice the speed as another factory is basically equivalent to two factories."

    30. EJEric Jorgenson1:03:57

        Yeah.
28. 1:03:58 – 1:10:11

    Speed Triage and Bottlenecks

    1. DSDavid Senra1:03:58

       this. "I have a running triage of what I do at each company, constantly thinking, what is the most useful thing I can do?" Which goes back to that tip of the spear meme, that tip of the spear focus.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:04:07

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:04:07

       Like, what is the limiting factor? Literally get on a plane, go-

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:04:10

       Yeah

    5. DSDavid Senra1:04:10

       ... and go to where- whatever the limiting factor is, and don't leave until that is resolved, which is another form of speed.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:04:15

       It's speed of identifying the bottleneck and then going to it and attacking it and resolving it. Like, every one of those steps is an increase in speed that pays off. And there's so many things, like, this is a tiny story, but I love it because I think it's an example. It's a thing that happens in every single company that usually takes two weeks that he does in an hour, right? So he's, like, interviewing a, a machinist, and twenty-minute, thirty-minute interview, he wants to hire the guy, so he asks him how much he costs, haggles right there, come to terms. Somebody's, like, standing beside him with a offer. It's like, "All right, fill in the blanks. Here you go." Signs it, goes to work. Like-

    7. DSDavid Senra1:04:52

       Same day.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:04:52

       Same day. A-and by the way, it's Saturday at, like, six PM. So, like, your, your description of, like, how he uses time, he's like, he uses all of it immediately. Like, that's such an important insight, and he is-- It's why these-- not just he, but also these companies move so quickly. Like, when you combine-- I feel like a lot of people talk about the tactics of, like, yes, he moves fast. Yes, he is first principles thinking. Yes, he works on the bottleneck. But when you combine these things, it's, it's like a Lollapalooza from Charlie Munger, right? It is like this is not a ten percent on a ten percent on a ten percent. If you're working on the most important thing with manic intensity, and you're doing that a hundred hours a week instead of forty hours a week, you are orders of magnitude beyond the productivity of somebody else, and he's been doing this for decades. So no wonder he's so far ahead. Yes, he's smart, yes, he's intense, but he's not superhuman. He's not orders of magnitude smarter than his competitors, but the way that he works and the, the methods that he uses, the mindset that he has, puts him orders of magnitude ahead.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:05:54

       I love that you, you described it as a Lollapalooza. I think that's what I'm trying to get across from, like, the podcast I've been doing on Elon, the conversation I, uh, wanna have with you, the conversation we're having right now, your book. It's like you have to use all the ideas-

    10. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:05

        Yep

    11. DSDavid Senra1:06:05

        ... 'cause then combined-

    12. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:06

        Yep

    13. DSDavid Senra1:06:06

        ... and they can be appli- they apply to, like, anything. I'm not building rockets.

    14. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:10

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:06:10

        Literally, like, right before we started recording, like, there's this idea of, like, finding a limiting factor, even for, like, this show. Me and my partner Rob, who's sitting over there, it's like we've identified there's two-- We wanna go faster and increase production. Well, what are our big bottlenecks? We have two of them, and we're attacking both of them. I was just-- You heard me talking to another team member right before we started recording. I was like, "There's one thing that I'm, you know, not happy about." It's like, we need to drill down on this over and over and over again.

    16. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:32

        Yeah.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:06:32

        It's like you can use this for anything. Uh, there's something that you have in your book which I read for the first time. I think I read-- This guy named Ashlee Vance wrote, uh-

    18. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:41

        Mm-hmm

    19. DSDavid Senra1:06:41

        ... this biography of Elon, I think in two thousand and thirteen-

    20. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:43

        Yeah

    21. DSDavid Senra1:06:43

        ... is when I first read it maybe.

    22. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:44

        That was the first one. Yeah.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:06:45

        Yeah. It's the first episode of Founders ever. Uh, in two thousand and sixteen, I did an episode on it. But-

    24. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:49

        Everybody should go listen to that. David will hate it.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:06:51

        No.

    26. EJEric Jorgenson1:06:51

        [laughs]

    27. DSDavid Senra1:06:51

        Do not do that. The way I think it's like, so we're talking about speed and time, building products, companies, everything else, but he even applies it, and you just mentioned this, that he has this, like, weird long-term view-

    28. EJEric Jorgenson1:07:01

        Yeah

    29. DSDavid Senra1:07:01

        ... that if you don't have that, you're not really gonna understand the decisions he's making. It's like, so the way I describe this paragraph when I read to you is like, this is how Elon thinks about money.And this I've never heard anywhere else. In early SpaceX, I told the team everything we did was a function of our burn rate. We were burning through $100,000 per day. In the same way, I expected the revenue in 10 years to be $10 million a day. Every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that revenue. So y- this is-- there's a story in, uh, the Ashlee Vance book where they're like, "I don't get Elon." It's like, "I just went to him and tried to get him to spend, you know, $25,000 on a part. He said no because he thinks I could build it for two thousand because the idiot index, that's, that part should be two thousand, figure out how to do it. Yet he just let us use his jet and burn sixty thousand dollars of jet fuel to get a part to Hawaii that would save us a workday."

    30. EJEric Jorgenson1:07:55

        Yeah.
29. 1:10:11 – 1:12:56

    Internalized Responsibility

    1. DSDavid Senra1:10:11

       [laughs]

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:10:11

       It's, it's actually o-over... You'll see this as a pattern as you read. There's, like, a pattern of responsibility, and, and there's a chapter in, in my book called, like, internalized responsibility, and over and over again, you'll see, like, the hero characters in Atlas Shrugged. E- everybody else is sort of trying to, like, find someone else to make a decision or, like, shove risk, and Dagny's just like, "I, I am responsible. This is me making this decision. I'm responsible for this decision. Like, if it's right or wrong, hold it against me later." And, like, you'll hear Elon do that. In, in, like, launch rooms, it's kind of like, "Hey, this is-- Like, we've identified a risk factor. Go or no-go?" And, like, him in that moment standing in front of, like, a, a rocket worth tens of millions and, like, the public watching him in a launch is, like, running a calculation of, like, the physics, the risk, the economics, the market value, the speed of the company, when the next launch window is, and he'll be like, "Take the risk." Like, like, "Launch the rocket. Let's go." Um, like, over and over and over again, so many of those decisions that he's just, like, solely responsible for, and that's why I think these lessons are so valuable. Like, who else has lived this kind of experience and honed these lessons to, to deliver to us?

