How Elon Achieves the Impossible - Eric Jorgenson

Eric Jorgenson is an investor, entrepreneur, and author. How does Elon Musk actually think? You can analyse him from first principles, but the closest thing to a blueprint is Eric Jorgenson’s The Book of Elon. So what’s really going on in his mind, and what makes him so extraordinary? Expect to learn what the most misleading narrative about Elon’s success is, why Elon decides to move so fast and his obsession with speed, why Eric decided to document the mind behind Elon Musk, what he decided to leave out of the book, what Eric learned about Elon that other biographies missed, what the 69 core Musk methods are, if Elon’s worldview is closer to philosophy than business and much more… - Get up to $350 off the Pod 5 at https://eightsleep.com/modernwisdom Get 10% discount on all Gymshark products at https://gym.sh/modernwisdom (use code MODERNWISDOM10) New pricing since recording: Function is now just $365, plus get $25 off at https://functionhealth.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom - 0:00 What Can We Learn From Elon Musk? 3:32 What Makes Elon So Unique? 6:28 Is This Elon’s Formula For Success? 10:23 Why Creating Things Is the Key to Wealth 12:19 Is Urgency the Key to Success? 17:43 Does Elon Have Time for Self-Care? 20:03 Does Elon Create His Own Pressure? 25:12 Does Elon Actually Sleep? 28:39 Why You Should Feel the Cost of Your Decisions 30:25 How to Compress Your Time Like Elon Musk 32:00 Why Taking Risks Is Non-Negotiable 33:11 The Biggest Myth About Elon Musk 34:56 The Strategy Behind Elon’s Media Dominance 37:55 What People Still Don’t Understand About SpaceX 43:20 How Big Could SpaceX Actually Become? 44:58 What’s Tesla’s Next Move? 46:43 Are Humanoid Robots Actually the Future? 53:05 Are Meta Glasses Always Watching? 55:13 Elon’s Most Underrated Skill Explained 57:40 How Elon Built an Machine-Like Memory 01:01:04 What Biographies Miss About Elon Musk 01:05:05 The “Idiot Index” That Slashes Costs 01:06:58 Elon’s Biggest Cost-Saving Breakthroughs 01:09:08 How Elon Crafted a World-Class Workforce 01:11:49 Not Everything Needs to Be Optimised 01:13:18 Great Leaders Always Lead From the Front 01:16:26 Inside the Chaos of Elon’s Mind 01:18:34 Why Humanity is at the Core of Elon’s Mission 01:25:20 Has Eric Created a New Genre? 01:27:03 How the Internet Supercharges Influence 01:30:18 Using Elon's Playbook in Real Life 01:34:48 What’s Next For Eric? - Get access to every episode 10 hours before YouTube by subscribing for free on Spotify - https://spoti.fi/2LSimPn or Apple Podcasts - https://apple.co/2MNqIgw Get my free Reading List of 100 life-changing books here - https://chriswillx.com/books/ Try my productivity energy drink Neutonic here - https://neutonic.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Chris Williamson?

  How many copies of The Navalmanac have you sold now?

• 0:02Speaker 01

  It's tough to know, but I think we're coming up on 2 million.

• 0:06Chris Williamson?

  How's that feel?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  I'm still, the word I like to use is gobsmacked. Like, I really thought I was doing fan service for a few thousand Naval nerds. And the fact that that's like 40 languages and millions of people and we've given away a few million more, right? Like, I don't even really know.

• 0:21Chris Williamson?

  Oh, so that's how many were sold, because it was available for free through the website?

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is another like 5 million plus, really hard to track.

• 0:28Chris Williamson?

  I think it's my most suggested book. When people say, where should I start with personal development? Essentialism by Greg McKeown or The Navalmanac?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  That's incredible. And that's, I mean, I had no idea how many people were going to resonate with it and recommend it. And, you know, I think the highest compliment a gift, the highest compliment a book can receive is to be gifted. And so much of what we read comes from what's recommended. Like, how often do you see an ad for a book and buy it? Like, almost never.

• 0:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  The bar's just too high.

• 0:56Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, and the subtitle of this new one is A Guide to Purpose and Success. About Elon. Why pick that? Why purpose specifically?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  It was, it's emergent. I mean, when I write these books, I start with millions and millions of words of source material, everything they've ever shared publicly. And I try to figure out, like, what is the essence of the person? What is the thing that is most special about them that anybody can learn from? And we all know that Elon is massively productive. I feel like the question everybody's asking is kind of like, how the hell did this happen? 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?

• 1:51Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I think everyone looks and just assumes tactics, raw tactics.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54Chris Williamson?

  But if there's something bigger driving that, Teal says about Elon, he seems to know something that about risk that the rest of us do not. What do you think that thing is?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think Elon is risk on, like, he takes risks that he shouldn't take. He's inherently biased towards risk, but the number of times that that pays off, I think, reveals and puts in Teal's context, like, 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 gonna

• 2:50Speaker 01

  keep going until I die because this is important enough to keep working on."

• 2:54Chris Williamson?

  And that explains why the purpose piece is crucial, because that's what would keep you pushing through.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  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 it is because he's driven by these massive purposes and he has this risk tolerance. And the combination of those things, I think, is what, you know, pushes him, like, these two opportunities, Tesla and SpaceX, being the biggest, were on nobody's radar. He looked absurd when he undertook them. And he put hundreds of millions of dollars on the line to achieve these things because he was purpose driven, even though the odds were long and the risk was high.

• 3:32Chris Williamson?

  Is he that singular of an individual? Obviously SpaceX impressive, Tesla impressive, Doge kind of cool, being on stage, Trump campaign, Twitter, X, rah rah.

• 3:45Chris Williamson?

  You know, how, just how impressive is he or how singular is he as an individual?

• 3:49Speaker 01

  I think he's pretty singular. Like, do you not?

• 3:52Chris 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?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  I think he's the greatest living entrepreneur, hard stop, and maybe the greatest of all time.

• 4:28Speaker 01

  The fact that he did Tesla and SpaceX, which are both, would both be singular accomplishments and put him on like top 10, if not Mount Rushmore. The fact that he did them both at the same time is unbelievable. It's after PayPal and after Zip2 as a young, young guy, like, and then just like sort of on the side. XAI, Boring Company, Neuralink, like Doge, if you want to include that as like a project.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Absolutely singular. I mean, and lots of game left, right? Like, he's only 55, not quite. Like, he might have 20 more years. Like, where does this go in 20 more years?

• 5:10Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable. I mean, the combination of traits that I think he has, and this is not to like, I know that I will be accused, like, through this book and this episode and everything, of like lionizing and overlooking the bad traits that you listed. And there are plenty, like, there's dark sides to every advantage. But he's got like the intensity of David Goggins, like, just raw.

• 5:31Chris Williamson?

  If not the physique.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, not quite the physique.

• 5:34Chris Williamson?

  Or the skin tone.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Goggins.

• 5:38Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 5:39Speaker 01

  But he's got the intensity of David Goggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Feynman. And then the like, I like Napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just like will to win. When you combine those things, absolutely singular. 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. I mean SpaceX, I think when it goes public, this will be more obvious to people, but he'll, he will have almost founded, but certainly funded, led and driven two of the top 10 companies in the world, if not two of the most important companies in the world in parallel at the same time. While doing a bunch of other shit and having 14 kids.

• 6:24Chris Williamson?

  How?

• 6:25Speaker 01

  Singular.

• 6:25Chris Williamson?

  What is, okay, that's, that is, that is pretty singular. After a few million words of looking through his life, what it is that he's said and done. What is the, what are the component parts of his success? What are the biggest drivers for how he's been so productive?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  I think there's a few, and I think the thing that people miss is the combination of those factors. So I think people talk a lot about, and it's correct to talk about the bias towards, or the, the intense urgency towards the limiting factor. Right? He's always looking for the bottleneck and attacking the bottleneck. He works with maniacal urgency. Those are the words he uses. And instills in people all around him. There is also this ability to sort of, uh, think from first principles has become this like key word 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.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  If you are working on the right thing with the right vision at the right time, immediately, all the time, you're not twice as productive, you're a thousand times more productive. And then you do that for 30 years, 40 years. And the, the way that

• 7:36Speaker 01

  sort of head start accrues and compounds and the way the leverage builds on itself and the way the allies show up and the way that capital piles in behind you. And the way that wins turn into additional wins. And then you, he has this sort of mystique now that people rightly criticize as a mystique, like it feels unreal and it feels like people don't critique it.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  But he hasn't lost, like. And that becomes self perpetuating.

