How Elon Achieves the Impossible w/ Eric Jorgenson (Transcript)

The fact that he did Tesla and SpaceX, which 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. And then just sort of on the side, XAI, Boring Company, Neuralink, Doge, if you want to include that as a project. Absolutely singular. And lots of game left, right? Like he’s only 55, not quite. He might have 20 more years. Where does this go in 20 more years? It’s unbelievable.

The combination of traits that I think he has — and I know that I will be accused, through this book and this episode and everything, of lionizing and overlooking the bad traits that you listed. And there are plenty, there’s dark sides to every advantage. But he’s got the intensity of David Goggins, just raw.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If not the physique.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, not quite the physique.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Or the skin tone.

ERIC JORGENSON: There are many differences between Elon Musk and David Goggins, but he’s got the intensity of David Goggins, the sort of unconventional but natural physical brilliance of Richard Feynman, and then the, I like Napoleon for strategic brilliance and bias to action and just the will to win. And when you combine those things, absolutely singular.

It would be like if Zuckerberg had also started Google. I feel like that’s kind of the order of magnitude thing. Like started Google and Facebook in parallel. SpaceX, I think when it goes public, this will be more obvious to people, but he will have almost founded, but certainly funded, led, and driven 2 of the top 10 companies in the world, if not 2 of the most important companies in the world, in parallel at the same time while doing a bunch of other sh and having 14 kids.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How?

ERIC JORGENSON: Singular.

The Component Parts of Elon’s Productivity

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

ERIC JORGENSON: I think there’s a few, and I think the thing that people miss is the combination of those factors. People talk a lot about, and it’s correct to talk about, the bias towards, or the intense urgency towards the limiting factor, right? He’s always looking for the bottleneck and attacking the bottleneck. He works with maniacal urgency. Those are the words he uses. And instills in people all around him. There is also this ability to think from first principles, which has become this keyword that he talks about and that he has a bunch of great examples for.

But when you combine all of those things, it’s not a 10% or a 50% improvement. It is like a 2 order of magnitude improvement. If you are working on the right thing with the right vision at the right time, immediately, all the time, you’re not twice as productive, you’re 1,000 times more productive. And then you do that for 30 years, 40 years. And the way that sort of head start accrues and compounds and the way the leverage builds on itself and the way the allies show up and the way that capital piles in behind you and the way that wins turn into additional wins. And then 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. But he hasn’t lost. And that becomes self-perpetuating.

The Tesla Compensation Package

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The trillion-dollar compensation package.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 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 why that was so ridiculous and what it constituted?

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 some number of years to 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.

And he achieved this impossible bar. And then the whole Delaware court thing happened where people were suing him, trying to retract that money. And it’s a whole mess that I’m not qualified to tell the story of in great detail. But it worked and he did the impossible and he has been doing the impossible over and over again.

And so when he comes and says, I think I can take Tesla from a $1 trillion company to a $10 trillion company and you don’t have to pay me anything unless I do. But if I do, maybe throw me a trillion dollars. Like, who is that hurting? Like, it’s helping all the shareholders who own it. They agreed to it. It’s supposed to be impossible, right? Like, it’s all upside. But he’s made all these impossible leaps before. Not always right, but like the way he says, 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.

Missing Deadlines by Design

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He misses deadlines all the time, but almost by design because he’s pushing the limit so quickly.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, he just articulated this really well. Of course, after I finished writing the book because he’s always dropping new stuff. But he says he chooses deadlines that he thinks he has a 50% chance of making. And he’s like, I don’t want to be making 100% of my deadlines. That means they’re way too conservative. That means things will get moved, things will get missed. So I set a deadline that I think we have a 50/50 chance of making. And sometimes we’ll be wrong. Sometimes we’ll miss it. But a lot of the time we will make a deadline that we didn’t think was possible because we chose to be really, really aggressive with schedules.

The 69 Core Musk Methods

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You had 69 core Musk methods. So let’s go through some of them.

ERIC JORGENSON: Funny how that works out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If we don’t make stuff, there is no stuff.

ERIC JORGENSON: He said this on the Joe Rogan podcast. It was one of a few things that hit me so hard. I was like, this book has to happen actually. And it was in this era where everyone was just going, just print money, just send it out, just like help us, help us, looking to 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, the whole economy collapses. That is what holds up the money.

And he’s a great example, I think, of the bias to build and serve and improve things. Tesla is the only car company trying to drive prices down. Have you seen another car company lower their prices in the last 40 years?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Tesla’s prices have gone down.

The Drive to Lower Prices and Fear of Failure

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. They’re actively lowering the price on the models. As they add volume, they lower the price. And as they simplify the car, they lower the price. But I looked this up, Ford F-150, if you just follow inflation, it used to be like 5 or 6 grand. And if you just follow inflation, it should be like $15,000 today, but they’re like $40,000 or $50,000.

And I feel like, yes, there’s more features and more safety, but like 3, 4 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, 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 “we’re driving costs down” business. And Tesla is the same.

He says, if we charge something, it’s because we can’t figure out how to charge less. Because 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?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “Fear of failure is the biggest cause of failure.”

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. Isn’t that a good one?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s f*ing pithy. Is fear of failure the biggest cause of failure? Not a lack of skill or understanding or foresight?

ERIC JORGENSON: The way I hear that quote is it’s because it kills something in the crib. Fear of failure is why people don’t even set out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Far more people have not attempted anything than have attempted something and failed at it.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. You can’t fail due to skill or fail due to stamina.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You never even try or start it.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. And you just think of how many things any of us have dreamed of doing, but never tried. It’s 99 to 1.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, lots of things that you dream of, you probably shouldn’t try. 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: I mean, I think that’s a very optimistic and enlightened view of why people rationalize not doing things that they do deeply want to do.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But for instance, Elon must have lots of dreams that he hasn’t pursued, presumably, unless he’s also able to f*ing program his own dreams. It’s like, “Oh, that would be cool. That would be cool.”

Elon’s Maniacal Urgency and Bias to Action

ERIC JORGENSON: I mean, he’s the most leveraged man on Earth, and I feel like he does indulge these random ways. The Boring Company was kind of a “sitting in traffic being like, f* this.” And he just picked up the phone, called one of his engineers, and said, “Start making a hole. Start researching drilling machines. I’m going to call you back in 2 hours.” By the way, that was at 2 AM.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That was when he did it? At 2 AM? Rang one of his engineers and said—

ERIC JORGENSON: It’s the guy who’s still running the Boring Company today. He said, “Do it. I’ll call you back.” And then the guy comes back and says, “All right, I found this and this about the drilling machines. I think they could be improved in this and this way.” And then he goes to Tesla headquarters and says, “We’re going to start digging a hole in the parking lot.” And they’re like, “Cool, we think we can get permits and do it in 2 weeks.” And he’s like, “Nope, move all the cars, start right now. I want to see a hole in the parking lot at midnight. It’s 6 PM, go.”

And it is that level of bias to action. 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 2 weeks to do in 4 hours.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are the most maniacal urgency stories about Elon?

