Modern WisdomHow Elon Achieves the Impossible - Eric Jorgenson
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
100 min read · 19,815 words- 0:00 – 3:32
What Can We Learn From Elon Musk?
- CWChris Williamson
How many copies of The Navalmanac have you sold now?
- EJEric Jorgenson
It's tough to know, but I think we're coming up on 2 million.
- CWChris Williamson
How's that feel?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I'm still, uh, the word I like to use is gobsmacked. Like, I really thought I was doing fan service for a few thousand Naval nerds.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And the fact that it's, like, 40 languages and millions of people and we've given away a few million more, right? Like, I don't even really know.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so that's how many were sold-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Sold
- CWChris Williamson
... 'cause it was available for free through the website.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah, which is another, like, 5 million plus. Really hard to track.
- CWChris Williamson
I think it's my most suggested book. When people say, "Where should I start with personal development?" Essentialism by Greg McKeown or The Navalmanac.
- EJEric Jorgenson
That's incredible. And, and that's-- I mean, I had no idea how many people were gonna resonate with it and recommend it and, you know, I think the highest compliment a gift, uh, the highest compliment a book can receive is to be gifted.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and so much of what we read comes from what's recommended. Like, how often do you see an ad for a book and buy it? Like, almost never.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
The bars are too high.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. And the subtitle of this new one is A Guide to Purpose and Success, about Elon. Why pick that? Why purpose specifically?
- EJEric Jorgenson
It was-- It's emergent. I mean, when I write these books, I start with millions and millions of words of source material, everything they've ever shared publicly, and I try to figure out, like, what is the essence of the person? What is the thing that is most special about them that anybody can learn from? And we all know that Elon is, like, massively productive. I feel like the question everybody's asking is kind of like, "How the hell did this happen?" Like, how does he get so much done?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But what I didn't realize until way into the process was that purpose was the other pillar. So I knew I wanted to know, like, how does he win, but I didn't know to the extent that purpose was a big part of why he wins, and that is actually, he has some really incredible answers for what do I do? What's important? How do I choose what's important?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Yeah, I think everyone looks and just assumes tactics, raw tactics.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But if there's something bigger driving that. Uh, Thiel says about Elon, "He seems to know something that, the, about risk that the rest of us do not." What do you think that thing is?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, I think Elon is risk on. Like, he takes risks that he shouldn't take. He's inherently biased towards risk. But the number of times that that pays off, I think reveals and puts in Thiel's context, like, Thiel is a risk manager, and Elon is a risk taker. And when you combine that with purpose, the fact that, like, Elon is on these missions, he's trying to accomplish something, and he almost doesn't care how much risk it takes. He'll just keep taking chances and keep taking chances until he breaks through. And he's got this amazing quote, um, "Failure is irrelevant unless it's catastrophic."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And I think that's a really good way to sort of explain that attitude towards risk of like, I, I just don't care how low my chances are. I don't care how long the odds are. I'm just gonna keep going until I die because this is important enough to keep working on.
- CWChris Williamson
And that explains why the purpose piece is crucial because that's what would keep you pushing through.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes. There's so many times that he has done things that seem insane from, like, a financial motivation point of view, or I'm trying to build a business, or... And it's because he's driven by these massive purposes and he has this risk tolerance, and the combination of those things I think is what, you know, pushes him. Like, these two opportunities, Tesla and SpaceX being the biggest, were, were on nobody's radar. He looked absurd when he undertook them, and he put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to achieve these things because he was purpose driven even though the odds were long and the risk was high.
- 3:32 – 6:28
What Makes Elon So Unique?
- CWChris Williamson
Is he that singular of an individual? Obviously, SpaceX impressive, Tesla impressive, Doge kinda cool, being on stage, Trump campaign, Twitter, X, ra, ra. I, you know, how, just how impressive is he or how singular is he as an individual?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I, I think he's pretty singular. Like, do you not?
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, I do.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But a lot of people that are detractors have found a way to say, actually, it's more to do with leverage and ridiculous risk tolerance and just sort of blowing through the boundaries that other people wouldn't. It's to do with, uh, lack of s- uh, scruples and being able to push through ethics that other people might find squirrely. Uh, where do you see the big competitive advantages for him coming from?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I, I think he's the greatest living entrepreneur, hard stop, and maybe the greatest of all time. Uh, the fact that he did Tesla and SpaceX, which are both s- would both be singular accomplishments and put him on, like, top 10 if not Mount Rushmore, the fact that he did them both at the same time is unbelievable. A- and it's after PayPal and after Zip2 as a young, young guy.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, and then just, like, sort of on the side, xAI, Boring Company, Neuralink, like, Doge if you wanna include that as, like, a project. Um, absolutely singular. I mean, and, and lots of game left, right? Like, he's only 55? Not quite.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, he might have 20 more years. Like, where does this go in 20 more years? Um, it's unbelievable. I mean, the combination of traits that I think he has, and this is not to, like... I, I know that I will be accused, like, through this book and this episode and everything of, like, lionizing and overlooking the bad traits that, that you listed, and there are plenty. Like, there's dark sides to every advantage.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, but he's got, like, the intensity of David Goggins, like, just raw-
- CWChris Williamson
If not the physique.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. [chuckles] Not, not quite the physique.
- CWChris Williamson
Or the skin tone.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs] There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Goggins.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, but he's got the intensity of David Goggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Feynman, and then the, like, I like Napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just, like, will to win.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And when you combine those things, absolutely singular. Um, it, it would be like if Zuckerberg had also started Google. Like, I feel like that's kind of the order of magnitude thing, and they started Google and Facebook in parallel.I mean, SpaceX, I think when it goes public, this will be more obvious to people, but he'll, he will have almost founded but certainly funded, led, and driven two of the top 10 companies in the world, if not two of the most important companies in the world in parallel at the same time while doing a bunch of other shit and having 14 kids.
- CWChris Williamson
How?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Singular. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
How? What is... Okay, that's, that is, that is pretty singular.
- 6:28 – 10:23
Is This Elon’s Formula For Success?
- CWChris Williamson
After a few million words of looking through his life, what it is that he's said and done, what is the, what are the component parts of his success? What are the biggest drivers for how he's been so productive?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think there's a few, and I think the thing that people miss is the combination of those factors. So I think people talk a lot about, and it's correct to talk about, the bias towards, or the, the intense urgency towards the limiting factor, right? He's always looking for the bottleneck and attacking the bottleneck. He works with maniacal urgency. Those are the words he uses, um, and instills in people all around him. There is also this ability to sort of, uh, think from first principles has become this, like, keyword that he talks about and that he has a bunch of great examples for. But when you combine all of those things, it's not a 10% or a 50% improvement. It is like a two order of magnitude improvement.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
If you are working on the right thing with the right vision at the right time immediately all the time, you're not twice as productive, you're a thousand times more productive, and then you do that for 30 years, 40 years. And the, the way that sort of head start accrues and compounds, and the way the leverage builds on itself, and the way the allies show up, and the way that capital piles in behind you, and the way that wins turn into additional wins.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And then you... He has this sort of mystique now that people rightly criticize as a mystique. Like, it feels unreal, and it feels like people don't critique it. Um, but he hasn't lost. Like... And that becomes self-perpetuating.
- CWChris Williamson
That was when he put the, uh, Tesla bonus structure in place for himself.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
The trillion dollar compensation package.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. That there's a lot of criticism that was thrown around, like, "This is ridiculous. What an insane amount of money. No one person is supposed to do that." But his pushback was, "Well, look at what I need to do in order to be able to achieve that." Can you just explain like why that was so ridiculous and what it constituted?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, this is the second time he's done it, actually. Um, so he had an insane all or nothing, like I will make $0 unless I 10X Tesla. I don't remember the exact number, but he had, he had some number of years to like turn Tesla into a massive unprecedented success, and everybody said it was absurd, but the shareholders were all kind of like, "All right, we'll vote for it. What do we have to lose?" Like, if he doesn't do it, we don't pay him.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And he achieved this impossible bar. And then these, and then the, the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were like suing him because trying to like retract that money, and it's a whole, that's a whole mess that like I'm not qualified to tell the story of in great detail, but it worked, and he did the impossible, and he has been doing the impossible over and over again. And so when he comes and says, "I think I can take Tesla from a $1 trillion company to a $10 trillion company, and you don't have to pay me anything unless I do. But if I do, maybe throw me a trillion dollars," like, who is that hurting? Like, it's helping all the shareholders who own it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
They agreed to it. It's supposed to be impossible, right? Like, it's all upside. Um, but he's made all these impossible leaps before. Not always right, but like the way he says, he's like, "I've lost many battles, but I've never lost a war." He's never lost a company.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
He's never missed a huge target. He misses deadlines all the time.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But almost by design.
- CWChris Williamson
Because he's pushing the limit so quickly.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. He, he just articulated this really well, of course, after I finished writing the book.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, 'cause he's always dropping new stuff, but he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks has a, he has a 50% chance of making. And he's like, "I don't want to be making 100% of my deadlines. That means they're way too conservative. That means things will get moved, things will get missed. So I set a deadline that I think we have a 50/50 chance of making, and sometimes we'll be wrong. Sometimes we'll miss it, but a lot of the time, we will make a deadline that we didn't think was possible-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... because we chose to be really, really aggressive with schedules."