• 8:02Chris Williamson?

  That was when he put the Tesla bonus structure in place for himself.

• 8:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:10Chris Williamson?

  The trillion dollar compensation package.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:12Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that there's a lot of criticism that was run 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?

• 8:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is the second time he's done it, actually. So he had an insane all or nothing, like I will make $0 unless I 10x Tesla. I don't remember the exact number, but he had, he had some number of years to like turn Tesla into a massive unprecedented success. And everybody said it was absurd, but the shareholders were all kind of like, all right, we'll vote for it. What do we have to lose? Like if he doesn't do it, we don't pay him.

• 8:52Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  And he achieved this impossible bar. And then these, and then the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were like suing him because trying to like retract that money. And it's a whole, that's a whole mess that like, I'm not qualified to tell the story of in great detail. But it worked and he did the impossible and he has been doing the impossible over and over again. And so when he comes and says, I think I can take Tesla from a $1 trillion company to a $10 trillion company. And you don't have to pay me anything unless I do, but if I do, maybe throw me a trillion dollars. Like, who is that hurting? Like it's helping all the shareholders who own it. They agreed to it.

• 9:31Speaker 01

  It's supposed to be impossible, right? Like it's all upside.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  But he's made all these impossible leaps before, not always right, but like the way he says, he's like, I've lost many battles, but I've never lost a war. He's never lost a company. He's never missed a huge target. He misses deadlines all the time, but almost by design.

• 9:51Chris Williamson?

  Because he's pushing the limit so quickly.

• 9:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, he, he just articulated this really well, of course, after I finished writing the book. Cause he's always dropping new stuff, but he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks has a, he has a 50% chance of making. And he's like, I don't want to be making a hundred percent 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 fifty fifty 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.

• 10:23Chris Williamson?

  You had sixty nine core Musk methods. So let's go through some of them.

• 10:27Speaker 01

  Funny how that works out.

• 10:29Chris Williamson?

  If we don't make stuff, there is no stuff.

• 10:32Speaker 01

  He said this on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was one of a few things that hit me so hard. I was like, this book has to happen, actually. And it was in this era where everyone was just going like, just print money, just send it out, just like, help us, help us. Like, looking to sort of the government as big brother to just take care of us no matter what, even though nobody was doing any work during COVID. And he's like, that's not how this works. Like, if we are not making stuff, if we're not building stuff, if we're not providing services, like, the whole economy collapses. Like, that is what holds up the money. And he's a great example, I think, of

• 11:07Speaker 01

  the bias to build and serve and improve things. You know, Tesla is the only car company trying to drive prices down. Have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last forty years?

• 11:20Chris Williamson?

  Tesla's prices have gone down?

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're actively lowering the price on the models. As they add volume, they lower the price. And as they simplify the car, they lower the price. But I looked this up, Ford F one fifty. If you just follow inflation, it used to be like five or six grand. And if you just follow inflation, it should be like fifteen thousand today. But they're like forty or fifty 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. And Amazon is a like, we're driving costs down business. And Tesla is the same. He says, like, if we can't figure out, if we charge something, it's because we can't figure out how to charge less.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  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. Why not lower the price as we increase the volume and make it accessible to more people?

• 12:19Chris Williamson?

  Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not a good one.

• 12:25Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking pithy.

• 12:28Chris Williamson?

  Is fear of failure the biggest cause of failure? Not a lack of skill or understanding or foresight?

• 12:34Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:42Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, the far more people have not attempted anything than have attempted something and failed at it.

• 12:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can't fail due to skill or fail due to stamina.

• 12:53Chris Williamson?

  If you never try. Or start it.

• 12:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and you just think of like how many things you've, any of us have dreamed of doing but never tried. Like, it's ninety nine to one.

• 13:02Chris Williamson?

  But 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. Not that I could do it and it wouldn't work, but if I did it, it wouldn't be worth it.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  I think that's a very optimistic and enlightened maybe view of why people rationalize not doing things that they that they do deeply want to do.

• 13:32Chris Williamson?

  But for instance, Elon Elon must have lots of dreams that he hasn't pursued. Presumably, unless unless he's also able to fucking program his own dreams. So, oh, that would be cool. That would be cool.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  I mean, he's like 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 drilling machines. I'm gonna call you back in two hours. By the way, that was at two AM. Okay, bye. Like.

• 14:03Chris Williamson?

  That was when he did it?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:04Chris Williamson?

  At two AM?

• 14:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:06Chris Williamson?

  Rang one of his engineers and said.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  It's the guy who's still running the Boring Company today. He's like, do it, I'll call you back. And then the guy comes back and says, like, all right, I found this and this about the drilling machines. I think they could be improved in this in this way. And then he goes with Tesla Tesla headquarters and is like, we're gonna start digging a hole in the parking lot. And they're like, cool, we think we can get permits and do it in two weeks. And he's like, nope, move all the cars. Start right now. I want to see a hole in the parking lot at midnight. It's 6pm, 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.

• 14:45Chris Williamson?

  What are the most maniacal urgency stories about Elon?

• 14:48Speaker 01

  I mean, a small one that I think drills at home is like, he was interviewing for his head of machining at a SpaceX, uh, at a SpaceX 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 qualified. Come to an agreement. Somebody standing behind him was like, here's a job offer, fill in the blanks, sign it, sign it, go to work. Like, 6pm 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.

• 15:31Speaker 01

  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's sake. Like, one of these pushes of like, stack the starship or build that part. And so it 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.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Hard stop, like, that's how we work.

• 16:00Chris Williamson?

  It's basically speed training, like you'd give to an athlete, but being done out of season.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and all the time. Um, and, 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.

• 16:18Chris Williamson?

  I have to imagine that the blast radius of this work rate is pretty huge, that the, the churn of people working for him is, is pretty insane.

• 16:26Speaker 01

  For sure. There are some people who are, who are very... Long tenured, but he 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, uh, when it was before they merged, but he was going to launch X.com on Thanksgiving weekend. Like, 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.

• 17:07Speaker 01

  People are like, can 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. And I can't do it for 40 years, but I can do it for two or four, 10.

• 17:44Chris Williamson?

  Does Elon do any kind of self-care? Morning routine, meditation, therapy?

• 17:50Speaker 01

  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.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  No, no discernible good habits from what I can tell, like,

• 18:10Speaker 01

  not abstaining, really eats donuts, like, not a lot of meditation, not a lot of introspection. Just like gets up, grabs his phone, draws a knife and like goes to war every single day. Like that is just-

• 18:22Chris Williamson?

  Just shiv someone.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  I got, that is the, I've got a, my friend Brett Bishore describes like operating business as a knife fight. And it's like an operator who's in it, like you wake up, you have a knife off the bed stand and like you go to work. And that's actually probably how it feels at Elon. You ask him his daily routine. He's like, I wake up, I check my phone. I look for an emergency. There's always an emergency. And sometimes if there's not, he creates one.

• 18:44Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 18:46Speaker 01

  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. Like, let's figure out how to create a situation that maybe gets things moving faster, maybe doesn't, but it is a bias to urgency all the time.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  But this, and I'm not advocating this, like, I don't live this way, even like, you can see the recipe and not want to cook the dish. But 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. 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. You work

• 19:51Speaker 01

  really hard to do it. It's, but everybody is capable of 10% more, 50% more. Just like, give the throttle a push and see what breaks. Might not be anything.

• 20:02Chris Williamson?

  So, given the lack of self-care, does he care about his subjective experience? Happiness, fulfillment, joy, things?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  I don't think that's what he's optimizing for. 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. 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. But he's just on to the next, on to the next. And like, I think when you have a glimpse in his childhood, that makes a little more sense.

• 20:47Chris Williamson?

  How so?

• 20:50Speaker 01

  I mean, his, as David Sandler says, like, the story of the father is embedded in the story of the son. His dad was

• 21:00Speaker 01

  certainly abusive, like, there's verbally abusive. Imagine like standing there as an eight year old boy for hours while your dad like screamed in your face, drill sergeant, so 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 like so swollen, he was unrecognizable. And his dad sided with the bullies. And like called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose. Like, what does that do? Like, that just creates this furnace in you that like, will never stop.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  And so I think there's, there's a lot of, he's not comfortable with peace. Like, he likes, he is, he is always at war and he's looking for the next war and that just like drives him always.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, that is one part, like, you know, is 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 gonna be awesome and people are gonna love it, or I'm really proud of what I've done. I'm achieving this powerful mission and 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, uh, I think that, that seems to drive him.