ERIC JORGENSON: A small one that I think drills it home is he was interviewing for his head of machining at a SpaceX site. It was a 20-minute interview. Just, “Tell me about your work. Tell me about your background.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: All right.

ERIC JORGENSON: “You’re qualified. Come to an agreement.” Somebody standing behind him says, “Here’s a job offer. Fill in the blanks. Sign it. Go to work.” Like 6 PM on a Saturday. Time just doesn’t exist. It’s irrelevant. Whatever is the most important thing to get done in this hour, get it done immediately and keep going.

There is no work-life separation. There is no “do it later.” If it is the most important thing to do, do it immediately. There are stories in the Isaacson biography of him ordering what you call surges, even when they don’t need to be done. He just loves urgency for urgency’s sake. One of these pushes of “stack the Starship” or “build that part,” and someone says, “This part is not the bottleneck.” And he says, “I don’t care. I don’t feel enough urgency from you. I’m giving you a deadline. I don’t care that it’s arbitrary. I want you to feel the kind of urgency that I feel. Hard stop. That’s how we work.”

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. And all the time. And this is not always — there are times when this has saved months or years or weeks or millions of dollars. But there’s also times when it’s burned people out and pissed them off and caused good people to quit.

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

ERIC JORGENSON: For sure. There are some people who are very long-tenured, but I think that’s part of the strategy — churning through relatively young, brilliant engineers, no work-life balance. This is your time in the wild. You are going to be here all the time, here at the drop of a hat.

He’s been doing this forever. He did this at PayPal. He decided he was going to launch X.com on Thanksgiving weekend. And people were like, “That doesn’t make any sense. Nobody’s going to be paying attention. Everybody’s with their families.” He said, “Don’t care. We’re launching on Sunday on Thanksgiving. I want everybody in here all the time.” People asked, “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 urgency for urgency’s sake all the time on everything. And this goes back to purpose — you only get that out of people if you have this incredible mission that people feel like they’re on. 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 they can’t do it for 40 years, but they can do it for 2 or 4, or 10.

Self-Care, Happiness, and What Drives Elon

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Not that there’s much evidence of, which I think is interesting. The most productive man on Earth barely sleeps, lives on his private jet, works maniacally all the time. No discernible good habits from what I can tell. Not abstaining, eats donuts. Not a lot of meditation, not a lot of introspection. Just gets up, grabs his phone, draws a knife and goes to war every single day.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just shivs someone.

ERIC JORGENSON: My friend Brent Beshore describes operating a business as a knife fight. An operator who’s in it — you wake up, you have a knife off the bed stand and you go to work. And that’s actually probably how it feels with Elon. You ask him his daily routine, he’s like, “I wake up, I check my phone, I look for an emergency.” There’s always an emergency. And sometimes if there’s not, he creates one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How so?

ERIC JORGENSON: From the Isaacson book — there were a lot of times when there’s not objectively an emergency, but there is sufficient cause to say, “We can increase the pace. Let’s figure out how to create a situation that maybe gets things moving faster.” But it is a bias to urgency all the time.

And I’m not advocating this — I don’t live this way. You can see the recipe and not want to cook the dish. But the takeaway that I think is useful and generalizable for everybody is very David Goggins. You’re capable of a lot more than you think. And the people who are massively orders of magnitude more productive are working at a pace and an intensity that is very foreign to most people.

And I think you’re a good example of this. I don’t think people appreciate how hard you work to do the things that you do and cover the amount of ground that you have — 800 episodes in 5 years. You’re an intense motherf*er. You cover a lot of ground. You work really hard to do it. But everybody is capable of 10% more, 50% more. Just give the throttle a push and see what breaks. Might not be anything.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So given the lack of self-care, does he care about subjective experience? Happiness, fulfillment, joy?

ERIC JORGENSON: I don’t think that’s what he’s optimizing for. I don’t think he’s a particularly happy person. He doesn’t really seem to take joy or pride in his past accomplishments. He’s just always looking forward. And I feel like it’s a great gift to us and a burden to him. The people around him talk about 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 I think when you have a glimpse into his childhood, that makes a little more sense.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How so?

ERIC JORGENSON: As David Sennett says, “The story of the father is embedded in the story of the son.” His dad was certainly abusive, verbally abusive. Imagine standing there as an 8-year-old boy for hours while your dad screams in your face, drill sergeant style, calls you worthless, calls you useless, calls you stupid.

When Elon was young, he got the absolute shit kicked out of him — gang stomped, not like losing a fight with one guy — hospitalized for a while. His brother said he was so swollen he was unrecognizable. And his dad sided with the bullies and called him stupid for picking a fight that he would lose. What does that do? That just creates this furnace in you that will never stop.

So I think he’s not comfortable with peace. He is always at war and he’s looking for the next war. And that just drives him always. There’s always the debate between clean fuel and dirty fuel — which is better? If you’re mean to yourself internally, you’re like, “I’m such a piece of shit. I’ve got to get more done. I can do more. I can accomplish more. I can be better.” Versus, “I’m building this great thing and I can do it and this is going to be awesome and people are going to love it.”

Elon does both. He burns clean fuel and dirty fuel. He’s achieving these missions that are important to humanity, that everybody thought was impossible, and he’s got this incredible string of successes. But he also has this internal angst that seems to drive him.

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: He did the tiny home thing. He sold all of his stuff at one point.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think he may still have no possessions basically and sleeps on the factory floor.

The Eight Sleep Ad Read

ERIC JORGENSON: Yes. Which, the possessions thing was part like, he’s like, “I’m not like a bad billionaire. I’m a billionaire because I built valuable companies. I’ll sell all my stuff. I don’t care. I don’t need fancy things.” Because people were dragging him. He’s like, “I want you to understand that I’m in it for the right reasons.” But I’m glad you asked about sleep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

ERIC JORGENSON: 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. I got one as a surprise for my wife when we had our first baby, and she wept with joy when it arrived on our porch. It goes on your mattress just like a fitted sheet and will automatically learn your preferences to cool or warm your side of the bed up to 20 degrees. It’s got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, sleep phases, HR, buddy, snoring, and heart rate.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I know it off my heart, dude. Don’t f*ing tell me my own ad read. All right.

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 1 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. Go to the link in the description or eightsleep.com/modernwisdom and use Modern Wisdom at checkout. That’s e-i-g-h-t sleep.com/modernwisdom and Modern Wisdom at checkout.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That was really great.

ERIC JORGENSON: I really am a huge fan of Eight Sleep.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I am too. There’s no one that’s used it that doesn’t get completely f*ing insane about it. Did Matteo put you up to that? Because they’ve just got listed for $1.5 billion on the stock exchange.

ERIC JORGENSON: No. I don’t know them at all. I just actually love Eight Sleep and I wanted it to — I thought it would be really funny to make you wear it.

CHRIS 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.

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

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Thank you.

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

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s true. You need to pay for yourself now. That’s it. All this isn’t cheap to put on, you know?

ERIC JORGENSON: I know.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You need to pay for yourself.

