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The Wild Psychology of Elon Musk - Eric Jorgenson -

Modern Wisdom

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  • Purpose Makes Musk’s Risk Tolerance Work
    • Eric Jorgenson says Elon Musk’s edge is not just tactics but purpose fused with extreme risk tolerance.
    • Musk keeps taking long-shot bets because, as Eric says, failure only matters if it is catastrophic. Transcript: Chris Williamson Yeah. And the subtitle of this new one is A Guide to Purpose and Success about Elon. Why pick that? Why purpose specifically? Eric Jorgenson It’s emergent. I mean, when I write these books, I start with millions and millions of words of source material, everything they’ve ever shared publicly. And I try to figure out what is the essence of the person? What is the thing that is most special about them that anybody can learn from? And we all know that Elon is massively productive i feel like the question everybody’s asking is kind of like how the hell did this happen like how does he get so much done but what i didn’t Realize until way into the process is that purpose was the other pillar so i knew i wanted to know like how does he win but i didn’t know to the extent that purpose was a big part of why he wins And that is actually, he has some really incredible answers for what do I do? What’s important? How do I choose what’s important? Chris Williamson Yeah. I think everyone looks and just assumes tactics, raw tactics. But if there’s something bigger driving that, uh, Teal says about Elon, he seems to know something that about risk that the rest of us do not. Do you think that thing is? Yeah. I mean, I think Elon is risk on. Eric Jorgenson He takes risks that he shouldn’t take. He’s inherently biased towards risk. But the number of times that that pays off, I think, reveals and puts in Teal’s context. Teal is a risk manager and Elon is a risk taker. And when you combine that with purpose, the fact that Elon is on these missions, he’s trying to accomplish something, and he almost doesn’t care how much risk it takes. He’ll just keep taking chances and keep taking chances until he breaks through. And he’s got this amazing quote, failure is irrelevant unless it’s catastrophic. And I think that’s a really good way to sort of explain that attitude towards the risk of like, I just don’t care how low my chances are. I don’t care how long the odds are. I’m just going to keep going until I die because this is important enough to keep working on. And that explains why the purpose piece is crucial because that’s what would keep you pushing through. Yes. There’s so many times that he has done things that seem insane from like a financial motivation point of view, or I’m trying to build a business or, and it’s because he’s driven by these Massive purposes and he has this risk tolerance. And the combination of those things I think is what, you know, pushes him like these two opportunities, Tesla and SpaceX being the biggest word, we’re on nobody’s radar. He looked absurd when he undertook them. And he put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to achieve these things because he was purpose-driven, even though the odds were long and the risk was high. (Time 0:00:56)
  • Musk’s Traits Compound Into Extreme Output
    • Eric Jorgenson argues Musk’s output comes from stacking urgency, first-principles thinking, and relentless bottleneck hunting.
    • He says the combination is multiplicative, not additive, making someone a thousand times more productive over decades. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson I think he’s pretty singular. Like, do you not? Chris Williamson Yeah, I do. But a lot of people that are detractors have found a way to say, actually, it’s more to do with leverage and ridiculous risk tolerance and just sort of blowing through the boundaries That other people wouldn’t. It’s to do with a lack of scruples and being able to push through ethics that other people might find squirrely. Where do you see the big competitive advantages for him coming from? Eric Jorgenson I think he’s the greatest living entrepreneur, hard stop, and maybe the greatest of all time. The fact that he did Tesla and SpaceX, which would both be singular accomplishments and put him on top 10, if not Mount Rushmore, the fact that he did them both at the same time is unbelievable. It’s after PayPal and after Zip2 as a young guy. And then just sort of on the side, XAI, Boring Company, Neuralink, Doge, if you want to include that as a project, absolutely singular. And lots of game left, right? He’s only 55, not quite. He might have 20 more years. Where does this go in 20 more years? It’s unbelievable. I mean, the combination of traits that I think he has, and this is not to, I know that I will be accused through this book and this episode and everything, of lionizing and overlooking The bad traits that you listed. And there are plenty. There’s dark sides to every advantage. But he’s got the intensity of David Goggins. Like, just raw. If not the physique. Yeah, not quite the physique. Or the skin tone. There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Goggins. But he’s got the intensity of David Goggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Feynman. Then the like i like napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just like will to win when you combine those things absolutely singular um it would be like if zuckerberg Had also started google like i feel like that’s kind of the order of magnitude thing and like started google and facebook in parallel mean, SpaceX, I think when it goes public, this will Be more obvious to people, but he will have almost founded, but certainly funded, led, and driven two of the top 10 companies in the world, if not two of the most important companies in Chris Williamson The world in parallel at the same time while doing a bunch of other shit and having 14 kids. How? Singular. Okay, that is pretty singular. After a few million words of looking through his life, what it is that he’s said and done, what are the component parts of his success? What are the biggest drivers for how he’s been so productive? Eric Jorgenson I think there’s a few, and I think the thing that people miss is the combination of those factors. So I think people talk a lot about, and it’s correct to talk about the bias towards or the intense urgency towards the limiting factor, right? He’s always looking for the bottleneck and attacking the bottleneck. He works with maniacal urgency. Those are the words he uses and instills in people all around him. There is also this ability to sort of think from first principles has become this like keyword that he talks about and that he has a bunch of great examples for. But when you combine all of those things, it’s not a 10% or a 50% improvement. It is like a two order of magnitude improvement. If you are working on the right thing with the right vision at the right time immediately, all the time, you’re not twice as productive. You’re a thousand times more productive. (Time 0:03:49)
  • Musk Bets His Pay On Impossible Targets
    • Musk structures compensation as all-or-nothing bets tied to seemingly impossible company outcomes.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Tesla shareholders only paid if Musk achieved giant valuation jumps, and Musk sets deadlines with just a 50 percent chance of success. Transcript: Chris Williamson That becomes self-perpetuating that was when he put the uh tesla bonus structure in place for himself yeah the trillion dollar compensation package yeah yeah that there’s a lot of Criticism that was thrown around like this is ridiculous what an insane amount of money no one person is supposed to do that but his pushback was well look at what i need to do in order to Be able to achieve that can you just explain like why that was so ridiculous and what it constituted yeah this is the second time he’s done it actually um so he had an insane all or nothing Eric Jorgenson Like i will make zero dollars unless i 10x tesla i don’t remember the exact number but he had he had some number of years to like turn tesla into a massive, unprecedented success. And everybody said it was absurd, but the shareholders were all kind of like, all right, we’ll vote for it. What do we have to lose? If he doesn’t do it, we don’t pay him. And he achieved this impossible bar. And then the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were suing him because trying to retract that money. And that’s a whole mess that I’m not qualified to tell the story of in great detail, but it worked and he did the impossible and he has been doing the impossible over and over again. And so when he comes and says, I think I can take Tesla from a $1 trillion company to a $10 trillion company and you don’t have to pay me anything unless I do. But if I do maybe throw me a trillion dollars. Like, who is that hurting? Like, it’s helping all the shareholders who own it. They agreed to it. It’s supposed to be impossible, right? Like, it’s all upside. But he’s made all these impossible leaps before. Not always right, but like, the way he says it, he’s like, I’ve lost many battles, but I’ve never lost a war. He’s never lost a company. He’s never missed a huge target. He misses deadlines all the time, but almost by design. Chris Williamson Because he’s pushing the limit so quickly. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. He just articulated this really well, of course, after I finished writing the book because he’s always dropping new stuff. But he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks has a 50% chance of making. And he’s like, I don’t want to be making 100% of my deadlines that means they’re way too conservative that means things will get moved things will get missed so I set a deadline that I think We have a 50-50 chance of making and sometimes we’ll be wrong sometimes we’ll miss it but a lot of the time we will make a deadline that we didn’t think was possible because we chose to be Really really aggressive with schedules you (Time 0:08:01)
  • Making Stuff Is The Foundation Of Wealth
    • Musk sees real wealth as production, not money printing or financial engineering.