• 22:32Chris Williamson?

  Definitely a tolerance for pain. It almost seems like he deliberately creates suffering for himself.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:37Chris Williamson?

  He did the, uh, the tiny home thing, he, he sold all of his stuff at one point.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:42Chris Williamson?

  Things may still have no possessions, basically, and sleeps on the factory floor.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  Yes, um, which, I mean, the possession thing was part like, he's like, I'm not, not like a bad billionaire. Like, I'm a billionaire because I built valuable companies. Like, I'll sell all my stuff, I don't care, I don't need fancy things. Cause people were like dragging him, he's like, I want, I want you to understand that, like, I'm in it for the right reasons. But I'm glad you asked about sleep.

• 23:08Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Because I'm a huge personal fan of Eight Sleep. If you struggle to sleep well, or just want to further optimize your sleep, Eight Sleep can help.

• 23:18Speaker 01

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• 23:39Speaker 01

  sleep phases, HRV, snoring, and heart rate.

• 23:43Chris Williamson?

  I know it off my heart, dude. Don't fucking tell me my own ad read, alright?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  With 99% accuracy. Eight Sleep starts to warm or cool your bed before you even get into it. That's why Eight Sleep has been clinically proven to increase total sleep up to one hour per night. Best of all, they have a 30-day sleep trial. You can try it for 29 days. And if you don't like it, they'll give you all your money back, plus they ship internationally.

• 24:08Speaker 01

  Go to the link in the description, or eightsleep.com/moderndwism and use modernwisdom at checkout. That's E-I-G-H-T, sleep.com/moderndwism, and modernwisdom at checkout.

• 24:20Chris Williamson?

  That was really great.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I really am a huge fan of Eight Sleep.

• 24:23Chris Williamson?

  I am too. There's no one that's used it that doesn't get completely fucking insane about it. Did Mateo put you up to that? Because they've just got listed for 1.5 bill on the stock exchange.

• 24:31Speaker 01

  No, I don't know them at all. I just actually love Eight Sleep and I wanted it to like, I thought it would be really funny to make you.

• 24:37Chris Williamson?

  Well, he's saved us from having to do the ad read, eh? Isn't that nice? That's one fewer ad read that I need to do this week.

• 24:42Speaker 01

  I feel like you've been working really hard. I just wanted to pick up a little bit of the slack.

• 24:45Chris Williamson?

  Thank you.

• 24:46Speaker 01

  I feel like the guests just show up and you have to do everything.

• 24:48Chris Williamson?

  That's true. You need to pay for yourself now. That's it. Or this isn't cheap to put on, you know?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I know.

• 24:53Chris Williamson?

  You need to pay for yourself.

• 24:54Speaker 01

  And I have an authentic, loving relationship with my Eight Sleep, and Elon needs one, because.

• 25:00Chris Williamson?

  Well, he doesn't have any possessions, so it's gonna be hard.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  Oh, that is, that is true.

• 25:02Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if they could fit it to the factory floor.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  Just fucking lay in eight sleep on the ground, be like, ah, it just sort of works, I guess.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:11Chris Williamson?

  What was that? What's that story? It's from the Isaacson book, but I think it's pretty telling. What's that story about when he needed to do an investor meeting? And the COO came in and found him like catatonic under his, under his desk? And basically had to like force him to get up?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was doing earnings call and um, I think this was like 2018. This is like the end of a really long stretch of just like miserable stuff. And I think he was in a really tough spot psychologically and he was just like lying on the floor.

• 25:44Speaker 01

  And this guy, to his credit, like, he's like, has experience with psychological

• 25:51Speaker 01

  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 and was like, how you doing, buddy?

• 25:58Chris Williamson?

  Just went to go under the desk?

• 26:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, like laid down next to him and was like, how you doing? Like, I know it's hard. I'm gonna take a couple more minutes and we gotta get up and we gotta do this, do our best and um,

• 26:12Speaker 01

  it's hard. Like, I think, I think he puts himself through a lot, like Elon burns the boats and challenges himself and.

• 26:18Chris Williamson?

  But he does have limits.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean.

• 26:21Chris Williamson?

  I mean, if you're lying under your desk, catatonic, that's a limit.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, dude, he uh, in the 2008 crisis, he was, Tolu 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. 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.

• 26:48Chris Williamson?

  I 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.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:03Chris Williamson?

  And it's useful to have them around because they teach you all of the lessons that you learn by going to the absolute edge. 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, uh, 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 and I don't want an army filled with scouts, but it's fucking useful to have a few.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  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?

• 28:39Chris Williamson?

  Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, this one is, uh, comes from like the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization. But I think it's a very generalizable rule.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  This version is like, you want the designers and the engineers and the manufacturers, like they all work in the plant. So they can see the downstream effects of the decisions that they make in the design process. It's a very, it's very easy to try to break your feedback loop and not sense when you're doing something harmful or even not missing an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you.

• 29:17Chris Williamson?

  I think that uh the idea of not insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions is probably a good, I mean, there has to be some times where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf. But I know what's that you have to locate physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately.

• 29:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:35Chris Williamson?

  Basically, the same rule.

• 29:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. And in the on the production line, it's like walk to the red. There's like green or red everywhere on the production line. And it's like, if something is red, there's a problem, go there immediately. Um, there's, there's a couple of 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. 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 is, 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

• 30:19Speaker 01

  going physically to where the problem is and seeing it for yourself directly, or pulling in all the people that have a handle on it.

• 30:25Chris Williamson?

  Do things in parallel.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, George and I were talking about this this morning, because I think there's like conventionally good wisdom that is focus. And this was one of the things I was surprised by. 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.

• 30:46Chris Williamson?

  Elon's stride.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  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, they can do both at once. We'll 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

• 31:33Speaker 01

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

• 31:59Chris Williamson?

  Wild, 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.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And even, even further than that, it's, it's a, 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, if you never take a risk, like the United States wouldn't exist. Like every great adventure involves risk and people will die. And we have to accept that. We are, the pendulum has swung too far towards like, oh my God, nobody can ever be harmed in any way. Nobody is allowed to risk their life. Nobody's allowed to take experimental treatments. He's like, we can't make progress like this. You know, colonizing Mars is a grand adventure. It involves risk. Like, not everything is going to go right. But especially if people

• 32:52Speaker 01

  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. Like, let's do it.

• 33:11Chris Williamson?

  What do you think's the most misleading narrative about Elon's success?

• 33:16Speaker 01

  It depends which camp you're kind of coming from. 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? Like, 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 like, well-rounded set of opinions on him.

• 33:51Chris 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 Kawaii aren't massive fans of him buying 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.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:13Chris Williamson?

  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, most people are kind of a bell curve, whereas Elon's managed to completely clear the middle.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't think that used to be true. Like, is that, do you think that's a byproduct of him having a political chapter?

• 34:30Chris Williamson?

  Uh, yeah, I guess so. And then that creates the foundation. And on top of that is wealth, huge amounts of wealth, this potential IPO thing.

• 34:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's spiky. I mean, he's, he is like, he's an unrefined sense of humor that he like, puts out there.

• 34:49Chris Williamson?

  What do you, 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 own 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. Senna 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.

• 35:25Chris Williamson?

  Tyson's hands were like Alex Honnold's hands, these gnarled, you could, the sinewy, tough, thick things, these fucking chodes on the end of his, the end of his arms. And um, I don't know, the, that, that element, for instance, what's the role that that level of exposure is playing? I think is an interesting one.

• 35:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's had a, he's had sort of a taste for that for a long time, I think. He's like dated actresses and kind of living in LA. But there's an element to which like, having that personal presence and talking about what you're doing, like he needs to rally support. Like you, you need a great team, you need investors, you need popular support. Like, think about how hard it was to convince people that electric cars were not just not stupid, but fucking awesome. Like, that took a lot of repetition.

• 36:18Chris Williamson?

  It is mad to think, when you, when you roll back the clock, that the Prius was like the eminent, pre-eminent fucking electric car.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  It was just a hybrid, like the real electric cars were even worse. Yeah, it was, it was really, um, I think it's difficult now to understand how stupid and insane it seemed when he started Tesla. And the same thing with the rocket, like there were no space startups, like a space economy was not a thing. And NASA had been on this like slow decline for like 50 years. We were paying Russia to take our astronauts up to the space station, like, um, these were by no means, it was not just not obvious, but like

• 36:54Speaker 01

  very consensus insane things to do.