ERIC JORGENSON: And I have an authentic loving relationship with my Eight Sleep and Elon needs one.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because he doesn’t have any possessions, it’s going to be hard.

ERIC JORGENSON: Oh, that is true.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I wonder if they could fit it to the factory floor. Just f*ing lay and sleep on the ground. Be like, “Ah, it just sort of works, I guess.”

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

Elon’s Psychological Limits

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, he was doing an earnings call, and I think this is like 2018. This is like the end of a really long stretch of just miserable stuff. And I think he was in a really tough spot psychologically and he was just lying on the floor. And yeah, this guy, to his credit, he has experience with psychological illnesses in his family and challenges. And so he kind of knew what to do and he went in and laid on the floor next to him and was like, “How you doing, buddy?”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just went under the desk. Yeah.

ERIC JORGENSON: Lay down next to him, was like, “How you doing? I know it’s hard. I’m going to take a couple more minutes and we got to get up and we got to do this, do our best.” And it’s hard. I think he puts himself through a lot. Elon burns the boats and challenges himself and—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But he does have limits.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, if you’re lying under your desk catatonic, that’s a limit.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. Dude, in the 2008 crisis, he was — Tallulah Riley talks about him having night terrors. He’s sitting up all night. He’s throwing up. He’s having screaming nightmares. But that goes back to — I don’t want to live that experience, but it gives you a sense of how far people can push themselves and how far.

The Scout Analogy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Look, the way that I see Elon is not too dissimilar to the way that I see Bryan Johnson and also David Goggins, which is there are people who will go to the 99.999th percentile of anything and everything. 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 Bryan Johnson going and basically being like a scout in — 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 going to fall and oh my God. And then he finds out some stuff 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 f*ing useful to have a few.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. Well, in particular, this scout who is building so many things that benefit so many people. And I think all this comes back to Elon being authentically himself. Who he is, is this insanely driven technical genius boy who is infused with sci-fi and military history, dreaming of making an impact on the world. In part because of this traumatic childhood he had. And in part because of this grand dream and grand adventure.

And I don’t think it’s an insult to say he has a little bit of a hero complex of like, “I can do this, I can make a difference, I can make this huge impact on the world.” And thank God he did, right? This type of person in the past would just become a conqueror. But thanks to the miracle of modern capitalism and technology, he’s building stuff that benefits all of us. And we’re going to have this huge evolutionary leap, hopefully, as we go to another planet and we get to live through it. How f*ing awesome is that?

Do Not Separate Yourself from the Pain of Your Decisions

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do not separate yourself from the pain of your decisions.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, this one comes from the manufacturing process and the structure of the organization. But I think it’s a very generalizable rule. This version is like you want the designers and the engineers and the manufacturers — they all work in the plant so they can see the downstream effects of the decisions that they make in the design process. It’s very easy to try to break your feedback loop and not sense when you’re doing something harmful or even missing an opportunity to do something great that could benefit you.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I think the idea of not insulating yourself from the outcomes of your decisions is probably a good — I mean, there has to be sometimes where he just gets other people to do stuff on his behalf, but I know what that is — you have to physically move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Basically the same rule.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. And on the production line, it’s like “walk to the red.” There’s green or red everywhere on the production line. And it’s like, if something is red, there’s a problem, go there immediately. There’s a couple versions of physically move yourself immediately to where the problem is. If you track his private jet, it’s all over the world, constantly on the move. And so it’s not just locally move yourself to wherever the problem is immediately, call the people, get them in the room — go there. It’s an underrated thing to be physically where the problem is.

And whatever the most important — this goes back to the original multiplying things — whatever the most important thing to do is, whatever the limiting factor is, attack it immediately in the most effective way possible, which is usually going physically to where the problem is and seeing it for yourself directly or pulling in all the people that have a hand in it.

Do Things in Parallel

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Do things in parallel.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. George and I were talking about this this morning because I think there’s conventionally good wisdom that is focus. And this was one of the things I was surprised by. Warren Buffett’s the perfect quote to explain this concept at a high level, which is “you can’t get a baby in 1 month by getting 9 women pregnant.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Elon’s tried.

ERIC JORGENSON: So there are some things where 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 thinking at the grandest scale, it’s kind of like most normal people would start an electric car company, grow it, make it successful, and then start their space company. And he was like, “Nah, I can do both at once. We 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 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 regulatory coverage. And we did all of them all at once. It was f*ing chaos. But we launched in a year instead of the 3 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 know the integrations until we have the product.” He’s like, “Nope. Do it all at once. Launch immediately.”

We Should Not Be Afraid of Doing Something Important

CHRIS 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: And even further than that — I think this comes from his study of history in a lot of ways. He says, the extended version of that quote is like, “If you never take a risk, the United States wouldn’t exist. Every great adventure involves risk and people will die. And we have to accept that.” We are — the pendulum has swung too far towards, “Oh my God, nobody can ever be harmed in any way. Nobody is allowed to risk their life. Nobody’s allowed to take experimental treatments.” He’s like, “We can’t make progress like this.”

Colonizing Mars is a grand adventure. It involves risk. Not everything is going to go right. But especially if people choose to take those risks or risk their life to accomplish this great feat for humankind, there’s something inherent about humans feeling fulfilled, sacrificing themselves to further humanity as a whole. And I think to me, that quote is like, yeah, damn the torpedoes. Let’s do it.

The Most Misleading Narrative About Elon’s Success

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think is the most misleading narrative about Elon’s success?

ERIC JORGENSON: It depends which camp you’re kind of coming from. I think there are diehard fanboys that have just total blindfold to the negatives. And I think there’s a lot of people, especially after his sort of political chapter, that have just a whole bunch of ideas that are factually incorrect that they believe as deep truths. I mean, like anybody who is one of the most famous people on earth, right? And past a certain level of fame, I think there’s a derangement syndrome about everybody. So I think it’s actually kind of hard to find a neutral or a well-rounded set of opinions on him.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That’s a good point. I was thinking about Elon in comparison with Mark Zuckerberg, and sure, there’s some people that don’t like Mark. People of Kauai aren’t massive fans of him buying up a ton of land, and there’s other bits and pieces, but I don’t think people have insane fervor against him or insane fervor for him.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

Elon’s Public Presence and the Role of Exposure

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But Elon seems to be much more barbell-y, right? If you were to draw a graph, it’s just a pair of boobs, whereas most people are kind of a bell curve, whereas Elon’s managed to completely clear the middle.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. I don’t think that used to be true. Is that— do you think that’s a byproduct of him having a political chapter?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, I guess so. And then that creates the foundation. And on top of that is wealth. Huge amounts of wealth, this potential IPO thing. Yeah, he’s spiky.

ERIC JORGENSON: I mean, he is like, he’s an unrefined sense of humor that he puts out there.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you, if he’s so concerned about the bias to action, working on the biggest problem, the bottlenecks, etc., 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. Senra told me about when he sat down with James Dyson. James Dyson’s done thousands, maybe tens of thousands of prototypes. He said he was looking at James Dyson’s hands. So James Dyson’s hands were like Alex Honnold’s hands, these gnarled, sinewy, tough, thick things, these f*ing chodes on the end of his arms. And I don’t know, that element, for instance, what’s the role that that level of exposure is playing, I think is an interesting one.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, he’s had a sort of a taste for that for a long time, I think. He’s dated actresses and kind of living in LA. But there’s an element to which having that personal presence and talking about what you’re doing, he needs to rally support. Like you need a great team, you need investors, you need popular support.