    • Eric Jorgenson ties that belief to Tesla lowering prices as volume rises, unlike legacy carmakers that mostly search for ways to charge more. Transcript: Chris Williamson Had 69 core Musk methods. So let’s go through some of them. Funny how that works out. If we don’t make stuff, there is no stuff. Eric Jorgenson He said this on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was one of a few things that hit me so hard. I was like, this book has to happen, actually. And it was in this era where everybody was just going, just print money, just send it out, just help us, help us. Like looking to sort of the government as big brother to just take care of us no matter what, even though nobody was doing any work during COVID. And he’s like, that’s not how this works. Like if we are not making stuff, if we’re not building stuff, if we’re not providing services, like the whole economy collapses. Like that is what holds up the money. He’s a great example, I think, of the bias to build and serve and improve things. Tesla is the only car company trying to drive prices down. Have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last 40 years? Chris Williamson Tesla’s prices have gone down? Yeah. Eric Jorgenson They’re actively lowering the price on the models. As they add volume, they lower the price. And as they simplify the car, they lower the price. But I looked this up, Ford F-150. If you just follow inflation, it used to be like five or six grand. And if you just follow inflation, it should be like 15,000 today. But they’re like 40 or 50 grand. And I feel like, yes, there’s more features and more safety, but like three, four times more. And I feel like every car company on earth is just trying to figure out how to charge more. And as Jeff Bezos said, like there’s two kinds of companies, there’s companies that try to charge, work hard to charge more. And there’s companies that work hard to charge less than Amazon is a, like, we’re driving costs down business. And Tesla is the same. He says like, if we can’t figure out, if we charge something, it’s because we can’t figure out how to charge less because he’s like the mission, the purpose. I want as many people as possible driving an electric car i want as many people as possible driving an autonomous car that is what solves the climate change problem that’s what makes Our cities quieter and cleaner and better like why not lower the price as we increase the volume and make it accessible to more people fear (Time 0:10:23)
  • Fear Kills More Projects Than Incompetence
    • Fear of failure blocks more ambition than lack of skill because most people never even begin.
    • Chris Williamson and Eric Jorgenson note many desired projects die before launch, so they never even get the chance to fail. Transcript: Chris Williamson Of failure is the biggest cause of failure Yeah. Isn’t that a good one? It’s fucking pithy. Is fear of failure the biggest cause of failure? Not a lack of skill or understanding or foresight? The way I hear that quote is it’s because it kills something in the crib. Like fear of failure is why people don’t even set out. Yeah. More people have not attempted anything than have attempted something and failed at it. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. You can’t fail due to skill or fail due to stamina. You never even try or start it. Yeah. And if you just think of like how many things any of us have dreamed of doing, but never tried, like it’s 99 to one. Chris Williamson Well, lots of things that you dream of, you probably shouldn’t try. So fear of, I guess the interesting small print here is it’s not necessarily fear of failure. It’s fear of that is not worth my time. I shouldn’t be spending my time on that thing. Eric Jorgenson Not that I could do it and it wouldn’t work, but if I did it, it wouldn’t be worth it. I mean, I think that’s a very optimistic and enlightened maybe view of why people rationalize not doing things that they do deeply want to do. Chris Williamson But for instance, Elon must have lots of dreams that he hasn’t pursued. Presumably, unless he’s also able to fucking program his own dreams. Eric Jorgenson It’s like, oh, that would be cool. That would be cool. (Time 0:12:20)
  • The Boring Company Started With A 2 AM Call
    • Musk’s urgency shows up as immediate physical action, even on half-formed ideas.
    • At 2 a.m. he told an engineer to research drilling, then ordered a hole dug in Tesla’s parking lot that same night. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson I mean, he’s the most leveraged man on earth and i feel like he does indulge these random i mean the boring company was kind of a like sitting in traffic being like fuck this and he just picked The phone and picked up the phone called one of his engineers is like start making a hole start researching uh drilling machines i’m gonna call you back in two hours by the way that was Chris Williamson At 2 a.m okay bye like that was when he did it yeah at 2 a.m yeah rang one of his engineers and said… It’s the guy who’s still running the boarding company today. Eric Jorgenson He’s like, do it. I’ll call you back. And then the guy comes back and says, all right, I found this and this about the drilling machines. I think they could be improved in this and this way. And then he goes to Tesla headquarters and is like, we’re going to start digging a hole in the parking lot. And they’re like, cool. We think we can get permits and do it in two weeks. And he’s like, nope. Move all the cars start right now i want to see a hole in the parking lot at midnight it’s 6 p.m go and like it is that level of bias to action like i think maniacal urgency the words don’t really Sink in until you hear story after story after story of him doing something that most people take two weeks to do in four hours what are the most maniacal urgency stories about elon i mean A small one that i think drills at home is like he was interviewing for his head of machining at a space x uh at a space x site and it was like a 20 minute interview just like tell me about your Work tell me about your background all right you’re you’re qualified. Come to an agreement. Somebody standing behind him is like, here’s a job offer, fill in the blanks, sign it, sign it, go to work. Like 6 p.m. On Saturday. Like time just doesn’t exist. It’s irrelevant. It is like the whatever is the most important thing to get done in this hour, get it done immediately and keep going. Like there is no work-life separation. There is no like do it later there is like if it is the most important thing to do do it immediately even if it’s irrelevant like there’s some there’s stories in the the isaacson biography Of him ordering you call them like surges even when they don’t need to be done he just he loves urgency for urgency such like one of these pushes of like stack the starship or build that Part. And so I was like, we don’t, this part is not the bottleneck. He’s like, I don’t care. I don’t feel enough urgency for you. Like I’m giving you a deadline. I don’t care that it’s arbitrary. Like I want you to feel the kind of urgency that I feel. Hard stop. Like that’s how we work. Chris Williamson It’s basically speed training. Like you’d give to an athlete, but being done out of season. Yeah. Eric Jorgenson And all the time. And this is not always, there are times when this is saved, you know, months or years or weeks or millions of dollars. But there’s also times when it’s like burn people out and piss them off and cause good people to quit. (Time 0:13:43)
  • Mission Lets Musk Demand Extreme Effort
    • Musk’s brutal pace works partly because the mission attracts people willing to burn hard for a limited stretch.
    • Eric Jorgenson says only a giant purpose can make brilliant engineers accept years of intense, no-balance work. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson Work rate is pretty huge that the churn of people working for him is is pretty insane for sure there are some people who are who are very long tenured um but it also i mean i think that’s part Of the strategy like churning through relatively young brilliant engineers no work-life balance this is this is your this is your time in the wild of like you are going to be here all The time here at the drop of a hat. But he’s been doing this forever. He did this. PayPal, he decided would, it was before they merged, but he was going to launch x.com on Thanksgiving weekend. And people were like, that doesn’t make any sense. Nobody’s going to be paying attention. Everybody’s with their families. Like, don’t care. We’re launching on Sunday on Thanksgiving. I want everybody in here all the time. People are i go see my family nope you’re not dedicated if you’re not in here working 20 hours a day trying to make this deadline it is it is urgency for urgency’s sake all the time on everything And the people this goes back to purpose is like only you only get that out of people if you have this incredible mission that people feel like they’re on, that they’re like, yes, I want To show up. I want you to put the pedal down. I want to be used for all I’m worth. I want to see what I’m capable of. I want to work as hard as I can with other brilliant people on this incredibly powerful mission. (Time 0:16:20)
  • Musk Optimizes For Mission Not Wellbeing
    • Musk appears to optimize for mission progress, not comfort, happiness, or self-care.
    • Eric Jorgenson says there is little evidence of routines or introspection; Musk wakes, checks for emergencies, and goes straight to war. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson Zelon do any kind of self-care morning routine meditation therapy not that there’s much evidence of which i think is interesting like the most productive man on earth barely sleeps Like lives on his private jet works maniacally all the time. No discernible good habits from what I can tell. Not on staining. It eats donuts. Not a lot of meditation. Not a lot of introspection. Just gets up, grabs his phone, draws a knife, and goes to war every single day. Chris Williamson That is just- Just shivs someone. Eric Jorgenson That is the- I’ve got got a, my friend Brent B. Short describes like operating business as a knife fight. And it’s like an operator who’s in it, like you wake up, you grab a knife off the bed stand and like you go to work. And that’s actually probably how it feels at the salon. You ask him his daily routine. He’s like, I wake up, I check my phone, I look for an emergency. There’s always an emergency. And sometimes if there’s not, he creates one. How so? This is also like from the Isaacson book. He’s like, there was a lot of times when there’s not objectively an emergency, but there is sufficient cause to be like, we can increase the pace. We can increase the pace. Let’s figure out how to create a situation that maybe gets things moving faster, maybe doesn’t. But it is a bias to urgency all the time. But this, and I’m not advocating this, like I don’t live this way. Even like you, you can see the recipe and not want to cook the dish. Um, but the, the takeaway that I think that is useful and generalizable for everybody is very David Goggins. It’s like, you’re capable of a lot more than you think. And the people who are like massively orders of magnitude more productive are working at a pace and an intensity that is like very foreign to most people. Um, you’re a good example of this. Like, I don’t think people appreciate how hard you work to like do the things that you do and cover the amount of ground that you have to do 800 episodes in five years like you’re an intense Motherfucker like you cover a lot of ground um you work really hard to do it it’s um but everybody is capable of 10 more 50 more just like give the throttle a push and see what breaks might Chris Williamson Not be anything so given the lack of self-care does he care about subjective experience the happiness fulfillment joy things it says um i don’t think that’s what he’s optimizing for Eric Jorgenson Like i don’t think he’s a particularly happy person i don’t think he even doesn’t really seem to take joy or pride in his past accomplishments. He’s just always looking forward. Um, and it’s, I mean, I feel like it’s a great gift to us and a burden to him, right? Like I, the people around him talk about like wishing that he would celebrate his accomplishments, wishing he would take a break, wishing he would be happier. (Time 0:17:44)
  • Trauma May Fuel Musk’s Relentlessness
    • Eric Jorgenson links Musk’s drive partly to childhood abuse, humiliation, and violence that created a permanent internal furnace.