• 36:57Chris Williamson?

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• 37:40Chris Williamson?

  And right now you can get 10% off everything site wide by going to the link in the description below. Or heading to jim.sh slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom 10 at checkout. That's jim.sh slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom 10 at checkout. Talk to me about SpaceX. What's the?

• 37:58Chris Williamson?

  What do most people not understand about that, that project to where, how he sort of got it to where it is and his plans?

• 38:04Speaker 01

  I mean SpaceX, I think most people don't realize started as like a pure philanthropy project. He was looking at the NASA website saying, when are we going to go to Mars? We went to the moon 50 years ago. Why haven't we been back? And when are we going to go to Mars? Surely there's a plan. And there was no plan. And he was coming off of his first exit with PayPal. So he had $200 million or something in the bank. And he's like, I'll just spend 100 million to like, see if I can increase NASA's budget. It was pure philanthropy. He's like, I'm going to buy a rocket. I'm going to make a little greenhouse. I'm going to ship it to Mars and I'm going to 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.

• 38:45Chris Williamson?

  That was the, that was the origin story.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was called Mars Oasis. That was the thing. And to do this, he like went around trying to buy a rocket. He's like, why are these rockets so fucking expensive? He went to Russia and tried to buy an intercom ICBM.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  And they laughed at him and spit on him and like fucked him around and he got pissed. And so he's like,

• 39:06Speaker 01

  maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high. How, why are rockets so expensive? Can't they be done better? And so he gathered a bunch of rocket engineers who had experience at his house. And I think this is an 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.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  There's not particularly capital efficient. They weren't iterating. They weren't doing volume. They were way overspending on basic parts because they were all like aerospace grade or whatever. And so as soon as the PayPal thing sold, he's like, all right, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna hire some rocket engineers and like, let's see if we can do this.

• 40:05Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't the original, like the Apollo 11 blueprints available just free online? Wasn't that part of it that you were able to get rocket blueprints? You could just download them, I think, or maybe he made his available for free?

• 40:19Speaker 01

  Maybe. I mean, he's like, when you, 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 like rocket hobbyist. He had built the single largest like rocket engine as just a dude in his garage, Tom Mueller. And that was his propulsion engineer.

• 40:43Chris Williamson?

  You're hired?

• 40:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:44Chris Williamson?

  You're fucking hired.

• 40:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay. And then what about now? Like what, obviously the cost has come down by some insane factor.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Orders of magnitude, which is driven Starlink and is gonna drive even more. 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.

• 41:09Chris Williamson?

  And that hasn't even talking about putting compute in space as well?

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. These are like big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then like.

• 41:17Chris Williamson?

  Oh, that's the same.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  Lasers. Yeah.

• 41:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, okay. I didn't realize that the Dyson sphere would power the compute.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  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. Which is insane and wild, but then that's not the mission. Like that is a, that is the cargo that

• 41:39Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  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't 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, you know, maybe a million people, get some plants. Like, if a comet hits Earth, or we blow ourselves up, or there's a catastrophic pandemic, like, we've got another horse in the race. Like, whether you're an environmentalist, or a humanist, or anything, like, this is a thing that we should universally agree is good. And why not go for it?

• 42:37Speaker 01

  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. And isn't that like one of the grandest missions that we can conceive of? And he puts it on this evolutionary timescale, right? So like, there was suddenly single-celled life, and then multi-celled life. And then there was fish, and then the fish came on land, and then the split into like plants and animals, different forms of life. And going from Earth to our first new planet is this massive step function in basically how successful life is and its resilience to whatever comes next.

• 43:21Chris Williamson?

  How successful do you think SpaceX is going to be, long term?

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Unbelievably. They have essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the planet. And like,

• 43:32Speaker 01

  there's ninety, if not ninety-nine.

• 43:34Chris Williamson?

  Do not pass go, do not go to the moon. Give me $200.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  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, trying to build compute and 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 is like, all right, we need new shipping technology. We have a taste for all of the fineries of this new world. So many people want to pay for passage.

• 44:23Speaker 01

  And it's like this economic bonanza and just zoom all the way out again and like the, where are most of the raw materials in the solar system? Let alone the galaxy, like not on earth. We have this bias to the, the 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.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  And getting the technology, the starship to go access then is going to be an unbelievable boon for humanity. But it does take that like leap of imagination to get there.

• 44:58Chris Williamson?

  What about Tesla?

• 45:00Speaker 01

  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

• 45:19Chris Williamson?

  That's going into Tesla.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, humanoid robots are in Tesla. He's, he's just shut down the model X and the model S production lines and switched them over to building humanoid robots. So like that is coming quickly. Um, he's going from, he's starting to build robo taxis that are like fully autonomous, no steering wheel. So thinking that the autonomy kind of curve is there. And he talks about this being one of the biggest markets of all time and that Optimus is even bigger. He's also now, I think this is underrated because it's a, not a consumer product, but he's building, they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries. Which is powering the kind of like solar to battery grid conversion, uh, which is going to speed up

• 46:02Speaker 01

  energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution. And then there's a whole nother kind of, they, they are backwards vertically and you're like, they're producing, they're just built a new lithium refinery. And so they're like, we, we, we are supply constrained in many cases. And so they're like working backwards. Further and further into their supply.

• 46:22Chris Williamson?

  Well, I mean, literally to the point where they're looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, he does. Did say he thinks Tesla is gonna have a factory on the moon, which like, I don't know. I don't know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what, but um he did. X is now owned by XAI, which is now owned by SpaceX. So there's some sort of congealing. But I don't know if Tesla and SpaceX will will merge at some point.

• 46:43Chris Williamson?

  What about these humanoid robots?

• 46:46Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  It's either gonna be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally like breaks the economy and ushers in this crazy era of abundance. But I I think it'll be slow adoption just because people are slow to adopt things that are in particular when they're like in the uncanny valley. So commercial uses, I think there'll be like a ton of them in factories and stuff like that. But also some of the robotics engineers come in and say like humanoid is sure it's generalizable, but like there's almost always a better, more specific form function robot to use for a use case.

• 47:20Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah. Why would we constrain this general purpose robot to have our like dimensions? When you could get one that cracks eggs and one that cleans the dishes and one that etc.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, you might just need like two arms on a rail in your kitchen and that's your kitchen robot. You might just need like two arms on your washer and that's your laundry robot and like. You might not actually want one that can like walk around your house and feel like a person.

• 47:43Chris Williamson?

  Have you seen, what was the super widely publicized one that kind of had a knitted jumper and a knitted face?

• 47:50Speaker 01

  I think that was Optimus.

• 47:51Chris Williamson?

  No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. It's already shipped. It's already out and floating around. There was an advert, there was a billboard on uh like East Sixth Street for it, and I thought it was just such a funny place to put it. Anyway. 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 6am at 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. But yeah, I I don't know. I. You're right to say as soon as you step outside of the existing bucket of what people use things for.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  Like going from driving a F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla. Ah, you know, 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.

• 48:51Chris Williamson?

  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, multipurpose dishwasher. It's not quite the same thing.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, here it is. Look at this.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  It's trying to close the door.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  If you're standing there watching that, this would be very painful.

• 49:26Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Why don't you just go away and the dishes are done? Cool.

• 49:29Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, I mean, are they done? No, no, fucking go back, dude. Yeah, it's, uh, there's work to be done.

• 49:38Speaker 01

  I think it's a, it is a really interesting question of like where, where and how are humanoid robots going to show up over the next 10 years? I think it's like one of the big questions. 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 a lot of money just because. Yeah, just because you partly go there for the human interaction.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  I don't know. I think it'll be really interesting to like, see how it all plays out.

• 50:07Chris Williamson?

  His plan is, what is this? One in every home within the space of basically no time at all?

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, like tons of demand.

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Especially if it is smart and helpful. It's kind of like Rosie from the Jetsons, right? Like do all the stuff I don't want to do. Go get the trash cans, take out the trash.

• 50:22Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  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's 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.

• 50:53Chris Williamson?

  And then getting rewards.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:54Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 51:09Chris Williamson?

  People are going to have to wear little cameras that show them going about their daily business to train robots.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 51:17Chris Williamson?

  This is a thing?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:18Chris Williamson?

  I mean, dude, I've only just, this is fucking blown my mind because obviously that's how Tesla's full self-driving was trained, right? They took the top one percent, 10% of drivers on Tesla.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 51:29Chris Williamson?