    3. DSDavid Senra1:11:18

       So going back, let's extend this idea of, like, how Elon thinks about money. Says, "Tesla is getting to the point where every high-quality minute of thinking has a million-dollar impact." You referenced this earlier.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:11:27

       Mm-hmm.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:11:27

       That is insane. [laughs] That's, that's Elon talking.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:11:30

       Yeah.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:11:30

       "If Tesla's doing two billion a week in revenue, that's about three hundred million a day, seven days a week. There are many instances where a half-hour meeting improved the company's financial outcome by a hundred million dollars."

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:11:42

       This is the highest leverage man on Earth. Like, how many tens of thousands of engineers, how many billions of dollars of capital, billions of dollars of CapEx factories? Like, you know, he says, like, "It makes it hard to sleep. There's always something important to go do." And he's, he's constantly running a triage on what's the most important thing he can do. That's why he runs no schedule. His jet is him flying all over the world, like, whatever the most important thing is to do.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:12:06

       Yeah, I think there's a story in the, um, Isaacson book where I think he's dating Grimes at the time, and she talks-- She was interviewed by him, and she's like, "I've caught him up in bed. Like, I'm sleeping and I wake up, and he's just sitting there in, like, the thinking man's pose." [laughs]

    10. EJEric Jorgenson1:12:19

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:12:19

        And he was thinking of the-- Like, when we went to sleep, he's in the thinking man's pose. I wake up, he's [laughs] still in the thinking man's pose.

    12. EJEric Jorgenson1:12:25

        [laughs] Yeah. There's-- I mean, there's hours of, like, uh, ma-many stories of, like, dressed to go to a party, and he's like, "I'm just gonna go look at this," and then ends up, like, spending the night under a rocket, like, working in a tuxedo. You know? [laughs]

    13. DSDavid Senra1:12:35

        There's a great-- Those, those are early days of, uh, of SpaceX history-

    14. EJEric Jorgenson1:12:39

        Yeah

    15. DSDavid Senra1:12:39

        ... where he shows up, I think it's, like, a Christmas party, and he's, like, fancy leather shoes or something.

    16. EJEric Jorgenson1:12:43

        Yeah.

    17. DSDavid Senra1:12:43

        And they're like, they're like, you know, "We're gonna be an hour late. We'll be two hours late. We're not going, and now my fancy shoes are fucked up." [laughs]

    18. EJEric Jorgenson1:12:48

        Yeah.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:12:49

        'Cause I got-- I'm like, and literally trying to help build a rocket.

    20. EJEric Jorgenson1:12:51

        Yeah.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:12:52

        Uh, just some random, um, uh-Quotes from him, I think this is

30. 1:12:56 – 1:14:31

    Avoid Serialized Dependencies

    1. DSDavid Senra1:12:56

       great. It's almost like a, a maxim. "Avoid serialized dependencies."

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:13:01

       I mean, the most obvious one is just like, who starts SpaceX and Tesla at the same time? Like, that's insane. Um, but both of these things are important, so I'm gonna like try my best to do them both. Um, the story from PayPal is like a little more generalizable, which is, you know, we have like these regulatory boxes we need to check, we have these partnership integrations we need to run, and we have a product we need to build. And the same things to do is like do one after the other, and these end up being like three-year things because you're not like wasting time building a product if you don't know you're gonna get the regulatory clearance you need. And he just attacks this. He's like, "We're gonna do it ar- all in parallel, maximum risk, minimum timeline. Do it all in parallel and launch in a year ready to go." Um, so these things are, you know, Warren Buffett's quote, like, "You can't get a, a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant." It's like this sense of like how many things can you do in a row to minimize the overall timeline? And yes, it comes with additional risk, and yes, it's more expensive, but back to the fundamental currency of time being the most valuable thing, like that's actually the thing you should do. And that's a big part, I think, of why the pace of these companies, the velocity of them is so high and over and... Many great entrepreneurs talk about like how underrated velocity is. And Elon talks about it too, not just like the pace of the company, but the team itself. So he talks about the team as being a vector sum. And so imagine like every employee as an arrow. How big the arrow is is maybe how high quality the employee is. Um, how long the arrow is is how fast they're

31. 1:14:31 – 1:15:07

    Aligning the Team

    1. EJEric Jorgenson1:14:31

       moving, and then Elon's job is to like align them all on the same thing. And so he talks about how good the team is, how aligned they are, and how hard they're working, right? Like that is the vector sum of the team, and that is what's ultimately gonna determine the progress of the company and how successful they are.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:14:48

       I wanna, uh, bring up a couple things you just mentioned about his-- he's just constantly hammering on time, not wasting time.

    3. EJEric Jorgenson1:14:54

       Yes.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:14:54

       Uh, but I can't help but notice that in an episode dedicated to Elon, you mentioned getting nine women pregnant. [laughing] I don't know if you me- if you slipped that in there intentionally or not, but we're just gonna move on.

32. 1:15:07 – 1:16:00

    Time Is the Constraint

    1. DSDavid Senra1:15:07

       Uh, direct quote-

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:15:08

       I'm not gonna say anything. I'm not s- I haven't slipped anything in intentionally.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:15:10

       [laughing] The one thing [laughs] -- direct quote from Elon here. Thank you very much. "The one thing you cannot replace is time." He goes on a few pages later, "I often tell the team, 'It's okay to scrap equipment or money. It is not okay to scrap time.'"

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:15:24

       Minimizing the waste of each other's time, especially-- Once you've identified the like exceptional entrepreneur-- or exceptional engineers are the fundamental constraint, the next is like how effectively are you using them? How effectively are they aligned? And this is a thing where I think Elon is underrated actually as a communicator. Like he's not a super polished presenter like Steve Jobs, but especially when you read him and read a well-edited transcript of him, the clarity that he communicates with is like extremely high, and he's got this amazing habit. You know, you talk about often about how clear and how repetitive good CEOs need to be, good leaders, good founders, like need to communicate super clearly and

33. 1:16:00 – 1:18:03

    One Metric Focus

    1. EJEric Jorgenson1:16:00

       align the team, and he's got, uh, y- the power of one, like one metric that the entire team is working towards, and he's really methodical about like the beginning of every meeting we are going to... This metric better be on the first slide. It's the thing that we're optimizing for. So when he was working on autonomous cars, it was like, how many miles were driven without interventions? When they're, uh, working on neuralinks, like how many electrodes are you installing per minute into a brain? So there's always like a single key metric that the team is driving towards that every decision is run through. Like does it drive this metric forward? Does it drive this metric forward? And that's a, a really good way of aligning all those arrows and for him to sort of know that the team is working on the objective that he's identified as the most important and doing it as most effectively as they can and for themselves to all keep in, keep each other honest and not get distracted by these like secondary objectives.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:16:49

       Yeah. I think that's, again, world-class communication. It's like there's so many limited things that a human being can remember.