- 10:23 – 12:19
Why We Need to Make Stuff to Have Stuff
- CWChris Williamson
You had 69 core Musk methods, so let's go through some of them.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Funny how that works out. [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
If we don't make stuff, there is no stuff.
- EJEric Jorgenson
He said this on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was one of a few things that hit me so hard, I was like, "This book has to happen, actually." And it was in this era where everyone was just going, "Just print money. Just send it out. Just, like, help us. Help us," like looking to sort of the government as Big Brother to just take care of us no matter what, even though nobody was doing any work during COVID. And he's like, "That's not how this works." Like, if we are not making stuff, if we're not building stuff, if we're not providing services, like the whole economy collapses. Like, that is what holds up the money. Um, and he's a great example, I think, of the bias to build and serve and improve things. Um, you know, the ex- like Tesla's the only car company trying to drive prices down. Have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last 40 years?
- CWChris Williamson
Tesla's prices have gone down?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. They're actively lowering the price on the models. As they add volume, they lower the price, and as they simplify the car, they lower the price.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, but I looked this up. Ford F-150, if you just follow inflation, it used to be like five or six grand, and if you just follow inflation, it should be like 15,000 today, but they're like 40 or 50 grand. And I feel like, yes, there's more features and more safety, but like three, four times more?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And I feel like every car company on Earth is just trying to figure out how to charge more. And as Jeff Bezos said, like there's two kinds of companies. There's companies that try to charge, work hard to charge more, and there's companies that work hard to charge less. And Amazon is a, like, we're driving costs down business, and Tesla is the same. He says, like, "If we can't figure out-- If we charge something, it's because we can't figure out how to charge less." Because he's like, the mission, the purpose, I want as many people as possible driving an electric car.I want as many people as possible driving an autonomous car.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
That is what solves the climate change problem. That's what makes our cities quieter and cleaner and better. Like why not lower the price as we increase the volume and make it accessible to
- 12:19 – 17:43
Is Urgency the Key to Success?
- EJEric Jorgenson
more people?
- CWChris Williamson
Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. Isn't that a good one?
- CWChris Williamson
It's fucking pithy. Uh, is fear of failure the biggest cause of failure, not a lack of skill or understanding or foresight?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I... The way I hear that quote is it's because it kills something in the crib. Like fear of failure is why people don't even set out.
- CWChris Williamson
Hmm. Yeah, the, far more people have not attempted anything than have attempted something and failed at it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah, you can't fail due to skill or fail due to stamina-
- CWChris Williamson
You never ship it
- EJEric Jorgenson
... if you never even try.
- CWChris Williamson
Or start it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. And, and you know, if you just think of like how many things you've, any of us have dreamed of doing but never tried.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like it's 99 to one.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, lots of things that you dream of, you probably shouldn't try.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
So fear of... I guess th- the interesting small print here is it's not necessarily fear of failure, it's fear of that is not worth my time. I shouldn't be spending my time on that thing. Not that I could do it and it wouldn't work, but if I did it, it wouldn't be worth it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
I mean, I think that's a very optimistic and enlightened maybe view of why people rationalize not doing things.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
That they, that they do deeply wanna do or do wanna try.
- CWChris Williamson
But for instance, El- Elon Musk have lots of dreams that he hasn't pursued, presumably, unless, unless he's also able to fucking program his own dreams. It's like, oh, that would be cool. That would be cool.
- EJEric Jorgenson
I mean, he's like the most leveraged man on Earth, and I feel like he, he does indulge these random wa- I mean, The Boring Company was kind of a like-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... sitting in traffic being like, "Fuck this," [laughs] and he just picked the phone and, picked up the phone, called one of his engineers, he's like, "Start making a hole. Start researching, uh, drilling machines. I'm gonna call you back in two hours. By the way, that was at 2:00 AM. Okay, bye." Like-
- CWChris Williamson
That was when he did it?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
At 2:00 AM?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Rang one of his engineers and said...
- EJEric Jorgenson
It's the guy who's still running The Boring Company today. He's like, "Do it. I'll call you back." And then the guy comes back and says like, "All right, I found this and this about the drilling machines. I think they could be improved in this and this way." And then he goes to Tesla, to Tesla headquarters and is like, "We're gonna start digging a hole in the parking lot." And they're like, "Cool, we think we can get permits and do it in two weeks." And he's like, "Nope, move all the cars. Start right now. I wanna see a hole in the parking lot at midnight. It's 6:00 PM. Go." And like, it, it is that level of bias to action. Like I think maniacal urgency, the words-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- 17:43 – 20:03
Does Elon Have Time for Self-Care?
- CWChris Williamson
Does Elon do any kind of self-care, morning routine, meditation, therapy?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Not that there's much evidence of, which I think is interesting. Like the most productive man on Earth barely sleeps, like lives on his private jet, works maniacally all the time. Uh, no, no discernible good habits from what I can tell. Like, uh [both laughing] ... Not on staining, or like he eats donuts.
- CWChris Williamson
Yep
- EJEric Jorgenson
Not a lot of meditation, not a lot of introspection.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, just like gets up, grabs his phone, draws a knife, and like goes to war every single day.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like that is just-
- CWChris Williamson
Just shivs someone.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like [laughs] that is the-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- EJEric Jorgenson
I've got a... My friend Brent Beshore describes b- like operating a business as a knife fight.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And it's like an operator who's in it, like you wake up, you have a knife off the n- bed stand and like-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... you go to work.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And I f- That's actually probably how it feels with Elon. You ask him his daily routine, he's like, "I wake up, I check my phone, I look for an emergency." There's always an emergency. Um, and sometimes if there's not, he creates one.
- CWChris Williamson
How so?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Uh, this is also like from the Isaacson book. He's like, th- there was a lot of times when there's not objectively an emergency, but there is sufficient cause to be like, "We can increase the pace. We can increase the pace. Like let's figure out how to create a situation that maybe gets things moving faster, maybe doesn't," but it is a bias to urgency all the time.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But this, uh, and I'm not advocating this. Like I don't live this way. Even like you, you can see the recipe and not wanna cook the dish. Um, but the, the takeaway that I think that is useful and generalizable for everybody is very David Goggins. It's like you're capable of a lot more than you think, and the people who are like massively orders of magnitude more productive are working at a pace and an intensity that is like very foreign to most people. Um, and I think you're a good example of this. Like I don't think people appreciate how hard you work to like do the things that you do and cover the amount of ground that you have to do 800 episodes in five years.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like you're an intense motherfucker. Like you cover a lot of ground. Um, you work really hard to do it. It's, um, but everybody is capable of 10% more, 50% more, just like give the throttle a push and-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... see what breaks. Might not be anything.
- CWChris Williamson
So
- 20:03 – 25:12
Does Elon Intentionally Create Suffering For Himself?
- CWChris Williamson
given the lack of self-care, does he care about his subjective experience? The, uh, happiness, fulfillment, joy things?
- EJEric Jorgenson
He does. Um, I don't think that's what he's optimizing for.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like I don't think he's a particularly happy person. I don't think... He, he even doesn't really seem to take joy or pride in his past accomplishments. He's just always looking forward.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and it's... I mean, I feel like it's a great gift to us and a burden to him, right? Like, i- the people around him talk about like wishing that he would celebrate his accomplishments, wishing he would take a break, wishing he would be happier. Um, but he's just onto the next, onto the next, and like I think when you have a, a glimpse into his childhood, that makes a little more sense. Um, you get-
- CWChris Williamson
How so?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I mean, his... As David Senner says, like the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son. Um, his dad was w- w- certainly abusive, like there's verbally abusive. Imagine like standing there as an eight-year-old boy for hours while your dad like screams in your face, drill sergeant style, calls you worthless, calls you useless, calls you stupid. Um, when Elon was young, he got the absolute shit kicked out of him, like gang stomped, not like lost a fight with one guy. Hospitalized for a while. Uh, his brother said he was like so swollen he was unrecognizable, and his dad sided with the bullies and like called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose. Like what does that do? Like that just creates this furnace in you that like will never stop. Um, and so I think there's, there's a lot of... He's not comfortable with peace. Like he likes... He is, he is always at war, and he's looking for the next war, and that just like drives him always. Um, and, you know, that is one part. Like, you know, is the debate between clean fuel and dirty fuel, like which is better?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
You know, if you're, if you're like mean to yourself internally, you're like, "I'm such a piece of shit. I gotta, I gotta get more done. I can do more. I can accomplish more. I can be better"-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... versus like, "I'm building this great thing and I can do it and this is gonna be awesome and people are gonna love it," or, "I'm really proud of what I've done. I'm achieving this powerful mission." And E- Elon does both. Like he burns clean fuel and dirty fuel it seems.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
He's achieving these, these missions that are important to humanity that so many people dream of, that everybody thought was impossible, and he's got this incredible string of successes, but he also has this, this like internal angst, uh, I think that, that seems to drive him.