  And use their driving style to reverse engineer what humans do so that the robots that drive your Tesla can drive in the manner that you wouldn't. It means that you've got more aggressive driving. You've got the ability to overtake and undertake, which if you ever get into a fucking Waymo, it does not have the capacity to do that. It's the most tentative grandma of all time because that's been created from first principles as opposed to the flow of traffic is other humans. I, as a human, am able to detect that and adjust appropriately. Therefore, if I, if you become me, robot, then you can also be kind of a human.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it is cool in a Tesla. You can have it set like, you can set like, I want to chill drive or like, I'm fucking late. Like, let's go.

• 52:11Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 52:12Speaker 01

  This is fun.

• 52:13Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, people are going to wear fucking cameras that just, they're going to crack eggs and iron clothes and.

• 52:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, training data has already been a huge like part of the economy. It's mostly like digital training data and companies are making a ton of money like selling training data to models digitally. But yeah, the ability to like collect massive, massive, massive amounts of data and train AI. And now in the real world, train AI to like do all these jobs.

• 52:37Chris Williamson?

  I mean, if someone's wearing one of those, you know, chest harness things with a DJI on it.

• 52:43Speaker 01

  Sees your.

• 52:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, they're going about that. They're already working at Starbucks or doing whatever. They're a mechanic and you go, well, do you want to earn an additional however many dollars per hour?

• 52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:54Chris Williamson?

  To submit your life to our training data? And you need to, you know, it's basically like being an Uber driver, but for your own life. And then sending that digitally up to whoever needs to be trained.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Did you see the thing about the meta glasses? Recently, this is like, I'm not sure if this is in the press or I just read this on a tweet, but it's like, those are always recording, even if they're like not.

• 53:16Chris Williamson?

  Oh, and some, some, uh, like African fucking AI labelers were able to see the faces weren't blurred out or something?

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, somebody just like puts the glasses on the nightstand and then like, you know, the spouse comes in and starts changing and there's like Nigerians like sitting there tagging data of like, yep, that's your wife changing clothes. Um, because this thing doesn't stop recording, like, you know, I'd rather wear it, you know, on my chest where I know.

• 53:42Chris Williamson?

  Fucking put it in a lockbox at night?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Put it down when I'm not on my, uh, yeah.

• 53:46Chris Williamson?

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• 54:29Chris Williamson?

  get flagged and you get clear explanations and a personalized protocol with actionable next steps. So you can actually do something about what you learn. Best of all, you test twice a year and everything lives in a simple dashboard. You can just track trends over time, make sure that you're moving in the right direction. Normally, this level of testing would cost thousands through private clinics. With Function, it is $365 a year. That's $1 a day to know what's actually happening inside of your body. And right now, you can get $25 off, bringing it down to 340. Get the exact same blood panels that I get and save that additional $25 by going to the link in the description below. I'm heading to functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom and using the code modern wisdom at checkout. That's functionhealth.com slash modern wisdom and modern wisdom at checkout.

• 55:13Chris Williamson?

  What's underappreciated about Elon's skillsets, do you think? What are the things that people don't realize?

• 55:19Speaker 01

  I think the breadth of his skillset is quite interesting. Um, I think if you try to emulate just one or two of these traits, like without appreciating how they interconnect, you could. Either make some mistakes or be an asshole, depending on like how you went about it. But I think he's like, he's a micromanager, but he's like in the technical details because he has technical expertise and like a strong intuition around the physics of things. He has a deep fluency across not just the physics and the engineering, but also the finance and the economics. Like he double majored in economics and physics in college. And so from the very beginning, he's been like, he's a great line, like to truly control the product,

• 56:00Speaker 01

  you have to control the company. And he does not share power well, but there's been many times where he's made like a risky or a technical decision based on his sort of economic and opportunity cost view of the future of the business. And so even early in SpaceX, he was, he was driving maniacal urgency because he's like, the future of this business is $10 million in revenue a day. And every day we fuck around, like every time you burn a day, every time you burn 12 hours, you burn half of our future $10 million a day run rate. So like, let's go, let's go, let's go. 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

• 56:43Speaker 01

  economic fluency, that's like a sense of project management, actually.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  And the ability to know how and when to like push, push people. 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 10 times, even like even five out of, even one out of 10 times. Cause every time that you're right about that, you've gained like a jewel that will pay off for the whole rest of your company. And the nine times that you were wrong, like, oh, I guess you were right. Impossible did mean impossible in that sense. Or maybe we'll revisit it next year or what made it impossible. Maybe we can, we can break that down further. And so it's the George Bernard

• 57:31Speaker 01

  Shaw quote, like all progress depends on the unreasonable man. Like he's unreasonable.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  The unreasonable man. What about memory? It seems like he's got a pretty good memory. Yeah, that was one of the things he he picked up really early in life. He like read one of those memory trick books with the guys who like memorize a whole deck of cards. And so he's been using memory tricks, which, you know, one of the things of like, how the hell does he do what he does? Like five companies, many projects in all of them, taking technical reviews. It'd be hard to remember all these people's names, let alone like what they're doing week over week and where the bottlenecks are and all this stuff. And he's got, you know, he practiced those as a kid. And so I think he still uses like memory palaces and some of these tricks, which are one of those things that like that seems superhuman. If if you don't know how it works, and there's a lot of stories of him.

• 58:25Speaker 01

  One of the ways he builds loyalty with his team, actually, is people are like, holy shit, when he he knows a specific technical detail. Like of somebody's project that is like, you know, a has a direct report who has a direct report. And he's like, it's like, you're the bottleneck. What's going on? And they're like this, this and this. He's 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 of. I live with this every single day and you just came in and. And had it. Yeah. Yeah, like, that's a mix of memory and intuition and incredible, like.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Recall and and depth and feeling for that, like the physics of the thing. Presumably, risk and pain tolerance have to be two. Yeah. Big skills. Immersed in it, like absolutely immersed in it. And and like, I think this is a place where the kind of the Asperger's is can be an advantage. Like, just lives in it over and over and over. Lives in what? The details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are like. That wouldn't suggest why pain and risk are more.

• 59:30Chris Williamson?

  Palatable, or 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.

• 59:39Speaker 01

  Well, I think it really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of, right? Like, I'm gonna look like a failure, people are gonna think I'm wrong, it's gonna ruin these relationships. Like, he doesn't have any of that. And he says, like, it is a huge weakness to want to be liked, and I do not have it.

• 59:51Chris Williamson?

  It is a huge weakness to want to be liked, and I do not have it.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  He tries to like-

• 59:56Chris Williamson?

  Weakness to want to be liked. You don't think that he wants to be liked?

• 59:59Speaker 01

  I do think he wants to be liked in a, in a general sense.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  It's a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked.

• 1:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the willingness to enter into dislike, maybe is the thing. Like, um, I think,

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  you know, he tries to coach his managers, and within the company versus outside the company, like, are you willing to be misunderstood by the general public? And that's an interesting question. Like, if you had the chance, pick your, pick your divisive opinion, right? Like, are you pro-choice or pro-life? Are you, are open borders or closed borders, whatever it looks like? If you had the chance to, like, flip the switch and make that decision, but the catch is, everybody knew it was you. Like, are you willing to make a hundred million enemies?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Who will do, like, lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, twist your words, like, attack your family, do anything because, like, they hate the decision that you made? Like, are you willing to do that? I think most people are not. And agree with or disagree with any particular decision, like, respect the, the commitment and the courage that it takes to go do that.

• 1:01:05Chris Williamson?

  What do you think you learned about Elon that most biographies miss? What did doing this kind of a book teach you that biographies don't get it?

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I think I got way deeper in the tactics. Like, I try, I try to, my north star for these books is usefulness to the reader. Like, I try to collect all the most useful things that person has ever said. And I want to simulate the feeling of being at dinner with Elon Musk. Like, it's, it's written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that's- 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, how did this happen?

• 1:01:42Chris Williamson?

  Didn't the Navalnok, isn't that per word, the most highlighted book in Kindle history or something? Is that a stat that I made up?

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Maybe. I was trying to make it that. I don't, I don't think Kindle will like, give me that. Readwise said it's like in their.

• 1:01:56Chris Williamson?

  Top whatever.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:57Chris Williamson?

  But that would be also including distribution, probably not per word. Like what you want is for people who read this book.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:02:04Chris Williamson?

  How much of the book is highlighted on Kindle?

• 1:02:06Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And I want, 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 the sauna, their backpack, their everything. It's so satisfying.