    3. EJEric Jorgenson1:16:54

       Yep.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:16:54

       And so if you can organize your entire, you know, company-

    5. EJEric Jorgenson1:16:57

       Yeah

    6. DSDavid Senra1:16:58

       ... w-a-around one single thing, it's like, is this getting better? Like this is how we're gonna judge our success. Brad Jacobs has started eight separate billion-dollar companies. He said, "I've come to know a lot of extremely successful people in my life, and they all have one thing in common. They think differently than most people. All of them, to a person, have rearranged their brains to prevail at achieving big goals in turbulent environments where conventional thinking often fails." What Brad noticed is that great business leaders are pattern spotters, but you can't spot patterns if you can't see all of your data. Most businesses only use twenty percent of their data. Why? Because eighty percent of customer intelligence is invisible. It's hidden in emails, transcripts, and conversations. That's where HubSpot comes in. With HubSpot, all of your data comes together so you can see the patterns that matter. This is important because when you know more, you grow more, and that is a pattern that never fails. Visit hubspot.com today. That is hubspot.com.

34. 1:18:03 – 1:19:06

    Directional Predictions

    1. DSDavid Senra1:18:03

       So you and I have been talking a few months. You were kind enough to give me an early copy of the book. So we've been talking about Elon for a few months, and you, you brought it up, I think, already in this conversation. You brought it up earlier this morning when we were having coffee. You've brought it up on the phone. This idea of like failure's almost meaningless as long as it's not catastrophic. There's a line in the book that I thought was interesting that he says, "The longer you do anything, the more mistakes you will make cumulatively."

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:18:28

       He's talking about his sense of prediction, but it's also cultivating these failures. Like he does not mind being too early. He does not mind being wrong in a specific prediction. And he talks how often about... He's like, "I'm rarely correct specifically on the timing of a prediction, but the direction of the prediction is almost always correct." He's like, "I might be a year off. I might be two years off. Sometimes I'm five." But like being directionally correct, a-a-again, once you're zoomed out about the, the-Heading of the future, and what we're working towards is massively more important than the specific breakpoints.

35. 1:19:06 – 1:25:39

    We Must Make Stuff

    1. DSDavid Senra1:19:06

       I wanna jump to something else that you and I have talked about a bunch, which is your-- one of your goals, stated goals for making this is, like, you want to encourage more people to make stuff.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:15

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:19:15

       To actually make products, services that make other people's lives better.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:18

       To make stuff, to make important stuff, to make it as cheap as possible.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:19:21

       I talked to Toby Lutke on this podcast, which was one of my favorite conversations I've ever had in my entire life. It was very interesting. I didn't even think about it in these terms, but at the end of the conversation, he's like, "Oh, me and you actually have the same job."

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:30

       Mm.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:19:30

       Our job is to increase entrepreneurs, to create-

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:32

       Mm

    9. DSDavid Senra1:19:32

       ... more entrepreneurs. He's doing it through Shopify. I'm obviously doing it through reading all these biographies, taking this collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs and pushing it, uh, d-down, like the generations.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:41

        Yeah.

    11. DSDavid Senra1:19:42

        So in, in, in many cases, I do think there's gonna be people that pick up your book-

    12. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:46

        Yeah

    13. DSDavid Senra1:19:46

        ... and your series of books and be like, "Wait, I, I can, like, do something too."

    14. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:50

        Yeah.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:19:50

        And take these ideas and apply it, even if it's in a small way. This section, there's only two pages here. It's like a page and a half. I think it's really important. I highlighted almost the whole thing, but it's like-

    16. EJEric Jorgenson1:19:58

        Yeah. You did

    17. DSDavid Senra1:19:58

        ... just again, these are Elon's words that are super important. He says, "We must make stuff. Manufacturing is underrated. It is hard. I've got mad respect for the makers of things." That's my favorite sentence on this book or in-- on this page. He says, and this is why it's important: "Some people have an absurd view of the economy as a magic thing that just produces stuff. Let me break it to the fools out there. If we don't make stuff, there's no [laughs] stuff. Some people have become detached from reality. This notion that the government can just send out checks to everybody and everything will be fine is not true, obviously. You can't just legislate money to solve things. If we don't make stuff," he says again, "there is no stuff. Technological progress is not inevitable. It's not some kind of abstract concept. Humans make technology."

    18. EJEric Jorgenson1:20:44

        Yes.

    19. DSDavid Senra1:20:44

        "If we don't do it, it will not happen. Somebody has to do the real work."

    20. EJEric Jorgenson1:20:50

        This is the clip, uh, I believe he was on the Joe Rogan podcast, where I was like, "I must write this book."

    21. DSDavid Senra1:20:57

        Say more.