    • He says Musk seems powered by both clean fuel like mission and dirty fuel like self-attack and angst. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson Um, but he’s just onto the next, onto the next. And like think when you have a glimpse in his childhood, that makes a little more sense. How so? I mean, as David Senra says, the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son. His dad was certainly abusive, verbally abusive. Imagine standing there as an eight-year boy for hours while your dad, like, screamed in your face, drill sergeant, style, calls you worthless, calls you useless, calls you stupid. When Elon was young, he got absolute shit kicked out of him. Like, gang stomped, not, like, lost a fight with one guy. Hospitalized for a while. His brother said he was, so swollen he was unrecognizable and his dad sided with the bullies and like called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose like what does that do like That just creates this furnace in you that like will never stop um and so i think there’s there’s a lot of he’s not comfortable with he likes, he is, he is always at war and he’s looking for The next war. And that just like drives him always. Um, and you know, that is one part, like, you know, always the debate between clean fuel and dirty fuel, like, which is better. You know, if you’re, if you’re like mean to yourself internally, you’re like such a piece of shit. I gotta, I gotta get more done. I can do more. I can accomplish more. I can be better versus like, I’m building this great thing and i can do it and this is going to be awesome and people are going to love it or i’m really proud of what i’ve done i’m achieving This powerful mission and elon does both like he burns clean fuel and dirty fuel it seems he’s achieving these these missions that are important to humanity that so many people dream Of that everybody thought was impossible and he’s got this incredible string of successes but he also has this, this like internal angst, (Time 0:20:38)
  • Even Musk Hit A Breaking Point
    • Musk’s tolerance for strain has clear limits despite his mythology of endurance.
    • Eric Jorgenson recounts a COO finding Musk catatonic under a desk before an earnings call, and 2008 night terrors during crisis periods. Transcript: Chris Williamson What’s that story? It’s from the Isaacson book, but I think it’s pretty telling. What’s that story about when he needed to do an investor meeting and the COO came in and found him like catatonic under his desk and basically had to like force him to get up. Yeah. He was still doing an earnings call. Eric Jorgenson And I think this is like 2018. This is like the end of a really long stretch of just like miserable stuff. And I think he was in a really tough spot psychologically. And he was just like lying on the floor. And yeah this guy to his credit like he’s like has experience with psychological illnesses in his family and challenges and so he kind of knew what to do and he like went in and laid on the Floor next to him it was like how you doing buddy you just went under the desk yeah like laid down next to him was like how you doing like i know it’s hard i’m gonna take a couple more minutes And we got to get up and we got to do this and do our best. And it’s hard. Like, I think he puts himself through a lot. Like, Elon burns the boats and challenges himself. But he does have limits. Yeah. Chris Williamson I mean, if you’re lying under your desk, catatonic, that’s a limit. Eric Jorgenson I do he uh in the 2008 crisis he was to lulu riley talks about him like having night terrors he’s like sitting up all night um he’s throwing up he’s having like screaming nightmares um but That goes back to like like i don’t want to live that experience but it gives you a sense of how far people can push themselves and how far. (Time 0:25:12)
  • Use Extreme People As Scouts Not Models
    • Chris Williamson frames Musk like David Goggins or Brian Johnson: useful as an edge-case scout, not as a lifestyle template.
    • These outliers reveal what humans can learn at extremes, even if few should copy their lives wholesale. Transcript: Chris Williamson Look, the way that I see Elon is not too dissimilar to the way that I see Brian Johnson and also David Goggins, which is there are people who will go to the 99.999th percentile of anything And everything. And it’s useful to have them around because they teach you all of the lessons that you learn by going to the absolute edge. But that doesn’t mean that you should try and follow what it is that they’re doing. It doesn’t mean that it’s a good strategy for anybody else to do. But if you’re going to try and say that Brian Johnson going and basically being like a scout in a, he’s essentially the same thing as a scout in an army he goes up to this crazy high ridge And it’s all treacherous and maybe he’s gonna fall and oh my god and then he finds out some shit about what’s over there and then comes back and tells us all i’m like i don’t want to be a scout Eric Jorgenson And i don’t want an army filled with scouts but it’s fucking useful to have a few yeah well in particular like this scout who is like building so many things that benefit so many people And i think i mean all this comes back to like elon is being authentically himself like who he is is this like insanely driven technical genius boy who is infused with sci-fi and military History like dreaming of making an impact on the world um in part because of this like traumatic childhood he had and in part because of like it’s this grand dream and grand adventure And um i don’t think it’s an insult to say is like a little bit of a hero complex of like i can i can do this i can make a difference i can make this huge impact on the world and thank god he did Right like this type of person in the past would just become like a conqueror but like thanks to the miracle of modern capitalism and technology he’s building shit that benefit all of Us and we’re gonna have this huge evolutionary leap hopefully as we go to another planet and we get to live through it how fucking awesome is that do not (Time 0:26:48)
  • Stay Close To The Pain Of Decisions
    • Do not insulate yourself from the consequences of your decisions; stay physically close to the problem.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk wants designers, engineers, and manufacturers in the plant and tells leaders to walk straight to the red light. Transcript: Chris Williamson Separate yourself from the pain of your decisions? Eric Jorgenson Yeah, this one comes from the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization, but I think it’s a very generalizable rule. This version is like you want the designers and the engineers and the manufacturers, they all work in the plant so they can see the downstream effects of the decisions that they make In the design process. It’s very easy to try to break your feedback loop and not sense when you’re doing something harmful or even not missing an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you. Chris Williamson I think the idea of not insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions is probably a good idea. I mean, there has to be sometimes where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf. But I know you have to physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately. Yes. Basically the same rule. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. And on the production line, it’s like walk to the red. There’s like green or red everywhere on the production line. And it’s like, if something is red, there’s a problem, go there immediately. There’s a couple versions of physically move yourself immediately where the product he’s you should see his like if you track his private jet it’s like all over the world constantly On the move um and so it’s not just like locally move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately call the people get them in the room go there like it’s an underrated thing to be physically Where the problem is and whatever the most important this goes back to the kind of like the original multiplying things of like whatever the most important thing to do is whatever the Limiting factor is attack it immediately in the most effective way possible which is usually going physically to where the problem is and seeing it for yourself directly or pulling In all the people that have a hand on it do things in parallel Yeah. (Time 0:28:40)
  • Parallel Work Shrinks Timelines Dramatically
    • Musk compresses timelines by running dependent workstreams in parallel instead of waiting for neat sequence.
    • Eric Jorgenson says PayPal built product, integrations, and regulatory work at once, launching in one year instead of three. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson George and I were talking about this this morning because I think there’s like conventionally good wisdom that is focus. And this was one of the things I was surprised by. Warren Buffett’s the perfect quote to like explain this concept at a high level, which is like, you can’t get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. Elon stride. So you just, there are some things that there’s an incompressible amount of time. And if you put those in sequence, now all of a sudden your timeline is this long. But if you can plant all the seeds at the same time and they’re growing in parallel, all of a sudden your timeline is shrunk by a third. And I was at the grandest scale. It’s kind of like most normal people would start an electric car company, grow it, make it successful, and then start their space company. And he was like, nah, I can do both at once, but just give it a try. Because we might be able to move the total timeline of success up dramatically, and it’s harder and it’s riskier, but it also generates returns sooner. And I think there’s only some problems that are like, this is the right approach for. And he talked about in PayPal, it was like, we were developing the product and trying to do all these integrations and trying to get like regulatory coverage. And it was like, we did all of them all at once. It was fucking chaos, but we launched in a year instead of the three years that would have been conventional wisdom of like, it doesn’t make sense to invest in the product until we have The permission and we don’t have the integrations until we have the product. He’s like, nope, do it all at once. Launch immediately. (Time 0:30:28)
  • Progress Requires Accepting Some Tragedy
    • Musk rejects the idea that important progress should stop because tragedy or danger is possible.