- CWChris Williamson
Definitely a tolerance for pain.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It almost seems like he deliberately creates suffering for himself.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
He did the, uh, the tiny home thing. He d- he sold all of his stuff at one point.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I think s- may still have no possessions basically-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... and sleeps on the factory floor.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes. Um, which I mean, the po- the possessions thing was part like, he's like, "I'm not, I'm not like a bad billionaire. Like I'm a billionaire because I built valuable companies. Like I'll sell all my stuff. I don't care. I don't need fancy things."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, 'cause people were like dragging him. He's like, "I want, I want you to understand that like I'm in it for the right reasons." Um, but I'm glad you asked about sleep.
- CWChris Williamson
Okay.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Because I'm a huge personal fan of Eight Sleep. If you struggle to sleep well or just wanna further optimize your sleep, Eight Sleep can help. I got one as a surprise for my wife when we had our first baby, and she wept with joy when it arrived on our porch. It goes on your mattress just like a fitted sheet and will automatically learn your preferences to cool or warm your side of the bed up to 20 degrees. It's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time-
- CWChris Williamson
Sleep phases
- EJEric Jorgenson
... sleep phases-
- 25:12 – 28:39
How Much Does Elon Really Sleep?
- EJEric Jorgenson
on a-
- CWChris Williamson
What's that, what's that story? It's from the Isaacson book, but I think it's pretty telling. What's that story about when he needed to do an investor meeting and the COO came in and found him, like, catatonic under his, under his desk, and basically had to, like, force him to get up?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. He was, so doing an earnings call and, um... I d- I think this was, like, 2018. This is, like, the end of a really long stretch of just, like, miserable stuff, and I think he was in a really tough spot psychologically, and he was just, like, lying on the floor.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and yeah, [chuckles] this guy, to his credit, like, he's like, has experience with psychological illnesses in his family-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... and challenges, and so he kinda knew what to do, and he, like, went in and laid on the floor next to him and was like, "How you doing, buddy?"
- CWChris Williamson
Just went and go-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like-
- CWChris Williamson
... under the desk?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
Okay
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, lay, laid down next to him, was like-
- CWChris Williamson
Okay
- EJEric Jorgenson
... "How you doing?" Like, "I know it's hard. Gonna take a couple more minutes, and we gotta get up, and we gotta do this, do our best." And, um, it's hard. Like, I think, I think he puts himself through a lot. Like, Elon burns the boats and-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... challenges himself and-
- CWChris Williamson
But he does have limits
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, I think he balances himself-
- CWChris Williamson
I mean, if you're lying under your desk catatonic, that's a limit
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I... Do... He, uh, the, in the 2008 crisis, he was... Tallulah Riley talks about him, like, having night terrors. He's, like, sitting up all night. Um, he's thr- he's throwing up. He's having, like, screaming nightmares. Um, but that goes back to, like, I, like, I don't want to live that experience.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But it gives you a sense of how far y- people can push themselves and how far...
- CWChris Williamson
I, I... Look, the way that I see, uh, Elon is not too dissimilar to the way that I see Bryan Johnson and also David Goggins, which is there are people who will go to the 99.999th percentile of anything and everything.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
And it's useful to have them around because they teach you all of the lessons that you learn by going to the absolute edge.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
But that doesn't mean that you should try and follow what it is that they're doing.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
It doesn't mean that it's a good strategy for anybody else to do. But if you're gonna try and say that, uh, Bryan Johnson going and basically being like a scout in a... He's, he's g- essentially the same thing as a scout in an army.
- 28:39 – 30:25
Why You Should Feel the Pain of Your Decisions
- EJEric Jorgenson
is that?
- CWChris Williamson
Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions
- EJEric Jorgenson
Mm. Yeah. Th- this one is, uh, comes from, like, the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization, but I think it's a very generalizable rule.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, it, this version is like you want the designers and the engineers and the manufacturers, like, they all work in the plant so they can see the downstream effects of the decisions that they make in the design process.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, it's very, it's very easy to try to break your feedback loop and not sense when you're doing something harmful or even not missing an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you
- CWChris Williamson
I think that, uh, the idea of not insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions, uh, is probably a good... I mean, there has to be some times where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf. But I know, what's that? You, you, you have to locate, uh, physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
Basically the same rule
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. He, and in the, on the production line, it's like walk to the red. There's, like, green or red everywhere on the production line. And it's like if something is red, there's a problem. Go there immediately.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, there's, there's a couple versions of it. Physically move yourself immediately where the product... He's, you should see his, like, if you track his private jet, it's like pa, pa, pa, pa, pa, pa all over the world constantly on the move. Um, and so it's not just, like, locally move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately. Call the people, get them in the room, go there. Like, it's an underrated thing to be physically where the problem is.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
And whatever the most important... This goes back to the kind of, like, the original multiplying things of, like, whatever the most important thing to do is, whatever the limiting factor is, attack it immediately in the most effective way possible, which is usually going physically to where the problem is-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... and seeing it for yourself directly or pulling in all the people that have a hand in it
- 30:25 – 32:00
The Smartest Way to Compress Your Timeline
- CWChris Williamson
Do things in parallel
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah, George and I were talking about this this morning, because I think there's like conventionally good wisdom that is focus, and this was one of the things I was surprised by. Um, Warren Buffett's the perfect quote to like explain this concept at a high level, which is like, "You can't get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant."
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs] Elon's tried.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs] So y- you just-- There are some things that there's an incompressible amount of time.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And if you put those in sequence, now all of a sudden your timeline is this long. But if you can plant all the seeds at the same time and they're growing in parallel, all of a sudden your timeline is shrunk by a third. And I was th- at the grandest scale, it's kind of like most normal people would start an electric car company, grow it, make it successful, and then start their space company. And he was like, "Nah, I think I can do both at once. We'll just give it a try," um, because we might be able to move the total timeline of success up dramatically and it's harder and it's riskier, but it also generates returns sooner. Um, and I think there's only some problems that are like this is the right approach for. Uh, and he talked about in PayPal, he's like, "We were developing the product and trying to do all these integrations and trying to get, um, like regulatory covered," and he was like, "We did all of them all at once and it was fucking chaos, but we launched in a year instead of the three years that would've been conventional wisdom of like it doesn't make sense to invest in the product until we have the permission and we don't have the integrations until we have the product." He was like, "Nope, do it all at once. Launch immediately."
- CWChris Williamson
Wild.
- 32:00 – 33:11
Why Taking Risks Isn’t Optional
- CWChris Williamson
Wild. Uh, we should not be afraid of doing something important simply because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur. This is more of that bias for action, this sort of disregard of fear.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And even, even further than that, it's, it's, uh... I think this comes from his study of history in, in a lot of ways. He says, I think the extended version of that quote is like, "If we did, if you, if you never take a risk, like the, the United States wouldn't exist." Like every great adventure involves risk and people will die, and we have to accept that. We are-- The pendulum has swung too far towards like, oh my God, nobody can ever be harmed in any way. Nobody is allowed to risk their life. Nobody's allowed to take experimental treatments. He's like, "We can't make progress like this."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
You know, colonizing Mars is a grand adventure. It involves a risk. Like not everything is gonna go right, but especially if people choose to take those risks or risk their life to accomplish this great feat for humankind, there's something inherent about humans sort of feeling fulfilled sacrificing themselves to further humanity as a whole. And I think to me that quote is like, yeah, damn the torpedoes, uh, like let's do it.
- 33:11 – 34:56
The Biggest Myth About Elon Musk
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think is the most misleading narrative about Elon's success?
- EJEric Jorgenson
It depends which camp you're kind of coming from. I think there are diehard fanboys that have just l- like total blindfold to the, the negatives. Um, and I think there's a lot of people, especially after his sort of political chapter, that have just a whole bunch of ideas that are factually incorrect that they believe as deep truths. Um, I mean, like anybody who is, uh, one of the most famous people on Earth, right? Like, and past a certain level of fame, I think there's like a derangement syndrome about everybody.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, so I think it's actually kind of hard to find a neutral or a like well-rounded set of opinions on him.
- CWChris Williamson
That's a good point. I, I was thinking about Elon in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg, and, um, s- sure, there's some people that don't like Mark. The, the people of Kauai aren't massive fans of him buying up a ton of land, and there's other bits and pieces. But I don't think people have like insane fervor against him or insane fervor for him.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, but Elon seems to be much more barbelly, right? If you were to draw a graph, it's just a pair of boobs at the end.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, whereas, you know, most, most people are kind of a bell curve-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... whereas Elon's managed to completely clear the middle.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I don't think that used to be true. Like is that, is that... Do you think that's a byproduct of him having a political chapter?
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, yeah, I guess so, and then that creates the foundation, and on top of that is wealth, huge amounts of wealth, this potential IPO thing.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Um-
- EJEric Jorgenson
He's spiky. I mean, he's, he is like, he's a, an unrefined sense of humor that he like puts out there.