    22. EJEric Jorgenson1:20:57

        It identified to me that he is, like, such a clear communicator, and this is such an important idea, and I think about, you know, my, my, like, generation of entrepreneurs and the, the leaders that we had, the people that we look up to, the content we created, and that's just something that I wanna install in as many people's heads as I, I can. Like, you, you, you and Toby talk about, like, your job is to create as many entrepreneurs as I can-- as you can. Like, I believe in creating entrepreneurs. I believe in spreading good ideas, spreading useful ideas, spreading correct ideas, like expanding knowledge into as many people as we can, and this is an unbelievably important meme, and if we all run around, like, creating info products or charging as much as we can while delivering as little value as you can or starting commodity businesses or, worst of all, like, trying to do as little as possible at-- while getting as much as possible or legislating yourself universal basic income and never working again or whatever, like, this is not how we advance. This is not how we grow. This is not how we take care of each other. Like, we have to produce stuff and build stuff. I think the first sentence in the book is like, "Don't aspire to glory. Aspire to work." Like, aspire to be useful. Do something that is a benefit to all of your fellow humans. Elon has both really, uh, hard and really positive motivations, like he burns clean fuel and dirty fuel at the same time, right? Like, yes, he's, like, trying to escape this really hard childhood he had and, like, prove to himself that he has this incredible value, but he also has these, like, really beautiful, massive aspirations, and he's inspiring so many people to do great work and helping them learn how to do it in a most effective way. Like, he's raising and educating this whole culture, all these entrepreneurs who are gonna come out of these companies. We're already seeing SpaceX founders do incredible things, and the intensity and pace and vision that these people are working with, I think, is gonna usher in, like, an incredible next generation of entrepreneurs, and I, I hope this book, like, helps people gain these ideas into their head and choose what they think is important and what they work on, who they work on it with, and how they work on it.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:23:09

        I do, I do agree with you. I think it's one of the most important ideas. In, in Max Olsen e-essay, I love what he said. He's like, "The output of SpaceX in particular is not cheaper rockets. It's people being trained to do difficult things and taking those ideas and putting them into different domains."

    24. EJEric Jorgenson1:23:21

        Yeah.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:23:21

        And I think the important thing is, like, making more things, not doing more deals, not going into finance. Like, you have the best entrepreneur on the planet, maybe the best in history, telling you... D- what did he say? "There is an over-allocation of talent in finance and law. Too many smart people are going into finance. We should have fewer people doing that [laughs]

    26. EJEric Jorgenson1:23:38

        Yeah

    27. DSDavid Senra1:23:39

        ... and more people making stuff." That is a direct quote. "We should have fewer people doing finance and more people making stuff." Man-- this is so important. "Manufacturing used to be highly valued in the United States. These days, it hasn't been as much, which I think is wrong."

    28. EJEric Jorgenson1:23:52

        Yeah.

    29. DSDavid Senra1:23:52

        "Making cars is an honest day's living, that's for sure. Making anything or providing a valuable service, like good en-entertainment, good information, these are valuable things to do." And then I'll close the section with, again, the, the quote which I-- my favorite part: "I've got mad respect for makers of things."

    30. EJEric Jorgenson1:24:10

        Going back to the, the kind of, like, founders archive in your head, like, how many of the great founders were making things, manufacturing, building, moving physical stuff around?
36. 1:25:39 – 1:26:23

    Manufacturing as Moat

    1. EJEric Jorgenson1:25:39

       of these companies.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:25:40

       It's just refreshing for him to talk about how important manufacturing and building-

    3. EJEric Jorgenson1:25:43

       It is

    4. DSDavid Senra1:25:43

       ... physical things are. Um, I mean, he says in, in the book, "Manufacturing is the moat. Two things define manufacturing competitiveness, ec- uh, economies of scale and technology. If you maximize your level of technology and maximize your level of scale, that is obviously going to be the most competitive situation. That's why these plants are so freaking giant."

    5. EJEric Jorgenson1:25:59

       Yeah. I mean, Tesla's building a lot of things in the Unit- US and now working backwards into their own supply chain. Like they can't get enough lithium, so they're starting a lithium refinery in the United States, um, spinning it up. They're now, you know, starting to fabricate their own chips because that's become a bottleneck. Like they just keep attacking like up and down the supply chain as much as they can, um, in order to be as efficient as possible and drive the product

37. 1:26:23 – 1:28:41

    Speed and Direct to Customer

    1. EJEric Jorgenson1:26:23

       cost down.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:26:23

       So we've already touched a few times on the fact that he wants to take technology to its absolute limits-

    3. EJEric Jorgenson1:26:28

       Yep

    4. DSDavid Senra1:26:28

       ... and like be operating on the frontier.

    5. EJEric Jorgenson1:26:30

       Yep.

    6. DSDavid Senra1:26:31

       You, again, you did a great job of finding quotes of somebody that like studied Elon for years that I've never heard anywhere else, and he was just talking about the fact that, you know, if you're developing technology, it should be pushed to the maximum level possible, and then he gives an example of somebody not doing that, and he's like, "It was like building F-22 fighter jets and then selling them to people who roll them down the hill at each other." [laughs] That's not the way to use the technology.

    7. EJEric Jorgenson1:26:53

       Yeah. That was an outcome of his, uh, his Zip2 experience where he was like he was building software and then selling it to legacy media companies to kind of move newspapers online like way back in the day, and he was just super frustrated by h- having to like sell to a slow-moving old school company that was between him and customers, and that's where he ca- kind of-- There was an early lesson that he's carried with him forever, which is like, go straight to the consumer. Like, own everything and let the... The customer is the one who's gonna make the final determination. Like you wanna take the technology straight to the customer.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:27:20

       The way I think about Elon is like there's no work about work, just work.

    9. EJEric Jorgenson1:27:23

       Yep.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:27:23

        So he has this great quote, "Better to pick a path and keep moving than just vacillate endlessly on a decision."

    11. EJEric Jorgenson1:27:29

        Also a PayPal thing. Like, make the decision as quickly as possible and then just like keep moving. Like the vel-- Back to like velocity, speed is everything.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:27:37

        "What matters to me is winning and not in a small way."

    13. EJEric Jorgenson1:27:41

        He's a competitive guy, like loves, loves to win. We are lucky that he's working on the things that he's working on. His inherent personality would dominate whatever industry he went into, and how lucky are we that he's like working on some of the most important problems that humanity faces?

    14. DSDavid Senra1:27:56

        Yeah, he could use his talents for evil. [laughs]

    15. EJEric Jorgenson1:27:59

        Yeah. Yeah. I mean, which goes back to like the incentive system, like, you know, thank God for capitalism. Like Napoleon didn't do a lot of good with his like massive energy and brilliance, right? He like won a lot of land, lost a lot of land, a lot of people died.

    16. DSDavid Senra1:28:12

        Did you ever read Jimmy Soni's biography of Claude Shannon?

    17. EJEric Jorgenson1:28:15

        Not yet.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:28:16

        I think it's called A Mind at Play.

