00:00:00How many copies of the navalmanac have you sold now is tough to know but I think we're coming
00:00:04up on 2 million. How's that feel? I'm still the word I like to use is gobsmacked like I really
00:00:11thought I was doing fan service for a few thousand naval nerds and the fact that that's like 40
00:00:16languages and millions of people and we've given away a few million more right like I don't even
00:00:20really know oh so that's how many were sold because it was available for free through the website yeah
00:00:24which is another like 5 million plus really hard to track. I think it's my most suggested book when
00:00:31people say where should I start with personal development essentialism by Greg McEwen or the
00:00:36navalmanac. That's incredible and that's I mean I had no idea how many people were going to resonate
00:00:41with it and recommend it and you know I think the highest compliment a gift the highest compliment
00:00:46a book can receive is to be gifted and so much of what we read comes from what's recommended
00:00:52like how often you see an ad for a book and buy it like almost ever yeah the bars are too high yeah
00:00:56and the subtitle of this new one is a guide to purpose and success about Elon why pick that why
00:01:04purpose specifically? It was it's emergent I mean when I write these books I start with
00:01:09millions and millions of words of source material everything they've ever shared publicly and I try
00:01:13to figure out like what is the essence of the person what is the thing that is most special
00:01:17about them that anybody can learn from and we all know that Elon is like massively productive.
00:01:24I feel like the question everybody's asking is kind of like how the hell did this happen like
00:01:27how does he get so much done but what I didn't realize until way into the process is that purpose
00:01:34was the other pillar so I knew I wanted to know like how does he win but I didn't know to the
00:01:39extent that purpose was a big part of why he wins and that is actually he has some really incredible
00:01:45answers for what do I do what's important how do I choose what's important. Yeah I think everyone
00:01:52works and just assumes tactics raw tactics yeah but if there's something bigger driving that
00:01:56Teal says about Elon he seems to know something about risk that the rest of us do not what do
00:02:04you think that thing is? Yeah I mean I think Elon is risk on like he takes risks that he shouldn't
00:02:10take he's inherently biased towards risk but the number of times that that pays off I think reveals
00:02:16and puts in Teal's context like Teal is a risk manager and Elon is a risk taker and when you
00:02:22combine that with purpose the fact that Elon is on these missions he's trying to accomplish something
00:02:26and he almost doesn't care how much risk it takes he'll just keep taking chances and keep taking
00:02:32chances until he breaks through and he's got this amazing quote failure is irrelevant unless it's
00:02:40catastrophic and I think that's a really good way to sort of explain that attitude towards risk of
00:02:46like I just don't care how low my chances are I don't care how long the odds are I'm just going to
00:02:50keep going until I die because this is important enough to keep working on. And that explains why
00:02:55the purpose piece is crucial because that's what would keep you pushing through. Yes there's so
00:03:00many times that he has done things that seem insane from like a financial motivation point of view or
00:03:06I'm trying to build a business or it is because he's driven by these massive purposes and he has
00:03:11this risk tolerance and the combination of those things I think is what you know pushes him like
00:03:17these two opportunities Tesla and SpaceX being the biggest we're on nobody's radar he looked absurd
00:03:22when he undertook them and he put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to achieve these
00:03:27things because he was purpose driven even though the odds were long and the risk was high. Is he
00:03:33that singular of an individual? Obviously SpaceX impressive, Tesla impressive, Doge kind of cool,
00:03:40being on stage, Trump campaign, Twitter ex rah rah you know how just how impressive is he or how
00:03:48singular is he as an individual? I think he's pretty singular like do you not? Yeah I do but a lot of
00:03:54people that are detractors have found a way to say actually it's more to do with leverage and
00:04:01ridiculous risk tolerance and just sort of blowing through the boundaries that other people wouldn't,
00:04:05it's to do with lack of scruples and being able to push through ethics that other people might
00:04:14find squirrely. Where do you see the big competitive advantages for him coming from? I think he's the
00:04:22greatest living entrepreneur, hard stop and maybe the greatest of all time. The fact that he did
00:04:30Tesla and SpaceX which are both, would both be singular accomplishments and put him on like top
00:04:3610 if not Mount Rushmore. The fact that he did them both at the same time is unbelievable as after
00:04:43PayPal and after Zip2 as a young young guy like and then just like sort of on the side XAI, boring
00:04:50company, Neuralink, like Doge if you want to include that as like a project. Absolutely singular, I mean
00:04:59and lots of game left right like he's only 55 not quite like he might have 20 more years.
00:05:05Like where does this go in 20 more years? It's unbelievable. I mean the combination of traits
00:05:12that I think he has and this is not to like I know that I will be accused like through this book and
00:05:17this episode and everything of like lionizing and overlooking the bad traits that you listed and
00:05:22there are plenty like there's dark sides to every advantage but he's got like the intensity of David
00:05:28Goggins like just raw. If not the physique. Yeah not quite the physique. Or the skin tone.
00:05:34There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Goggins. Yeah. But he's got the intensity
00:05:40of David Goggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Feynman
00:05:44and then the like I like Napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just like will
00:05:52to win and when you combine those things absolutely singular. It would be like if Zuckerberg had also
00:05:59started Google like I feel like that's kind of the order of magnitude thing and like started Google
00:06:04and Facebook in parallel. I mean SpaceX I think when it goes public this will be more obvious to
00:06:09people but he will have almost founded but certainly funded, led and driven two of the top 10 companies
00:06:16in the world if not two of the most important companies in the world in parallel at the same time
00:06:20while doing a bunch of other shit and having 14 kids. How? Okay that is that is pretty singular.
00:06:28After a few million words of looking through his life what it is that he's said and done
00:06:34what is the what are the component parts of his success what are the biggest drivers for how he's
00:06:39been so productive? I think there's a few and I think the thing that people miss is the combination
00:06:44of those factors. So I think people talk a lot about and it's correct to talk about the bias towards
00:06:50or the the intense urgency towards the limiting factor right. He's always looking for the bottleneck
00:06:56and attacking the bottleneck. He works with maniacal urgency those are the words he uses
00:07:00and instills in people all around him. There is also this ability to sort of think from first
00:07:06principles has become this like keyword that he talks about and that he has a bunch of great
00:07:12examples for but when you combine all of those things it's not a 10 percent or a 50 percent
00:07:18improvement it is like a two order of magnitude improvement. If you are working on the right thing
00:07:22with the right vision at the right time immediately all the time you're not twice as productive you're
00:07:27a thousand times more productive and then you do that for 30 years 40 years and the the way that
00:07:34sort of head start accrues and compounds and the way the leverage builds on itself and the way the
00:07:41allies show up and the way that capital piles in behind you and the way that wins turn into
00:07:45additional wins and then you he has this sort of mystique now that people rightly criticize as a
00:07:50mystique like it feels unreal and it feels like people don't critique it but he hasn't lost like
00:07:59and that becomes self-perpetuating. That was when he put the Tesla bonus structure in place
00:08:08for himself yeah the trillion dollar compensation package yeah yeah that there's a lot of criticism
00:08:14that was thrown around like this is ridiculous what an insane amount of money no one person is
00:08:18supposed to do that but his pushback was well look at what I need to do in order to be able
00:08:25to achieve that can you just explain like why that was so ridiculous and what it constituted yeah this
00:08:30is the second time he's done it actually um so he had an insane all or nothing like I will make zero
00:08:37dollars unless I 10x Tesla I don't remember the exact number but he had he had some number of
00:08:42years to like turn Tesla into a massive unprecedented success and everybody said it was absurd
00:08:47but the shareholders were all kind of like all right we'll vote for it what do we have to lose
00:08:50like if he doesn't do it we don't pay him yep and he achieved this impossible bar and then these and
00:08:57then the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were like suing him because trying to like
00:09:01retract that money and it's a whole that's a whole mess that like I'm not qualified to tell the story
00:09:06of in great detail but it worked and he did the impossible and he has been doing the impossible
00:09:11over and over again and so when he comes and says I think I can take Tesla from a one trillion dollar
00:09:16company to a 10 trillion dollar company and you don't have to pay me anything unless I do but if I
00:09:20do maybe throw me a trillion dollars like who is that hurting like it's helping all the shareholders
00:09:27who own it they agreed to it it's supposed to be impossible right like it's all upside um but he's
00:09:37made all these impossible leaps before not always right but like the way he says he's like I've lost
00:09:41many battles but I've never lost a war he's never lost a company he's never missed a huge target he
00:09:46misses deadlines all the time but almost by design because he's pushing the limit so quickly yeah he
00:09:54just articulated this really well of course after I finished writing the book because he's always
00:09:58dropping new stuff but he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks has a he has a 50 chance of making
00:10:04and he's like I don't want to be making 100 of my deadlines that means they're way too conservative
00:10:09that means things will get moved things will get missed so I set a deadline that I think we have a
00:10:1450 50 chance of making and sometimes we'll be wrong sometimes we'll miss it but a lot of the time we
00:10:17will make a deadline that we didn't think was possible because we chose to be really really
00:10:22aggressive with schedules you had 69 core musk methods so let's go through some of them funny
00:10:27how that works out if we don't make stuff there is no stuff he said this on the joe rogan podcast it
00:10:34was one of a few things that hit me so hard I was like this book has to happen actually and it was
00:10:41in this era where everyone just got like just print money just send it out just like help us help us
00:10:46like looking to sort of the government as big brother to just take care of us no matter what
00:10:50even though nobody was doing any work during covid and he's like that's not how this works like if we
00:10:56are not making stuff if we're not building stuff if we're not providing services like the whole economy
00:11:00collapses like that is what holds up the money um and he's a great example I think of the bias to
00:11:08build and serve and improve things um you know the example like tesla is the only car company
00:11:14trying to drive prices down have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last 40 years
00:11:20tesla's prices have gone down yeah they're actively lowering the price on the models as they add volume
00:11:25they lower the price and as they simplify the car they lower the price um but I looked this up ford
00:11:30f-150 if you just follow inflation it used to be like five or six grand and if you just follow
00:11:35inflation it should be like 15 000 today but they're like 40 or 50 grand and feel like yes
00:11:40there's more features and more safety but like three four times more and I feel like every car company
00:11:46on earth is just trying to figure out how to charge more and as jeff bezo said like there's two kinds