• 1:02:15Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Speaker 01

  Just wring it out.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Uh, okay. So that like biography miss the tactic.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  I, I just go deeper into how, like, how does that person accomplish what they do? What are their, what is their secret sauce? I feel like biographers kind of come at this from like, how comprehensive and correct can I be about their whole history? Not, what's the most useful thing that you would pull out of the biography? Like that, I think that's why like David Senna's episodes are amazing because he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down. And that is like my approach is like, take a million words and turn it into 50,000 of the most useful ones.

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  And to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is like actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through and how timeless can it be and how universally can it be applied? Like, I think anybody on earth can take something useful out of this. And I, over and over again, kind of sifted through that filter.

• 1:03:17Chris Williamson?

  It's like, almost like a version of writing fiction, because in fiction, you're trying to bring a character to life. And in this, you're trying to be that person briefly to try and condense down what would they want to say of their own words that they've already said? What would they, what would their top 50,000 be out of this million and a half?

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  If they were trying to be as helpful as possible, like their best selves, right? So that's the other, the other difference is like. I'm not trying to build a comprehensive view of the person. I'm not trying to put them in historical context. I'm trying to be as useful as possible and I don't, I don't dwell on any of the personal stuff, any of the political stuff, like we don't talk about his family. It's just like, what would he teach if he set out to teach all of the ideas that he had the most conviction in?

• 1:03:59Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, 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 and...

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  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. Like I very much believe in model traits, not people. And so my aspiration is to collect the most useful traits of some of the most accomplished people and make them accessible and useful.

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  One of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the idiot index, he, uh, it's kind of an outcropping, uh, it's a, it's downstream of the first principles thinking. And so the idiot index applies to a particular part or a particular product. And it's the difference between the raw material cost and the price. And so the, an example, he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who like didn't know what the stupidest parts in his product were, in his composite. Cause that shows you where you're massively overpaying. So there's a part, um, that was, they were paying $13,000 for. That was like one piece of steel. And if you just weight it, the weight of that steel was worth like $200. And so he's like, you multiply the price of the raw material

• 1:05:52Speaker 01

  or divide that out of the total price and like, I don't know what that is, 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?

• 1:06:09Speaker 01

  And you get those insane idiot indexes, especially in aerospace, because you go outsource and then outsource and then outsource. And so there's like layers of delegation and profit.

• 1:06:16Chris 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.

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like five subcontractors where you're gonna 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.

• 1:06:40Chris Williamson?

  I guess, asking the question, why is this so expensive?

• 1:06:43Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 1:06:44Chris Williamson?

  Becomes quite a powerful question.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  And then power ranking the things like, what is most expensive? Like, we're attacking that one. What's the second most expensive? We're attacking that one. And this is how, I mean, this is how he's able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and more and more available.

• 1:06:58Chris Williamson?

  What have been the biggest cost breakthroughs? What have been the ones that have completely unlocked SpaceX Tesla?

• 1:07:03Speaker 01

  I, I think it's a million little ones all stacked up, right? So like, there, that, that one example, like $13,000 to 200 is like more than two orders of magnitude. You know, it's 500x or something. There's, there's a story about like a latch that was supposed to be a thousand dollars or something. And a guy just like looked at it and was like, kind of looks like a bathroom stall latch. And so he like went to Home Depot, bought a bathroom stall latch and was like, did a little, did a little magic on it. It's like, okay, did it 50 bucks, boom. It's just that scrappiness over every single part, every single part, every single part. And, you know, it's, it's just this simple things done over and over and over again with like ruthless intensity.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  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 sell it into 500, like, who cares? And if the ultimate buyer is the government who like can just have a black box budget, like, fine, doesn't matter. But if Elon comes in and says like, I need to drop the cost of space launch by two orders of magnitude in order to accomplish this thing, and then two more orders of magnitude, because we need to get to fucking Mars. Then like now the goal, the bar is so much higher. And you start asking questions like, how cheap can it get? How cheap can it get? Can't we do this cheaper? Do we need that part at all? Like simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  And, and that's, you know, when, when it's SpaceX, it feels more abstract because like none of us are consuming rockets. But. If we're buying a Tesla, we care a lot, whether it's $20,000 or $30,000. That's massive and that changes by a huge number, the number of people who can access a nice car that's safe, that doesn't pollute, right? And so like if in five or 10 more years, we keep doing these things, we keep eliminating parts, we keep increasing scale, we keep lowering the idiot index of every part, then like now the car's $10,000 and it's like an absolute no brainer. And the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner.

• 1:09:08Chris Williamson?

  As you move forward, allies will assemble around you.

• 1:09:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's no better example than Chris Williamson.

• 1:09:16Chris Williamson?

  Because of all of my allies?

• 1:09:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, think this like this started with you and a microphone, right? Like what, seven years ago?

• 1:09:23Chris Williamson?

  Eight.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Eight years ago, like a thousand episodes later, there's, there's like an army at your back. You got an incredible team here, you've got millions of listeners, you've got people all around the world who are like excited to see you tour. But you didn't wait for a million people to like demand for you to create a podcast. You started and you had one fan and then two and then four and then eight. And you know, thousand episodes later, like here you are, you just have to start carrying that flag.

• 1:09:49Chris Williamson?

  Do you think, because when people think about Elon, when they talk about him, a lot of the time it is this, it's quite cantankerous, it's adversarial, there is this super aggression, the bias for action and the urgency, all of this would make you think difficult to work for, hiring and firing, maybe there is a runway for each individual member of staff. I reckon I can get on average, I would love to know what the average tenure is. And I get nine months out of people, but I get nine months of 100 hours a week or something like that, let's say. You're okay, well, that, and that is just the cost of doing business. In order to push people at the pace that I want to, I need to have a bigger staff base in order to do that. Have you got any idea about how he hires, about what his hiring process is like?

• 1:10:30Chris Williamson?

  He must have just the most insane HR department that is constantly trying to put out fires. People, yeah, there's permanently people just like fucking exiting the business because I've, I can't like, it's like Leonardo DiCaprio dating someone who's 25. And you're like fucking the day that she, yeah, exactly. Like what, 26, you're out, like, you know?

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, but Elon talks about is like phony and rich of like people have a certain level of success. And then he's like, you you got soft like I'm not getting, we're not getting enough out of you anymore. You're not dedicated enough and people like it. His hiring process is, you know, at least he speaks about it very simply. He's like, I'm looking for evidence of exceptional ability. And he wants to hire young, brilliant engineers, even if they're not necessarily like super trained, but they have the capability to solve problems in this really quick way. And the culture, I think, is such, he's done an amazing job of like, building that intensity and the decision making process into the culture such that like people who come in are kind of brought along and swept up in it and

• 1:11:31Speaker 01

  carried through, like you do go through that machine. But those allies assembling around you, like people have to choose to come work for you. And it's because he chose these giant purposes. But you know, it's easy to forget that these started really small and really crazy. And he had to paint these big pictures to get people to be excited and show up and give their all for it.

• 1:11:49Chris Williamson?

  The most common mistake of smart engineers is to optimize something that should not exist.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is a, he likens this to like, school teaches us to solve the problem in front of us. Like you can't reject a question on a test.

• 1:12:03Chris Williamson?

  But actually, this is a stupid question. I don't want to answer it.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, dumb, don't like it, take it back. Oh, 100%. Yeah, congratulations. Here's your A. It doesn't happen. So the piece that he, the first step of the algorithm, this is his 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, you know, the complexity of plenty of products around us, it's like, did nobody try to put these parts together?

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  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. And it's less. Tolerance, like it's 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.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  If you don't eat the glass, you're not going to be successful.

• 1:13:21Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, his, I think this is originally a Bill Lee quote, who's a friend of his. And entrepreneurship is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. And the follow up is like, eventually you start to like the taste.

• 1:13:32Chris Williamson?

  It's your own blood. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:36Chris Williamson?

  I think that it is a sad lesson for people who are on the outside of business that like the idea of running a business, that at some point, all of the problems will go away. But you are the person in charge of the problems.

• 1:13:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:13:50Chris Williamson?

  Like that's your, your job is to find the biggest problem and to always be at the vanguard of trying to fix that problem. And at no point throughout your entire career, will there be no problems. And given that you are ultimately the problem solver that the buck stops with.

• 1:14:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:14:05Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  Yes, you better fall in love with solving problems.