    19. EJEric Jorgenson1:28:18

        Yeah.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:28:18

        And Claude Shannon f- made famous for, uh, coming up with in-information theory, but he gives this great talk in this biography where he wins this award and he's like, "It's really weird that history celebrates like conquerors-

    21. EJEric Jorgenson1:28:30

        Yeah

    22. DSDavid Senra1:28:30

        ... and like politicians." He's like, "We should actually celebrate innovators, uh, inventors, engineers," and he gives this whole speech, and that was probably like sixty years ago.

    23. EJEric Jorgenson1:28:39

        Yeah, uh, and Claude Shannon's an incredible

38. 1:28:41 – 1:33:07

    SpaceX Feasibility Study

    1. EJEric Jorgenson1:28:41

       example.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:28:42

       Here's another thing we've already talked about, but I think it's really important. A lo-- This is Elon, "A lot of entrepreneurial talent and financing goes to the internet. Other sectors like automotive, solar, and space don't see new entrants. Not a lot of entrepreneurs go into those areas, and not a lot of capital goes into those startups. This is a problem because innovation tends to come from new entrants to an industry. In an oligopoly, no one is forced to innovate. New entrants drive innovation more than anything, which is why I have devoted my efforts to building new companies in those industries."

    3. EJEric Jorgenson1:29:09

       There's actually a, a great story that I think is a really replicatable tactic that's underrated that, um, I, I think people can really use actually, which is when he was considering starting SpaceX, so this is after he sort of had his, his like bad experience in Russia and he's thinking about entering the launch market, he doesn't just say like, "I'm starting a company." What he does is do-- he calls it a feasibility study. So he pulls in a bunch of engineers that have worked on the great launch vehicles. He starts reading all the books, as you say, like devouring the entire shelf, talking to all the people that he can, and he sets up a series of meetings with these engineers who are experienced to basically vet the idea of how good could launch be. Let's start with first principles. Let's start with a clean sheet of paper and what's possible in this market. And a-almost at the same time that s- they sort of came to the conclusion through this work that like massive order of magnitude breakthroughs were possible was when they actually sold PayPal. And so he's kind of like, "All right. I got a bunch of cash. We've like vetted this idea with these experts." But I think it's really worth drilling down on the fact that like, you know, at this point, he was almost thirty, if not more. He had only worked in software. He studied physics in undergrad, but like had not built hardware, and he just learned how to, uh, become a rocket scientist, essentially, just by like reading the books, talking to people, and going after it. And he says, "Most people self-limit their ability to learn." Like, "I never studied rocket science, but I picked it up along the way." He's a powerful example of like what is possible. You know, once you've identified a meaningful mission, you just become who you need to be in order to accomplish that mission.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:30:42

       He's obviously very high agency. The-- What I loved about the, the story from, um, one of the biographies is how dismissive everybody was. It's like, "Oh, this is just a software guy playing with expensive toys." That's how he was described.

    5. EJEric Jorgenson1:30:53

       I mean, that was the press, but also his friends. Like I'm sure that many of them would deny it now, but they were all trying to talk him out of it. There's only a graveyard in this particular place. People were like showing him rocket videos. Who-- It's not that nobody had ever attempted this before. It's just-Everybody had failed

    6. DSDavid Senra1:31:08

       No, there was a lot of failed-- I mean, one-- I find this guy fascinating 'cause there's so little known about him, Andy Beall. But Andy Beall was, he, he made money independently in another industry and then tried to do a rocket company.

    7. EJEric Jorgenson1:31:19

       Yeah.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:31:19

       Wound up burning, I think, a couple hundred million of his own money, and then the reason it was related to Elon is because when they s- trying to find a place in Texas to set up, turns out they could lease this property that was previously used-utilized by Beall. I think it was-

    9. EJEric Jorgenson1:31:32

       Mm

    10. DSDavid Senra1:31:32

        ... Beall Aerospace.

    11. EJEric Jorgenson1:31:33

        Yeah.

    12. DSDavid Senra1:31:33

        And so it kinda like jump-started them.

    13. EJEric Jorgenson1:31:34

        It was actually a big motivation of Elon's is like, "Even if I fail, even if I lose this money," and that is the most likely outcome, not just by a little, like, by a lot. He's like, "I will have moved the ball forward." Like, this is an important mission, and going in with the idea that he'll burn this money on the Mars mission. He's like, "Even if I waste my money on advancing progress in space launch technology, at least I will have made progress," in the same way that, like, Andy Beall, you know, l-left some infrastructure behind that helped SpaceX. Like, these things do build and compound, and there's, you know, back to the sort of fragility sense, like, even when entrepreneurs fail trying to move the ball forward, the s- the ecosystem, like, moves forward. Like, that's part of the beauty of the human system that we have.

    14. DSDavid Senra1:32:16

        Another great quote that I haven't seen anywhere else: "I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and just sitting there with chipmunk cheeks."

    15. EJEric Jorgenson1:32:22

        [laughs] That's a great visual, yeah. [laughs]

    16. DSDavid Senra1:32:25

        You think he's doing that right now?

    17. EJEric Jorgenson1:32:27

        Yeah.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:32:28

        [laughs]

    19. EJEric Jorgenson1:32:28

        Yeah. I mean, he, like, he keeps... An underrated piece of him again is that I think, like, he keeps doubling down and taking massive risk. Like, he took what seemed like that impossible pay package trade-off at Tesla that everyone was like, "Oh my god, this is never gonna work." He did it, got the biggest, you know, comp package in history because it was the riskiest, and now he's doing it again. Like, he won't-- He'll get a trillion dollars if Tesla becomes a ten-trillion-dollar company, but nothing if it doesn't. Like, again, just all on the line over and over again, burning the boats, putting his back to the wall, putting himself in a situation where there's, there's no option but forward at max

39. 1:33:07 – 1:37:10

    Edge of Sanity Leadership

    1. EJEric Jorgenson1:33:07

       speed.

    2. DSDavid Senra1:33:07

       So as I'm here listening to you talk, I'm just, like, leafing through the book to see what other interesting stuff comes. What you said just matches up perfectly with the subheading of the page I just happened to randomly turn to, which is called The Edge of Sanity. [laughs] I just need to read some of this stuff to you 'cause he's hilarious.

    3. EJEric Jorgenson1:33:22

       Yeah.