00:11:50of companies companies that try to charge work hard to charge more and there's companies that work hard
00:11:53to charge less and amazon is a like we're driving cost down business and tesla is the same he says
00:11:58like if we can't figure out if we charge something it's because we can't figure out how to charge less
00:12:02because he's like the mission the purpose I want as many people as possible driving an electric car I
00:12:08want as many people as possible driving an autonomous car that is what solves the climate change problem
00:12:13that's what makes our cities quieter and cleaner and better like why not lower the price as we
00:12:17increase the volume and make it accessible to more people fear of failure is the biggest cause of
00:12:22failure yeah it's not a good one it's fucking pithy uh is fear of failure the biggest cause of failure
00:12:31not a lack of skill or understanding or foresight the way I hear that quote is it's because it kills
00:12:37something in the crib like fear of failure is why people don't even set out um yeah the far more
00:12:46people have not attempted anything than have attempted something and failed at it yeah you
00:12:50can't fail due to skill or fail due to stamina you never even try or start it yeah and any of you just
00:12:56think of like how many things you've any of us have dreamed of doing but never tried like it's 99 to 1
00:13:02with lots of things that you dream of you probably shouldn't try so fear of I guess the interesting
00:13:10small print here is it's not necessarily fear of failure it's fear of that is not worth my time I
00:13:17shouldn't be spending my time on that thing not that I could do it and it wouldn't work but if I
00:13:22did it it wouldn't be worth it I think that's a very optimistic and enlightened maybe view of why people
00:13:28rationalize not doing things that they that they do deeply want to do but for instance Elon must have
00:13:33lots of dreams that he hasn't pursued presumably unless unless he's also able to fucking program his
00:13:39own dreams it's like oh that would be cool that would be cool I mean he's like the most leveraged
00:13:44man on earth and I feel like he does indulge these random I mean the boring company was kind of a like
00:13:49sitting in traffic being like fuck this and he just picked the phone and picked up the phone called one
00:13:54of his engineers is like start making a hole start researching drilling machines I'm going to call you
00:13:58back in two hours by the way that was a 2am okay bye like that was when he did it yeah at 2am yeah
00:14:05rang one of his engineers and said it's the guy who's still running the boring company today he's
00:14:10like do it I'll call you back and then the guy comes back and says like all right I found this
00:14:14and this about the drilling machines I think they could be improved in this in this way and then he
00:14:17goes with Tesla to Tesla headquarters and is like we're gonna start digging a hole in the parking lot
00:14:22and they're like cool we think we can get permits and do it in two weeks and he's like nope move all
00:14:26the cars start right now I want to see a hole in the parking lot at midnight it's 6pm go and like
00:14:33it is that level of bias to action like I think maniacal urgency the words don't really sink in
00:14:40until you hear story after story after story of him doing something that most people take two weeks to
00:14:44do in four hours what are the most maniacal urgency stories about Elon I mean a small one that I think
00:14:50drills at home is like he was interviewing for his head of machining at a spacex uh at a spacex site
00:14:56and it was like a 20-minute interview just like tell me about your work tell me about your
00:15:01background all right you're qualified come to an agreement somebody standing behind them is like
00:15:06here's a job offer fill in the blanks sign it sign it go to work like 6pm on Saturday like time just
00:15:14doesn't exist it's irrelevant it is like the whatever is the most important thing to get done
00:15:19in this hour get it done immediately and keep going like there is no work life separation
00:15:24there is no like do it later there is like if it is the most important thing to do do it immediately
00:15:30even if it's irrelevant like there's some there's stories in the the isaacson biography of him
00:15:35ordering you call them like surges even when they don't need to be done he just he loves urgency for
00:15:40urgency search like one of these pushes of like stack the starship or build that part and so it's
00:15:46like we don't this part is not the bottleneck he's like i don't care i don't feel enough urgency for
00:15:50you like i'm giving you a deadline i don't care that it's arbitrary like i want you to feel the
00:15:55kind of urgency that i feel hard stuff like that's how we work it's basically speed training like
00:16:01you'd give to an athlete but being done out of season yeah and all the time um and and this is
00:16:07not always there are times when this has saved you know months or years or weeks or millions of
00:16:14dollars but there's also times when it's like burn people out and piss them off and cause good people
00:16:17to quit i have to imagine that the blast radius of this work rate is pretty huge that the the churn
00:16:23of people working for him is is pretty insane for sure there are some people who are who are very
00:16:28long tenured um but it also i mean i think that's part of the strategy like churning through
00:16:34relatively young brilliant engineers no work-life balance this is this is your this is your time in
00:16:40the wild of like you're gonna be here all the time here at the drop of a hat um but he's been doing
00:16:47this forever he did this paypal he decided would uh when it was before they merged but he was gonna
00:16:52launch x.com on thanksgiving weekend like and people were like that doesn't make any sense
00:16:59nobody's me paying attention everybody's with their families like don't care we're launching on sunday
00:17:02on thanksgiving i want everybody in here all the time people are like can i go see my family nope
00:17:09you're not dedicated if you're not in here working 20 hours a day trying to make this deadline it is
00:17:16it is urgency for urgency's sake all the time on everything and the people this goes back to purpose
00:17:22is like only you only get that out of people if you have this incredible mission that people feel like
00:17:27they're on that they're like yes i want to show up i want you to put the pedal down i want to be
00:17:31used for all i'm worth i want to see what i'm capable of i want to work as hard as i can with
00:17:36other brilliant people on this incredibly powerful mission and i can't do it for 40 years but i can do
00:17:40it for two or four ten does elon do any kind of self-care morning routine meditation therapy
00:17:48not that there's much evidence of which i think is interesting like the most productive man on earth
00:17:55barely sleeps like lives on his private jet works maniacally all the time uh no no discernible good
00:18:05habits from what i can tell like uh not on staining really it eats donuts like not a lot of meditation
00:18:15not a lot of introspection um just like gets up grabs his phone draws a knife and like goes to war
00:18:20every single day like that is just shiv someone i got that is the i've got a my friend b shard describes
00:18:26like operating business as a knife fight and it's like an operator who's in it like you wake up you
00:18:31have a knife off the bed stand and like you go to work and that's actually probably how it feels
00:18:36with elon yeah assume his daily routine he's like i wake up i check my phone i look for an emergency
00:18:39there's always an emergency um and sometimes if there's not he creates one how so uh this is also
00:18:46like from the isaacson book he's like there was a lot of times when there's not objectively an
00:18:52emergency but there is sufficient cause to be like we can increase the pace we can increase the pace
00:18:56like let's figure out how to create a situation that maybe gets things moving faster maybe doesn't
00:19:02but it is a bias or urgency all the time but this and i'm not advocating this like i don't live this
00:19:11way even like you you can see the recipe and not want to cook the dish um but the takeaway that i
00:19:19think that is useful and generalizable for everybody is very david goggins it's like you're capable of a
00:19:23lot more than you think and the people who are like massively orders of magnitude more productive
00:19:28are working at a pace and an intensity that is like very foreign to most people um you're a good
00:19:38example of this like i don't think people appreciate how hard you work to like do the things that you do
00:19:42and cover the amount of ground that you have to do 800 episodes in five years like you're an intense
00:19:48motherfucker like you cover a lot of ground um you work really hard to do it it's um but everybody is
00:19:55capable of ten percent more fifty percent more just like give the throttle a push and see what breaks
00:20:01might not be anything so given the lack of self-care does he care about his subjective experience the
00:20:08happiness fulfillment joy things it says um i don't think that's what he's optimizing for
00:20:17like i don't think he's a particularly happy person i don't think he even doesn't really seem to take
00:20:22joy or pride in his past accomplishments he's just always looking forward um and it's i mean i feel
00:20:29like it's a great gift to us and a burden to him right like i the people around him talk about like
00:20:34wishing that he would celebrate his accomplishments wishing he would take a break wishing he would be
00:20:38happier um but he's just on to the next onto the next and like i think when you have a glimpse in
00:20:44his childhood that makes a little more sense um how so i mean his as david center says like the
00:20:53story of the father is embedded in the story of the son um his dad was
00:20:57certainly abusive like there's verbally abusive imagine like standing there as an eight-year-old
00:21:05boy for hours while your dad like screamed in your face drill sergeant cell calls you worthless
00:21:10calls you useless calls you stupid um when elon was young he got absolute shit kicked out like
00:21:16gang stomped not like lost a fight with one guy hospitalized for a while his brother said he was
00:21:24like so swollen he was unrecognizable and his dad sided with the bullies and like called him stupid
00:21:30for picking a fight that he would lose like what does that do like that just creates this furnace
00:21:37in you that like will never stop um and so i think there's there's a lot of he's not comfortable with
00:21:44peace like he likes he is he is always at war and he's looking for the next war and that just like
00:21:49drives him always um and you know that is one part like you know is the debate between clean fuel and
00:21:56dirty fuel like which is better you know if you're if you're like mean to yourself internally you're
00:22:00like such a piece of shit i gotta i gotta get more done i can do more i can accomplish more i can be
00:22:04better versus like i'm building this great thing and i can do it and this is going to be awesome
00:22:08and people are going to love it or i'm really proud of what i've done i'm achieving this powerful
00:22:12mission and elon does both like he burns clean fuel and dirty fuel it seems he's achieving these
00:22:18these missions that are important to humanity that so many people dream of that everybody
00:22:21thought was impossible and he's got this incredible string of successes but he also has this this like
00:22:27internal angst uh i think that that seems to drive him definitely a tolerance for pain it almost
00:22:34seems like he deliberately creates suffering for himself yeah he did the uh the tiny home thing
00:22:39he sold all of his stuff at one point yeah i think may still have no possessions basically and sleeps
00:22:46on the factory floor yes um which i mean the the possessions thing was part like he's like i'm not
00:22:51i'm not like a bad billionaire like i'm a billionaire because i build valuable companies
00:22:55like i'll sell all my stuff i don't care i don't need fancy things um because people
00:22:59were like dragging me like i want i want you to understand that like i'm in it for the right
00:23:02reasons um but i'm glad you asked about sleep okay because i'm a huge personal fan of eight sleep
00:23:11if you struggle to sleep well or just want to further optimize your sleep eight sleep can help
00:23:16i got one as a surprise for my wife when we had our first baby and she wept with joy when it arrived
00:23:24on our porch it goes on your mattress just like a fitted sheet and will automatically learn your
00:23:30preferences to cool or warm your side of the bed up to 20 degrees it's got integrated sensors that