    • Eric Jorgenson says colonizing Mars is a grand adventure with voluntary risk, and overprotectiveness can freeze civilization in place. Transcript: Chris Williamson Wild. We should not be afraid of doing something important simply because some amount of tragedy is likely to occur. This is more of that bias for action, this sort of disregard of fear. Eric Jorgenson And even further than that, I think this comes from his study of history in a lot of ways. He says, I think the extended version of that quote is like, if we did, if you never take a risk, the United States wouldn’t exist. Accept that. The pendulum has swung too far towards like, oh my God, nobody can ever be harmed in any way. Nobody is allowed to risk their life. Nobody’s allowed to take experimental treatments. He’s like, we can’t make progress like this. Colonizing Mars is a grand adventure. It involves risk. Not everything is going to go right, but especially if people choose to take those risks or risk their life to accomplish this great feat for humankind. There’s something inherent about humans sort of feeling fulfilled, sacrificing themselves to further humanity as a whole. And I think to me, that quote is like, yeah, damn the torpedoes. (Time 0:32:00)
  • Musk’s Public Image Destroys Neutral Judgments
    • Public misunderstanding around Musk is amplified because he became politically polarizing while remaining personally spiky and unfiltered.
    • Eric Jorgenson says it is hard to find a neutral view of someone so famous, rich, online, and divisive. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you think is the most misleading narrative about Elon’s success? It depends which camp you’re kind of coming from. Eric Jorgenson I think there are diehard fanboys that have just like total blindfold to the negatives. And I think there’s a lot of people, especially after his sort of political chapter that have just a whole bunch of ideas that are factually incorrect that they believe as deep truths. I mean, like anybody who is one of the most famous people on earth, right? And past a certain level of fame, I think there’s like a derangement syndrome about everybody. So I think it’s actually kind of hard to find a neutral or a well-rounded set of opinions on him. Chris Williamson That’s a good point. I was thinking about Elon in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg. And sure, there’s some people that don’t like Mark. People of Kauai aren’t massive fans of him buying up a ton of land and there’s other bits and pieces. But I don’t think people have like insane fervor against him or insane fervor for him. But Elon seems to be much more barbelly, right? If you were to draw a graph, it’s just a pair of boobs. Whereas, you know, most people are kind of a bell curve. Whereas Elon’s managed to completely clear the middle. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. I don’t think that used to be true. Like, do you think that’s a byproduct of him having a political chapter? Chris Williamson Yeah, I guess so. And then that creates the foundation. And on top of that is wealth, huge amounts of wealth, this potential IPO thing. Eric Jorgenson He’s spiky. I mean, he is like an unrefined sense of humor that he puts out there. Chris Williamson If he’s so concerned about the bias to action, working on the biggest problem, the bottlenecks, et cetera. Why have such a public presence? Like why tweet a lot? Yeah, you on the platform or whatever, but podcasts and interviews and stuff like that. If you’re the, I compare him with someone like James Dyson, right? Who kind of from some areas of a skill set is not massively different. Senra told me about when he sat down with James Dyson. James Dyson’s done thousands, maybe tens of thousands of prototypes. He said he was looking at James Dyson’s hands. So James Dyson’s hands were like Alex Honnold’s hands, these gnarled, sinewy, tough, thick things, these fucking chodes on the end of his arms and um i don’t know that that element for Eric Jorgenson Instance what’s the role that that level of exposure is playing i think is an interesting one yeah he’s had a he’s had sort of a taste for that for a long time i think um he’s like dated actresses And kind of living in LA. But there’s an element to which having that personal presence and talking about what you’re doing, he needs to rally support. You need a great team. You need investors. You need popular support. Think about how hard it was to convince people that electric cars were not just not stupid, but fucking awesome. Like that took a lot of repetition. Chris Williamson It is meant to think when you, when you roll back the clock that the Prius was like the eminent, preeminent fucking electric car. It was just a hybrid. Like the real electric cars were even worse. Yeah. Eric Jorgenson It was, it was really, um, I think it’s difficult now to understand how stupid and insane it seemed when he started Tesla. And the same thing with the rocket. Like, there were no space startups. Like, space economy was not a thing. And NASA had been on this, like, slow decline for, like, 50 years. We were paying Russia to take our astronauts up to the space station. Like, these were by no means, not just not obvious, but, like, very consensus, insane things to do. (Time 0:33:11)
  • SpaceX Began As A Mars Philanthropy Project
    • SpaceX began as a philanthropic attempt to inspire Mars exploration, not as a normal startup.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk planned to send a greenhouse called Mars Oasis, got mocked buying rockets in Russia, then decided launch cost was the bottleneck. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson That project to where how he sort of got it to where it is and his place i mean spacex i think most people don’t realize started as like a pure philanthropy project he was looking at the nasa Website saying when are we going to go to mars we went to the moon 50 years ago why haven’t we been back and when we going to go to Mars? Surely there’s a plan. And there was no plan. And he was coming off of his first exit with PayPal. So he had $200 million or something in the bank. And he’s like, I’ll just spend a hundred million to see if I can increase NASA’s budget. It was pure philanthropy. He’s like, I’m going to buy a rocket. I’m going to make a little greenhouse. I’m going to ship it to it to mars and i’m gonna get a photo of a little baby plant on the red planet it’ll be the first life on another planet and that’ll catalyze this movement and inspire People this popular that was the that was the origin story yeah it was called mars oasis that was the thing and to do this he like went around trying to buy a rocket he’s like why are these Rockets so fucking expensive he went to russia and tried to buy an intercontinental icbm and they laughed at him and spit on him and like fucked him around and he got pissed and so he’s Like maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high how why are rockets so expensive can’t they be done better and so he gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience At his and i think this is a interesting part of the story is like did a series of like saturday sessions of like first principles let’s look at all the historical things but let’s also Say like how good could good be with all the modern technology modern design like is there a design that we can come up with that would be a massive improvement in space launch costs such That this would be possible and he realized like the market for space launch, that was the bottleneck. That was the real problem that like you couldn’t get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was space shuttle, which is this like massive bloated government program. There’s not particularly capital efficient. They weren’t iterating. They weren’t doing volume. Um, they were way over spending on basic parts because they were all like aerospace grade or whatever and so as soon as the paypal thing sold he’s like all right i’m gonna go i’m gonna hire Chris Williamson Some rocket engineers and like let’s see if we can do this wasn’t the original like the apollo 11 blueprints available just free online wasn’t that part of it that you were able to get Rocket blueprints? You could just download them, I think. Or maybe he made his available for free. Maybe. Eric Jorgenson I mean, he’s not a rocket scientist. So he’s like, how did you learn how to do this? And he’s like, I just read books and I talk to people. I read all the textbooks on rocket science that I could find. I borrowed them and I started talking to experts. And his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was like the foremost rocket hobbyist. (Time 0:38:00)
  • SpaceX Is Really A Backup Plan For Life
    • SpaceX’s core mission is not satellites or rockets but making life multi-planetary as an existential backup.
    • Eric Jorgenson frames Mars as the next evolutionary step after life moved from sea to land: redundancy for consciousness itself. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson Cost has come down by some insane factor i know that orders of magnitude which is driven starlink and is going to drink drive even more um and now he’s talking about like building a dyson Sphere which is like solar but in space so we can capture more energy than even hits the the earth from the sun and that hasn’t he been talking about putting compute in space as well yeah These are like big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then like oh that’s insane lasers yeah oh okay i didn’t realize that the dyson sphere would power the compute Yeah it’s just like a bunch of like solar panels with computer chips on the back that like can communicate with each other floating all around in space um which is insane and wild but that’s Not the mission. That is the cargo that makes Starship economic to build hundreds or thousands of them. But the actual mission is to make life multi-planetary. And this goes back to like, zoomed all the way out, his altruistic philanthropic things is like, look, we should all agree that we do not want the only form of life that we know in the universe To die. Like we are the only conscious beings we know. Earth is the only planet with life that we know of. Can we all agree that like, it would be great to have life move just, just next door. Just get some on Mars. Just get a couple, maybe a million people. Get some plants. If a comet hits Earth or we blow ourselves up or there’s a catastrophic pandemic, we’ve got another horse in the race. Whether you’re an environmentalist or a humanist or anything, this is a thing that we should universally agree is good. And why not go for it like he’s like this is the window that is for the first time in not just human history but earth’s history we have the ability to make life redundant to get it to another Planet um and isn’t that like one of the grandest missions that we can conceive of and he puts it on this evolutionary time scale right so like there was suddenly single-celled life, Then multi celled life. And then there was fish, and then the fish came on land, and then the split into like, plants and animals, different forms of life. And going from Earth to our first new planet is this massive step function in basically how successful life is and its resilience to whatever comes next. (Time 0:40:50)
  • SpaceX Could Become The Toll Booth Off Earth
    • Eric Jorgenson thinks SpaceX could become one of the greatest companies ever because it controls access off Earth.