- CWChris Williamson
What do you... If he's so concerned about the bias to action, working on the biggest problem, the bottlenecks, et cetera,
- 34:56 – 37:55
Why Elon’s Media Strategy is So Powerful
- CWChris Williamson
why have such a public presence? Like why tweet a lot? I, yeah, you own the platform or whatever, but, uh, podcasts and a l- interviews and stuff like that, if you're the... I compare him with someone like James Dyson-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Right
- CWChris Williamson
... who kind of from some areas of a skill set is not massively different.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And Senra told me about when he sat down with James Dyson. James Dyson's done thousand, maybe tens of thousands of prototypes.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
He said he was looking at James Dyson's hands. Said James Dyson's hands were like Alex Honnold's hands, these gnarled, y- you could, the sinewy, tough, thick things, these fucking chodes on the end of his-
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
... the end of his arms. And, um, I don't know, the, the, that, that element, for instance, what's the role that that level of exposure is playing I think is an interesting one.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. He's had a, he's had sort of a taste for that for a long time, I think. Um, you know, he's like dated actresses and kind of living in LA. Um, but there's an element to which like having that personal presence and talking about what you're doing, like he needs to rally support. Like y- you need a great team, you need investors, you need popular support. Like think about how hard it was to convince people that electric cars were not just not stupid, but fucking awesome.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like that took a lot of repetition, a lot of messaging.
- CWChris Williamson
It is mad to think when you, when you, uh, roll back the clock that the Prius was like the eminent, preeminent-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... fucking electric car.
- EJEric Jorgenson
It was just a hybrid. Like-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- EJEric Jorgenson
... the real electric cars were even worse.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. It was, it was really, um... I think it's difficult now to understand how stupid and insane it seemed when he started Tesla.And the same thing with the rocket. Like, there were no space startups. Like, a space economy was not a thing, and NASA had been on this, like, slow decline for, like, 50 years. We were paying Russia to take our astronauts up to the space station.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, um, these were by no means... It was not just not obvious, but, like, very consensus insane things to do.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 37:55 – 43:20
What Most People Still Don’t Understand About SpaceX
- CWChris Williamson
Talk to me about SpaceX. What's the... W- what do most people not understand about that, that project to where-- how he sort of got it to where it is and his plans?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, SpaceX, I think most people don't realize, started as, like, a pure philanthropy project. He was looking at the NASA website saying, "When are we gonna go to Mars? We went to the moon 50 years ago. Why haven't we been back, and when are we gonna go to Mars? Surely there's a plan." And there was no plan, and he was coming off of his first exit with PayPal. Um, so he had $200 million or something in the bank, and he's like, "I'll just spend 100 million to, like, see if I can increase NASA's budget." It was pure philanthropy. He's like, "I'm gonna buy a rocket. I'm gonna make a little greenhouse. I'm gonna ship it to Mars, and I'm gonna get a photo of a little baby plant on the red planet. It'll be the first life on another planet, and that'll catalyze this movement-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... and inspire people, this popular-
- CWChris Williamson
That was the, that was the-
- EJEric Jorgenson
This popular movement
- CWChris Williamson
... origin story.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah, it was called Mars Oasis. That was the thing, and to do this, he, like, went around trying to buy a rocket. He's like, "Why are these rockets so fucking expensive?" He went to Russia and tried to buy an intercontinental ICBM. [laughs] And they laughed at him, and spit on him, and, like, fucked him around, and he got pissed. And so he's like, "Maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
"How... Why are rockets so expensive? Can't they be done better?" And so he gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience at his house, and I think this is a, a interesting part of the story is, like, did a series of, like, Saturday sessions of, like, first principles, let's look at all the historical things. But let's also say, like, how good could, could be with all the modern technology-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... modern design. Like, is there a design that we can come up with that would be a massive improvement in space launch costs such that this would be possible? And he realized, like, the market for space launch, w- that was the bottleneck. That was the real problem, that, like, he couldn't get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was space shuttle, which is this, like, massive, bloated government program that's not particularly capital efficient. They weren't iterating. They weren't doing volume. Um, they were s- s- way overspending on basic parts because they were all, like, aerospace grade or whatever. And so as soon as the PayPal thing sold, he's like, "All right. I'm gonna go. I'm gonna hire some rocket engineers and, like, let's see if we can do this."
- CWChris Williamson
Wasn't the original, like, the Apollo 11 blueprints available just free online? Wasn't that part of it, that you were able to get rocket blueprints? You could just download them, I think, or maybe he made his available for free.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Maybe. I mean, he's... Like, when you a- he's not a rocket scientist, so he's like, "How did you learn how to do this?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And he's like, "I just read books, and I talked to people. I read all the textbooks on rocket science that I could find. I borrowed them, and I started talking to experts." And his, his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was, like, the sig- the foremost, like, rocket hobbyist. He had built the single largest, like, rocket engine as just a dude in his garage, Tom Mueller, and that was his propulsion engineer.
- CWChris Williamson
You hire it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Y- you fucking hire it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, okay, and then what about now? Like, what... Obviously, the cost has come down by some insane factor. I know that much.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah, orders of magnitude-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- EJEric Jorgenson
... which has, has driven Starlink and is gonna dri- dr- drive even more. Um, and d- now he's talking about, like, building a Dyson sphere, which is, like, solar, but in space, so we can capture more energy than even hits the, the Earth from the sun.
- CWChris Williamson
And hasn't he been talking about putting compute in space as well?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah, yeah. These, these, like, big flat sheets that are, like, solar panels with compute and then, like n-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, so that's the same
- EJEric Jorgenson
... network together with lasers. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, okay.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- 43:20 – 44:58
How Big Could SpaceX Actually Become?
- CWChris Williamson
How successful do you think SpaceX is gonna be long term?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Unbelievably. They have a, essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the planet, and like- [laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, there, there's some 90 if not 99-
- CWChris Williamson
Do not pass go. Do not go to the moon. Give me $200.
- EJEric Jorgenson
They could have been the great- one of the greatest companies on Earth even if they never built Starship, even if they just, like, cash flowed off of Falcon 9 and they were the only reusable rocket company.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
They would've been an unbelievably successful company, but they are reinvesting into Starship, um, they're trying to build compute and, uh, and, um, energy in space. They're trying to build a... I think he's been talking now about, like, a mass driver on the moon that'll build these, like, von Neumann probes and all kinds of other crazy stuff. But if y- the historical analogy that he talks about is, like, this is when the New World was discovered. Like, we all existed around the Mediterranean for, like, most of Western human history.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And then all of a sudden Columbus discovered the New World, and it's like, all right, we need new shipping technology. We have a taste for all of the fineries of this new world.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
So many people wanna pay for passage, and it's like this economic bonanza. And j- just zoom all the way out again, and, like, the... where are most of the raw materials in the solar system, let alone the galaxy? Like, not on Earth. We have this bias to the, the, the only raw materials that matter are, like, wood and farmland, but there are raw materials, atomic raw materials, on every other world and in the asteroid belt and just, like, floating around in space. Um, and getting the technology, the Starship, to go access them is going to be an unbelievable boon for humanity. But it does take that, like, leap of imagination to get there.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 44:58 – 46:43
What’s Tesla’s Next Move?
- CWChris Williamson
What about Tesla?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Tesla is, I think, going through... Like, these startups are stacked S curves, right? And so electric cars was one very fundamental inno- innovation. Um, autonomy is a whole nother one, and so a big question mark is this leap to autonomy. And then he's already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And already-
- CWChris Williamson
That's going under Tesla?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Humanoid robots are in Tesla. He's, he's just shut down, um, the Model X and the Model S-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... production lines and switched them over to building humanoid robots. So, like, that is coming quickly. Um, he's going from h- starting to build robotaxis that are, like, fully autonomous, no steering wheel. Um, so thinking that the autonomy kind of curve is there, and he talks about this being one of the biggest markets of all time, and that Optimus is even bigger. He's also now... I think this is underrated because it's a, not a consumer product, but he's building, they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries, um, which is powering the kind of like solar to battery grid conversion-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... uh, which is gonna speed up energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution. Um, and then there's a whole nother kind of c- they, they are backwards vertically integrated. They're producing... They just built a new lithium refinery, and so they're like, "We c- we, we are supply constrained in many cases." And so they're, like, working backwards, um, further and further into their supply chain.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, I mean, literally to the point where they're looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. He does, did say he thinks Tesla's gonna have a factory on the moon, which, like, I don't know. I don't know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what, but, um, he did... X is now owned by xAI, which is now owned by SpaceX, so there's some sort of congealing.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But I don't know if Tesla and, and SpaceX will, will merge at
- 46:43 – 53:05
Will Humanoid Robots Actually Be Useful?
- EJEric Jorgenson
some point.