00:23:36track your sleep time sleep phases and heart rate i know enough my heart dude don't fucking tell me
00:23:45my own ad read all right with 99 accuracy eight sleep starts to warm or cool your bed before you
00:23:51even get into it that's why eight sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep up to
00:23:56one hour per night best of all they have a 30-day sleep trial you can try it for 29 days and if you
00:24:02don't like it they'll give you all your money back plus they ship internationally
00:24:06go to the link in the description or eight sleep dot com slash modern wisdom and use modern wisdom
00:24:13at checkout that's e i g h t sleep dot com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout
00:24:20that was really great i really am a huge fan of eight sleep i am too there's no one that's used
00:24:24it that doesn't get completely fucking insane about it did mateo put you up to that because they've
00:24:29just got listed for 1.5 bill on the stock exchange no because this i don't know them at all i just
00:24:34actually love eight sleep and i wanted it to like i thought it would be really funny to make you well
00:24:37he's saved us from having to do the ad read a nice that's one fewer ad read that i need to do this week
00:24:42i feel like you've been working really hard i just wanted to pick up a little bit of the slack i feel
00:24:45like the guests just show up and you have to do everything that's true you need to pay for yourself
00:24:50now that's it all this isn't cheap to put on you know i know you need to pay for yourself and i have
00:24:54an authentic loving relationship with my eight sleep and elon needs one because he didn't have
00:25:00any possessions it's going to be hard oh that is that is true i wonder if they could fit it to the
00:25:03factory floor just fucking lay an eight sleep on the ground be like hey it just sort of works i guess
00:25:10yeah uh what's that story it's from the isaacson book but i think it's pretty telling what's that
00:25:15story about when he needed to do an investor meeting and the coo came in and found him like
00:25:23catatonic under his under his desk and basically had to like force him to get up yeah he was doing
00:25:30earnings call and um i think this is like 2018 this is like the end of a really long stretch of just
00:25:37like miserable stuff and i think he was in a really tough spot psychologically and he was just like
00:25:41lying on the floor um and yeah this guy to his credit like he's like has experience with
00:25:48psychological illnesses in his family and challenges and so he kind of knew what to do
00:25:54and he like went in and laid on the floor next to him it was like how you doing buddy you just
00:25:58went under the desk yeah like laid down next to him was like how you doing like i know it's hard
00:26:04i'm gonna take a couple more minutes and we gotta get up and we gotta do this do our best and um
00:26:12i it's hard like i think i think he puts himself through a lot
00:26:14like elon burns the boats and challenges himself and but he does have limits
00:26:19yeah i mean i mean if you're lying under your desk catatonic that's a limit yeah dude he uh
00:26:26in the 2008 crisis he was tallulah riley talks about him like having night terrors
00:26:30he's like sitting up all night um he's throwing up he's having like screaming nightmares um
00:26:38but that goes back to like like i don't want to live that experience but it gives you a sense of
00:26:44how far people can push themselves and how far i look the way that i see uh elon is not too
00:26:52dissimilar to the way that i see brian johnson and also david goggins which is there are people who
00:26:56will go to the 99.999th percentile of anything and everything yeah and it's useful to have them around
00:27:05because they teach you all of the lessons that you learn by going to the absolute edge but that
00:27:09doesn't mean that you should try and follow what it is that they're doing it doesn't mean that it's
00:27:13a good strategy for anybody else to do but if you're going to try and say that uh brian johnson
00:27:19going and basically being like a scout in a he's essentially the same thing as a scout in an army
00:27:25he goes up to this crazy high ridge and it's all treacherous and maybe he's gonna fall and oh my god
00:27:31and then he finds out some shit about what's over there and then comes back and tells us all
00:27:36like i don't want to be a scout and i don't want an army filled with scouts but it's fucking useful
00:27:40to have a few yeah well in particular like this scout who is like building so many things that
00:27:46benefit so many people and i think i mean all this comes back to like elon is being authentically
00:27:50himself like who he is is this like insanely driven technical genius boy who is infused with sci-fi and
00:28:00military history like dreaming of making an impact on the world um in part because of this like
00:28:06traumatic childhood he had and in part because of like it's this grand dream and grand adventure and
00:28:11um i don't think it's an insult to say is like a little bit of a hero complex of like i can
00:28:16i can do this i can make a difference i can make this huge impact on the world and thank god he did
00:28:22right like this type of person in the past would just become like a conqueror but like thanks to
00:28:27the miracle of modern capitalism and technology he's building shit that benefit all of us and we're
00:28:32gonna have this huge evolutionary leap hopefully as we go to another planet and we get to live through
00:28:38it how fucking awesome is that do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions yeah
00:28:44this one is uh comes from like the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization but
00:28:49i think it's a very generalizable rule um this version is like you want the designers and the
00:28:55engineers and the manufacturers like they all work in the plant so they can see the downstream
00:29:00effects of the decisions that they make in the design process it's very it's very easy to try
00:29:06to break your feedback loop and not sense when you're doing something harmful or even not missing
00:29:12an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you i think that uh the idea of not
00:29:22insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions uh is probably a good i mean there
00:29:26has to be some times where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf but i know what's
00:29:30that you you have to locate physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately
00:29:34yes basically the same rule yeah and in the on the production line it's like walk to the red there's
00:29:39like green or red everywhere on the production line and it's like if something is red there's a problem
00:29:43go there immediately um there's there's a couple versions of physically move yourself immediately
00:29:49where the product he's you should see his like if you track his private jet it's like all over
00:29:54the world constantly on the move um and so it's not just like locally move yourself to wherever
00:29:59the problem is immediately call the people get them in the room go there like it's an underrated thing
00:30:05to be physically where the problem is and whatever the most important this goes back to the kind of
00:30:09like the original multiplying things of like whatever the most important thing to do is whatever
00:30:13the limiting factor is attack it immediately in the most effective way possible which is usually
00:30:19going physically to where the problem is and seeing it for yourself directly or pulling in all the
00:30:23people that have a hand in it do things in parallel yeah george and i were talking about this this
00:30:29morning because i think there's like conventionally good wisdom that is focus and this was one of the
00:30:35things i was surprised by um warren buffett's the perfect quote to like explain this concept at a
00:30:41high level which is like you can't get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant
00:30:44elon's tried so you just there are some things that there's an incompressible amount of time
00:30:54and if you put those in sequence now all of a sudden your timeline is this long
00:30:58but if you can plant all the seeds at the same time and they're growing in parallel
00:31:02all of a sudden your timeline is shrunk by a third and i was at the grandest scale it's kind of like
00:31:09most normal people would start an electric car company grow it make it successful and then start
00:31:14their space company and he was like ah there i can do both at once we just give it a try um
00:31:20because we might be able to move the total timeline of success up dramatically and it's harder and it's
00:31:26riskier but it also generates returns sooner um and i think there's only some problems that are like
00:31:33this is the right approach for and he talked about in paypal is like we were developing the product
00:31:37and trying to do all these integrations and trying to get um like regulatory covered and he's like we
00:31:42did all of them all at once it was fucking chaos but we launched in a year instead of the three
00:31:48years that would have been conventional wisdom of like it doesn't make sense to invest in the product
00:31:51until we have the permission and we don't know the integrations until we have the product he's like
00:31:55nope do it all at once launch immediately wild wild uh we should not be afraid of doing something
00:32:03important simply because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur this is more of that bias for
00:32:09action this sort of disregard of fear and even even further than that it's it's uh i think this comes
00:32:15from his study of history in a lot of ways he says i think the extended version of that quote is like
00:32:20if we did if you if you never take a risk like the united states wouldn't exist like every great
00:32:27adventure involves risk and people will die and we have to accept that we are the pendulum is swung
00:32:33too far towards like oh my god nobody can ever be harmed in any way nobody is allowed to risk their
00:32:39life nobody's allowed to take experimental treatments we can't make progress like this
00:32:43you know colonizing mars is a grand adventure it involves risk like not everything is going to go
00:32:49right but especially if people choose to take those risks or risk their life to accomplish this great
00:32:56feat for humankind there's something inherent about humans sort of feeling fulfilled sacrificing
00:33:02themselves to further humanity as a whole and i think to me that quote is like yeah damn the
00:33:08torpedoes uh like let's do it what do you think is the most misleading narrative about your lunch
00:33:13success it depends which camp you're kind of coming from i think there are die-hard fanboys that have
00:33:20just like total blindfold to the the negatives um and i think there's a lot of people especially
00:33:26after his sort of political chapter that have just a whole bunch of ideas that are factually incorrect
00:33:31that they believe as deep truths um i mean like anybody who is one of the most famous people on
00:33:37earth right like and past a certain level of fame i think there's like a derangement syndrome about
00:33:42everybody um so i think it's actually kind of hard to find a neutral or a like well-rounded set of
00:33:50opinions on him that's a good point i i was thinking about elon in comparison with mark zuckerberg and
00:33:55um sure there's some people that don't like mark the people of kawaii aren't massive fans of him
00:34:03buying up a ton of land and there's other bits and pieces but i don't think people have like insane
00:34:08fervor against him or insane fervor for him yeah uh but elon seems to be much more barbell-y right
00:34:16if you were to draw a graph it's just a pair of boobs whereas you know most most people are kind
00:34:21of a bell curve whereas elon's managed to completely clear the middle yeah i don't think
00:34:25that used to be true like is that is that do you think that's a byproduct of him having a political
00:34:29chapter uh yeah i guess so and then that creates the foundation and on top of that is wealth huge
00:34:38amounts of wealth this potential ipo thing yeah um he's spiky i mean he's he is like he's an unrefined
00:34:46sense of humor that he like puts out there what do you if he's so concerned about the bias to action
00:34:52working on the biggest problem the bottlenecks etc why have such a public presence like why
00:35:00tweet a lot yeah you on the platform or whatever but podcasts and interviews and stuff like that
00:35:08if you're the i compare with someone like james dyson right who kind of from some areas of a skill
00:35:14set is not massively different yeah senra told me about when he sat down with james dyson james