    • He compares it to discovering the New World, where the transport layer becomes the toll booth for a vast new economy. Transcript: Chris Williamson Successful do you think SpaceX is going to be? Long term. Unbelievably. Eric Jorgenson They have essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the planet. And like, there’s 90, if not 99. Do not pass go. Do not go to the moon give me 200 they could have been the great one of the greatest companies on earth even if they never built starship even if they just like cash flowed off of falcon 9 And they were the only reusable rocket company they would have been an unbelievably successful company but they are reinvesting into starship um trying to build compute and and um Energy in space they’re trying to build a, I think he’s been talking now about like a mass driver on the moon that’ll build these like von Neumann probes and all kinds of other crazy stuff. But if the historical analogy that he talks about is like, this is when the new world was discovered. Like we all existed around the Mediterranean for like most of Western human history. And then all of a sudden Columbus discovered the new world and it’s like, all right, we need new shipping technology. We have a taste for all of the fineries of this new world. So many people want to pay for passage. And it’s like this economic bonanza. And just zoom all the way out again. And like, where are most of the raw materials in the solar system, let alone the galaxy? Like not on Earth. We have this bias to the only raw materials that matter are like wood and farmland, but there are raw materials, atomic raw materials on every other world and in the asteroid belt and Just like floating around in space. And getting the technology, the Starship to go access them is going to be an unbelievable boon for humanity. (Time 0:43:21)
  • Tesla Keeps Jumping To New S Curves
    • Tesla now looks like stacked S-curves rather than one company, moving from EVs to autonomy to humanoid robots.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk has even shifted lines from premium cars toward Optimus, betting robotics may dwarf cars. Transcript: Chris Williamson What about Tesla? Eric Jorgenson Tesla is, I think, going through, like these startups are stacked S-curves, right? And so electric cars was one very fundamental innovation. Autonomy is a whole nother one. And so a big question mark is this leap to autonomy. And then he’s already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots. And that’s going under Tesla. Chris Williamson Yeah. Eric Jorgenson Humanoid robots are in Tesla. He’s, he’s just shut down, um, the model X and the model S production lines and switch them over to building humanoid robots. So like that is coming quickly. Um, he’s going from starting to build robo taxis that are fully autonomous, no steering wheel. So thinking that the autonomy curve is there, and he talks about this being one of the biggest markets of all time, and that Optimus is even bigger. Not a consumer product, but he’s building, they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries, which is powering the kind of like solar to battery grid conversion, which is going To speed up energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution. And then there’s a whole nother kind of, they are backwards vertically, like they’re producing, they just built a new lithium refinery. And so they’re like, we are supply constrained in many cases. Chris Williamson And so they’re like working backwards um further and further into their supply chain literally to the point where they’re looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials Eric Jorgenson Yeah he does did say he thinks tesla’s gonna have a factory on the moon which like i don’t know i don’t know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what but He did X is now owned by XAI, which is now owned by SpaceX. So there’s some sort of congealing, but I don’t know if Tesla and SpaceX will merge at some point. What about these humanoid robots? I mean, I don’t know. It’s either going to be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally like breaks the economy and ushers in this crazy era of abundance um but i think it’ll be slow adoption just because People are slow to adopt things that are in particular when they’re like in the uncanny valley so commercial uses i think there’ll be like a ton of them in factories and stuff like that But also some of the robotics engineers come in and say like humanoid is sure it’s generalizable but like there’s almost always a better more specific form function robot to use for Chris Williamson A use case um right yeah why would we constrain this general purpose robot to have our like dimensions when you could get one that cracks eggs and one that cleans the dishes and one that Eric Jorgenson Etc yeah you might just need like two arms on a rail in your kitchen and that’s your kitchen robot yeah you might just need like two arms on your washer and that’s your laundry robot and Like you might not (Time 0:44:57)
  • Humanoid Robots Still Look More Strange Than Useful
    • Chris Williamson mocks current humanoid robots as awkward and half-useful despite the hype.
    • He describes one loading a dishwasher like someone at a 6 a.m. ketamine afterparty, while Eric Jorgenson says commercial use may arrive first. Transcript: Chris Williamson Actually want one that can like walk around your house and feel like a person have you seen what was the super widely publicized one that kind of had a knitted jumper and a knitted face I think that was optimus no it wasn’t no it wasn’t it’s already shipped it’s already out and floating around uh there was an advert there was a billboard on uh like east 6th street for it And i thought it was just such a funny place to put it anyway uh there was this video that someone had put of it trying to load dishes into the dishwasher and it’s got this weird position It’s sort of leaning like this and somebody had captioned it as uh me every time that it’s 6 a.m at a ketamine after party and it literally looks like it’s done too much ketamine and it’s Like all contorted it’s like in a really fucking weird position um but yeah i i don’t know i you’re right to say as soon as you step outside of the existing bucket of what people use things For, going from driving a F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla, I can kind of see how it works a little bit. People were nervous about full self-driving, but after a while, okay, there we go, there we go. No one has, no one’s looking at the fact, oh, well, I already have a dishwasher and this robot is basically an on its feet, multi-purpose dishwasher. It’s not quite the same thing. Yeah. Here it is. Look at this. It’s trying to close the door. Eric Jorgenson Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha If you’re standing there watching that, this would be very painful. Yeah. But if you just go away and the dishes are done, cool. I mean, are they done? Chris Williamson No. No. Fucking go back, dude. Yeah. It’s, uh, there’s work to be done. Eric Jorgenson I think it is a really interesting question of, like, where and how are humanoid robots going to show up over the next 10 years? I think it’s, like, one of the big questions. And, like, I would probably go to a laundromat staffed by humanoid robots great makes total sense like a coffee shop maybe maybe not maybe washing dishes but not like at the counter making Chris Williamson A lot just because yeah just because you partly go there for the human interaction um i don’t know i think it’ll be really interesting to like see it all plays his plan is what is this one Eric Jorgenson In every home within the space of basically no time at all yeah i mean like tons of demand especially if it is smart and helpful um it’s kind of like rosie from the jetsons right like do all Chris Williamson The stuff i don’t want to do go get the trash cans take out the trash presumably powered by xai in some regards so that is going to have to start to cross over the Tesla to XAI thing. So that would suggest a natural sort of convergence. Eric Jorgenson Well, Tesla has its own amazing AI team. They’re building their own chips. But he does say like Tesla, because of all of the like real world AI stuff that Tesla has done to create self-driving, that’s actually very analogous to making really smart humanoid Robots. And he talks about having like a, this crazy training center full of humanoid robots, basically doing stuff like that, looking like idiots, trying to like figure out the training data. Chris Williamson And then getting rewards. Yeah. Oh, you did it well. You closed it without looking like you’re on ketamine. Congratulations. Who was I speaking to? Fuck, I was talking to someone, I was talking to someone at dinner the other night and they were saying that basically they think a lot of people, I go, oh, it was my friend Austin. People are going to have to wear little cameras that show them going about their daily business to train robots. This is a thing? Yeah. Dude, I’ve only just, this has fucking blown my mind. Because obviously that’s how Tesla’s full self-driving was trained, right? They took the top 1%, 10% of drivers on Tesla and used their driving style to reverse engineer what humans do so that the robots that drive your Tesla can drive in the manner that you wouldn’t. It means that you’ve got more aggressive driving. You’ve got the ability to overtake and undertake, which if you ever get into a fucking Waymo, it does not have the capacity to do that. It’s the most tentative grandma of all time because that’s being created from first principles as opposed to the flow of traffic is other humans i as a human i’m able to detect that and Eric Jorgenson Adjust appropriately therefore if i if you become me robot then you can also be kind of a human yeah and it is cool in a tesla you can have it set like you can set like i want to chill drive or Chris Williamson Like i’m fucking late like let’s go okay um but yeah people are gonna wear fucking cameras that just they’re gonna crack eggs and iron clothes and yeah yeah i mean training data has already Eric Jorgenson Been a huge like part of the economy it’s mostly like digital training data and companies are making a ton of money selling training data to models digitally. But yeah, the ability to collect massive, massive, massive amounts of data and train AI, and now in the real world train AI, to do all these jobs. (Time 0:47:40)
  • Musk Wins By Combining Technical And Economic Depth
    • Musk’s underrated advantage is breadth: he mixes engineering intuition, economics, project management, and aggressive judgment.