    4. DSDavid Senra1:33:23

       "Question: How do you prioritize with so many things going on at once?" [laughs] He goes, "Prioritizing is usually made out of desperation, not selection." [laughs] It's not, "Oh, let's sit back and leisurely decide how we should spend these resources." It's, "This isn't working. If we don't make it work, we're gonna go bankrupt, so we better make it work." And then he goes, "I felt [laughs] I felt like Indiana Jones running down the temple. There's a huge boulder chasing you, and you need to jump across a giant pit in the ground. If you slow down, the boulder will crush you, and if you don't make the leap, you'll die in the pit. That's prioritizing." [laughs]

    5. EJEric Jorgenson1:33:56

       [laughs] It is how scaled entrepreneurs feel. Like, when, when you interviewed Brian Armstrong, that is how it sounded. You know, he's like, "We hit product market fit, and all I could do for years was just wake up and, like, stay alive, just try to keep up. Like, the servers were on fire. The support tickets were coming in. Like, oh my God, I just have to stay on top of it. Like, I just gotta keep running and jump across the pit."

    6. DSDavid Senra1:34:14

       "How do you motivate the team? I told them we have to go ultra hardcore." [laughs]

    7. EJEric Jorgenson1:34:18

       Yeah.

    8. DSDavid Senra1:34:18

       It's just funny to me. "I lived in the factories for three years," talking about the Tesla production hell.

    9. EJEric Jorgenson1:34:23

       Yeah.

    10. DSDavid Senra1:34:23

        Uh, "I lived in the factories for three l-years, running around like a maniac through every part of the factory. I was living with the team. I slept on the floor." This is actually smart. "I slept on the floor, floor so the team going through a hard time could see me on the floor and knew I was not in some ivory tower. Whatever pain they experienced, I experienced more."

    11. EJEric Jorgenson1:34:40

        It comes straight from his, like, study of military history, right? Like, wherever generals lead from the front line, wherever the general is, the, the troops are gonna fight better. Like, these are Napoleon things, um, that he exemplified. And he, he even says in there, like, not only did I sleep on the factory floor, but he slept, like, outside the conference room. It's not like he slept at the factory. And I've, I've talked to employees there who are like, they're like, "There's a hotel across the street." Like, it would've been fine if he just went to the hotel and come back. His presence would've been the same. But he wanted people to see him sleeping on the factory floor. He doesn't just, like, not have concern for his personal comfort. He, like, sacrifices his personal comfort for leadership, like, for the credibility of his engineers to build trust in that. And that is, like, part of how he gets so much out of people is, like, these conspicuous, visible, tangible, obvious displays of self-sacrifice. And it, it does over and over again. He d- he pushes himself so hard. I mean, the, the edge of sanity, he says, like, "I've worked to the edge of sanity." Um, you, you've talked about Tallulah Riley in, in the two thousand and eight thing. He was having, like, night terrors. He'd wake up screaming and puking, like-

    12. DSDavid Senra1:35:46

        Tallulah Riley was his wife at the time-

    13. EJEric Jorgenson1:35:48

        Yeah

    14. DSDavid Senra1:35:48

        ... that that's occurring, so she's seeing this. In- they're in bed, he's trying to sleep-

    15. EJEric Jorgenson1:35:52

        Yeah

    16. DSDavid Senra1:35:52

        ... and he's just yelling in his sleep and-

    17. EJEric Jorgenson1:35:54

        Yeah.

    18. DSDavid Senra1:35:54

        Yeah.

    19. EJEric Jorgenson1:35:55

        Like, it is, it, like, edge of sanity is not a, like, euphemism for "I worked hard." It is, like, a Herculean test.

    20. DSDavid Senra1:36:04

        And a direct quote from him on the page I just flipped to: "I worked to the edge of sanity." [laughs]

    21. EJEric Jorgenson1:36:08

        Yeah. It's a, it is a very, like, um, I think, a meta lesson from the book and from his life that, that anybody can take away. It's, it's the, it is Goggins of entrepreneurship, is you are capable of so much more than you think. What you think is your best effort is maybe thirty percent effort, and you're actually capable of so much more if you make full, massive use of time, if you push yourself to the edge. Like, and I'm not advocating that this is the right path for everybody. I think, like, some people are Jason Fried-

    22. DSDavid Senra1:36:34

        I don't know anybody-

    23. EJEric Jorgenson1:36:35

        ... and some people are Elon Musk.

    24. DSDavid Senra1:36:36

        I don't know anybody else that could withstand as much pain and torment as he, he has.

    25. EJEric Jorgenson1:36:40

        Yeah, I know.

    26. DSDavid Senra1:36:40

        Can't think of another entrepreneur living that has.

    27. EJEric Jorgenson1:36:42

        No, but, but people can probably take more than they're currently taking. If it's not a blueprint, it's an example of what's possible, right? Like, um, it also, I think it's a, it's an antidote to envy. Like, I don't wanna live through what he lived through, and that makes it very easy to be like, "I, I don't, I don't wanna compete with that." Um, but it does show you what's possible. Like, that's what maximum effort really looks like. I think that's a really helpful lesson to know.

    28. DSDavid Senra1:37:08

        Yeah, maximum effort always everywhere

40. 1:37:10 – 1:40:01

    Bottlenecks and Integration

    1. DSDavid Senra1:37:10

       is the way I really think about him. I just came across another paragraph that I underlined that I thinkTies a lot of these ideas we're talking about, the fact that he's obsessed with speed, obsessed with control, and if you're obsessed with control, it's gonna lead to vertical integration, and then you really should just design from a blank sheet of paper-

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:37:23

       Yep

    3. DSDavid Senra1:37:23

       ... and do that in a first principles way. He says, "There's a lot of vertical integration at Tesla. We make the battery pack, the power electronics, and the drive trains ourselves. We vertically integrated because the pace we need to move was much faster than the supply chain could move." That's a great line. "To the degree that you rely on the legacy supply chain, you inherit the legacy constraints, including their speed, their costs, and their technology." He's talking about Tesla. The exact same thing is applies to SpaceX, though.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:37:46

       You can't make two orders of magnitude improvements if you rely on the existing supply chain. And, and one of the things we were talking about this morning is, like, the most interesting thing is identify the limiting factor and work on the bottleneck is, like, almost so obvious that it's trite, right? Like-

    5. DSDavid Senra1:38:00

       But no one does it.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:38:01

       One, people don't do it, but two, it's a more nuanced thing than it appears at first blush, right? Like, if the limiting factor is energy, it's like, okay, what is the, what is the peak load? Where does it come from? What's the cost-optimized thing? Like, oh, if, if turbines are the cheapest way to do it, what is the actual... Like, who's manufacturing the turbines? Where do they come from? Where do they exist? Um, if the piece-- what piece of the turbine makes it more difficult? So he did this ex- example and drilled all the way down, and he's like, there's actually one, like, machined part that is the fin of the turbine that is the, like, portable piece of the generator that is the bottleneck of compute infrastructure for xAI right now. And so he's like, it's actually one part of a thing, drilling all the way down and, like, identifying with super high specificity where the bottleneck is.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:38:49

       Wait, wait, essentially. Explain that to me again. So he's trying to find out the limiting factor for xAI.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:38:54

       Yeah. And the limiting factor is energy, right?