00:35:19dyson's done thousand maybe tens of thousands of prototypes he said he was looking at james dyson's
00:35:23hands so james dyson's hands were like alex honnold's hands these gnarled you could the sinewy
00:35:31tough thick things these fucking chodes on the end of his the end of his arms and um i don't know
00:35:38that that element for instance what's the role that that level of exposure is playing i think
00:35:45is an interesting one yeah he's had a he's had sort of a taste for that for a long time i think
00:35:50um he's like dated actresses and kind of living in la um but there's an element to which like
00:35:57having that personal presence and talking about what you're doing like he needs to rally support
00:36:02like you need a great team you need investors you need popular support like think about how
00:36:09hard it was to convince people that electric cars were not just not stupid but fucking awesome like
00:36:16that took a lot of repetition it is mad to think when you when you roll back the clock that the
00:36:21prius was like the eminent preeminent fucking electric car it was just a hybrid like the real
00:36:27electric cars were even worse yeah it was it was really um i think it's difficult now to understand
00:36:33how stupid and insane it seemed when he started tesla and the same thing with the rock like there
00:36:38were no space startups like space economy was not a thing and nasa had been on this like slow decline
00:36:43for 50 years we were paying russia to take our astronauts up to the space station like um these
00:36:49were by no means he was not just not obvious but like very consensus insane things to do this
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00:37:45gym.sh modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 at checkout that's gym.sh modern wisdom
00:37:52and modern wisdom 10 at checkout talk to me about spacex what's the what do most people not
00:37:59understand about that that project to where how he sort of got it to where it is in his place
00:38:03i mean spacex i think most people don't realize started as like a pure philanthropy project he
00:38:10was looking at the nasa website saying when are we going to go to mars we went to the moon 50 years ago
00:38:15why haven't we been back and when are we going to go to mars surely there's a plan and there was
00:38:18no plan and he was coming off of his first exit with paypal um so he had 200 million dollars or
00:38:25something in the bank and he's like i'll just spend a hundred million to like see if i can increase
00:38:30nasa's budget it was pure philanthropy he's like i'm gonna buy a rocket i'm gonna make a little
00:38:33greenhouse i'm gonna ship it to mars and i'm gonna get a photo of a little baby plant on the red
00:38:40planet it'll be the first life on another planet and that'll catalyze this movement and inspire
00:38:44people this that was the that was the origin story yeah it was called mars oasis that was the thing
00:38:49and to do this he like went around trying to buy a rocket he's like why are these rockets so fucking
00:38:53expensive he went to russia and tried to buy an intercontinental icbm and they laughed at him and
00:39:00spit on him and like fucked him around and he got pissed and so he's like maybe the problem is that
00:39:07space launch costs are so high how why are rockets so expensive can't they be done better and so he
00:39:12gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience at his house i think this is a
00:39:16interesting part of the story he's like did a series of like saturday sessions of like
00:39:20first principles let's look at all the historical things but let's also say like how good could
00:39:27good be with all the modern technology modern design like is there a design that we can come up
00:39:31with that would be a massive improvement in space launch costs such that this would be possible
00:39:35and he realized like the market for space launch that was the bottleneck that was the real problem
00:39:41that like you couldn't get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was space shuttle
00:39:45which is this like massive bloated government program that's not particularly capital efficient
00:39:50they weren't iterating they weren't doing volume they were way overspending on basic parts because
00:39:55they were all like aerospace grade or whatever and so as soon as the paypal thing sold he's like all
00:40:01right i'm gonna go i'm gonna hire some rocket engineers and like let's see if we can do this
00:40:05wasn't the original like the apollo 11 blueprints available just free online wasn't that part of it
00:40:13that you were able to get rocket blueprints you could just download them i think or maybe he made
00:40:17his available for free maybe i mean he's like when you he's not a rocket scientist so he's like how
00:40:22did you learn how to do this and he's like i just read books and i talk to people i read all the
00:40:26textbooks on rocket science that i could find i borrowed them and i started talking to experts
00:40:31and his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was like the sick the foremost like rocket
00:40:35hobbyist he had built the single largest like rocket engine as just a dude in his garage tom
00:40:40mueller and that was his propulsion engineer you're hired yeah you're fucking hired uh okay and then
00:40:47what about now like what obviously the cost has come down by some insane factor i know that orders
00:40:53of magnitude which is driven starlink and is going to drive even more um and now he's talking about
00:41:01like building a dyson sphere which is like solar but in space so we can capture more energy than
00:41:07even hits the the earth from the sun and that hasn't even been talking about putting compute
00:41:11in space as well yeah these are like big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then
00:41:16like oh that's the same lasers yeah oh okay i didn't realize that the dyson sphere would power
00:41:23the compute yeah it's just like a bunch of like solar panels with computer chips on the back that
00:41:28like can communicate with each other floating all around in space um which is insane and wild
00:41:34but then that's not the mission like that that is a that is the cargo that makes starship economic to
00:41:40build hundreds or thousands of them but the actual mission is to make life multi-planetary and this
00:41:46goes back to like zoomed all the way out his altruistic philanthropic things is like look
00:41:53we should all agree that we do not want the only form of life that we know in the universe to die
00:42:02like we are the only conscious beings we know earth is the only planet with life that we know of
00:42:09can we all agree that like it would be great to have life move just just next door just
00:42:14get some on mars just get a couple you know maybe a million people get some plants like if a comet
00:42:20hits earth or we blow ourselves up or there's a catastrophic pandemic like we've got another
00:42:26horse in the race like whether you're an environmentalist or a humanist or
00:42:30anything like this is a thing that we should universally agree is good um and why not go for
00:42:37it like he's like this is the window that is for the first time in not just human history but earth's
00:42:43history we have the ability to make life redundant to get it to another planet and isn't that like one
00:42:50of the grandest missions that we can conceive of and he puts it on this evolutionary time scale
00:42:54right so like there was suddenly single-celled life and then multi-celled life and then there was uh
00:43:00fish and then the fish came on land and the split into like plants and animals um different forms of
00:43:06life and going from earth to our first new planet is this massive step function in basically how
00:43:14successful life is and its resilience to whatever comes next how successful do you think spacex is
00:43:22going to be long term unbelievably they have them essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the
00:43:29planet and like they're they're 90 if not pass go do not go to the moon give me 200 they could have
00:43:38been the great one of the greatest companies on earth even if they never built starship even if
00:43:41they just like cash flowed off of falcon 9 and they were the only reusable rocket company they would
00:43:47have been an unbelievably successful company but they are reinvesting into starship um trying to
00:43:52build compute and and um energy in space they're trying to build a i think he's been talking now
00:43:58about like a mass driver on the moon that'll build these like von neumann probes and all kinds of
00:44:03other crazy stuff but if the historical analogy that he talks about is like this is when the new
00:44:07world was discovered like we all existed around the mediterranean for like most of western human
00:44:12history and then all of a sudden columbus discovered the new world and is like all right we need new
00:44:16shipping technology we have a taste for all of the fineries of this new world so many people want to
00:44:22pay for passage and it's like this economic bonanza and just zoom all the way out again like where are
00:44:29most of the raw materials in the solar system let alone the galaxy like not on earth we have this
00:44:35bias to the the only raw materials that matter like wood and farmland but there are raw materials
00:44:41atomic raw materials on every other world and in the asteroid belt and just like floating around
00:44:46in space um and getting the technology the starship to go access them is going to be an unbelievable
00:44:54boon for humanity but it does take that like leap of imagination to get there what about tesla tesla
00:45:00is i think going through like these startups are stacked s curves right and so electric cars was
00:45:07one very fundamental innovation um autonomy is a whole nother one and so a big question mark is this
00:45:13leap to autonomy and then he's already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots and that's
00:45:19going into tesla yeah humanoid robots are in tesla he's he's just shut down um the model x and the
00:45:26model s production lines and switch them over to building humanoid robots so like that is coming
00:45:32quickly um he's going from starting to build robo taxis that are like fully autonomous no steering
00:45:39wheel um so thinking that the autonomy kind of curve is there and he talks about this being one
00:45:44of the biggest markets of all time and that optimus is even bigger he's also now i think this is
00:45:49underrated because it's a not a consumer product but he's building they are building an unbelievable
00:45:54amount of batteries um which is powering the kind of like solar to battery grid conversion
00:46:01which is going to speed up energy that drives all the compute for the ai revolution um and then
00:46:07there's a whole nother kind of they are backwards vertically integral like they're producing they've
00:46:12just built a new lithium refinery and so they're like we we are supply constrained in many cases
00:46:18and so they're like working backwards um further and further into their supply chain literally to
00:46:23the point where they're looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials yeah he
00:46:26does did say he thinks tesla's gonna have a factory on the moon which like i don't know i don't know if
00:46:30these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what but um he did x is now owned by
00:46:36xai which is now owned by spacex so there's some sort of congealing but i don't know if tesla and
00:46:41spacex will will merge at some point what about these humanoid robots i mean i don't know it's
00:46:49either gonna be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally like breaks the economy and ushers
00:46:55in this crazy era of abundance um but i i think it'll be slow adoption just because people are slow
00:47:01to adopt things that are in particular when they're like in the uncanny valley so commercial uses i
00:47:07think there'll be like a ton of them in factories and stuff like that but also some of the robotics
00:47:11engineers come in and say like humanoid is sure it's generalizable but like there's almost always
00:47:15a better more specific form function robot to use for a use case um right yeah why would we constrain
00:47:22this general purpose robot to have our like dimensions when you could get one that cracks eggs
00:47:30and one that cleans the dishes and one that etc yeah you might just need like two arms on a rail
00:47:34in your kitchen and that's your kitchen robot yeah you might just need like two arms on your washer
00:47:37and that's your laundry robot like you might not actually want one that can like walk around your
00:47:42house and feel like a person have you seen what was the super widely publicized one that kind of