• 1:14:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:18Speaker 01

  It's a very interesting, uh, he, he didn't originally set out as CEO of Tesla. And he didn't, he says he didn't 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, the sense of like internalizing responsibility of like the, the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for, for comfort or my desire to avoid problems. It's like as CEO, you are dealing with a, a distillation of the worst problems in the company. And that's the chewing glass piece. Like if you're not going to the hard part, if you're not tackling the hardest thing, then you know, that denial or that lack of urgency or that willful blindness is going to catch up with you and the company is going to suffer.

• 1:15:00Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah. Because ultimately that is the biggest bottleneck, right? That is the thing that is holding everything else up.

• 1:15:05Speaker 01

  And if you're the leader where you direct that attention is where the organization sort of chooses to focus.

• 1:15:10Chris Williamson?

  What's that thing that Formula One drivers talk about? Don't look at the wall. Like the car goes where you look.

• 1:15:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:15:16Chris Williamson?

  And the, the company will go where you're looking, presumably all of the staff that work for you as well.

• 1:15:19Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah, which I think is another part of like his, this comes from the military history of like being a battlefield general, always being at the front, your troops fight harder when you're there. This is why he sleeps in the factory. This is why he physically goes to wherever the problem is immediately. Like that leading from the front is a part of how he gets so much out of the people that he works with.

• 1:15:41Chris Williamson?

  I'm doing it. I'm in the trenches. I'm sleeping on the factory floor.

• 1:15:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:15:44Chris Williamson?

  You can do it.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  We are, we are suffering together, like for a good cause. It's worth it. We can do it.

• 1:15:49Chris Williamson?

  But also that's the way that he's constructed, right? That's the way that he's built.

• 1:15:52Speaker 01

  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 kinds of challenges, those kinds of.

• 1:16:04Chris Williamson?

  So much so that you construct wars that don't even exist. You create chaos and discomfort when you don't need to.

• 1:16:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I think he would rather err on the side of

• 1:16:16Speaker 01

  like over, over dosing on anxiety, overdosing on effort, making sure that nothing slips, making sure that he's always making as much progress as they possibly can.

• 1:16:26Chris Williamson?

  What do you think the inside of his mind's like? Do we exist in that?

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  He calls it a, a storm or a nonstop explosion. Those are like the two ways he's described it. And then somebody was like, is it a happy storm? 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 um, some bipolar tendencies and that's a hard hand with, especially with, you know, a traumatic childhood. Um, and the, the stresses that he deals with, you know, publicly and privately and like he's, he carries a heavy load.

• 1:17:03Chris Williamson?

  Do you think he's actually a genius or is he just someone who's consistently applying a handful of sort of brutal principles over and over again?

• 1:17:10Speaker 01

  I think it's both. Um, 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 um, coding video games when he was 12 and like, you know, had a patent, his name on a patent when he was like 20. So like, I think people who go around being like Elon's an idiot, everybody else does all the work is like, that is just not an informed opinion at all. But I don't think he's a thousand times smarter than any other human who's ever lived. And so the difference between like, all right, he's smart. He's probably, you know, certainly smarter than me, but like, he's not.

• 1:17:52Speaker 01

  That does not explain the difference in order of magnitudes of the outcome.

• 1:17:55Chris Williamson?

  It seems like level of smart, tolerance for risk,

• 1:18:02Chris Williamson?

  bias for action,

• 1:18:05Chris Williamson?

  and work rate. At least from what we've been talking about, those seem to be four of the big drivers.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  And grand quests, I think. I think that's a, that is a key piece of actually like what makes him special. I think if he, if he applied like, you know, massive work ethic and first principles and ingenuity to like reinventing insurance, it just like wouldn't, wouldn't have the same zest and zeal and it wouldn't have the same like level of outlier results.

• 1:18:34Chris Williamson?

  What is the purpose piece? How does that sort of factor in?

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  I think it's an interesting, I think he cares very deeply about humanity as a whole.

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  I think it's, it's an interesting paradox where he's like,

• 1:18:48Speaker 01

  people who criticize him for like being cruel or whatever to people he works with and like coming down hard on them or having really high expectations or

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  being mean or firing people capriciously or whatever. But as he explains, it's like, I am, yes, I push people really hard. I sometimes step on toes, but I do that in service of this mission that serves all of us, which is making life multi-planetary or electrifying transport, advancing clean energy. If it's Neuralink, it's like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics like control computers or eventually walk again. That also has some AI alignment components to it. He's, there's a chapter in the book of like, my companies are philanthropy. Every, 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.

• 1:19:42Chris Williamson?

  So your first book is on my list of 100 books to read. And there's a top five at the top, which are the ones that everybody should start with. And it's in that. One of the other ones that's in there is The Precipice by Toby Ord. And that's all about existential risk, how humanity could go extinct from supervolcanoes to 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.

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:10Chris Williamson?

  Why is that important?

• 1:20:14Speaker 01

  I almost early stages of this book, I didn't have it in there. 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. As what I'm sure that that book goes into great detail about it, but like, there's been many extinction events in human history, or not in human history, but in Earth's history. Like many species, most species were wiped out multiple times, entire continents destroyed, like asteroids have hit Earth in the past. We don't know if things have like evolved and then been killed. But his big motivation is like, make life multiplanetary, preserve the only form of consciousness that we're aware of that exists in the world, in the universe, which is ourselves. And

• 1:20:57Speaker 01

  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

• 1:21:25Speaker 01

  if we fuck this up before we get off the planet, like

• 1:21:31Speaker 01

  big L.

• 1:21:31Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. Well, I think what's fascinating to me is I wonder about

• 1:21:37Chris Williamson?

  people who are very singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times. I think this is so funny, that 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.

• 1:21:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:01Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:22:13Chris Williamson?

  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.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:21Chris Williamson?

  And there are a lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good. They have no interest in that.

• 1:22:33Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of the move fast, break things, I didn't give a fuck what you think of me type approach, even if that's untrue in some part, like an ability to be disliked, a preparedness to not care so much about optics in the way that other people do.

• 1:22:50Chris Williamson?

  It's a fucking big unlock.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  Peter Thiel has a very interesting observation of like, how high a percent of the successful founders, especially in tech, seem to be somewhere on the spectrum. And he's like, what does it say about our society that the people who are like, have a biological advantage in

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  de-emphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve an outlier success.

• 1:23:17Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Have you heard Jonathan B's approach? He says there's only three types of founders that are going to be successful. Number one is megalomaniac. Number two is autist. And number three is revenge fantasy. And megalomaniac, Adam Newman 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 some slights that occurred earlier on. But, uh, look, I think in order to do different things, in order to make changes and to push the limits in ways that people haven't seen before, obviously, obviously, you're going

• 1:23:58Chris Williamson?

  to need, but by design, you're going to have to get comfortable with people doubting you and making judgments about it. The disregard for the way things are done.

• 1:24:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:24:11Chris Williamson?

  Is completely crucial.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  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? You know, there's a great like Douglas Adams line of like, everything invented. Before you're thirty is like a new miracle. And to be appreciated and everything invented after you're thirty is like a crime against humanity and a sin and should be not be created.

• 1:24:52Chris Williamson?

  I swear there's a line about driving, everybody driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster than you is a maniac.

• 1:24:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Chris Williamson?

  Uh, every, there's one about women as well. Every girl who's got smaller titties than me is flat chested and every girl who's got bigger titties than me is a fatty.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  That was in your episode about, uh, female.

• 1:25:15Chris Williamson?

  Intersexual competition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, small titties, big titties. It all comes down to titties. So look dude, this, coming to the book process, which I think is fascinating, obviously you write the Navalmanak and then that kind of springboards you into this, pretty much the forefront of the self-published, like pioneer space. What, what is this book? Like, what are these books? Is it a new kind of biography? Is it a compendium? It's, it's a very strange type of book to read, even though it's obviously been super popular. So is it a new genre?

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  I, I, I truly don't know what to call it. Like, it's kind of weird. I even feel weird saying like, I write this book because I feel like I build it. Like, it feels like doing a jigsaw puzzle to me.

• 1:25:59Chris Williamson?

  And it's much more about removal.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:26:01Chris Williamson?

  Right? Once you've got everything, this is everything that this person has ever said.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:05Chris Williamson?

  Now, how much of this block of marble do I need to remove before David's left?

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, and just organizing and finding the thread so that it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the, the previous idea and it's just like a clean.

• 1:26:19Chris Williamson?

  Oh, yeah, and then weaving, the weaving as well, I suppose.

• 1:26:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:22Chris Williamson?

  It's maybe more akin to clay than it is to marble.