Think about how hard it was to convince people that electric cars were not just not stupid, but f*ing awesome. Like, that took a lot of repetition.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It is mad to think when you roll back the clock that the Prius was like the preeminent f*ing electric car.

ERIC JORGENSON: It was just a hybrid. Like, the real electric cars were even worse. It was really 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, the space economy was not a thing. And NASA had been on this slow decline for like 50 years. We were paying Russia to take our astronauts up to the space station. These were by no means not just not obvious, but like very consensus insane things to do.

SpaceX: From Philanthropy to Multi-Planetary Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Talk to me about SpaceX. What do most people not understand about that project, and how he sort of got it to where it is and his plans?

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 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.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: This possibility. That was the origin story.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. It was called Mars Oasis. That was the thing. And to do this, he went around trying to buy a rocket. He’s like, “Why are these rockets so fing expensive?” He went to Russia and tried to buy an intercontinental ICBM and they laughed at him and spit on him and fed him around and he got pissed. And so he’s like, “Maybe the problem is that space launch costs are so high. 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. He did a series of Saturday sessions of first principles, let’s look at all the historical things, but let’s also say how good could good be with all the modern technology, modern design? 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 the market for space launch, that was the bottleneck. That was the real problem, that you couldn’t get stuff off the planet cheap enough because all we had was Space Shuttle, which is this massive bloated government program that’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 aerospace grade or whatever. And so as soon as the PayPal thing sold, he’s like, “All right, I’m going to hire some rocket engineers and let’s see if we can do this.”

CHRIS 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: Maybe. I mean, when you ask, 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 talked to people. I read all the textbooks on rocket science that I could find. I borrowed them and I started talking to experts.”

And his rocket propulsion engineer was a guy who was the foremost rocket hobbyist. He had built the single largest rocket engine as just a dude in his garage, Tom Mueller. And that was his propulsion engineer.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You’re f*ing hired. Okay. And then what about now? Obviously the cost has come down by some insane factor. I know that much.

ERIC JORGENSON: Orders of magnitude, which has driven Starlink and is going to drive even more. And now he’s talking about building a Dyson sphere, which is like solar, but in space. So we can capture more energy than even hits the Earth from the sun.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And that hasn’t even been talking about putting compute in space as well.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. These are these big flat sheets that are like solar panels with compute and then network together with lasers.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, okay. I didn’t realize that the Dyson sphere would power the compute.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. It’s just like a bunch of solar panels with computer chips on the back that can communicate with each other floating all around in space. Which is insane and wild, but that’s not the mission. That is the cargo that makes Starship economic to build hundreds or thousands of them. But the actual mission is to make life multi-planetary.

And this goes back to zoomed all the way out, his altruistic philanthropic things is like, “Look, we should all agree that we do not want the only form of life that we know in the universe to die. 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 it would be great to have life move just next door? Just get some on Mars. Just get a couple, maybe a million people, get some plants. If a comet hits Earth or we blow ourselves up or there’s a catastrophic pandemic, we’ve got another horse in the race. Whether you’re an environmentalist or a humanist or anything, this is a thing that we should universally agree is good. And why not go for it?”

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 one of the grandest missions that we can conceive of?”

And he puts it on this evolutionary timescale, right? So 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 they split into 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.

SpaceX’s Long-Term Success and the New World Analogy

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: How successful do you think SpaceX is going to be long-term?

ERIC JORGENSON: Unbelievably. They have essentially a monopoly on the toll booth off the planet. And there’s 90, if not 99—

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

ERIC JORGENSON: They could have been one of the greatest companies on earth, even if they never built Starship, even if they just 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.

They’re trying to build compute and energy in space. They’re trying to build, I think he’s been talking now about a mass driver on the moon that’ll build these von Neumann probes and all kinds of other crazy stuff.

But 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 most of Western human history. And then all of a sudden Columbus discovered the New World and it’s like, “All right, we need new shipping technology. We have a taste for all of the fineries of this new world. So many people want to pay for passage,” and it’s like this economic bonanza.

And just zoom all the way out again. Where are most of the raw materials in the solar system, let alone the galaxy? Not on Earth. We have this bias to the only raw materials that matter are like wood and farmland, but there are raw materials, atomic raw materials on every other world and in the asteroid belt and just floating around in space. And getting the technology, the Starship, to go access them is going to be an unbelievable boon for humanity, but it does take that leap of imagination to get there.

Tesla: Electric Cars, Autonomy, and Humanoid Robots

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about Tesla?

ERIC JORGENSON: Tesla is going through, like these startups are stacked S-curves, right? And so electric cars was one very fundamental innovation. Autonomy is a whole other one. And so a big question mark is this leap to autonomy. And then he’s already looking around this corner to do humanoid robots and that’s going into Tesla.

Humanoid robots are in Tesla. He’s just shut down the Model X and the Model S production lines and switched them over to building humanoid robots. So that is coming quickly. He’s going from starting to build robo taxis that are fully autonomous, no steering wheel. So thinking that the autonomy curve is there and he talks about this being one of the biggest markets of all time and that Optimus is even bigger.

He’s also now, and I think this is underrated because it’s not a consumer product, but they are building an unbelievable amount of batteries, which is powering the kind of solar to battery grid conversion, which is going to speed up energy that drives all the compute for the AI revolution.

And then there’s a whole other kind of, they are backwards vertically integrated. Like they’re producing, they’ve just built a new lithium refinery. And so they’re like, “We are supply constrained in many cases,” and so they’re working backwards further and further into their supply chain.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, literally to the point where they’re looking to go to new planets so that they can get more raw materials.

Humanoid Robots and the Future of AI

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. He did say he thinks Tesla is going to have a factory on the moon, which like, I don’t know. I don’t know if these companies all end up kind of smashed together eventually or what, but he did— X is now owned by xAI, which is now owned by SpaceX. So there’s some sort of congealing, but I don’t know if Tesla and SpaceX will merge at some point.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What about these humanoid robots?

ERIC JORGENSON: I mean, I don’t know. It’s either going to be one of the biggest markets of all time that totally breaks the economy and ushers in this crazy era of abundance. But I think it’ll be slow adoption just because people are slow to adopt things that are, in particular, when they’re like in the uncanny valley. So commercial uses, I think there’ll be 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 there’s almost always a better, more specific form function robot to use for a use case.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why would we constrain this general purpose robot to have our robot-like dimensions, when you could get one that cracks eggs and one that cleans the dishes and one that, et cetera.

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 you might not actually want one that can walk around your house and feel like a person.