    • Eric Jorgenson says he can overrule experts because even rare wins against “impossible” create massive enduring payoffs. Transcript: Chris Williamson What’s underappreciated about Elon’s skill sets, do you think? What are the things that people don’t realize? Eric Jorgenson I think the breadth of his skill set is quite interesting. I think if you try to emulate just one or two of these traits without appreciating how they interconnect, you could either make some mistakes or be an asshole, depending on how you went About it. But I think he’s a micromanager, but he’s in the technical details because he has technical expertise and a strong intuition around the physics of things. He has a deep fluency across not just the physics and the engineering, but also the finance and the economics. He double majored in economics and physics in college. And so from the very beginning, he’s been like, he has a great line. To truly control the product, you have to control the company. And he does not share power well, but there’s been many times where he’s made a risky or a technical decision based on his economic and opportunity cost view of the future of the business. Even early in SpaceX, he was driving maniacal urgency because he’s like, the future of this business is $10 million in revenue a day. Every day we fuck around, every time you burn a day, every time you burn 12 hours, you burn half of our future 10 million dollar a day run rate so like let’s go let’s go let’s go um so that mix Of like really big picture and deep in the details understanding the limiting factor attacking it which is a mix of like that’s technical skill that’s economic fluency that’s like A sense of project management actually um and the ability to know how and when to like push push people like if if really really smart rocket scientists are telling you that’s impossible No and he’s like do it anyway like it is possible i’m telling you it’s possible go do it anyway and you’re seven out of times, even like even five out of even one out of 10 times. Because every time that you’re right about that, you’ve gained like a jewel that will pay off for the whole rest of your company. And the nine times that you were wrong, like, oh, I guess you were right. Impossible did mean impossible in that sense. Or maybe we’ll revisit it next year or what made it impossible. (Time 0:55:13)
  • Musk’s Memory System Supports His Micromanagement
    • Musk’s memory system helps him track enormous technical detail across many companies.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk learned memory tricks young, likely using palaces and recall systems that make his cross-company oversight seem superhuman. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson He’s unreasonable the unreasonable man what about memory it seems like he’s got a pretty good memory yeah that was one of the things um he he picked up really early in life he like read One of those memory trick books with the guys who memorize a whole deck of cards. And so he’s been using memory tricks, which one of the things of how the hell does he do what he does? Five companies, many projects in all of them, taking technical reviews. It’d be hard to remember all these people’s names, let alone what they’re doing week over week and where the bottlenecks are and all this stuff. And he practiced those as a kid. And so I think he still uses memory palaces and some of these tricks, which are one of those things that seems superhuman if you don’t know how it works. And there’s a lot of stories of him. Of the ways he builds loyalty with his team actually is people like holy shit when he he knows a specific technical detail like of somebody’s project that is like you know a has a direct Report who has a direct report and he’s like it’s like you’re the bottleneck what’s going on and they’re like this this and this he’s like try this they’re gonna like holy shit that worked Like how how did you know that you haven’t like spent time in here and it’s this mix i live with this every single day and you just came in and and had it yeah yeah like that’s a mix of memory Chris Williamson And intuition and incredible like uh recall and and depth and feeling for that like the physics of the thingably risk and pain tolerance have to be two big skills. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. It’s immersed in it, like absolutely immersed in it. And like, I think this is a place where the kind of the Asperger’s can be an advantage, like just lives in it over and over and over again. Lives in what? The details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are. That wouldn’t suggest why pain and risk are more palatable. Chris Williamson Maybe it would. I don’t know. Maybe people who are a little spectrum-y don’t have the same detection of risk. They certainly don’t have the same detection of other stuff. Eric Jorgenson Well, I think it really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of, right? Like, I’m going to look like a failure. People are going to think I’m wrong. It’s going to ruin these relationships. Like, he doesn’t have any of that. And he says, it is a huge weakness to want to be liked and (Time 0:57:36)
  • Outlier Founders Can Tolerate Mass Dislike
    • A major founder advantage is tolerating being disliked while making consequential choices in public.
    • Eric Jorgenson says most people avoid decisions that would create millions of enemies, even when the decision itself might be necessary. Transcript: Chris Williamson I do not have it. It is a huge weakness to want to be liked and I do not have it. Weakness to want to be liked. You don’t think that he wants to be liked? I do think he wants to be liked in a general sense. Eric Jorgenson It’s a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked. Yeah. The willingness to enter into dislike maybe is the thing. Like, um, I think, uh, you know, he drives a coach’s managers and within the company versus outside the company, like, are you willing to be misunderstood by the general public? And that’s an interesting question. Like if you had the chance, pick your, pick your divisive opinion, right? Like, are you pro-choice or pro-life? Are you open borders or closed borders? Whatever. If you had the chance to, like, flip the switch and make that decision, but the catch is everybody knew it was you. Like, are you willing to make 100 million enemies who will do, like, lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, twist your words, like attack your family do anything because like they hate the decision That you made like are you willing to do that i think most people are not and agree with or disagree with any particular decision like respect the (Time 0:59:50)
  • Jorgenson Builds Books For Use Not Completeness
    • Eric Jorgenson’s books intentionally ignore full biography and instead distill what a person would teach at dinner.
    • He strips out politics, family, and gossip to collect only the highest-conviction ideas that readers can actually use. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson North star for these books is usefulness to the reader like i try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said and i want to simulate the feeling of being at dinner with Elon musk like it written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that doesn’t feel like you would be curious about it from a sense of like, how do I improve my own life and how did this happen? Chris Williamson Didn’t the Navalman Act, isn’t that per, the most highlighted book in Kindle history or something? Is that a stat that I made up? Eric Jorgenson Maybe. I was trying to make it that. I don’t think Kindle will give me that. Readwise said it’s like in their… Top whatever. Yeah. But that would be also including distribution, probably not per word. Chris Williamson What you want is for people who read this book, how much of the book is highlighted on Kindle. Eric Jorgenson Yes. And I want to see like, I love when people show me like beat to shit copies of their book like it’s been in and out of a sauna their backpack everything it’s so satisfying yeah just ring it Out yeah uh okay so that like biography miss the tactic i just go deeper into how like how does that person accomplish what they do what are their what is their secret sauce i feel like biographers Kind of come at this from like how comprehensive and correct can i be about their whole history not what’s the most useful thing that you would pull out of the biography like that i think That’s why like david sunro’s episodes are amazing because he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down. And that is my approach is take a million words and turn it into 50,000 of the most useful ones. And to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through and how timeless can it be And how universally can it be applied like i think anybody on earth can take something useful out of this and i over and over again kind of sift it through that filter it’s like almost like Chris Williamson A version of writing fiction because in fiction you’re trying to bring a character to life and in this you’re trying to be that person briefly to try and condense down what would they Want to say of their own words that they’ve already said? What would their top 50,000 be out of this million and a half? Eric Jorgenson If they were trying to be as helpful as possible, like their best selves, right? So that’s the other difference is like, I’m not trying to build a comprehensive view of the person. I’m not trying to put them in historical context. I’m trying to be as useful as possible. And I don’t dwell on any of the personal stuff, any of the political stuff. We don’t talk about his family. It’s just like, what would he teach if he set out to teach all of the ideas that he had the most conviction in? Chris Williamson It’s an interesting challenge with somebody who is as widely regarded and hated as Elon because almost everything that everybody wants to talk about is not to do with the tactics and The principles and the purpose. It’s to do with the intention. It’s to do with the drive. It’s to do with the ethics and the scruples. Eric Jorgenson And almost every conversation I hear people have casually about Elon is them projecting their own opinion. They’re using Elon as a foil to be like, I think it’s great that we’re going to Mars and doing these things. Or I think it’s terrible that he made this decision about, you know, the USAID. And that’s fine. Like you can agree or disagree with anything that this person does, but like you’re using that to project your values. You’re not asking like, what can I learn from this person? And to pick somebody as an exemplar is not to say that everything they do is correct. I very much believe in model traits, not people. (Time 1:01:20)
  • The Idiot Index Exposes Absurd Overpricing
    • The idiot index measures how absurdly overpriced a part is by comparing its raw material cost to its purchase price.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk attacked parts like a $13,000 steel component worth about $200 in material, exposing lazy supply chains. Transcript: Chris Williamson One of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index. Yeah. The idiot index, it’s kind of an outcropping. Eric Jorgenson It’s downstream of the first principles thinking. And so the idiot index applies to a particular part or a particular product. And it’s the difference between the raw material cost and the price. And so an example, he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who like didn’t know what the stupidest parts in his product were in his composite because that shows you where you’re Massively overpaying so there’s a part um that was they were paying thirteen thousand dollars for that was like one piece of steel and if you just weighed it the weight of that steel was Worth like two hundred dollars and so he’s like you multiply the price of the raw material or divide that out of the total price and like i don’t know what that is other than a big number Like that’s fucking stupid we’re overpaying by like 50x for that thing so like how cheaply can you get the steel and then get it into that shape and you get those insane idiot indexes, Especially in aerospace because we go outsource and then outsource and then outsource. And so there’s like layers of delegation and profit. Chris Williamson Everyone is arbitraging their profit off the top of this final thing that ends up coming down. There’s Rolls Royce that make the engine, but before that the turbine is milled in this place. And before that, the raw materials are mined out of- Yeah. There’s like five subcontracts. Eric Jorgenson We’re like one guy who’s like welding a thing together. And you’re like, oh, just bring that guy over here. And then the part is like 400 bucks. Great. We just saved $12,000. Chris Williamson I guess asking the question, why is this so expensive? 100%. Becomes quite a powerful question. And then power ranking the things like what is most expensive? Eric Jorgenson Like’re attacking that one what’s the second most expensive we’re attacking that one and this is how i mean this is how he’s able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make Things more and more and more available what have been the biggest cost breakthroughs what have been the ones that have completely unlocked spacex tesla i i think it’s a million little Ones all stacked up right so like they’re $13,000 to $200,000 is more than two orders of magnitude, 500X or something. There’s a story about a latch that was supposed to be $1,000 or something, and a guy just looked at it and was like, it kind of looks like a bathroom stall latch. And so he went to Home Depot, bought a bathroom stall latch and was like, did a little magic on it. It’s like, okay, did it, 50 bucks, boom. And so it does that scrappiness over every single part, every single part, every single part. And it’s just the simple things done over and over and over again with ruthless intensity. And really, it goes back to the the kind of the quote that you brought up about like feeling the pain of your decisions like if there’s a company making money by selling a part that they Bought from a subcontractor for a hundred dollars and then selling it to 500 like who cares and if the ultimate buyer is the government who like can just have a black box budget like fine Doesn’t matter. But if Elon comes in and says like, I need to drop the cost of space launch by two orders of magnitude in order to accomplish this thing. And then two more orders of magnitude, because we need to get to fucking Mars. Then like now the goal, the bar is so much higher. And you start asking questions like how cheap can it get? How cheap can it get? Can’t we do this cheaper? Do we need that part at all? Like simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs. When it’s SpaceX, it feels more abstract because none of us are consuming rockets. But if we’re buying a Tesla, we care a lot, whether it’s $20,000 or $30,000. That’s massive. (Time 1:05:05)
  • Allies Assemble Only After You Start Moving
    • Momentum attracts support; allies usually appear after visible commitment, not before it.