    9. DSDavid Senra1:38:58

       Okay.

    10. EJEric Jorgenson1:38:58

        Like, we, we, we bought the chips. We need the building. This is when he was running the first supercluster, and somebody told him it was gonna take, like, two years to get this building up and running. He's like, "Nope, if we don't do it, there's a break point. If we don't do it in ninety days, like, we're, we're dead, or six months maybe, we're dead." And they spun up the whole thing. They, they found a building in Memphis. They bought the chips from NVIDIA, then they needed cooling, and they needed, uh, power. You can't get a grid interconnect done in six months, so what do you do? You go get these turbines, these gas turbines, which are like portable energy generators, and you just line them up all along one side of the building, and you can't get that much cooling installed, so he went and hired mobile, like, refrigerator trucks to, like, line them up against the other side of the building, um, so it was just like, what is the fastest possible way to get this thing done, and what's the limiting factor of the limiting factor of the limiting factor, like drilling all the way down to figure out truly where to attack. That kind of five whys all the way down to figure out the limiting factor of the limiting factor of the limiting factor.

41. 1:40:01 – 1:45:15

    Design and Simplify

    1. DSDavid Senra1:40:01

       Kind of relates to a little bit about, like, the just paying attention to the smallest details.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:40:05

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:40:06

       Um, this is something that I think is really important too is like most people don't consciously notice the small details, but they do subconsciously.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:40:12

       Mm.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:40:12

       Your mind takes in an overall impression. You know if something is appealing or not, even though you may not be able to point out exactly why. That sense is a summation of many details. Most of us experience this as, "That's ugly," or, "That's beautiful," or, "Wow, that's elegant," or, but that-- but we cannot break down why. Pay attention to little details. Train yourself to notice them. When I read that section, I thought about it's what Steve Jobs was-

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:40:34

       Yeah

    7. DSDavid Senra1:40:34

       ... I think maybe the best in history at. And he has this great way of describing this. He says that a great product is better than it has to be.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:40:40

       Yeah. I think Elon is underrated in his design sense, actually. Like, um, there's a lot of times when you, you hear Elon quotes that sound exactly like Steve Jobs would have said. There's an important piece of the design, in particular for cars, um, a-and a lot of the... He thinks about it like an algorithm, right? Like, there's certain specific things, ratios that have to ha- exist between the product, or it needs to feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside, um, that he just absolutely insists on. In their stories, especially from early Tesla, of him being like unreasonable about design decisions that he's just puts a finger on. He's like, "It has to be this way or it's not good enough, it's not beautiful enough, it's not aesthetic enough," um, in the same way that Steve Jobs was very much like, "No, put a handle on that computer because it changes the relationship that somebody has with this, like, kind of new foreign machine."

    9. DSDavid Senra1:41:32

       Something I thought about when I was reading your book was, you know, the idea is like we're gonna have a s- a single organizing principle to see, to track like the progress on this-

    10. EJEric Jorgenson1:41:39

        Mm

    11. DSDavid Senra1:41:39

        ... particular product or this particular company. It kind of breaks things down to like a singular objective or a singular, uh, something he repeats. There's a, a, a line in Sam Walton's autobiography which I thought was very interesting, 'cause we're talking about, like, you know, Elon has not only started the companies, but now these companies are at scale.

    12. EJEric Jorgenson1:41:57

        Yeah.

    13. DSDavid Senra1:41:57

        And Sam's like, "Listen, it's in human nature to overcomplicate things. As your company grows, you are going to add bureaucracy, and your job as the founder is to beat bureaucracy back over the line. And you're gonna beat it back over the line, and it's gonna creep back up, and you're gonna beat it back over the line." That, that ebb and flow will never stop. And one way that Elon talks about this in the book that I thought was interesting, he's just like, for any company, you just ask yourself a very simple question. Are the efforts that we're doing right now, are the efforts that we're expending resulting in a better product or service? If they, they're n- if they're not, then you stop those efforts.

    14. EJEric Jorgenson1:42:31

        It's an easily forgotten truth. Like, Tesla doesn't advertise. They're just all the money back into the product or all the money back into the next product. There's stories about, uh, the rift between him and his cousins doing SolarCity, because SolarCity was a very, like, sales-driven organization. They're like door-to-door sales. They weren't as focused on product differentiation, and he just, like, he was on the board, and he just came in like a maniac on their product, and it's like, "Why do these clips exist? Why do these roofs take so long to install? Why are they so expensive to install?" And he was, like, adopting that super Steve Jobs, like, make a beautiful product, make it an obviously better thing. Um, get rid of these salespeople. Like, I don't want this to be w- I don't want the organization to be better at selling a mediocre product. I want it to be better at creating an excellent product that sells itself. That is his whole ethos.

    15. DSDavid Senra1:43:15

        Yeah, I like the point that you made that, like, w- he applies the same idea to the product level and at the company level.So this idea where he's like, please go ultra-hardcore on simplification-

    16. EJEric Jorgenson1:43:23

        Yeah

    17. DSDavid Senra1:43:23

        ... and deletion, like in the product and in the company is a great-- he, he, he repeats the same idea in different ways too-

    18. EJEric Jorgenson1:43:29

        Mm-hmm

    19. DSDavid Senra1:43:29

        ... which I thought was interesting. Like eliminate what isn't necessary to solve the key problem. And so he gives an example of what, what is he talking about there. Early versions of Starship didn't even have doors. We didn't need doors. We [laughs] we did need to be super focused on getting to orbit. Doors were just unnecessary complexity. The first ten ships or more, we were not gonna get back from orbit, so then again, understanding that failure is built into it.