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

ERIC JORGENSON: I think that was Optimus.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: No, it wasn’t. It’s already shipped. It’s already out and floating around. There was an advert, there was a billboard on like East 6th 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, me every time that it’s 6 AM at a ketamine afterparty. And it literally looks like it’s done too much ketamine. And it’s like all contorted. It’s like in a really f*ing weird position.

But yeah, I don’t know. You’re right to say, as soon as you step outside of the existing bucket of what people use things for, like going from driving an F-150 to a Prius to a Tesla, you know, I can kind of see how it works a little bit. And people were nervous about full self-driving, but after a while, okay, there we go. No one has, no one’s looking at the fact, oh, well, I already have a dishwasher and this robot is basically an on-its-feet multipurpose dishwasher. It’s not quite the same thing.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Here it is. Look at this. It’s trying to close the door.

ERIC JORGENSON: If you’re standing there watching that, this would be very painful. Yeah. What if you just go away and the dishes are done? Cool.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. I mean, are they done? No. No. F*ing go back, dude. Yeah. There’s work to be done.

ERIC JORGENSON: I think it’s a really interesting question of like where and how humanoid robots are going to show up over the next 10 years. I think it’s like one of the big questions. And 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 or making a latte just because you partly go there for the human interaction. I don’t know. I think it’ll be really interesting to see how it all plays out.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But his plan is, what is this, one in every home within the space of basically no time at all?

ERIC JORGENSON: I mean, tons of demand. 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Presumably powered by xAI in some regard. So that is going to have to start to cross over the Tesla to xAI thing. So that would suggest a natural sort of convergence.

ERIC JORGENSON: Well, Tesla has its own amazing AI team. They’re building their own chips. But he does say like Tesla, because of all of the real-world AI stuff that Tesla has done to create self-driving, that’s actually very analogous to making really smart humanoid robots. And he talks about having this crazy training center full of humanoid robots basically doing stuff like that, looking like idiots, trying to figure out the training data and then getting rewards.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, you did it well. You closed it without looking like you’re on ketamine. Congratulations. Who was I speaking to?

ERIC JORGENSON: F*.

Training AI with Human Data

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I was talking to someone at dinner the other night and they were saying that basically they think a lot of people — oh, it was my friend Austin — people are going to have to wear little cameras that show them going about their daily business to train robots. This is a thing.

I mean, dude, I’ve only just — this has fing blown my mind because obviously that’s how Tesla’s full self-driving was trained, right? They took the top 1%, 10% of drivers on Tesla and used their driving style to reverse engineer what humans do so that the robots that drive your Tesla can drive in the manner that you would. And 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 fing 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 you become me, robot, then you can also be kind of a human.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. And it is cool in a Tesla, you can set like, I want a chill drive or like, I’m f*ing late. Let’s go.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay.

ERIC JORGENSON: This is fun.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But yeah, people are going to wear f*ing cameras that just — they’re going to crack eggs and iron clothes and yeah.

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

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I mean, if someone’s wearing one of those chest harness things with a DJI on it, and they’re going about their business — 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 to submit your life to our training data? 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: Did you see the thing about the Meta glasses recently? 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 not on.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, and some AI labelers were able to see the faces weren’t blurred out or something.

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

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F*ing put it in a lockbox at night.

ERIC JORGENSON: Put it down when I’m not on my—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

What People Underappreciate About Elon’s Skill Set

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s underappreciated about Elon’s skill sets, do you think? What are the things that people don’t realize?

ERIC JORGENSON: I think the breadth of his skill set is quite interesting. I think if you try to emulate just one or two of these traits, without appreciating how they interconnect, you could either make some mistakes or be an asshole depending on how you went about it.

But I think he’s a micromanager, but he’s in the technical details because he has technical expertise and a strong intuition around the physics of things. He has a deep fluency across not just the physics and the engineering, but also the finance and the economics. He double majored in economics and physics in college. And so from the very beginning, he has a great line, like, “To truly control the product, you have to control the company.” And he does not share power well, but there’s been many times where he’s made a risky or a technical decision based on his sort of economic and opportunity cost view of the future of the business.

Even early in SpaceX, he was driving maniacal urgency because he’s like, “The future of this business is $10 million in revenue a day. And every day we f* around, 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 let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

So that mix of really big picture and deep in the details, understanding the limiting factor, attacking it — which is a mix of technical skill, economic fluency, and a sense of project management — and the ability to know how and when to push people. If really, really smart rocket scientists are telling you that’s impossible, he’s like, “Do it anyway. It is possible. I’m telling you it’s possible. Go do it anyway.”

And you’re right 7 out of 10 times, even 1 out of 10 times, because every time that you’re right about that, you’ve gained a jewel that will pay off for the whole rest of your company. And the 9 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 break that down further.

And so it’s the George Bernard Shaw quote, like, “All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” He’s unreasonable.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: The unreasonable man. What about memory? It seems like he’s got a pretty good memory.

Memory, Risk Tolerance, and Elon’s Edge

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, that was one of the things he picked up really early in life. He read one of those memory trick books with the guys who memorize a whole deck of cards. And so he’s been using memory tricks, which is one of the things of like, how the hell does he do what he does? Like 5 companies, many projects in all of them taking technical reviews. It’d be hard to remember all these people’s names, let alone what they’re doing week over week and where the bottlenecks are and all this stuff. And he practiced those as a kid. And so I think he still uses memory palaces and some of these tricks, which are one of those things that seems superhuman if you don’t know how it works.

And there’s a lot of stories of him. One of the ways he builds loyalty with his team actually is people are like, “Holy shit,” when he knows a specific technical detail of somebody’s project that has a direct report who has a direct report and he’s like, “You’re the bottleneck, what’s going on?” And they’re like, “This, this, and this.” And he’s like, “Try this.” They’re going to like, “Holy shit, that worked. How did you know that? You haven’t spent time in here.” And it’s this mix of—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I live with this every single day and you just came in and had it. Yeah.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. Like that’s a mix of memory and intuition and incredible recall and depth and feeling for that. Like the physics of the thing.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Presumably risk and pain tolerance have to be too. Big skills.

ERIC JORGENSON: Immersed in it. Like absolutely immersed in it. And I think this is a place where the kind of the Asperger’s can be an advantage. Like just lives in it over and over and over again.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Lives in what?

ERIC JORGENSON: The details of these products and these people and where the bottlenecks are.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: That wouldn’t suggest why pain and risk are more palatable. Maybe it would. I don’t know. Maybe people who are a little spectrum-y don’t have the same detection of risk. They certainly don’t have the same detection of other stuff.

ERIC JORGENSON: Well, I think it really helps to set aside social risk, which I think we blend a lot of, right? Like, “I’m going to look like a failure. People are going to think I’m wrong. It’s going to ruin these relationships.” He doesn’t have any of that. And he says, “It is a huge weakness to want to be liked, and I do not have it.”

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: “It is a huge weakness to want to be liked, and I do not have it.” Weakness to want to be liked. You don’t think that he wants to be liked?