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's just, um, it is a weird thing. And it came out of loving, I mean, I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett. And like, they never wrote books, but a lot of people built books out of their talks, their lectures, their letters. And I never knew what to call those either, but I just found myself asking like, who do I wish had written books? And then realizing that the raw material is out there and I've been lucky to get, you know, permission from Naval and Balaji and Elon to like. Build these things. Um, and I don't know what to call them and I don't know how to talk about it, but I like.

• 1:26:57Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking awesome is what you can call it, dude. I think it's really, really good. Um, what, what have you learned about the scale of the internet? Since obviously the Navalman Act was a, a huge rip roaring success and really sort of catapulted you. You weren't already that small before, but that really sort of put you at the forefront. What's it taught you about leverage online and that experience?

• 1:27:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's easy. I feel like, um, anybody's into podcasting, YouTube, social media knows intellectually that like the internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think. But it sometimes takes a like palpable human experience to be like, oh shit, no, really? Like they are much bigger than you think. And I was really, um, I was just surprised and delighted to like see that book take on a life of its own and see how many people recommended it and see how many people resonated. Like I, I thought I was writing a book is like building a lighthouse where you're like, it has this ability to kind of like attract your people and a podcast I'm sure is the same. You're like, you, you kind of put your values out there and people who resonate with it are like, man, I really like that. I was like, then we probably get along great. Like that's super cool and fun. Um, and it's a great, it's a great life on the other side of that, creating something like that.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  And the relationships that come out of it, right? The, the thing, the scale still blows me away. Like I, I can't believe that we're, you know, this sells so well in China and India and all around the world and across so many different demographics. India, India makes a little more sense. That's fair. Um, but yeah, I just, I didn't, it was not on my like vision board that like yoga instructors in Bali were going to be like reading the almanac of Naval and that like, you know, it was going to be so popular among like high school and college students.

• 1:28:35Chris Williamson?

  We've been talking about that. Me and George have been talking about this a lot. And obviously we spoke about it last night, that the TAM for the book of Elon is way bigger than it is for Naval, but the potential hurdle of ideological disagreement is also greater. So again, it's the boobies on the, on the like popularity graph, right? Lots of people that go, ah, that I've got to. And then lots of people who go, never as opposed, I don't know how many people have a fervent dislike of Naval. Most people probably didn't know. And it's like, you should really read this. No one's going to go, yeah, exactly. No one's going to go, you should really read this and someone say, who is the book about?

• 1:29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. So I'm, I'm prepared. I spent, I did spend a lot of time be like answering the question, who is Naval? Um, but I think once it's. It was just such a weird book, like it's a weird title. It's a weird book. It was like crafted for a niche and just like broke out. But Elon is one of the most famous people on earth, right? Like, um, and I think he's, he's not a polished presenter, the way Steve Jobs is. I don't think people necessarily think of him as a like font of wisdom or like deep introspection. But he has fucking incredible ideas, like when you can really access them, like, and he's, his life story is just so, so many ups and downs, so many hard lessons.

• 1:29:54Speaker 01

  And he is a really good communicator, actually, like he's, he's got a gift for distilling things and bringing people along and finding a key metric, like honing a team, organizing people around a mission. And, you know, some of these ideas in his book, you know, about being multiplanetary, he's been talking about for 20 years. But we still, there's still so much to learn from them. Um, they're just, they're battle tested ideas, I think, in a lot of cases.

• 1:30:18Chris Williamson?

  What are the tactical principles? What are the ways that you've changed your life, having gone through the process of writing this book?

• 1:30:28Speaker 01

  I think the first would be my focus on hydration.

• 1:30:32Speaker 01

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• 1:31:10Chris Williamson?

  Is he doing all four? Is he doing all of them?

• 1:31:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, there you go. Oh, wow. Showing the product as well. Holy shit. Thank you, dude. That's a, that's a wonderful, that's a wonderful gift. That's the best gift that you could have given me is a free ad read because now I don't need to do it. How fun, how fucking fantastic.

• 1:31:28Speaker 01

  I am also a deep personal fan of Element. I drink it after every workout and every sweat session.

• 1:31:33Chris Williamson?

  It's fucking great.

• 1:31:34Speaker 01

  I don't know who the other sponsors are. You're off the hook. That was the rest.

• 1:31:36Chris Williamson?

  Thank fuck for that. Beyond, I feel I'm getting, getting jump scared by my own ad reads. Um, what have you applied to your life beyond eight sleep and element? What have you applied to your life after learning about Elon?

• 1:31:51Speaker 01

  I think it is, uh, the, the most meta is this sense that I'm capable of more than I think. It has encouraged me to do more things in parallel back to the like parallel justation thing. Like I'm trying to run scrap media, which is a publishing company and write a book, actually work on three at the same time and podcast and invest. So like there's, it gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, no, this is, this is doable and sane. And if these things are all sort of like stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long period of time. Um, the bias to urgency, I'm not working a hundred hour weeks and running around the world on my private jet, but I do have a much stronger discipline around like,

• 1:32:34Speaker 01

  where is the bottleneck? What's the most important problem to solve? How, what is the most effective way to solve it? How can I physically go to the problem? How can I pull in the right people? Um, I think like the idea of a war room is kind of underrated of like, what's the bottleneck? Gather the people, like attack it. The rest will kind of take care of itself. Um, is not how a lot of companies are run frankly, like a lot of them are like, oh, weekly meeting, do this, do that, like standard schedule.

• 1:32:58Chris Williamson?

  Procedural as opposed to tactical.

• 1:33:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:00Chris Williamson?

  What is the issue? Let's go after that. Let's go through it. You know, when I, I think about this, it makes me think about the difference between watching a UFC and boxing. When you watch boxing, does it's this weird, it's almost ceremonial, this sort of monarch like weird vestige of the people doffing their caps. We must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th anniversary. And you're like, what the fuck? Whereas it's just at the UFC, it's rock music and the guys in the middle of the octagon, they start hitting each other. Um, and it kind of feels a little bit like that, that when you have. Why do we, why do we have an agenda? Why do we always have the same agenda for each of these meetings? Why can't it just be what is the problem?

• 1:33:42Chris Williamson?

  Given that the rate limit is constrained by the slowest moving part or person or department, or whatever it might be. And if you continue to open those up, the total like capacity of the pipeline increases.

• 1:33:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, 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.

• 1:34:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm, well, also by doing that, by delegating, by it not being them, even if they're not purposefully delegating it or whatever, they're off the hook.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:15Chris Williamson?

  I don't need to be moving that fast. I don't, you know, and it's a really good point to say, if you've worked super hard for a good while, like that's the point at which you get to kick back and Matthew McConaughey with your feet up on the table. Like, that's the point. The point of working that hard was to get to escape velocity.

• 1:34:32Speaker 01

  Which is perfectly fine, depending on like what you're optimizing for. Again, like I'm, this is not a blueprint that like everybody should follow. It is a like explanation of how one person who is unique and special happens to operate. And take whatever works for you and leave the rest.

• 1:34:48Chris Williamson?

  Fuck yeah. Eric Jorgenson, ladies and gentlemen, why should people go to check out everything you've got going on?

• 1:34:53Speaker 01

  EJorgensen.com is my personal site. ElonMuskBook.org has everything for this book. You can read it for free or listen to it for free if you want to. If you want to buy it on Amazon, rock on. Check out the Naval book and the Naval episode. We did 800 episodes five years ago.

• 1:35:10Chris Williamson?

  Wow, that is a good one. I saw that you just released on Smart Friends, the four hour conversation on your YouTube.

• 1:35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we just updated, Naval and I updated the audiobook. So I got to like spend a day, deep conversation and kind of be like, all right, which of these ideas hold, which are refined, which have you changed? It was a really cool, like full circle kind of experience.

• 1:35:29Chris Williamson?

  Unreal. What are you doing next? Can you say?

• 1:35:33Speaker 01

  The one I can say is I'm doing a book with David Sundra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories from the founders archive.

• 1:35:41Chris Williamson?

  That will fucking rip.

• 1:35:42Speaker 01

  Which I think will be, it's so fun to work on.

• 1:35:44Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:44Speaker 01

  I think will be amazing. The other one, I don't have like a thumbs up yet, so I don't want to say that one publicly.

• 1:35:49Chris Williamson?

  Well, I'm looking forward to getting you and Sundra in here and we can have a chat.

• 1:35:52Speaker 01

  That'll be amazing.

• 1:35:53Chris Williamson?

  Fuck yeah. Appreciate you, man.

• 1:35:54Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 1:35:56Speaker 02

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