00:47:48had a knitted jumper and a knitted face i think that was optimus no it wasn't no it wasn't it's
00:47:52already shipped it's already out and floating around uh there was an advert there was a billboard on uh
00:47:58like east sixth street for it and i thought it was just such a funny place to put it anyway uh there
00:48:03was this video that someone had put of it trying to load dishes into the dishwasher and it's got this
00:48:11weird position it's sort of leaning like this and somebody had captioned it as uh me every time that
00:48:17it's 6 a.m at a ketamine after party and it literally looks like it's done too much ketamine
00:48:21and it's like all contorted it's like in a really fucking weird position um but yeah i i don't know i
00:48:29you're right to say as soon as you step outside of the existing bucket of what people use things for
00:48:36like going from driving a f-150 to a prius to a tesla ah you know i can kind of see how it works
00:48:44a little bit yeah people were nervous about full self-driving but after a while okay there we go
00:48:49there we go no one has no one's looking at the fact well i already have a dishwasher
00:48:56and this robot is basically an on-its-feet multi-purpose dishwasher it's not quite the
00:49:02same thing yeah here it is look at this it's trying to close the door
00:49:08if you're standing there watching that this would be very painful
00:49:26yeah but you just go away and the dishes are done cool yeah i mean are they done
00:49:30no no fucking go back dude yeah it's uh there's work to be done i think it's a it's a it is a
00:49:40really interesting question of like where where and how our humanoid robot is going to show up over the
00:49:43next 10 years i think it's like one of the big questions um and like i would probably go to a
00:49:48laundromat staffed by humanoid robots great makes total sense like a coffee shop maybe maybe not
00:49:55maybe washing dishes but not like at the counter making a lot of it just because yeah just because
00:50:00you partly go there for the human interaction um i don't know i think it'll be really interesting
00:50:06to like see how it all plays out his plan is what is this one in every home within the space of
00:50:10basically no time at all yeah i mean like tons of demand especially if it is smart and helpful um
00:50:17it's kind of like rosie from the jetsons right like do all the stuff i don't want to do go get
00:50:21the trash cans take out the trash presumably powered by xai in some regard so that is going
00:50:26to have to start to cross over the tesla to xai thing so that would suggest a natural sort of
00:50:32convergence well tesla has its own amazing ai team they're building their own chips but he does say
00:50:36like tesla because of all of the like real world ai stuff that tesla's done to create self-driving
00:50:41that's actually very analogous to making really smart humanoid robots and he talks about having
00:50:46like a this crazy training center full of humanoid robots basically doing stuff like that looking like
00:50:50idiots trying to like figure out the training data and then getting rewards yeah oh you did it well
00:50:55you closed it without looking like you're on ketamine congratulations who was i speaking to
00:50:59fuck i was talking to someone i was talking to someone at dinner the other night and they
00:51:03were saying that basically they think a lot of people i go oh it was uh my friend austin um
00:51:08people are gonna have to wear little cameras that show them going about their daily business to train
00:51:15robots this is a thing yeah i mean dude i've only just this is fucking blowing my mind because
00:51:21obviously that's how tesla's full self-driving was uh trained right they took the top one percent ten
00:51:27percent of drivers on tesla and used their driving style to reverse engineer what humans do so that
00:51:34the robots that drive your tesla can drive in the manner that you wouldn't it means that you've got
00:51:38more aggressive driving you've got the ability to overtake and undertake which if you ever get into
00:51:43a fucking waymo it does not have the capacity to do that it's the most tentative grand mar of all time
00:51:48because that's being created from first principles as opposed to the flow of traffic is other humans
00:51:55i as a human i'm able to detect that and adjust appropriately therefore if i if you become me
00:52:02robot then you can also be kind of a human yeah and it is cool in a tesla you can have it set like
00:52:06you can set like i want a chill drive or like i'm fucking late like let's go okay um there's just
00:52:12but yeah people are gonna wear fucking cameras that just they're gonna crack eggs and iron clothes and
00:52:21yeah yeah i mean training data has already been a huge like part of the economy it's mostly like
00:52:24digital training data and companies are making a ton of money like selling training data to
00:52:28models digitally but yeah the ability to collect massive massive massive amounts of data and train
00:52:34ai and now in the real world train ai to like do all these i mean if someone's wearing one of those
00:52:40you know chest harness things with a dgi on it and easier yeah they're going about that they're
00:52:45already working at starbucks or doing whatever they're a mechanic and you go well do you want
00:52:50to earn an additional however many dollars per hour yeah to submit your life to our training data and
00:52:56you need to you know it's basically like being an uber driver but for your own life and then sending
00:53:02that digitally up to whoever needs to be trained did you see the thing about the meta glasses
00:53:09recently this is like i'm not sure if this is in the press or i just read this on a tweet but it's
00:53:13like those are always recording even if they're like not oh and some some uh uh like african
00:53:20fucking ai labelers were able to see the faces weren't blurred out or something yeah i mean
00:53:24somebody just like puts the glasses on the nightstand and then like you know the spouse
00:53:28comes in and starts changing and there's like nigerians like sitting there tagging data of like
00:53:32yep that's your wife changing clothes um because this thing doesn't stop recording like you know
00:53:39i'd rather wear it you know on my chest right now put it in a lockbox at night when i'm not on my
00:53:45yeah yeah we'll get back to talking in just one second but first tell me if this sounds familiar
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00:55:08at checkout that's functionhealth.com/modernwisdom and modernwisdom at checkout what's underappreciated
00:55:15about elon's skill sets do you think what are the things that people don't realize i think the the
00:55:20breadth of his skill set is is quite interesting um i think if you try to emulate just one or two of
00:55:26these traits like without appreciating how they interconnect you could either make some mistakes
00:55:32or be an asshole depending on like how you went about it um but i think he's like he's a
00:55:37micromanager but he's like in the technical details because he has technical expertise and like a
00:55:42strong intuition around the physics of things um he has a deep fluency across not just the the physics
00:55:50and the engineering but also the finance and the economics like he double majored in economics and
00:55:54physics in college and so from the very beginning he's been like he's a great line like to truly
00:55:59control the product you have to control the company and he does not share power well but there's been
00:56:04many times where he's made like a risky or technical decision based on his sort of economic and
00:56:11opportunity cost view of the future of the business and so even early on spacex he was he was driving
00:56:16maniacal urgency because he's like the future of this business is 10 million dollars in revenue a
00:56:20day and every day we fuck around like every time you burn a day every time you burn 12 hours you
00:56:26burn half of our future 10 million dollar a day run rate so like let's go let's go let's go um
00:56:32so that mix of like really big picture and deep in the details understanding the limiting factor
00:56:39attacking it which is a mix of like that's technical skill that's economic fluency that's
00:56:45like a sense of project management actually um and the ability to know how and when to
00:56:51push push people if really really smart rocket scientists are telling you that's impossible
00:56:57no and he's like do it anyway like it is possible i i'm telling you it's possible go do it anyway
00:57:05and you're seven out of ten times even like even five out of even one out of ten times because
00:57:10every time that you're right about that you've gained a like a jewel that will pay off for the
00:57:15whole rest of your company and the nine times that you were wrong like oh i guess you were right
00:57:20impossible did mean impossible in that sense or maybe we'll revisit it next year or what made it
00:57:25impossible maybe we can we can break that down further um and so it's this the george bernard
00:57:31shaw quote like all progress depends on the unreasonable man like he's unreasonable
00:57:38the unreasonable man what about memory it seems like he's got a pretty good memory yeah that was
00:57:42one of the things um he he picked up really early in life he like read one of those memory trick books
00:57:48with the guys who like memorize a whole deck of cards um and so he's been using memory tricks um
00:57:53which you know one of the things of like how the hell does he do what he does like five companies
00:57:58many projects in all of them taking technical reviews it'd be hard to remember all these
00:58:04people's names let alone like what they're doing week over week and where the bottlenecks are and
00:58:08all this stuff and he's got you know he practiced those as a kid um and so i think he still uses like
00:58:13memory palaces and some of these tricks which are one of those things that like that seems superhuman
00:58:19if if you don't know how it works um and there's a lot of stories of him one of the ways he builds
00:58:26loyalty with his team actually is people like holy shit when he he knows a specific technical detail
00:58:32like of somebody's project that is like you know a has a direct report who has a direct report and he
00:58:38like is like you're the bottleneck what's going on and they're like this this and this he's like try
00:58:42this they're gonna like holy shit that worked like how how did you know that you haven't like spent
00:58:47time in here and it's this mix i live with this every single day and you just came in and and had
00:58:52it yeah yeah like that's a mix of memory and intuition and incredible like uh recall and and
00:59:02depth and feeling for that like the physics of the thing presumably risk and pain tolerance
00:59:07have to be too yeah it's immersed in it like absolutely immersed in it and and like i think
00:59:13this is a place where the kind of the asperger's is it can be an advantage like just lives in it
00:59:20over and over and over again lives in what the details of these products and these people and
00:59:24where the bottlenecks are like that wouldn't suggest why pain and risk are more palatable
00:59:31or maybe it would i don't know maybe people who are a little spectrumy don't have the same
00:59:36detection of risk they certainly don't have the same detection of other stuff well i think it
00:59:39really helps to set aside social risk which i think we blend a lot of right like i'm going to look like
00:59:43a failure people are going to think i'm wrong it's going to ruin these relationships like he doesn't
00:59:47have any of that and he says like it is a huge weakness to want to be liked and i do not have it
00:59:50um it is a huge weakness to want to be liked and i do not have it he tries to like weakness to want
00:59:56to be liked you don't think that he wants to be liked i do think he wants to be liked in a in a
01:00:00general sense it's a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked yeah the willingness to enter
01:00:07into dislike maybe is the thing like um i think uh you know he tries to coach his managers and
01:00:13within the company versus outside the company like are you willing to be
01:00:17misunderstood by the general public and that's an interesting question like
01:00:21if you had the chance pick your pick your divisive opinion right like are you pro-choice or pro-life
01:00:27for you or open borders or closed borders whatever if you had the chance to like flip the switch and
01:00:33make that decision but the catch is everybody knew it was you like are you willing to make a
01:00:39hundred million enemies who will do like lie cheat steal fabricate twist your words like attack your
01:00:48family do anything because like they hate the decision that you made like are you willing to
01:00:52do that i think most people are not and agree with or disagree with any particular decision like