ERIC JORGENSON: I do think he wants to be liked in a general sense.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s a huge weakness to think that you want to be liked.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. The willingness to enter into dislike maybe is the thing. Like, I think 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 divisive opinion, right? Like, are you pro-choice or pro-life? Are you open borders or closed borders? Whatever. Like, if you had the chance to flip the switch and make that decision, but the catch is everybody knew it was you. Like, are you willing to make 100 million enemies who will lie, cheat, steal, fabricate, twist your words, attack your family, do anything because 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 commitment and the courage that it takes to go do that.

What Biographies Miss About Elon

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think you learned about Elon that most biographies miss? What did doing this kind of a book teach you that biographies don’t get at?

ERIC JORGENSON: I think I got way deeper in the tactics. My North Star for these books is usefulness to the reader. 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 written as a dialogue. I keep it all in exactly his words as tightly as I can. I edit out anything that doesn’t feel like you would be curious about it from a sense of like, how do I improve my own life? And how did this happen?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Didn’t the Naval Almanack, isn’t that per word the most highlighted book in Kindle history or something? Is that a stat that I made up?

ERIC JORGENSON: Maybe. I was trying to make it that. I don’t think Kindle will give me that. Readwise said it’s like in their top whatever.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: But that would be also including distribution, probably not per word. Like what you want is for people who read this book, how much of the book is highlighted on Kindle?

ERIC JORGENSON: Yes. And I love when people show me beat to shit copies of their book. Like it’s been in and out of a sauna, their backpack, everything. It’s so satisfying. Just wring it out. Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Okay. So that’s like biography myths, the tactic.

ERIC JORGENSON: I just go deeper into how does that person accomplish what they do? 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. I think that’s why David Senra’s episodes are amazing because he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down. And that is my approach — take a million words and turn it into 50,000 of the most useful ones. And to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through. And how timeless can it be and how universally can it be applied? I think anybody on earth can take something useful out of this. And I, over and over again, kind of sift it through that filter.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s 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 their top 50,000 be out of this million and a half?

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

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s an interesting challenge with somebody who is as widely regarded and hated as Elon because almost everything that everybody wants to talk about is not to do with the tactics and the principles and the purpose. It’s to do with the intention. It’s to do with the drive. It’s to do with the ethics and the scruples.

ERIC JORGENSON: And almost every conversation I hear people have casually about Elon is them projecting their own opinion. They’re using Elon as a foil to be like, “I think it’s great that we’re going to Mars and doing these things,” or “I think it’s terrible that he made this decision about the USAID.” And that’s fine. You can agree or disagree with anything that this person does, but you’re using that to project your values. You’re not asking, what can I learn from this person? And to pick somebody as an exemplar is not to say that everything they do is correct. I very much believe in model traits, not people. And so my aspiration is to collect the most useful traits of some of the most accomplished people. Make them accessible and useful.

The Idiot Index

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: One of the most interesting ideas is the idiot index. What’s that?

ERIC JORGENSON: The idiot index is kind of an outcropping, it’s downstream of the first principles thinking. And so the idiot index applies to a particular part or a particular product. And it’s the difference between the raw material cost and the price. And so an example, he absolutely roasted an engineer in a meeting who didn’t know what the stupidest parts in his product were in his composite, because that shows you where you’re massively overpaying. So there’s a part that was — they were paying $13,000 for that was like one piece of steel. And if you just weighed it, the weight of that steel was worth like $200. So he’s like, you multiply the price of the raw material or divide that out of the total price and — I don’t know what that is off the top of my head. A big number. Like, that’s f*ing stupid. We’re overpaying by like 50x for that thing. So like, how cheaply can you get the steel and then get it into that shape? And you get those insane idiot indexes, especially in aerospace, because people outsource and then outsource and then outsource. And so there’s like layers of delegation and profit.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Everyone is arbitraging their profit off the top of this final thing that ends up coming down. There’s Rolls-Royce that make the engine, but before that, the turbine is milled in this place. And before that, the raw material builds a mine out of.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, there’s like 5 subcontractors before you get like one guy who’s welding a thing together and you’re like, oh, just bring that guy over here. And then the part is like $400. Great. We just saved $12,000.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I guess asking the question, “Why is this so expensive?” 100% becomes quite a powerful question.

ERIC JORGENSON: And then power ranking the things like, what is most expensive? We’re attacking that one. What’s the second most expensive? We’re attacking that one. And this is how he’s able to make these huge cost breakthroughs that then make things more and more and more available.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What have been the biggest cost breakthroughs? What have been the ones that have completely unlocked SpaceX, Tesla?

ERIC JORGENSON: I think it’s a million little ones all stacked up, right? So that one example, like $13,000 to $200 is more than 2 orders of magnitude, you know, 500x or something. There’s a story about a latch that was supposed to be $1,000 or something. And a guy just looked at it and was like, kind of looks like a bathroom stall latch. And so he went to Home Depot, bought a bathroom stall latch, and did a little magic on it. Like, okay, did it. $50. Boom. And so just that scrappiness over every single part, every single part, every single part. And it’s just the simple things done over and over and over again with ruthless intensity.

And really, it goes back to the kind of the quote that you brought up about feeling the pain of your decisions. Like if there’s a company making money by selling a part that they bought from a subcontractor for $100 and then selling it for $500, like, who cares? And if the ultimate buyer is the government who can just have a black box budget, like, fine, doesn’t matter. But if Elon comes in and says, “I need to drop the cost of space launch by 2 orders of magnitude in order to accomplish this thing, and then 2 more orders of magnitude because we need to get to f*ing Mars,” then 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? Simplifying, eliminating, reducing costs.

And that’s, when it’s SpaceX, it feels more abstract because none of us are consuming rockets. But if we’re buying a Tesla, we care a lot whether it’s $20,000 or $30,000. That’s massive. 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 if in 5 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 now the car’s $10,000 and it’s like an absolute no-brainer. And the world is quieter and calmer and cleaner.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: As you move forward, allies will assemble around you. Yeah.

ERIC JORGENSON: I mean, there’s no better example than Chris Williamson.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Because of all of my allies.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. I mean, this started with you and a microphone, right? Like what, 7 years ago?

Hiring, Firing, and the Cost of Doing Business

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 8.

ERIC JORGENSON: 8 years ago. Yeah. Like 1,000 episodes later, there’s an army at your back. You got an incredible team here. You got millions of listeners. You got people all around the world who are excited to see you tour. But you didn’t wait for a million people to demand for you to create a podcast. You started and you had 1 fan and then 2 and then 4 and then 8 and 1,000 episodes later, here you are. You just have to start carrying that flag.

CHRIS 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 9 months out of people, but I get 9 months of 100 hours a week or something like that. Let’s say, okay, well, that is just the cost of doing business. In order to push people at the pace that I want to, I need to have a bigger staff base in order to do that. Have you got any idea about how he hires, about what his hiring process is like? He must have just the most insane HR department that is constantly trying to put out fires. People, yeah, permanently people just like fing exiting the business because I can’t, it’s like Leonardo DiCaprio dating someone who’s 25. You’re like, f, the day that she, yeah, exactly. Like, what? 26, you’re out. Like, you know?