    • Eric Jorgenson uses Chris Williamson’s podcast as the example: one microphone, then years of output, then a team and global audience. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson That changes by a huge number, the number of people who can access a nice car that’s safe, doesn’t pollute right and so like if in five or ten more years we keep doing these things we keep Eliminating parts we keep increasing scale we keep uh lowering the idiot index of every part and like now the car is ten thousand dollars and it’s like an absolute no-brainer um and the World is quieter and calmer and cleaner. As you move forward, allies will assemble around you. Yeah. I mean, there’s no better example than Chris Williamson. Because of all of my allies? Yeah. I mean, think this started with you and a microphone, right? Like, what, seven years ago? Eight. Eight years ago? Yeah. Like a thousand episodes later, there’s like an army at your back you got an incredible team here you got millions of listeners you got people all around the world they’re like excited To see you tour um but you didn’t wait for a million people to like demand for you to create a podcast you started and you had one fan and then two and then four and then eight and you know thousand Episodes later like here are. You just have to start carrying that flag. (Time 1:08:42)
  • Delete Bad Complexity Before You Optimize It
    • Smart people often waste effort optimizing things that should be deleted instead.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk starts by questioning requirements, then removing parts because simpler products cut cost, attachment points, and failure modes. Transcript: Chris Williamson The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist. Yeah. Eric Jorgenson He likens this to school teaches us to solve the problem in front of us. You can’t reject a question on a test. Oh, this is a stupid question. Chris Williamson I don’t want to answer it. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. Dumb. Don’t like it. Take it back. Oh, 100%. Chris Williamson Yeah. Eric Jorgenson Congratulations. Here’s your A. It doesn’t happen. So the piece that he, the first step of the algorithm, this is his like five-step engineering process, is to question the requirements. And then the second is to try very, very hard to delete the part or process. You know, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. So if something can be deleted, the product gets simpler. And simplicity, as he says, delivers both reliability and low cost. And so I think it is this, we spend so much time doing things or optimizing things that truly don’t need to exist. And if you look at the complexity of plenty of products around us, it’s like, did nobody try to put these parts together but when you’re trying to build a car out of 10 000 different parts You’re like all right every time i can put i can combine these two things it’s one less thing to attach to another and then it’s four less parts because i don’t need these two screws to connect These two parts together um and it’s less tolerance. Like it’s less things that can space to show up in the thing. It was less things that can fall apart if they’re one unit instead of two. So it is part of the process to just revisit and revisit and revisit. (Time 1:11:49)
  • Leadership Means Owning The Worst Problems
    • Running a company means inheriting a distilled stream of its hardest problems forever.
    • Eric Jorgenson says Musk became Tesla CEO reluctantly because leadership means chewing glass and attacking the biggest bottleneck yourself. Transcript: Chris Williamson You don’t eat the glass, you’re not going to be successful. Oh yeah. Eric Jorgenson I think this was originally a Bill Lee quote, who’s a friend of his. And entrepreneurship is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. Chris Williamson The follow-up is like eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood yeah yeah yeah i think it is a sad lesson for people who are on the outside of business that like the idea of Running a business that at some point all of the problems will go away but you are the person in charge of the problems. Your job is to find the biggest problem and to always be at the vanguard of trying to fix that problem. And at no point throughout your entire career will there be no problems. And given that you are ultimately the problem solver that the buck stops with, guess what? It’s going to be on you and it’s going to be on you for the rest of time. And if the business is in decline, that is a problem. And if the business is in ascendancy, you will have new, bigger problems as you push new frontiers. Yes. You better fall in love with solving problems. Eric Jorgenson It’s a very interesting, he didn’t originally set out as CEO of Tesla and he says he didn’t want to become CEO of Tesla. And he just felt like compelled to do it at a certain point because if he didn’t, he felt like the company would have failed. And the sense of internalizing responsibility of the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for comfort or my desire to avoid problems. As CEO, you are dealing with a distillation of the worst problems in the company. And that’s the chewing glass piece. (Time 1:13:18)
  • Leading From The Front Multiplies Urgency
    • Musk leads from the front because presence itself changes how hard people fight.
    • Eric Jorgenson links his factory-floor sleeping and constant travel to a battlefield-general style that signals shared sacrifice and urgency. Transcript: Chris Williamson What’s that thing that Formula One drivers talk about? Don’t look at the wall. Like the car goes where you look. The car goes where you look. Yeah. And the company will go where you look and presumably all of the staff that work for you as well. Yeah. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. Which I think is another part of like his, this comes from the military history of like being a battlefield general, always being at the front. Your troops fight harder when you’re there. Is why he sleeps in the factory this is why he physically goes to wherever the problem is immediately like that leading from the front is a part of how he gets so much out of the people that Chris Williamson He works with i’m doing it i’m in the trenches i’m sleeping on the factory floor yes you can do it we are suffering together like for a good cause it’s worth it we can do it well also that’s The way that he’s constructed right that’s the way that he’s built i do think that’s authentic to him yes um and he he leans into it and he you know he says i’m like i’m wired for war like i Find comfort in like those kind of challenges those so much so that you construct wars that don’t even exist you create chaos and discomfort when you don’t need to yeah (Time 1:15:10)
  • Genius Alone Does Not Explain Musk
    • Eric Jorgenson thinks genius alone cannot explain Musk; his results come from high intelligence applied with brutal consistency.