01:00:58respect the the commitment and the courage that it takes to go do that
01:01:03what do you think you learned about elon that most biographies miss
01:01:08what did doing this kind of a book teach you that biographies don't get up
01:01:13i think i got way deeper in the tactics like i try to my north star for these books is usefulness
01:01:22to the reader like i try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said
01:01:26and i want to simulate the feeling of being at dinner with elon musk like it's written
01:01:30as a dialogue i keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as i can i edit out anything that's
01:01:36doesn't feel like you would be curious about it from a sense of like how do i improve my own life
01:01:40and how did how did this happen um didn't the navarman act isn't that per word the most highlighted
01:01:46book in kindle history or something is that stat that i made up maybe i was trying to make it that
01:01:51i don't i i don't think kindle will like give me that readwise said it's like in their top whatever
01:01:56yeah but that would be also including distribution probably not per word like what you want is for
01:02:02people who read this book yes how much of the book is highlighted on kindle yes and i want to see like
01:02:08i love when people show me like beat to shit copies of their book like it's been in and out of a sauna
01:02:12their backpack everything is so satisfying yeah just wring it out yeah uh okay so that like
01:02:21biography miss the tactic i i just go deeper into how like how does that person accomplish what they
01:02:29do what are their what is their secret sauce i feel like biographers kind of come at this from like
01:02:33how comprehensive and correct can i be about their whole history not what's the most useful thing that
01:02:41you would pull out of the biography like that i think that's why like david center's episodes are
01:02:45amazing because he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down and that is like my
01:02:50approach is like take a million words and turn it into 50 000 of the most useful ones um and to pull
01:02:57out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is like actually a really
01:03:03interesting kind of test for material to go through and how timeless can it be and how universally can
01:03:10it be applied like i think anybody on earth can take something useful out of this and i over and
01:03:14over again kind of sift it through that filter it's like almost like a version of writing fiction
01:03:19because in fiction you're trying to bring a character to life and in this you're trying to
01:03:23be that person briefly to try and condense down what would they want to say of their own words
01:03:30that they've already said what would they what would their top 50 000 be out of this million
01:03:35and a half if they were trying to be as helpful as possible like their best selves right so that's the
01:03:39other the other difference is like i'm not trying to build a comprehensive view of the person i'm not
01:03:45trying to put them in historical context i'm trying to be as useful as possible and i don't i don't
01:03:49dwell on any of the personal stuff any of the political stuff like we don't talk about his
01:03:53family it's just like what would he teach if he set out to teach all of the ideas that he had the most
01:03:59conviction in yeah it's an interesting challenge with somebody who is as uh widely regarded and
01:04:05hated as elon because almost everything that everybody wants to talk about is not to do with
01:04:12the tactics and the principles and the purpose it's to do with the intention it's to do with
01:04:17the drive it's to do with the ethics and the scruples and almost every conversation i hear
01:04:23people have casually about elon is them projecting their own opinion they're using elon as a foil to
01:04:28be like i think it's great that we're going to mars and doing these things or i think it's terrible
01:04:33that he made this decision about you know the us aid and that's fine like you can agree or disagree
01:04:40with anything that this person does but like you're using that to project your values you're
01:04:45not asking like what can i learn from this person and to pick somebody as an exemplar is not to say
01:04:50that everything they do is correct like i very much believe in model traits not people and so my
01:04:56aspiration is to collect the most useful traits of some of the most accomplished people and make them
01:05:03accessible and useful one of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index what's that the idiot
01:05:09index he uh it's kind of an outcropping uh it's a it's downstream of the first principles thinking
01:05:15and so the idiot index applies to a particular part or a particular product and it's the difference
01:05:20between the raw material cost and the price and so the an example he absolutely roasted an engineer
01:05:27in a meeting who like didn't know what the stupidest parts in his product were in his
01:05:34composite because that shows you where you're massively overpaying so there's a part um that was
01:05:39they were paying thirteen thousand dollars for there was like one piece of steel and if you just
01:05:44weighed it the weight of that steel was worth like two hundred dollars and so he's like you multiply
01:05:49the price of the raw material or divide that out of the total price and like i don't know what that
01:05:56is all the time a big number like that's fucking stupid we're overpaying by like 50x for that thing
01:06:03so like how cheaply can you get the steel and then get it into that shape and you get those insane
01:06:10idiot indexes especially in aerospace because you go outsource and then outsource and then outsource
01:06:14and so there's like layers of delegation and profit everyone is arbitraging their profit off the top of
01:06:19this final thing that ends up coming down there's rolls royce that make the engine but before that
01:06:23the turbine is milled in this place and before that the raw materials are mined out of yeah there's like
01:06:29five subcontractors we're figuring out like one guy who's like welding a thing together and you're like
01:06:33oh just bring that guy over here and then the part is like 400 bucks great we just saved twelve
01:06:39thousand dollars i guess asking the question why is this so expensive 100 becomes quite a powerful
01:06:45question and then power ranking the things like what is most expensive like we're attacking that
01:06:50one what's the second most expensive we're attacking that one and this is how i mean this is how he's
01:06:55able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and more and more available
01:06:58what have been the biggest cost breakthroughs what have been the ones that have completely unlocked
01:07:02spacex tesla i i think it's a million little ones all stacked up right so like there that that one
01:07:09example like thirteen thousand dollars to 200 is like more than two orders of magnitude you know
01:07:15500x or something um there's there's a story about like a latch that was supposed to be a thousand
01:07:21dollars or something and a guy just like looked at it and was like kind of looks like a bathroom stall
01:07:25latch and so he like went home depot bought a bathroom stall latch and was like did a little
01:07:30did a little magic magic on it it's like okay did it 50 bucks boom um it does that scrappiness over
01:07:36every single part every single part every single part and you know it's just the simple things done
01:07:42over and over and over again with like ruthless intensity and really it goes back to the the kind
01:07:48of the quote that you brought up about like feeling the pain of your decisions like if there's a company
01:07:53making money by selling a part that they bought from a subcontractor for a hundred dollars and
01:07:58then selling it to 500 like who cares and if the ultimate buyer is the government who like can just
01:08:03have a black box budget like fine doesn't matter but if elon comes in and says like i need to drop
01:08:08the cost of space launch by two orders of magnitude in order to accomplish this thing and then two more
01:08:14orders of magnitude because we need to get to fucking mars then like now the goal the bar is
01:08:19so much higher and you start asking questions like how cheap can you get how cheap can you get can't
01:08:24we do this cheaper do we need that part at all like simplifying eliminating reducing costs um and and
01:08:30that's you know when when it's spacex it feels more abstract because like none of us are consuming
01:08:35rockets but if we're buying a tesla we care a lot whether it's twenty thousand dollars or thirty
01:08:41thousand dollars that's massive and that changes by a huge number the number of people who can access
01:08:46a nice car that's safe that doesn't pollute right and so like if in five or ten more years we keep
01:08:53doing these things we keep eliminating parts we keep increasing scale we keep uh lowering the
01:08:59idiot index of every part and like now the car's ten thousand dollars and it's like an absolute
01:09:04no-brainer um and the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner as you move forward allies will assemble
01:09:10around you yeah i mean there's no better example than chris williams said because of all of my
01:09:17allies yeah i mean think this like this started with you and a microphone right like what seven
01:09:22years ago eight eight years ago like a thousand episodes later there's there's like an army at
01:09:28your back you got an incredible team here you've got millions of listeners you got people all around
01:09:32the world they're like excited to see you tour um but you didn't wait for a million people to like
01:09:37demand for you to create a podcast you started and you had one fan and then two and then four and then
01:09:42eight and you know a thousand episodes later like here you are you just have to start carrying that
01:09:48flag do you think because when people think about elon when they talk about him a lot of the time it
01:09:53is this it's quite cantankerous it's adversarial there is this super aggression the bias for action
01:09:59and the urgency all of this would make you think difficult to work for hiring and firing maybe there
01:10:05is a runway for each individual member of staff i reckon i can get on average i would love to know
01:10:11what the average tenure is you know and i get nine months out of people but i get nine months of a
01:10:16hundred hours a week or something like that let's say you go okay well that and that is just the cost
01:10:21of doing business in order to push people at the pace that i want to i need to have a bigger staff
01:10:25base in order to do that have you got any idea about how he hires about what his hiring process is like
01:10:30he must have just the most insane hr department that is constantly trying to put out fires people
01:10:36yeah they're permanently people just like fucking exiting the business because i've i can't like you
01:10:42know it's like a leonardo dicaprio dating someone who's 25 and you're like fucking the day that she
01:10:47yeah exactly like what 26 you're out like you know yeah what elon talks about is we like phony and
01:10:53rich of like people have a certain level of success and then he's like you you got soft like i'm not
01:10:57getting we're not getting enough out of you anymore you're not dedicated enough um and people exit his
01:11:02hiring process is you know at least he speaks about it very simply he's like i'm looking for evidence
01:11:07of exceptional ability and he wants to hire young brilliant engineers even if they're not necessarily
01:11:13like super trained but they have the capability to solve problems in this really quick way and the
01:11:18culture i think is such he's done an amazing job of like building that intensity and the decision-making
01:11:23process into the culture such that like people who come in are kind of brought along and swept up in
01:11:28it and carried through like the you do go through that machine um but those allies are stumbling
01:11:36around you like people have to choose to come work for you and it's because he chose these giant
01:11:39purposes um but you know it's easy to forget that these started really small and really crazy and he
01:11:44had to paint these big pictures to get people to be excited and show up and give their all for it the
01:11:49most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist yeah
01:11:54this is uh he likens this to like school teaches us to solve the problem in front of us like you
01:12:00can't reject a question on a test but actually this is a stupid question i don't want to answer it
01:12:05yeah dumb don't like it take it back oh 100 yeah congratulations here's your a it doesn't happen