- CWChris Williamson
What about these humanoid robots?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I mean, I don't know. It's either gonna be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally, like, breaks the economy and ushers in this crazy era of abundance, um, but I, I think it'll be slow adoption just 'cause people are slow to adopt things that are, in particular, when they're, like, in the uncanny valley.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
So commercial uses, I think there'll be, like, a ton of them in factories and stuff like that, but also some of the robotics engineers come in and say, like, humanoid is, sure, it's generalizable, but, like, there's almost always a better, more specific form function robot to use for a use case. Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Right. Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
So-
- CWChris Williamson
Why would we constrain this general purpose robot to have our, like, dimensions-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Mm-hmm
- CWChris Williamson
... when you could get one that cracks eggs, and one that cleans the dishes, and one that etc.?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. You might just need, like, two arms on a rail in your kitchen, and that's your kitchen robot.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
You might just need, like, two arms on your washer, and that's your laundry robot.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And, like, you might not actually want one that can, like, walk around your house and feel like a person.
- CWChris Williamson
Have you seen... What was the super widely publicized one that kind of had a knitted jumper and a knitted face? Um-
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think that was Optimus.
- CWChris Williamson
No, it wasn't.
- EJEric Jorgenson
No?
- CWChris Williamson
It wasn't. It's already shipped. It's already out-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Oh
- CWChris Williamson
... and floating around.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Oh.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, there was an advert. There was a billboard on, uh, like, East 6th Street for it, and I thought it was just such a funny place to put it. Anyway, uh, there was this video that someone had put of it trying to load dishes into the dishwasher, and it's got this weird-
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
... position. It's sort of leaning like this, and somebody had captioned it as, uh, "Me every time that it's 6:00 AM at a ketamine afterparty."
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
And it literally looks like it's done too much ketamine, and it's, like, all contorted. It's, like, in a really fucking weird position. Um, but yeah, I, I don't know. I... You're right to say as soon as you step outside of the existing bucket of what people use things for, like, going from driving a F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla, ah, you know, I can kinda see how it works a little bit.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
People were nervous about, uh, full self-driving, but after a while, okay, there we go. There we go.W- g- th- no one has, no one's looking at the fact, oh, well, I already have a dishwasher-
- 53:05 – 55:13
Are Meta Glasses Always Watching?
- CWChris Williamson
trained.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Did you see the thing about the Meta Glasses recently? This is like, I'm not sure if this is in the press or I've just read this in a tweet, but it's like those are always recording, even if they're like not on your-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, and some, some, uh, uh, like African fucking AI labelers were able to see the faces weren't blurred out or something.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, somebody just like puts the glasses on the nightstand and then like, you know, the spouse comes in and starts changing and there's like Nigerians like sitting there tagging data of like, "Yep, that's your wife changing clothes," um, because this thing doesn't stop recording. Like-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh
- EJEric Jorgenson
... the, you know, I'd rather wear it, you know, on my chest where I know [laughs] where it is-
- CWChris Williamson
Fucking put it in, put it in a lockbox at night
- EJEric Jorgenson
... put it down when I'm not on my, uh-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
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- 55:13 – 57:40
What is Elon’s Most Underrated Skill?
- CWChris Williamson
at checkout. What's underappreciated about Elon's skill sets, do you think? What are the things that people don't realize?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think the, the breadth of his skill set is, is quite interesting. Um, I think if you try to emulate just one or two of these traits, like without appreciating how they interconnect, you could either make some mistakes or be an asshole, depending on like how you went about it. Um, but I think he's, like he's a, I don't know, a micromanager, but he's like in the technical details because he has technical expertise and like a strong intuition around the physics of things. Um, he has a deep fluency across not just the, the physics and the engineering, but also the finance and the economics. Like he, he double majored in economics and physics-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
... in college. Um, and so from the very beginning, he's been like, here's a great line, "Like to truly control the product, you have to control the company." And he does not share power well, but there's been many times where he's made like a, a risky or a technical decision based on his sort of economic and opportunity cost view of the future of the business. And so even early in SpaceX he was, he was driving maniacal urgency because he's like, "The future of this business is $10 million in revenue a day, and every day we fuck around, like every time you burn a day, every time you burn 12 hours, you burn half of our future $10 million a day run rate." So like-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
... "Let's go, let's go, let's go." Um, so that mix of like really big picture and deep in the details, understanding the limiting factor, attacking it, which is a mix of like that's technical skill, that's economic fluency, that's like a, a sense of project management actually, um, and the ability to know how and when to like push, push people.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like if, if really, really smart rocket scientists are telling you, "That's impossible. No." And he's like, "Do it anyway."
- CWChris Williamson
[chuckles]
- EJEric Jorgenson
"Like, it is possible. I, I, I'm telling you it's possible. Go do it anyway." And you're seven out of 10 times, even like, even five out of, even one out of 10 times, 'cause every time that you're right about that, you've gained a, like a jewel that will pay off for the whole rest of your company.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And the nine times that you were wrong, like, "Oh, oh, I guess you were right. Impossible did mean impossible in that sense," or, "Maybe we'll revisit it next year," or, "What made it impossible? Maybe we can, we can break that down further." Um, and so it's this, the George Bernard Shaw quote, like, "All progress depends on the unreasonable man."
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like he's unreasonable.
- CWChris Williamson
The unreasonable man.
- 57:40 – 1:01:04
How Elon Has Trained His Memory Like a Machine
- CWChris Williamson
What about memory? It seems like he's got a pretty good memory.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. That was one of the things, um, he, he picked up really ear-early in life. He like read one of those memory trick books with the guys who like memorize a whole deck of cards. Um, and so he, he's been using memory tricks, um, which, you know, one of the things of like how the hell does he do what he does? You know, like five companies, d- many projects in all of them, taking technical reviews. Like it'd be hard to remember all these people's names, let alone like what they're doing week over week and where the bottlenecks are and all this stuff. And he's got... You know, he, he practiced those as a kid. Um, and so I think he still uses like memory palaces and some of these tricks, which are one of those things that like, that seems superhuman if, if you don't know how it works. Um, and there's a lot of stories of him... One of the ways he builds loyalty with his team actually is people are like, "Holy shit," when he, he knows a specific technical detail like of somebody's project that is like, you know, a, a re- has a direct report who has a direct report and he's like, he's like, "You're the bottleneck. What's going on?" And they're like, "This, this, and this." And he's like, "Try this." They're gonna like, "Holy shit, that worked. Like how did, how did you know that? You haven't like spent time in here." And it's this mix of-
- CWChris Williamson
I live with this every single day-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... and you just came in and-
- EJEric Jorgenson
And had it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. Like that's a mix of memory and intuition and incredible like, uh, recall and, and depth and feeling for that, like the physics of the thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Presumably risk and pain tolerance have to be two-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... big skills.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Well, he's, he's immersed in it, like absolutely immersed in it. And, and ba- like I think this is a place where the kind of the Asperger's is, can be an advantage. Like just lives in it over and over and over again.
- CWChris Williamson
Lives in what?
- EJEric Jorgenson
The details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are. Like-
- CWChris Williamson
That wouldn't suggest why pain and risk are more palatable, or maybe it would. I don't know. Maybe people who are a little spectrumy don't have the same detection of risk. They certainly don't have the same detection of other stuff.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Well, I think it, it really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of, right?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, "I'm gonna look like a failure. People are gonna think I'm wrong. It's gonna ruin these relationships." Like, he doesn't have any of that. And he says like, "It is a huge weakness to wanna be liked and I do not have it." Um-
- CWChris Williamson
It is a huge weakness to want to be liked and I do not have it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
He, he tries to like-
- CWChris Williamson
Weakness to want to be liked.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You don't think that he wants to be liked?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I do think he wants to be liked in a, in a general sense.
- CWChris Williamson
It's a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. The, the willingness to enter into dislike, I, maybe is the thing.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, um, I think, uh, you know, he, he tries to coach his managers and, uh, within the company versus outside the company, like are you willing to be misunderstood by the general public? And I... That's an interesting question. Like if you had the chance, pick your, pick your divisive opinion, right? Like are you pro-choice or pro-life? Are you open borders or closed borders? Whatever. Like if you had the chance to like flip the switch and make that decision, but the catch is everybody knew it was you, like are you willing to make 100 million enemies who will do, like lie, cheat, steal-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... fabricate, twist your words, like attack your family, do anything because like they hate the decision that you made? Like, are you willing to do that? I think most people are not. And agree with or disagree with any particular decision, like, uh, respect the, the commitment and the courage that it takes to go do that.
- 1:01:04 – 1:05:05
What Did Eric Discover That Biographies Miss?
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think you learned about Elon that most biographies miss? What did doing this kind of a book teach you that biographies don't get at?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think I got way deeper in the tactics. Like I tr- I try to... My north star for these books is usefulness to the reader. Like, I try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And the, I wanna simulate the feeling of being at dinner with Elon Musk. Like it's, it's written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that'sDoesn't feel like you would be curious about it from a sense of like, how do I improve my own life and how did, how did this happen? Um-
- CWChris Williamson
Didn't The Navalmanac, isn't that per word the most highlighted book in Kindle history or something? Is that a stat that I made up?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Maybe. I was trying to make it that. I don't-
- CWChris Williamson
Right
- EJEric Jorgenson
... I, I don't think Kindle will, like, give me that. Readwise said it's, like, in their-
- CWChris Williamson
Top whatever.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
But that would be also including distribution, probably not per word. Like, it-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... what you want is for people who read this book-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes
- CWChris Williamson
... how much of the book is highlighted on Kindle.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And, and I wa- I wanna see, like... I love when people show me, like, beat to shit copies of their book.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, it's been in and out of a sauna, their backpack-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- EJEric Jorgenson
... their everything. It's so satisfying.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Just wring it out.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Uh, okay, so that, like, biography miss-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Oh, yeah, yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... the tactic.