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. But Elon talks about his, like, phoning in rich of, like, people have a certain level of success and then he’s like, you’ve gone soft. Like, I’m not getting, we’re not getting enough out of you anymore. You’re not dedicated enough. And people exit. 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 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 building that intensity and the decision-making process into the culture such that people who come in are kind of brought along and swept up in it and 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 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.

The Algorithm: Question Everything, Delete What Doesn’t Need to Exist

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. 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. But actually—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Oh, this is a stupid question. I don’t want to answer it.

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 5-step engineering process, is to question the requirements. And then the second is to try very, very hard to delete the part or process. You know, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. So if something can be deleted, the product gets simpler. And simplicity, as he says, delivers both reliability and low cost.

And so I think it is this, we spend so much time doing things or optimizing things that truly don’t need to exist. And if you look at the complexity of plenty of products around us, it’s like, did nobody try to put these parts together? But when you’re trying to build a car out of 10,000 different parts, you’re like, all right, every time I can 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. It’s less things that can show up in the thing. There’s less things that can fall apart if they’re one unit instead of two. So it is part of the process to just revisit and revisit and revisit.

Eating Glass: The Reality of Leadership

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: If you don’t eat the glass, you’re not going to be successful.

ERIC JORGENSON: Oh yeah. I think this is originally a Bill Lee quote. It was a friend of his. And “entrepreneurship is like eating glass and staring into the abyss.” And I think the follow-up is like, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it is a sad lesson for people who are on the outside of business that the idea of running a business is that at some point all of the problems will go away. But you are the person in charge of the problems. Like that’s 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yes. You better fall in love with solving problems.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah.

ERIC JORGENSON: It’s a very interesting, he didn’t originally set out as CEO of Tesla and he says he didn’t want to become CEO of Tesla and he just felt compelled to do it at a certain point because if he didn’t, he felt like the company would have failed. And the sense of internalizing responsibility of like the outcome of the mission is more important than my desire for comfort or my desire to avoid problems. It’s like as CEO, you are dealing with 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 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, yeah, because ultimately that is the biggest bottleneck, right? That is the thing that is holding everything else up.

ERIC JORGENSON: And if you’re the leader, where you direct that attention is where the organization sort of chooses to focus.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What’s that thing that Formula 1 drivers talk about? Don’t look at the wall.

ERIC JORGENSON: Like the car goes where you look.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And the company will go where you look and presumably all of the staff that work for you as well.

Leading from the Front

ERIC JORGENSON: Yep. Yeah. Which I think is another part of 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: I’m doing it. I’m in the trenches. I’m sleeping on the factory floor.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yes.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: You can do it too.

ERIC JORGENSON: We are suffering together, for a good cause. It’s worth it. We can do it.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, also that’s the way that he’s constructed, right? That’s the way that he’s built.

ERIC JORGENSON: I do think that’s authentic to him. Yes. And he leans into it and he says, “I’m wired for war.” Like I find comfort in those kinds of challenges. Those kinds of things.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So much so that you construct wars that don’t even exist. You create chaos and discomfort when you don’t need to. Yeah.

ERIC JORGENSON: But I think he would rather err on the side of overdosing on anxiety, overdosing on effort, making sure that nothing slips, making sure that he’s always making as much progress as they possibly can.

Inside the Mind of Elon Musk

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What do you think the inside of his mind’s like to exist in that?

ERIC JORGENSON: He calls it a storm or a nonstop explosion. Those are the two ways he’s described it. And 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 some bipolar tendencies. And that’s a hard hand, especially with a traumatic childhood and the stresses that he deals with publicly and privately. And he carries a heavy load.

CHRIS 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?

ERIC JORGENSON: I think it’s both. I think there’s sufficient evidence that he is certainly above average, if not way up there in IQ. You know, he was precocious. He was like the head of his class as a kid and coding video games when he was 12 and had his name on a patent when he was like 20. So I think people who go around being like Elon’s an idiot, everybody else does all the work — that is just not an informed opinion at all. But I don’t think he’s 1,000 times smarter than any other human who’s ever lived. And so the difference between, all right, he’s smart, he’s probably certainly smarter than me, but that does not explain the difference in order of magnitudes of the outcome.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It seems like level of smart, tolerance for risk, bias for action, and work rate. At least from what we’ve been talking about, those seem to be 4 of the big drivers.

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

Purpose, Philanthropy, and the Love of Humanity

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

ERIC JORGENSON: I think it’s an interesting paradox where he’s like, people who criticize him for being cruel or whatever to people he works with and coming down hard on them or having really high expectations or 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 multiplanetary or electrifying transport, advancing clean energy. If it’s Neuralink, it’s like helping paraplegics or quadriplegics control computers or eventually walk again. That also has some AI alignment components to it.

There’s a chapter in the book of like, my companies are philanthropy. Everything that he starts, 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.

Existential Risk and Why It Matters

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So your first book is on my list of 100 books to read, and there’s a top 5 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Why is that important?

The Purpose Behind Multi-Planetary Life

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 book goes into great detail about it, but there’s been many extinction events in human history, or not in human history, but in Earth’s history. Most species were wiped out multiple times, entire continents destroyed. Asteroids have hit Earth in the past. We don’t know if things have evolved and then been killed, but his big motivation is make life multi-planetary, preserve the only form of consciousness that we’re aware of that exists in the world, in the universe, which is ourselves.

And we’re going to feel pretty stupid if we destroy ourselves before we back ourselves up, like back up the hard drive. And his point is like, we’ve been around, Earth has been around a really long time. Humanity has not been around so long. Civilization is very young. We’re only 10,000 years into what could be a million-year civilization, but we’ve got to take this first step off the planet and into the solar system. And if we f* this up before we get off the planet, like, big L.

Singular People in Different Eras

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I think what’s fascinating to me is I wonder about people who are very singular in the modern world and what that person would have done in ancient times. I think this is so funny. Assuming that you weren’t born a slave and you couldn’t have raised out of anything, if there’s some sort of egalitarian meritocracy seen. You can just toss them into the Roman Empire or toss them into the middle of the War of the Roses or something.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Just watch what happens.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

CHRIS 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. I remember he gave this interview, it was probably about 3 or 4 years ago, and he said something to the effect of what I care about is doing good, not the appearance of it. And there are a lot of people around who are doing bad while trying to appear good. They have no interest in that.

And it’s kind of the move fast, break things, I didn’t give a f 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. It’s a fing big unlock.

The Advantage of Ignoring Others’ Opinions

ERIC JORGENSON: Peter Thiel has a very interesting observation of like how high a percent of the successful founders, especially in tech, seem to be somewhere on the spectrum. And he’s like, what does it say about our society that the people who have a biological advantage in de-emphasizing the opinions of others are the ones who more reliably seem to achieve an outlier success.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Have you heard Jonathan B.’s approach? He says there’s only 3 types of founders that are going to be successful. Number 1 is megalomaniac. Number 2 is autist. And number 3 is revenge fantasy. And megalomaniac, Adam Neumann from WeWork. Autist, Elon Musk. And revenge fantasy, Palmer Luckey. Although I think Palmer actually kind of has a bit of all 3. And I think Elon probably has a bit of all 3 as well, trying to alchemize some slights that occurred earlier on.