01:12:10so the piece that he the first step of the algorithm this is his like five-step engineering
01:12:16process is to question the requirements and then the second is to try very very hard to delete
01:12:21the part or process you know the best part is no part the best process is no process so if something
01:12:27can be deleted the product gets simpler and simplicity as he says delivers both reliability
01:12:33and low cost and so i think it is this we spend so much time doing things or optimizing things that
01:12:41that truly don't need to exist um and if you look at you know the complexity of plenty of products
01:12:47around us it's like did nobody try to put these parts together uh but when you're trying to build
01:12:52a car out of ten thousand different parts you're like all right every time i can put i can combine
01:12:56these two things it's one less thing to attach to another and then it's four less parts because i
01:13:01don't need two screws to connect these two parts together um and it's less tolerance like it's it's
01:13:08less things that can space to show up in the thing and there's less things that can fall apart if
01:13:12they're one unit instead of two so it is part of the process to just revisit and revisit and revisit
01:13:18if you don't eat the glass you're not going to be successful oh yeah his uh i think this is
01:13:23originally a bill lee quote who's a friend of his and entrepreneurship is like eating glass and
01:13:28staring into the abyss and the follow-up is like eventually you start to like the taste of your own
01:13:33blood yeah yeah yeah i think it is a sad lesson for people who are on the outside of business
01:13:41that like the idea of running a business that at some point all of the problems will go away
01:13:47but you are the person in charge of the problems yeah like that's your job is to find the biggest
01:13:52problem and to always be at the vanguard of trying to fix that problem and at no point throughout your
01:13:58entire career will there be no problems and given that you are ultimately the problem solver at the
01:14:02buck stops with yeah guess what it's going to be on you and it's going to be on you for the rest
01:14:07of time and if the business is in decline that is a problem and if the business is in ascendancy you
01:14:12will have new bigger problems as you push new frontiers yes you better fall in love with solving
01:14:16problems yeah um it's a very interesting uh he didn't originally set out as ceo of tesla and he
01:14:23didn't he says he didn't want to become ceo of tesla and he just felt like compelled to do it at
01:14:28a certain point because if he didn't he felt like it the company would have failed and the sense of
01:14:32like internalizing responsibility of like the the outcome of the mission is more important than my
01:14:37desire for for comfort or my desire to avoid problems it's like as ceo you are dealing with a
01:14:42distillation of the worst problems in the company and that's the chewing glass piece like if you're
01:14:47not going to the hard part if you're not tackling the hardest thing then you know that denial or that
01:14:55lack of urgency or that willful blindness is going to catch up with you and the company is going to
01:14:59suffer yeah because ultimately that is the biggest bottleneck right that is the thing that is holding
01:15:04everything else up and if you're the leader where you direct that attention is where the organization
01:15:08sort of chooses to focus what's that thing that formula one drivers talk about don't look at the
01:15:13wall like the car goes the car goes where you look yeah and the company will go where you're looking
01:15:17presumably all of the staff that work for you as well yeah yeah which i think is another part of
01:15:22like his this comes from the military history of like being a battlefield general always being at
01:15:27the front your troops fight harder when you're there this is why he sleeps in the factory this
01:15:30is why he physically goes to wherever the problem is immediately like that leading from the front is
01:15:36a part of how he gets so much out of the people that he works with i'm doing it i'm in the trenches
01:15:42i'm sleeping on the factory floor yes you can do it we are suffering together like for a good cause
01:15:47it's worth it we can do it well also that's the way that he's constructed right that's the way
01:15:52that he's built i do think that's authentic to him yes um and he he leans into it and he you know he
01:15:58says i'm like i'm wired for war like i find comfort in like those kind of challenges those are so much
01:16:05so that you construct wars that don't even exist you create chaos and discomfort when you don't need
01:16:10to yeah but i think he would rather err on the side of like over over dosing on anxiety overdosing on
01:16:21effort making sure that nothing slips making sure that he's always making as much progress as they
01:16:25possibly can what do you think the inside of his mind's like to exist in that he calls it a a storm
01:16:32or a non-stop explosion those are like the two ways he's described it and someone who's like
01:16:37is it a happy storm no i i don't know that he's been formally diagnosed but i think he has talked
01:16:43about either tendencies towards not just asperger's but also um some bipolar tendencies and that's a
01:16:50hard hand with especially with you know a traumatic childhood um and the the stresses that he deals
01:16:57with you know publicly and privately and like he's he carries a heavy load do you think he's
01:17:03actually a genius or is he just someone who's consistently applying a handful of sort of brutal
01:17:08principles over and over again i think it's both um i think he's i think there's sufficient evidence
01:17:14that he is certainly above average if not like way up there in in iq um you know he was precocious he
01:17:22was like the head of his class as a kid and um coding video games when he was 12 and like you
01:17:28know had a patent his name on a patent when he was like 20 so like i think people who go around being
01:17:33like elon's an idiot everybody else does all the work is like that is just not an informed opinion
01:17:38at all but i don't think he's a thousand times smarter than any other human who's ever lived
01:17:42and so the difference between like all right he's smart he's probably you know certainly smarter than
01:17:48me but like he's not that doesn't not explain the difference in order of magnitudes of the outcome
01:17:55it seems like level of smart tolerance for risk
01:18:00bias for action and work rate at least from what we've been talking about those seem to be four of
01:18:09the big drivers and grand quests i think i think that's a that is a key piece of actually like what
01:18:18makes him special i think if he if he applied like you know massive work ethic and first principles
01:18:23and ingenuity to like reinventing insurance it just like wouldn't wouldn't have the same zest
01:18:29and zeal and he wouldn't have the same like level of outlier results what is the purpose piece how
01:18:35does that sort of factor in i think it's an interesting i think he cares very deeply about
01:18:40humanity as a whole um i think it's it's an interesting paradox where he's like
01:18:46people who criticize him for like being cruel or whatever to people he works with like coming down
01:18:54hard on them or having really high expectations or um being mean or firing people capriciously or
01:19:00whatever but as he explains it's like i am yes i push people really hard i sometimes step on toes
01:19:09but i do that in service of this mission that serves all of us which is making life multi-planetary
01:19:14or electrifying transport advancing clean energy if it's neuro link it's like helping paraplegics
01:19:21or quadriplegics like control computers or eventually walk again that also has some ai
01:19:25alignment components to it um he there's a chapter in the book like my companies are philanthropy
01:19:31everything that he starts are all the technologies that he tries to advance come from this inherent
01:19:35love of humanity and the desire to solve problems that make collectively our lives better or preserve
01:19:41consciousness itself so your first book is on my list of a hundred books to read and there's a top
01:19:47five at the top which are the ones that everybody should start with and it's in that one of the other
01:19:50ones that's in there is the precipice by toby ord and that's all about existential risk how humanity
01:19:55could go extinct from super volcanoes to supernova explosions to nanotechnology and engineered
01:20:04pandemics and natural pandemics and ai and all the rest of it but you did a section on x risk as well
01:20:09yeah why is that important i i almost early stages of this book i didn't have it in there um and it
01:20:18wasn't until the purpose piece kind of clarified itself that i was like oh this is actually like
01:20:22the frame through which he is is so motivated um as what i'm sure that that book goes into
01:20:29great detail about it like there's been many extinction events in human history or not in
01:20:34human history but in earth's history like many species most species were wiped out multiple
01:20:38times entire continents destroyed like asteroids have hit earth in the past we don't know if things
01:20:43have like evolved and then been killed but his big motivation is like make life multi-planetary
01:20:48preserve the only form of consciousness that we're aware of that exists in the world in the universe
01:20:53which is ourselves and we're gonna feel pretty stupid if we destroy ourselves before we use
01:21:02before we back ourselves up like back up the hard drive and his point is like you know we've been
01:21:07around earth has been around a really long time humanity has not been around so long civilization
01:21:12is very young like we're only 10 000 years into what could be a million year civilization
01:21:17but we've got to take this first step um off the planet and into the solar system and
01:21:23if we've fucked this up before we get off the planet like
01:21:28big l yeah well i think what what's fascinating to me is i wonder about uh people who are very
01:21:38singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times it was so funny
01:21:44assuming that you weren't born a slave and you couldn't have raised out of anything if there's
01:21:49some sort of egalitarian meritocracy and you can just like toss them into the roman empire or toss
01:21:54them into the middle of the war of the roses or something just watch what happens yeah
01:21:58i don't know man it certainly seems like it's the time to have somebody that's like that
01:22:05um regardless of what is going on personally what you think about ethics and all the rest of it
01:22:11um i remember he gave this interview it's probably about three or four years ago and he said something
01:22:16to the effect of what i care about is doing good not the appearance of it yeah and there are a lot
01:22:23of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good they have no interest in that and um
01:22:33it's kind of the move fast break things i didn't give a fuck what you think of me
01:22:36type approach even if that's untrue in some part like an ability to be disliked a preparedness to
01:22:44not care so much about optics in the way that other people do um it's a fucking big unlock
01:22:51peter has a very interesting observation of like how high a percent of the successful founders
01:22:58especially in tech seem to be somewhere on the spectrum and he's like what does it say about our
01:23:03society that the people who are like have a biological advantage in
01:23:09de-emphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve an
01:23:16outlier success have you heard jonathan b's approach he says there's only three types of
01:23:20founders that are going to be successful number one is megalomaniac number two is autist
01:23:28and number three is revenge fantasy and megalomaniac adam newman from we work uh autist elon musk
01:23:36and revenge fantasy palmer lucky um although i think palmer actually kind of has a bit of all
01:23:41three and i think elon probably has a bit of all three as well like you know trying to alchemize
01:23:44some slights that occurred earlier on but uh hey look i think in order to do different things in
01:23:52order to make changes and to push the limits in ways that people haven't seen before obviously
01:23:57obviously you're going to need but by design you're going to have to get comfortable with people
01:24:03doubting you and making judgments about it the the disregard for the way things are done
01:24:10yes is completely crucial yeah and i think so many of us forget that we
01:24:15you know it's almost like we're in the matrix unless we make the willful effort to break out of it
01:24:21and we have this bias to defend the status quo no matter what it is without even really