- EJEric Jorgenson
I, I just go deeper into how. Like, how does that person accomplish what they do? What are their... What is their secret sauce? I feel like biographers kind of come at this from, like, how comprehensive and correct can I be about their whole history, not what's the most useful thing that you would pull out of the biography. Like, that... I think that's why, like, David Senra's episodes are amazing, 'cause he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down, and that is, like, my approach is, like, take a million words and turn it into 50,000 of the most useful ones.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is, like, actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through, and how timeless can it be and how universally can it be applied. Like, I think anybody on Earth can take something useful out of this, and I over and over again kind of sift it through that filter.
- 1:05:05 – 1:06:58
The “Idiot Index” That Slashes Costs
- CWChris Williamson
One of the most interesting ideas is the Idiot Index.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
What's that?
- EJEric Jorgenson
The Idiot Index, he, uh... It, it's kind of an outcropping. Uh, it's a, it's downstream of the first principles thinking. And so the Idiot Index applies to a particular part or a particular product, and it's the difference between the raw material cost and the price. And so the... An example, he, he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who, like, didn't know what the stupidest parts in his product were-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... in his composite 'cause that shows you where you're massively overpaying. So there was a part, um, there was, they were paying $13,000 for that was, like, one piece of steel, and if you just weighed it, the weight of that steel was worth, like, $200.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And so he's like, you multiply the price of the raw material or di- divide that out of the f- total price and, like, I don't know what that is off the top of my head, a big number.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like, that's fucking stupid. We're overpaying by, like, 50x for that thing. So, like, how cheaply can you get the steel and then get it into that shape? And you get those insane Idiot Indexes, especially in aerospace because people outsource and then outsource and then outsource, and so there's, like, layers of delegation and profit. If you find anybody who's like-
- CWChris Williamson
Everyone is arbitrage-ing their profit off the top of this final thing-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... that ends up coming down.
- EJEric Jorgenson
There's like-
- CWChris Williamson
There's a Rolls-Royce that make the engine, but before that, the turbine is milled in this place, and before that, the raw materials are mined out of-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. There's like five subcontractors before you get, like, one guy who's, like, welding a thing together.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And you're like, "Oh, just bring that guy over here," and then the part is, like, 400 bucks.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Great.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
We just saved $12,000.
- CWChris Williamson
I guess asking the question, why is this so expensive-
- EJEric Jorgenson
100%
- CWChris Williamson
... becomes quite a powerful question.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. And then power ranking the things, like what is most expensive? Like, we're attacking that one. What's the second most expensive? We're attacking that one. And this is how... I mean, this is how he's able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and
- 1:06:58 – 1:09:08
Elon’s Biggest Cost-Cutting Breakthroughs
- EJEric Jorgenson
more and more available.
- CWChris Williamson
What have been the biggest cost breakthroughs? What have been the ones that have completely unlocked SpaceX, Tesla?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I, I think it's a million little ones all stacked up.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Right? So, like, there... That, that one example, like $13,000 to 200 is, like, more than two orders of magnitude. You know, it's like 500x or something. Um, there's, there's a story about, like, a latch that was supposed to be $1,000 or something, and a guy just, like, looked at it and was like, "Kind of looks like a bathroom stall latch." And so he, like, went to Home Depot, bought a bathroom stall latch, and was like, did a little, did a little ma- magic on it, and was like, "Okay, did it. 50 bucks. Boom." Um, and so it, it's just that scrappiness over every single part, every single part, every single part. And, you know, it's, it's just the simple things done over and over and over again with, like, ruthless intensity.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Really, it, it goes back to the, the kind of the quote that you brought up about like feeling the pain of your decisions. Like if there's a company making money by selling a part that they bought from a subcontractor for $100 and then selling it at $500, like who cares? And if the ultimate buyer is the government who like can just have a black box budget, like fine, doesn't matter. But if Elon comes in and says like, "I need to drop the cost of space launch by two orders of magnitude in order to accomplish this thing, and then two more orders of magnitude because we need to get to fucking Mars," then like now the goal, the bar is so much higher and you start asking questions like, how cheap can it get? How cheap can it get? Can't we do this cheaper? Do we need that part at all? Like simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs. Um, and, and that's, you know, when, when it's SpaceX it feels more abstract because like none of us are consuming rockets. But if we're buying a Tesla, we care a lot whether it's $20,000 or $30,000. That's massive, and that changes by a huge number, the number of people who can access a nice car that's safe that doesn't pollute, right? And so like if in five or 10 more years we keep doing these things, we keep eliminating parts, we keep increasing scale, we keep, uh, lowering the idiot, idiot index of every part, then like now the car's $10,000 and it's like an absolute no-brainer.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and the, the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner.
- 1:09:08 – 1:11:49
How Elon Crafted a Formidable Workforce
- CWChris Williamson
As you move forward, allies will assemble around you.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, there's no better example than Chris Williamson.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs] Because of all of my allies?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. I mean, th-think this like, this started with you and a microphone.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Right? Like what, seven years ago?
- CWChris Williamson
Eight.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Eight years ago?
- CWChris Williamson
Yep.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like 1,000 episodes later, there's, uh, there's like an army at your back.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
You got an incredible team here. You've got millions of listeners. You got people all around the world who are like excited to see you tour. Um, but you didn't wait for a million people to like demand for you to create a podcast. You started, and you had one fan, and then two, and then four, and then eight. And, you know, 1,000 episodes later, like here you are. You just have to start carrying that flag.
- CWChris Williamson
Do you think... 'Cause wh- when people think about Elon, when they talk about him, a lot of the time it is this, it's quite cantankerous. It, it's adversarial. There is this super aggression, the bias for action and the urgency. All of this would make you think, uh, difficult to work for, hiring and firing. Maybe there is a, a runway for each individual member of staff.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I reckon I can get on average, I would love to know what the average tenure is. You know, and I get nine months out of people, but I get nine months of 100 hours a week-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... or something like that, let's say.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
You go, okay, well, that... and that is just the cost of doing business. In order to push people at the pace that I want to, I need to have a bigger staff base in order to do that. Have you got any idea about how he hires, about what his hiring process is like? He must have just the most insane HR department that is constantly trying to put out fires as pe-
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
... people, yeah, there... just permanently ju- people just like fucking exiting the business because I've, I can't like-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... you know, it's like, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio dating someone who's 25, and you're like fucking-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Time turns up
- CWChris Williamson
... the day that she... Yeah, exactly.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Like, what? 26, you're out. Like, you know?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. But Elon talks about as being like phony and rich of like people have a certain level of success, and then he is like, "You, you gone soft. Like I'm not getting, we're not getting enough out of you anymore. You're not dedicated enough," um, and people exit. H- his hiring process is, you know, at least he speaks about it very simply. He's like, "I'm looking for evidence of exceptional ability." And he wants to hire young, brilliant engineers, even if they're not necessarily like super trained, but they have the capability to solve problems in this really quick way. And the culture I think is such, he's done a amazing job of like building that intensity and the decision-making process into the culture such that like people who come in are kind of brought along and swept up in it and carried through.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like they, you, you do go through that machine. Um, but those allies assembling around you, like people have to choose to come work for you and it's because he chose these giant purposes. Um, but i- it, you know, it's easy to forget that these started really small and really crazy, and he had to paint these big pictures to get people to be excited and show up and give their all
- 1:11:49 – 1:13:18
Not Everything Needs to Be Optimised
- EJEric Jorgenson
for it.
- CWChris Williamson
The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. This is, uh, he likens this to like school teaches us to solve the problem in front of us. Like you can't reject a question on a test.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But actually you're-
- CWChris Williamson
Oh, this is a stupid question. I don't want to answer it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. Dumb. Don't like it.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Take it back.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Oh, 100%. Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Congratulations. Here's your A. It doesn't happen. Um, so the piece that he... The first step of the algorithm, this is his like five-step engineering process, is to question the requirements, and then the second is to try very, very hard to delete the part or process. You know, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. So if something can be deleted, the product gets simpler, and simplicity, as he says, delivers both reliability and low cost. And so I think it is this, we spend so much time doing things or optimizing things that, that truly don't need to exist.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and if you look at, you know, the complexity of plenty of products around us, it's like, did nobody try to put these parts together? Um, but it, when you're trying to build a car out of 10,000 different parts, you're like, all right, every time I can put, I can combine these two things, it's one less thing to attach to another, and then it's four less parts because I don't need these two screws to connect these two parts together. Um, and it's less tolerance. Like it's, it's less things that can space to show up-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... in the thing, and there's less things that can fall apart if they're one unit instead of two. So it is part of the process to just revisit and revisit and revisit.