    20. EJEric Jorgenson1:43:52

        Yeah.

    21. DSDavid Senra1:43:52

        Like we're seeking the limits, so we are gonna fail things. Uh, and then, then he talks about, again, the genius of the fewest moving parts. It's really hard to scale something that's complex, so he says, "Scale has value in itself. For example, the same computer that controls a tiny rocket controls the big rocket. The percentage of weight of the electronics is significant in a small rocket but becomes vanishingly small in a big one."

    22. EJEric Jorgenson1:44:16

        Yeah. Which this is the same logic that he applies to factories, right? Like the, the inherent value of scale. Just make something extremely big and diminish the fixed cost as much as you can and the value of volume. Like making these leaps between... You know, that's why they started with sports car, 'cause you can have like a unit profitable thing at small volume, then the Model S, then the Model three. And the same thing he's doing with the rockets, right? Falcon one to Falcon nine. Um, the, the, the ability to sequence the strategy through different products, different S-curves, and have it be profitable the, at, at each sort of stable equilibrium is a really important piece that I think for all the talk about how he's like a visionary and builds these great products, he's still really economical about how he goes about it, which I think is very, um, very overrated or underrated piece of his genius.

    23. DSDavid Senra1:45:07

        Well, another thing you do a good job in the book of is you give multiple examples of the same idea.

    24. EJEric Jorgenson1:45:12

        Mm-hmm.

    25. DSDavid Senra1:45:12

        And again, all these ideas relate to each other,

42. 1:45:15 – 1:48:14

    Catch the Rocket

    1. DSDavid Senra1:45:15

       and so he talks about like why did they move, remove the landing legs. I think this is of Starship three. Uh, and he says, "Again, here we try to think to the limit of physics."

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:45:25

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:45:26

       "The problem with landing legs is they add mass. We have to protect them during re-entry, and we have to get a giant rocket from wherever it landed back onto the launch stand. That is tricky. I was trying to think of the limit. What's the fastest way to achieve reusability? It would be to land on the launch stand." So he talks about, you know, planes land, and then they immediately take off again. That's what we wanna do with rockets.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:45:48

       Yep.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:45:48

       "It would be to land on the launch stand. Why not just have it land on the arms of the tower it launches from?" So again, which is a crazy thing. "When we talked about it first, it sounded batshit crazy," direct quote from Elon. "To custom build a giant tower to catch the heaviest flying object ever made with mechanical arms, pluck it out of the air... But we did it. It is an epic sight, giant robot arms catching a giant rocket."

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:46:09

       That is a great story because it exemplifies a few different things, right? There's the thinking in limits part. Like what is the platonic ideal? How good could it be if we were just dreaming? And then it seemed impossible, and he's got a really, um, specific tactic he does. When he's, when he's exploring, he says, "What's possible within the absurd?" And so he takes these crazy ideas and throws them out, and people are like, "That's crazy. That wouldn't work. That would be absurd." And he asks, "What would it take? Don't tell me no. Tell me what would have to be true. What would it take to make it possible?" What he finds and what there-- this comes up over and over again is in stories is what first seems impossible and people push back, and he sort of gives it like a day. Um, and then people start to like churn on it a little bit. And then he asks more questions, questions more assumptions, asks what would it take again. And then like within a week, people start to be like, "Wait a minute, this might be possible." Um, and, and he-- I think he's been through this loop enough times where people are like, "No, that's crazy." They dismiss it. He pushes back. He says, "What would it take?" He says, "Do the brainstorm." He says, "Just spend a day or spend a week designing it. Just assume that it's possible and start working on it to see how far you can get." And so many times he's like, "What seems impossible, he'll be-- there's no fundamental law of physics reason why this is impossible." And I think all of this actually goes back to his belief that like engineering is magic, and the laws of physics are the limit of the magic. And so not analogy, not what have we designed before, not what problems have already been solved, not what do our current methods let us achieve, but like what is the limit of what's theoretically possible, and he's just gonna be unreasonable in pushing as far as he can towards that, and he's seen over and over again that when he holds that line and asks, "What would it take?" and says, "Keep trying. I know it's hard. Keep trying. You've just gotta muscle through. There's, uh, there's no reason this isn't possible. Show me why it's impossible or keep working on it." And people respond to those pushes and do achieve things that seem impossible over and over again.

43. 1:48:14 – 1:50:03

    Capitalism and Closing

    1. DSDavid Senra1:48:14

       I think the book that you wrote is really important. What I wanna do is I'm gonna buy a thousand copies. Uh, I will leave a link down in the show notes, so maybe the first thousand people that click that link, I'll buy a, a copy of the book for them 'cause I do think like what you're doing is cer-- like think about how crazy it is. Elon has a thirty-five-year career as an entrepreneur so far, something arou- around that way.

    2. EJEric Jorgenson1:48:37

       Yeah.

    3. DSDavid Senra1:48:37

       You spent five years and thousands of hours distilling the way he thinks about building companies and products and new technologies into a book somebody could read in five hours, ten hours.

    4. EJEric Jorgenson1:48:47

       Yeah.

    5. DSDavid Senra1:48:47

       Like that is insanely valuable. I do wanna end our conversation with what I think is most important to you and I and what we're both trying to do with work.

    6. EJEric Jorgenson1:48:55

       Yeah.

    7. DSDavid Senra1:48:56

       This entire reason I'm doing this new show is like a celebration of capitalism. It is a love letter to capitalism. It is, "Hey, you know what? If you want a role model, how about somebody that started a company, that built a product, and made somebody else's life better, that created wealth for their, their, their, their employees, that, that created jobs, that created wealth for themselves and their family?" Like these things should be applauded, and it's exactly what Elon says here, so I wanna close here. He says, "It is insanely hard to build and ship useful products to a large number of people. There's a hell of a lot of difference between a company that has shipped a product and one that hasn't. It is night and day. If you create great products and services which create wealth, that should be applauded. You increase the standard of living of the country and perhaps the world." Thanks for writing the book. Thanks for taking the time to have this conversation.

    8. EJEric Jorgenson1:49:41

       Thank you for having me. I'm honored.

    9. DSDavid Senra1:49:42

       I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review, and make sure you listen to my other podcast, Founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over four hundred biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through Founders. [outro music]

Episode duration: 1:50:05