01:24:25ever thinking critically about it um and so most of us when you hear something like somebody's
01:24:30disrupting and radically innovating something new we're just kind of like ah do we really need that
01:24:35isn't it fine the way it is especially as we get older or as we get comfortable with that thing
01:24:39you know there's a great like douglas adams line like everything invented before your 30 is like a
01:24:45new miracle and to be appreciated and everything invented after your 30 is like a crime against
01:24:50humanity and a sin and should be not this is where there's a line about driving everybody driving
01:24:55slower than you as an idiot and everyone driving faster than you as a maniac yeah uh every there's
01:25:00one about women as well every girl who's got smaller titties than me is flat chested and
01:25:04every girl who's got bigger titties than me is a fatty that was in your episode about uh female
01:25:15intra-sexual competition yeah yeah small titties big titties it all comes down to titties so look
01:25:21dude this coming to the book process which i think is fascinating obviously you write
01:25:25the navalmanac and then that kind of springboards you into this pretty much the forefront of the
01:25:31self-published like pioneer space what what is this book like what are these books is it a new kind of
01:25:39biography is it a compendium it's it's a very strange type of book to read even though it's
01:25:47obviously been super popular so is it a new genre i i i truly don't know what to call it like it's
01:25:53kind of weird i even feel weird saying like i write this book because i feel like i build it
01:25:57like it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle to me and it's much more about removal yes right once you've
01:26:02got everything this is everything that this person has ever said yeah now how much of this block of
01:26:07marble do i need to remove before david's left yeah and just organizing and finding the thread so that
01:26:13it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the the previous idea and it's just
01:26:18like a clean oh yeah and then weaving the weaving as well i suppose yeah it's maybe more akin to clay
01:26:24than it is to marble yeah there's just um it is a weird thing and it came out of loving i mean i'm a
01:26:31big fan of charlie monger and warren buffett and like they never wrote books but a lot of people
01:26:35built books out of their talks their lectures their letters and i never knew what to call
01:26:41those either but i just found myself asking like who do i wish had written books and then realizing
01:26:46that the raw material is out there and i've been lucky to get you know permission from naval and
01:26:50biology and elon to like build these things um and i don't know what to call them and i don't know how
01:26:56to talk about it but i like it's fucking awesome here's what you can call it dude i think it's
01:26:59really really good um what what have you learned about the scale of the internet since obviously the
01:27:06naval manic was a huge rip-roaring success and really sort of catapulted you you weren't already
01:27:11that small before but that really sort of put you at the forefront what's it taught you about leverage
01:27:16online and that experience yeah it's easy i feel like um anybody's into podcasting youtube social
01:27:22media knows intellectually that like the internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think
01:27:27um but it sometimes takes a like palpable human experience to be like oh shit no really like they
01:27:33are much bigger than you think and i was really um i'm just surprised and delighted to like see that
01:27:38book take on a life of its own and see how many people recommended it and see how many people
01:27:42resonated like i thought i was writing a book is like building a lighthouse where you're like
01:27:46it has this ability to kind of like attract your people in a podcast i'm sure is the same
01:27:50you're like you you kind of put your values out there and people who resonate with it are like
01:27:54man i really like that i was like then we probably get along great like that's super cool and fun um
01:27:59and it's a great it's a great life on the other side of that creating something like that um
01:28:04and the relationships that come out of it right the the thing the scale still blows me away like i
01:28:10can't believe that we're you know this sells so well in china and india and all around the world
01:28:16and across so many different demographics india india makes a little more sense that's fair um
01:28:22but yeah i just i didn't it was not on my like vision board that like yoga instructors in bali
01:28:28were going to be like reading the almanac of navel and that like you know it was going to be so
01:28:32popular among like high school and college students we've been talking about that me and george been
01:28:36talking about this a lot and obviously we spoke about it last night the the tam for the book of
01:28:41elon is way bigger than it is for navel but the potential hurdle of ideological disagreement is
01:28:49also greater so again it's the boobies on the on the like popularity graph right lots of people
01:28:55that go ah i've got to and then lots of people who go never as opposed i don't know how many people
01:29:01have a fervent dislike of navel most people probably didn't know you should really read this
01:29:06no one's gonna go yeah exactly no one's gonna go you should really read this and someone say who
01:29:11is the book about yeah yeah so i i'm prepared i spent a lot of time being like answering the
01:29:16question who is navel um but i think once it's there's just such a weird book like it's a weird
01:29:22title it's a weird book it was like crafted for a niche and just like broke out but elon is one of
01:29:28the most famous people on earth right like um and i think he's he's not a polished presenter the way
01:29:35steve jobs is i don't think people necessarily think of him as a like font of wisdom or like
01:29:40deep introspection but he has fucking incredible ideas like when you can really access them like
01:29:47and he's his life story is just so so many ups and downs so many hard lessons and he is a really good
01:29:55communicator actually like he's he's got a gift for distilling things and bringing people along and
01:29:59finding a key metric like honing a team organizing people around a mission and you know some of these
01:30:05ideas in this book you know about being multi-planted he's been talking about for 20 years but we still
01:30:10there's still so much to learn from them um you're just they're battle-tested ideas i think in a lot
01:30:17of cases what are the tactical principles what are the ways that you've changed your life having gone
01:30:25through the process of writing this book i think the first would be my focus on hydration hydration
01:30:33makes a massive difference in how you perform and hydration is more than just drinking water element
01:30:38is a tasty electrolyte drink with everything you need and nothing that you don't each grab and go
01:30:43stick pack contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio of sodium potassium and magnesium with no
01:30:49sugar no coloring no artificial ingredients or any other bs free shipping in the us for a sample pack
01:30:56by going to drink lmnt.com modern wisdom if you don't like it for any reason they will return
01:31:03your money and you can keep the box that's drink lmnt.com is he doing all four is he doing all of
01:31:12them okay yep there you go oh wow showing the product as well holy shit thank you dude that's a
01:31:20that's a wonderful that's a wonderful gift that's the best gift that you could have given me is a
01:31:24free ad read because now i don't need to do it how fun how [ __ ] fantastic i am also a deep personal
01:31:29fan of element i drink it after every workout and every sweat session it's [ __ ] great i don't know
01:31:34who the other sponsors are you're off the hook that was the rest thank [ __ ] for that beyond i
01:31:38felt i'm getting getting jump scared by my own ad reads um what have you applied to your life beyond
01:31:46eight sleep and element what have you applied to your life after learning about elon i think it is
01:31:51uh the most meta is this sense that i'm capable of more than i think um it has encouraged me to
01:31:57do more things in parallel back to the like parallel gestation thing like i'm trying to
01:32:01run scribe media which is a publishing company and write a book actually work on three at the same
01:32:05time and podcast and invest so like there's it gave me some fuel in the fire to be like no this is this
01:32:15is doable and sane and if these things are all sort of like stacking and compounding it is sane to do
01:32:21them all in parallel over a long period of time um the bias to urgency i'm not working 100 hour weeks
01:32:29and running around the world on my private jet but i do have a much stronger discipline around like
01:32:34where is the bottleneck what's the most important problem to solve how what is the most effective way
01:32:39to solve it how can i physically go to the problem how can i pull in the right people um i think like
01:32:44the idea of a war room is kind of underrated of like what's the bottleneck gather the people like
01:32:49attack it the rest will kind of take care of itself um is not how a lot of companies are run
01:32:54frankly like a lot of them are like on a weekly meeting do this do that like standard schedule
01:32:58procedural as opposed to tactical yeah what is the issue let's go after that is let's go through it
01:33:03you know when i think about this it makes me think about the difference between watching a UFC
01:33:08and boxing when you watch boxing does it's this we it's almost ceremonial this sort of monarch like
01:33:15weird vestige of people dothing their caps we must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th
01:33:23anniversary and you're like what the fuck whereas it's just at the UFC it's rock music and the guys
01:33:29in the middle of the octagon they start hitting each other um and it kind of feels a little bit
01:33:33like that that when you have why do we why do we have an agenda why do we always have the same
01:33:38agenda for each of these meetings why can't it just be what is the problem given that the rate limit is
01:33:45constrained by the slowest moving heart or person or department or whatever it might be and if you
01:33:50continue to open those up the total like capacity of the pipeline increases yeah i think most leaders
01:33:57are by default delegating the pace of the entire organization to someone or something but they don't
01:34:05exactly know who but also by doing that by delegating by it not being them even if they're not
01:34:12purposefully delegating it or whatever they're off the hook yeah i don't need to be moving that fast
01:34:17i don't you know and it's a really good point to say if you've worked super hard for a good while
01:34:22like that's the point at which you get to kick back and matthew mcconaughey with your feet up on the
01:34:28table like that's the point the point of working that hard was to get to escape velocity which is
01:34:33perfectly fine depending on like what you're optimizing for again like i'm this is not a
01:34:36blueprint that like everybody should follow it is a like explanation of how one person who is unique
01:34:43and special happens to operate and take whatever works for you and leave the rest fuck yeah eric
01:34:49jorgensen ladies and gentlemen where should people go to check out everything you've got going uh
01:34:52ejorgensen.com is my personal site elonmuskbook.org has everything for this book um you can read it for
01:34:59free or listen to it for free if you want to if you want to buy it on amazon rock on um check out the
01:35:04navel book and the navel episode we did 800 episodes five years ago wow that is a good one i saw that
01:35:12you just released on smart friends the four hour conversation on your youtube yeah we just updated
01:35:17navel and i updated the audiobook so i got to like spend a day deep conversation and kind of be like
01:35:22all right which of these ideas hold which are refined which have you changed um it was a really
01:35:27cool like full circle kind of experience unreal uh what are you doing next can you say i'm i the one i
01:35:34can say is i'm doing a book with david senra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories
01:35:39from the like founders archive that will fucking rip which i think will be it's so fun to work on
01:35:44i think will be amazing um the other one i don't have like a thumbs up yet so i don't want to say
01:35:48that one publicly uh well i'm looking forward to getting you in the center in here and we can have
01:35:51a chat that would be amazing fuck yeah appreciate you man thank you