- 1:13:18 – 1:16:26
Why Great Leaders Always Lead From the Front
- CWChris Williamson
If you don't eat the glass, you're not going to be successful.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Oh, yeah. His, uh, I think this is originally a Bill Lee quote, who's a friend of his, and entrepreneurship is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. And I think the follow-up is like, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.
- CWChris Williamson
Taste your own blood. Yeah. Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I think [clears throat] the, it is a sad lesson for people who are on the outside of business that like the idea of running a business, that at some point all of the problems will go away.But you are the person in charge of the problems.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Like that's your, your job is to find the biggest problem and to always be at the vanguard of trying to fix that problem, and at no point throughout your entire career will there be no problems. And given that you are ultimately the problem solver that the buck stops with-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... guess what? It's gonna be on you, and it's gonna be on you for the rest of time, and if the business is in decline, that is a problem, and if the business is in ascendancy, you will have new, bigger problems as you push new frontiers.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes. You better fall in love with solving problems.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, it's a very interesting, uh... He, he didn't originally set out as CEO of Tesla, and he didn't-- he says he didn't wanna become CEO of Tesla, and he just felt like compelled to do it at a certain point because if he didn't, he felt like it, the company would've failed.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And the, the sense of like internalizing responsibility of like the, the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for, for comfort or my desire to avoid problems. It's like as CEO, you are dealing with a, a distillation of the worst problems in the company, and that's the chewing glass piece. Like if you're not going to the hard part, if you're not tackling the hardest thing, then, you know, that denial or that lack of urgency or that w-willful blindness is going to catch up with you, and the company's gonna suffer.
- CWChris Williamson
Well, yeah, because ultimately that is the biggest bottleneck, right? That is-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... the thing that is holding everything else up.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And if you're the leader, where you direct that attention is where the organization sort of chooses to focus.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, what's that thing that Formula 1 drivers talk about, "Don't look at the wall"? Like the car goes where you look.
- EJEric Jorgenson
The car goes where you look, yep.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. And the b- the company will go where you look and presumably all of the staff that work for you as well.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yep. Yeah, which I think is another part of like his... This comes from the military history of like being a battlefield general, always being at the front. Your troops fight harder when you're there. This is why he sleeps in the factory. This is why he physically goes to wherever the problem is immediately.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like that leading from the front is a part of how he gets so much out of the people that he works with.
- CWChris Williamson
I'm doing it. I'm in the trenches. I'm sleeping on the factory floor.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
You can do it too.
- EJEric Jorgenson
We are s- we are suffering together-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... like for a good cause. It's worth it. We can do it.
- 1:16:26 – 1:18:34
Inside the Chaos of Elon’s Mind
- CWChris Williamson
What do you think the inside of his mind's like to exist in that?
- EJEric Jorgenson
He calls it a, a storm or a nonstop explosion. Uh, those are like the two ways he's described it, and, uh, somebody was like, "Is it a happy storm?" He's like, "No." I, I don't know that he's been formally diagnosed, but I think he has talked about either tendencies towards not just Asperger's, but also, um, some bipolar tendencies, and that's a hard hand, with, especially with, you know, a traumatic childhood-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... um, and the, the s-stresses that he deals with, you know, publicly and privately and like he's-- he carries a heavy load.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Do you think he's actually a genius, or is he just someone who's consistently applying a handful of sort of brutal principles over and over again?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think it's both.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, I think he's-- I think there's sufficient evidence that he is w-certainly above average, if not like way up there in, in IQ. Um, you know, he was precocious. He was like the head of his class as a kid and, um, coding video games when he was 12 and like, you know, had a patent, his name on a patent when he was like 20. So like I think people who go around being like, "Elon's an idiot, everybody else does all the work," is like, that is just not an informed opinion at all. But I don't think he's a thousand times smarter than any other human who's ever lived. And so the difference between like, all right, he's smart, he's probably, you know, certainly smarter than me, but like he's not... That does not explain the difference in order of magnitudes of the outcome.
- CWChris Williamson
It seems like level of smart, tolerance for risk, bias for action, and work rate, at least from what we've been talking about, those seem to be four of the big drivers.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And grand quests, I think. I think that's a, that is a key piece of actually like what makes him special. I think if he, if he applied like, you know, massive work ethic and first principles and ingenuity to like reinventing insurance, it just like wouldn't, wouldn't have the same zest and zeal, and it wouldn't have the same like level of outlier results.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- 1:18:34 – 1:25:20
Why Humanity is at the Core of Elon’s Mission
- CWChris Williamson
What is the purpose piece? How does that sort of factor in?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think it's an interesting-- I think he cares very deeply about humanity as a whole. Um, I think it's, it's a, it's an interesting paradox where he's like people who criticize him for like being cruel or whatever to people he works with and like coming down hard on them or having really high expectations or, um, being mean or firing people capriciously or whatever. But as he explains, it's like, "I am-- Yes, I push people really hard. I sometimes step on toes, but I do that in service of this mission that serves all of us," which is making life multi-planetary-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- EJEric Jorgenson
... or electrifying transport, um, advancing clean energy. W-If it's Neuralink, it's like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics like control computers or eventually walk again. That also has some AI alignment components to it. Um, he's-- There's a chapter in the book called like, "My companies are philanthropy." Everyth-everything that he starts or all the technologies that he tries to advance come from this inherent love of humanity and the desire to solve problems that make collectively our lives better or preserve consciousness itself.
- CWChris Williamson
So your first book is on my list of 100 books to read, and there's a top five at the top, which are the ones that everybody should start with, and it's in that. One of the other ones that's in there is The Precipice by Toby Ord, and that's all about existential risk, how humanity could go extinct, from supervolcanoes to s-supernova explosions toNanotechnology and engineered pandemics and natural pandemics and AI and all the rest of it, but you did a section on X risk as well
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
Why is that important?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I, I almo- early stages of this book, I didn't have it in there. Um, and it wasn't until the purpose piece kind of clarified itself that I was like, "Oh, this is actually like the frame through which he v- is, is so motivated." Um, a- as what I'm sure that d- that book goes into great detail about it, but like there's been many extinction events in human history, or not in human history, but in Earth's history. Like many species, most species were wiped out multiple times, entire continents destroyed, like asteroids have hit Earth in the past. We don't know if things have like evolved and then been killed. But his big motivation is like make life multi-planetary, preserve the only form of consciousness that we're aware of that exists in the world, in the universe, which is ourselves.
- CWChris Williamson
Right.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And we're gonna feel pretty stupid if we destroy ourselves before we [chuckles] before we back ourselves up, like back up the hard drive.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
And his point is like, you know, we've been around, Earth has been around a really long time. Humanity has not been around so long. Civilization is very young, like we're only 10,000 years into what could be a million year civilization, but we've got to take this first step, um, off the planet and into the solar system. And i- if we fuck this up before we get off the planet, like big L.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah. Well, I think, uh, what, what's fascinating to me is I wonder about, uh, people who are very singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I think that's so funny that y- uh, assuming that you weren't born a slave and you couldn't have raised out of anything, if there's some sort of egalitarian meritocracy and you can just like toss them into the Roman Empire or toss them into the middle of the War of the Roses or something-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... and just watch what happens.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I don't know, man. It, it certainly seems like it's the time to have somebody that's like that, um, regardless of what is going on personally, what you think about ethics and all the rest of it. Um, I, I remember he gave this interview, it was probably about three or four years ago, and he said something to the effect of, "What I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it."
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And there are a lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good, and I have no interest in that. And um, it's kind of the move fast, break things, I don't give a fuck what you think of me type approach. Even if that's untrue in some part, like an ability to be disliked, a preparedness to not care so much about optics in the way that other people do, um, it's a fucking big unlock.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Peter Thiel has a very interesting observation of like how high a percent of the successful founders, especially in tech, seem to be somewhere on the spectrum. And he's like, "What does it say about our society that the people who are like have a biological advantage in de-emphasizing the opinions of others are the ones-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... who more reliably seem to achieve an outlier success?"
- CWChris Williamson
Mm. Have you heard Jonathan Bi's approach? He says there's only three types of founders that are gonna be successful. Number one is megalomaniac.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, number two is autist, and number three is revenge fantasy. And megalomaniac, Adam Neumann from WeWork, uh, autist, Elon Musk, and revenge fantasy, Palmer Luckey.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Mm.
- CWChris Williamson
Um, although I think Palmer actually kind of has a bit of all three, and I think Elon probably has a bit of all three as well.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- 1:25:20 – 1:27:03
Has Eric Created a New Genre?
- CWChris Williamson
to titties. So look, dude, this, coming to the book process, which I think is fascinating, obviously, you write The Navalmanac, and then that kind of springboards you into this, pretty much the forefront of the self-published like pioneer space. What, what is this book? Like what are these books? Is it a new kind of biography? Is it a compendium? 'Cause it's, it's a very strange type of book to read, even though it's obviously been super popular. So is it a new genre?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I, I, I truly don't know what to call it. Like it's kind of weird. I even feel weird saying like I write this book because I feel like I build it.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle to me.
- CWChris Williamson
And it's much more about removal.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yes.