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah.

Breaking Out of the Status Quo

ERIC JORGENSON: And I think so many of us forget that we’re almost like 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?

There’s a great Douglas Adams line of like everything invented before you’re 30 is like a new miracle and to be appreciated, and everything invented after you’re 30 is like a crime against humanity and a sin and should not be created.

CHRIS 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. Yeah. 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.

ERIC JORGENSON: That was in your episode about female intrasexual competition.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah, small titties, big titties. It all comes down to titties.

The Book-Building Process

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: So look, dude, this coming to the book process, which I think is fascinating. Obviously you write the Naval Almanac and then that kind of springboards you into this pretty much the forefront of the self-published pioneer space. What is this book? Like, what are these books? Is it a new kind of biography? Is it a compendium? It’s a very strange type of book to read, even though it’s obviously been super popular. So is it a new genre?

ERIC JORGENSON: I truly don’t know what to call it. 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.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: And it’s much more about removal. Marble. Yes. Right. Once you’ve got everything, this is everything that this person has ever said. Now, how much of this block of marble do I need to remove before David’s left?

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. And just organizing and finding the thread so that it feels like each question is sort of a natural byproduct of the previous idea. And it’s just like a clean—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. And then weaving the weaving as well, I suppose. It’s maybe more akin to clay than it is to marble.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. It is a weird thing. It came out of loving— I mean, I’m a big fan of Charlie Munger and Warren Buffett and 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, who do I wish had written books? And then realizing that the raw material is out there and I’ve been lucky to get permission from Naval and Balaji and Elon to build these things. And I don’t know what to call them and I don’t know how to talk about it, but I like—

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: It’s f*ing awesome is what you can call it, dude. I think it’s really, really good.

The Scale of the Internet and Online Leverage

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What have you learned about the scale of the internet since obviously the Naval Almanac was 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?

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. I feel like anybody who’s into podcasting, YouTube, social media knows intellectually that the internet is vast and the niches are bigger than you think. But it sometimes takes a palpable human experience to be like, oh shit, no, really, like they are much bigger than you think.

And I was really surprised and delighted to see that book take on a life of its own and see how many people recommended it and see how many people resonated. I thought I was writing a book like building a lighthouse where you’re like, it has this ability to kind of attract your people. And a podcast I’m sure is the same. You kind of put your values out there and people who resonate with it are drawn in, and they’re like, man, I really like that. And I was like, then we probably get along great. That’s super cool and fun. And it’s a great life on the other side of that, creating something like that and the relationships that come out of it.

The scale still blows me away. I can’t believe that it sells so well in China and India and all around the world and across some different demographics. India makes a little more sense. But I just didn’t have it on my vision board that yoga instructors in Bali were going to be reading the Almanac of Naval, and that it was going to be so popular among high school and college students.

The TAM for the Book of Elon

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: 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 popularity graph, right? Lots of people that go, “Ah, 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?”

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah. So I’m prepared. I did spend a lot of time answering the question, “Who is Naval?” But I think once it’s— it was just such a weird book. It’s a weird title. It’s a weird book. It was crafted for a niche and just broke out.

But Elon is one of the most famous people on Earth. And I think he’s not a polished presenter the way Steve Jobs is. I don’t think people necessarily think of him as a font of wisdom or deep introspection, but he has f*ing incredible ideas when you can really access them. And his life story is just so many ups and downs, so many hard lessons. And he is a really good communicator actually. He’s got a gift for distilling things and bringing people along and finding a key metric, honing a team, organizing people around a mission.

And some of these ideas in this book about being multi-planetary, he’s been talking about for 20 years, but there’s still so much to learn from them. These are just battle-tested ideas, I think, in a lot of cases.

Applying Elon’s Lessons to Life

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are the tactical principles, or what are the ways that you’ve changed your life having gone through the process of writing this book?

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What have you applied to your life beyond Eight Sleep and Element? What have you applied to your life after learning about Elon?

The War Room Mentality and Attacking Bottlenecks

ERIC JORGENSON: I think it is the most meta is this sense that I’m capable of more than I think. It has encouraged me to do more things in parallel. Back to the parallel gestation thing. I’m trying to run Scribe Media, which is a publishing company, and write a book, actually work on 3 at the same time. And podcast and invest. So it gave me some fuel in the fire to be like, no, this is doable and sane. And if these things are all sort of like stacking and compounding, it is sane to do them all in parallel over a long period of time.

The bias to urgency, I’m not working 100-hour weeks and running around the world on my private jet, but I do have a much stronger discipline around like, where is the bottleneck? What’s the most important problem to solve? What is the most effective way to solve it? How can I physically go to the problem? How can I pull in the right people? I think the idea of a war room is kind of underrated — what’s the bottleneck? Gather the people, attack it. The rest will kind of take care of itself. That is not how a lot of companies are run, frankly. A lot of them are like a weekly meeting, do this, do that, standard schedule, procedural as opposed to tactical.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Yeah. What is the issue? Let’s go after that. Let’s go through it. When I think about this, it makes me think about the difference between watching UFC and boxing. When you watch boxing, it’s almost ceremonial, this sort of monarch-like, weird vestige of people doffing their caps. “We must remember that today is a grand entry for the 45th anniversary.” And you’re like, “What the f*?” Whereas at the UFC, it’s rock music, and the guys in the middle of the octagon, they start hitting each other.

And it kind of feels a little bit like that — why do we have an agenda? Why do we always have the same agenda for each of these meetings? Why can’t it just be what is the problem, given that the rate limit is constrained by the slowest moving part or person or department or whatever it might be? And if you continue to open those up, the total capacity of the pipeline increases.

ERIC JORGENSON: 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.

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

ERIC JORGENSON: Which is perfectly fine depending on what you’re optimizing for. Again, this is not a blueprint that everybody should follow. It is an explanation of how one person who is unique and special happens to operate — take whatever works for you and leave the rest.

Closing Remarks and What’s Next

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: F* yeah. Eric Jorgenson, ladies and gentlemen. Where should people go to check out everything you’ve got going on?

ERIC JORGENSON: 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 5 years ago.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Wow. That is a good one. I saw that you just released on Smart Friends, the 4-hour conversation on your YouTube.

ERIC JORGENSON: Yeah, Naval and I updated the audiobook. So I got to spend a day in 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, full circle kind of experience. Unreal.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: What are you doing next? Can you say?

ERIC JORGENSON: The one I can say is I’m doing a book with David Senra for distilling some of the maxims and the key stories from the Founders Archive. That will f*ing rip. Which I think will be so fun to work on. Yeah, I think it will be amazing. The other one, I don’t have a thumbs up yet, so I don’t want to say that one publicly.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Well, I’m looking forward to getting you in the center in here and we can have a chat. That would be amazing.

ERIC JORGENSON: F* yeah.

CHRIS WILLIAMSON: Appreciate you, man.

ERIC JORGENSON: Thank you.

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