    • The bigger force is smartness plus risk tolerance, action bias, work rate, and quests grand enough to sustain obsession. Transcript: Chris Williamson Do you think the inside of his mind’s like to exist in that? Eric Jorgenson He calls it a storm or a nonstop explosion. Those are like the two ways he’s described it. And somebody was like, is it a happy storm? I was like, no. I don’t know that he’s been formally diagnosed, but I think he has talked about either tendencies towards not just Asperger’s, but also some bipolar tendencies. And that’s a hard hand with, especially with, you know, a traumatic childhood and the stresses that he deals with, you know, publicly and privately. Chris Williamson And like he carries a heavy load. Do you think he’s actually a genius or is he just someone who’s consistently applying a handful of sort of brutal principles over and over again? Eric Jorgenson I think he’s both. I think he’s, I think there’s sufficient evidence that he is certainly above average, if not like way up there in, in IQ. You know, he was precocious. He was like the head of his class as a kid and coding video games when he was 12 and like, you know, had a patent, his name on a patent when he was like 20. So like, I think people who go around being like, Elon’s an idiot, everybody else does all the work is like, that is just not an informed opinion at all. But I don’t think he’s a thousand times smarter than any other human who’s ever lived. And so the difference between like, all right, he’s smart. He’s probably, you know, certainly smarter than me. But like, he’s not, that does not explain the difference in order of magnitudes of the outcome. It seems like level of smart, tolerance for risk, bias for action, and work rate. At least from what we’ve been talking about those seem to be four of the big drivers and grand quests i think i think that’s a that is a key piece of actually like what makes him special i Think if he if he applied like you know massive work ethic and first principles and ingenuity to like reinventing insurance, it just like wouldn’t have the same zest and zeal and it wouldn’t Have the same like level of outlier results. (Time 1:16:26)
  • Musk Frames His Companies As Philanthropy
    • Musk treats his companies as philanthropy because each one targets a civilizational problem rather than a mere market.
    • Eric Jorgenson says the unifying aim is preserving and upgrading humanity, from clean energy to brain interfaces to becoming multi-planetary. Transcript: Chris Williamson Is the purpose piece? How does that sort of factor in? I think it’s an interesting, I think he cares very deeply about humanity as a whole. Eric Jorgenson I think it’s an interesting paradox where he’s like, who criticize him for like being cruel or whatever to people he works with like coming down hard on them or having really high expectations Or um being mean or firing people capriciously or whatever but as he explains it’s like i am yes i push people really hard i sometimes step on toes but i do that in service of this mission That serves all of us which is making life multi-planetary or electrifying transport um advancing clean energy if it’s neural link it’s like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics Like control computers or eventually walk again that also has some ai alignment components to it um a chapter in the book of like my companies are philanthropy. Everything that he starts or all the technologies that he tries to advance come from this inherent love of humanity and the desire to solve problems that make collectively our lives Better or preserve consciousness itself. Chris Williamson So your first book is on my list of 100 books to read and there’s a top five the top, which are the ones that everybody should start with. And it’s in that. One of the other ones that’s in there is The Precipice by Toby Ord. And that’s all about existential risk, how humanity could go extinct from super volcanoes to supernova explosions to nanotechnology and engineered pandemics and natural pandemics And AI and all the rest of it. But you did a section on X risk as well. Yeah. Eric Jorgenson Why is that important? I, I almost early stages of this book, I didn’t have it in there. Um, and it wasn’t until the purpose piece kind of clarified itself that I was like, Oh, this is actually like the frame through which he is so motivated. Um, as what I’m sure that deep, goes into great detail about it, but there’s been many extinction events in human history, or not in human history, but in Earth’s history. Most species were wiped out multiple times, entire continents destroyed. Asteroids have hit Earth in the past. We don’t know if things have evolved and then been killed, but his big motivation is like make life multi-planetary preserve the only form of consciousness that we’re aware of that Exists in the world in the universe which is ourselves and we’re gonna feel pretty stupid if we destroy ourselves before we before we back ourselves up like back up the hard drive and His point is like you know we’ve been around. Earth has been around a really long time. Humanity has not been around so long. Civilization is very young. Like we’re only 10,000 years into what could be a million year civilization. But we’ve got to take this first step off the planet and into the solar system. And if we fuck this up before we get off the planet, like, big (Time 1:18:34)
  • Great Founders Break The Social Spell
    • Extreme founders often succeed because they can ignore social approval and violate default assumptions.
    • Chris Williamson and Eric Jorgenson compare that trait to being on the spectrum, a megalomaniac, or driven by revenge fantasy. Transcript: Chris Williamson Well, I think what’s fascinating to me is I wonder about people who are very singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times. Yeah. I think it’s so funny. Assuming that you weren’t born a slave and you couldn’t have raised out of anything, if there’s some sort of egalitarian meritocracy and you can just like toss them into the Roman empire Or toss them into the middle of the war of the roses or something, just watch what happens. I don’t know, man. It certainly seems like it’s the time to have somebody that’s like that. Regardless of what is going on personally, what you think about ethics and all the rest of it. I remember he gave this interview, it was probably about three or four years ago, and he said something to the effect of what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. Lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good they have no interest in that and um it’s kind of the move fast break things i didn’t give a fuck what you think of me type Approach even if that’s untrue in some part like an ability to be disliked a preparedness to not care so much about optics in the way that other people do um it’s a fucking big unlock peter Eric Jorgenson Thiel has a very interesting observation of like how high a percent of the successful founders especially in tech seem to be somewhere on the spectrum and he’s like what does it say about Our society that the people who are like have a biological advantage in de-emphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve an outlier success have Chris Williamson You heard jonathan b’s approach he says there’s only three types of founders that are going to be successful number one is megalomaniac. Number two is Autist. And number three is Revenge Fantasy. And Megalomaniac, Adam Neumann from WeWork. Autist, Elon Musk. And Revenge Fantasy, Palmer Lucky. Although I think Palmer actually kind of has a bit of all three. And I think Elon probably has a bit of all three as well. Like, you know, trying to alchemize slights that occurred earlier on but uh look i think in order to do different things in order to make changes and to push the limits in ways that people Haven’t seen before obviously obviously you’re going to need but by design you’re going to have to get comfortable with people doubting you and making judgments about it the the disregard For the way things are done is completely crucial. Eric Jorgenson Yeah. And I think so many of us forget that we, you know, it’s almost like we’re in the matrix unless we make the willful effort to break out of it. And we have this bias to defend the status quo, no matter what it is, without even really ever thinking critically about it. And so most of us, when we hear something like somebody’s disrupting and radically innovating something new, we’re just kind of like, ah, do we really need that? Isn’t it fine the way it is, especially as we get older or as we get comfortable with that thing? (Time 1:21:32)
  • Push Harder On The Real Bottleneck
    • Assume you can handle more than you think, then push on the true bottleneck with urgency.
    • Eric Jorgenson says writing about Musk pushed him to run multiple projects in parallel and form war rooms around the key constraint. Transcript: Eric Jorgenson Think it is the most meta is this sense that I’m capable of more than I think. It has encouraged me to do more things in parallel, back to the parallel gestation thing. I’m trying to run Scrap Media, which is a publishing company, and write a book, actually work on three at the same time, and podcast, and invest. It gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, no, this is doable and sane, and if these things are all sort of like stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long Period of time. The bias to urgency, I’m not working 100-hour weeks and running around the world on my private jet, but I do have a much stronger discipline around like, where is the bottleneck? What’s the most important problem to solve? What is the most effective way to solve it how can i physically go to the problem how can i pull in the right people um i think like the idea of a war room is kind of underrated of like what’s The bottleneck gather the people like attack it the rest will kind of take care of itself um it’s not how a lot of companies are run frankly like a lot of them are like a weekly meeting do This do that like standard schedule as (Time 1:31:51)
  • Most Companies Let The Wrong Thing Set Pace
    • Many organizations quietly let their pace be set by the slowest person or ritual instead of the actual constraint.
    • Chris Williamson contrasts fixed-agenda meetings with a tactical style that attacks the live bottleneck and expands total throughput. Transcript: Chris Williamson Opposed to tactical yeah what is the issue let’s go after that is let’s go through it you know when i think about this it makes me think about the difference between watching a ufc and boxing When you watch boxing does it’s this we it’s almost ceremonial this sort of monarch like we invested people dothing their caps. We must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th anniversary. And you’re like, what the fuck? Whereas it’s just, at the UFC, it’s rock music and the guys in the middle of the octagon, they start hitting each other. And it kind of feels a little bit like that, that when you have, why do we have an agenda? Why do we always have the same agenda for each of these meetings? Why can’t it just be, what is the problem? Given that the rate limit is constrained by the slowest moving heart or person or department or whatever it might be. And if you continue to open those up, the total capacity of the pipeline increases. Yeah. Eric Jorgenson I think most leaders are by default delegating the pace of the entire organization to someone or something, but they don’t exactly know who. Chris Williamson Well, also by doing that, by it not being them, even if they’re not purposefully delegating it or whatever, they’re off the hook. I don’t need to be moving that fast. And it’s a really good point to say, if you’ve worked super hard for a good while, that’s the point at which you get to kick back and Matthew McConaughey with your feet up on the table. That’s the point. Eric Jorgenson The point of working that hard was to get to escape velocity. Which is perfectly fine, depending on what you’re optimizing for. Again, this is not a blueprint that everybody should follow. (Time 1:32:59)