- CWChris Williamson
Right? Once you've got everything-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... this is everything that this person has ever said.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Now, how much of this block of marble do I need to remove before David's left?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. And just organizing and finding the thread so that it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the n- the previous idea, and it's just like a clean read all the way through.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh yeah, and then weaving, the, the, the weaving as well, I suppose.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
It's maybe more akin to clay than it is to marble.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. There, there's just, um... It is a weird thing. And it, it like it came out of loving... I mean, I'm, I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett, and like they never wrote books. But a lot of people built books out of their talks, their lectures, their letters, and I never knew what to call those either. But I just found myself asking like, "Who do I wish had written books?" And then realizing that the raw material is out there, and I've been lucky to get, you know, permission from Naval and Balaji and Elon to like build these things. Um, and I don't know what to call them, and I don't know how to [laughs] talk about it, but I like-
- CWChris Williamson
Well, it's fucking awesome-
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think it's been fun
- CWChris Williamson
... is what you can call it, dude.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
I think it's really, really good. Um, what,
- 1:27:03 – 1:30:18
How the Internet Supercharges Influence
- CWChris Williamson
what have you learned about the scale of the internet since obviously the Naval Almanac was a, a huge rip-roaring success and really sort of catapulted you. You weren't already that small before, but-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... that really sort of put you at the forefront.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Right.
- CWChris Williamson
What's it taught you about leverage online and that experience?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. It, it's easy. I feel like, um, anybody who's into podcasting, YouTube, social media knows intellectually that like the internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, but it sometimes takes a like palpable human experience to [laughs] be like, "Oh, shit. No, really." Like they are much bigger than you think. And I was really, um... I'm just surprised and delighted to like see that book take on a life of its own and see how many people recommended it and see how many people resonated. Like I, I thought I was-- Writing a book is like building a lighthouse where you're like, it, it has this ability to kind of like attract your people. In a podcast, I'm sure it's the same.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
You're like, you, you kind of put your values out there, and people who resonate with it are like, "Man, I really like that." And I was like, "Then we probably get along great." Like that's super cool and fun.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, and it's a great, it's a great life on the other side of that, creating something like that, um, and the relationships that come out of it, right? The, the thing, uh, the scale still blows me away. Like I j- I can't believe that we're, you know, this sells so well in China and India and all around the world and across so many different-
- CWChris Williamson
I can see India
- EJEric Jorgenson
... demographics. India, India makes a little more sense. That's fair. Um, but yeah, I just, I didn't... It was not on my like vision board that like yoga instructors in Bali were gonna be like reading The Almanac of Naval and that like-
- CWChris Williamson
Mm
- EJEric Jorgenson
... you know, it was gonna be so popular among like high school and college students.
- CWChris Williamson
We've been talking about, me and George have been talking about this a lot, and obviously we spoke about it last night. The, the TAM for The Book of Elon is way bigger than it is for Naval, but the potential hurdle of ideological disagreement-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... is also greater. So again, it's the boobies on the, on the like, uh, popularity graph.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Right? Lots of people that go, "Ah, I've got to," and then lots of people who go, "Never," as oppo- I don't know how many people have a fervent dislike of Naval. Most people probably didn't know.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
And it's like you should really read this. No one's gonna go-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like who? Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah, exactly. No one's gonna go, "You should really read this," and someone say, "Who is the book about?"
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm prepared. I sp- did spend a lot of time people like answering the question, who is Naval? Um, but I think once it's... It, it's just such a weird book. Like it's a weird title. It's a weird book. It was like crafted for a niche and just like broke out.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
But Elon is one of the most famous people on Earth, right? Like, um, and I think he's, he's not a polished presenter the way Steve Jobs is. I don't think people necessarily think of him as a like font of wisdom or like deep introspection, but he has fucking incredible ideas.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Like when you can really access them, like, and he's, his life story is just so, so many ups and downs, so many hard lessons, and he is a really good communicator actually. Like he's, he's got a gift for distilling things and bringing people along and finding a key metric, like honing a team, organizing people around a mission. And you know, some of these ideas in his book, you know, about being multi-planet, he's been talking about for 20 years.
- 1:30:18 – 1:34:48
Has Eric Applied Elon’s Methods to His Own Life?
- CWChris Williamson
What are the tactical principles or what, what are the ways that you've changed your life having gone through the process of writing this book?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think the first would be my focus on hydration.
- CWChris Williamson
[laughs]
- EJEric Jorgenson
Hydration makes a massive difference in how you perform, and hydration is more than just drinking water. LMNT is a tasty electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing that you don't. Each grab-and-go stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium, potassium, and magnesium with no sugar, no coloring, no artificial ingredients or any other BS. Free shipping in the US for a sample pack by going to drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom. If you don't like it for any reason, they will return your money, and you can keep the box. That's drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom.
- CWChris Williamson
Oh my God, he did it again. Is he doing all four? Is he doing all of them? Okay, yep. There you go. Oh, wow. Showing the product as well. Holy shit. Thank you, dude. That's a, that's a wonderful, that's a wonderful gift. That's the best gift that you could have given me, is a free ad read, because now I don't need to do it.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
How fan- how fucking fantastic.
- EJEric Jorgenson
I am also a deep personal fan of LMNT. I drink it after every workout and every sweat session.
- CWChris Williamson
It's fucking, it's fucking great. Uh-
- EJEric Jorgenson
I don't know who the other sponsors are. You're off the hook. That was a wrap.
- CWChris Williamson
Thank fuck for that.
- EJEric Jorgenson
[laughs]
- CWChris Williamson
Beyond... I f- I'm getting, getting jump scared by my own ad reads. Um, what have you applied to your life beyond Eight Sleep and LMNT? What have you applied to your life after learning about Elon?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I think it is, uh, the, the most meta is this sense that I'm capable of more than I think. Um, it has encouraged me to do more things in parallel, back to that like parallel gestation thing. Like I'm trying to run Scribd Media, which is a publishing company, and write a book, actually work on three at the same time, and podcast and invest. So like there's-It gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, "No, this is, this is doable and sane, and if these things are all sort of like stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long period of time." Um, the bias to urgency, I'm not working 100-hour weeks and running around the world on my private jet, but I do have a much stronger discipline around, like, where is the bottleneck? What's the most important problem to solve? How, what is the most effective way to solve it? How can I physically go to the problem?
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
How can I pull in the right people? Um, I think, like, the idea of a war room is kind of underrated of, like, what's the bottleneck? Gather the people. Like, attack it, the rest will kind of take care of itself.
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, it's not how a lot of companies are run, frankly. Like, a lot of them are like, oh, weekly meeting, do this, do that. Like, standard schedule.
- CWChris Williamson
It's procedural as opposed to tactical.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
What is the issue? Let's go after that. Is, let's go through it. You know, when I, I think about this, it makes me think about the difference between watching a UFC and boxing. When you watch boxing, does... It's this wei- It's almost ceremonial, this sort of monarch-like-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Mm
- CWChris Williamson
... weird vestige of the people doffing their caps. We must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th anniversary. And you're like, "What the fuck?" Whereas it's just, at the UFC, it's rock music, and the guy's-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... in the middle of the octagon, they start hitting each other. Um, and it kind of feels a little bit like that, that when you have... Why do we, why do we have an agenda? Why do we always have the same agenda for each of these meetings?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- CWChris Williamson
Why can't it just be what is the problem, given that the rate limit is constrained by the slowest moving-
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah
- CWChris Williamson
... part or person or department or whatever it might be.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah.
- 1:34:48 – 1:35:55
What’s Next For Eric?
- EJEric Jorgenson
rest.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck yeah. Eric Jorgenson, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go to check out everything you've got going on?
- EJEric Jorgenson
Uh, ejorgenson.com is my personal site. Elonmuskbook.org has everything for this book. Um, you can read it for free or listen to it for free if you want to. If you want to buy it on Amazon, rock on. Um, check out the Naval book and the Naval episode. We did 800 episodes five years ago.
- CWChris Williamson
Wow. That is a good one. I saw that you just released on Smart Friends the four-hour conversation on your YouTube.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Yeah. We just updated, Naval and I updated the audiobook. So I got to, like, spend a day, deep conversation, and kind of be like, all right, which of these ideas hold? Which are refined? Which have you changed? Um, it was a really cool, like, full circle kind of experience.
- CWChris Williamson
Unreal. Uh, what are you doing next, can you say?
- EJEric Jorgenson
I'm, I... The one I can say is I'm doing a book with David Senra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories from the, like, Founders Archive.
- CWChris Williamson
That will fucking rip.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Which I think will be, is so fun to work on-
- CWChris Williamson
Yeah
- EJEric Jorgenson
... and I think will be amazing.
- CWChris Williamson
Mm-hmm.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Um, the other one I don't have, like, a thumbs up yet, so I don't want to say that one publicly.
- CWChris Williamson
Uh, well, I'm looking forward to getting you and Senra in here, and we can have a chat.
- EJEric Jorgenson
That'll be amazing.
- CWChris Williamson
Fuck yeah. Appreciate you, man.
- EJEric Jorgenson
Thank you.
Episode duration: 1:35:56
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