Eric Jorgenson | What We Can Learn From Elon

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Eric Jurgensen is the author of the Navalmanac, The Anthology of Biology, and the Book of Elon.
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He is the CEO of the publishing house Scribe and a central figure in a small group of people I discovered online about eight years ago, who, each without them knowing, nudged me slightly and then, together as a group, really influenced me to go out and take the risk, which was the creation of this podcast, with the confidence that irrespective of the outcome, it would be worthwhile to do.
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Eric doesn't know this, um, nor does he know me personally, beyond the hour we sat across from each other to record this.
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But such is the nature of parasocial relationships we all have with the various people we follow online or listen to on podcasts or whose books we've read.
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I know a lot about Eric's worldview.
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I've read a lot of his stuff, and it's therefore quite likely that Eric has influenced me more than I know.
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And so with that, it was a very special pleasure to have gotten to record this interview with him.
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Eric put himself on the map with the almanac of Naval Ravicans back in 2020.
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It's the dual inputs of Naval's pithy wisdom combined with Eric's superb curation.
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It became an outlier bestseller over two million copies sold and a top ten highlighted book of all time across all genres within Kindle.
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And it's that same effort and taste in curation which applies to Eric's new book, except in this case with a different central character, the one and only Elon Musk.
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Now, whatever you think of Elon, it is at this stage a losing argument to claim anything other than him being the most consequential entrepreneur alive.
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His ability to attract talent, accumulate resources, execute goals, discover new markets, to never stop doubling down.
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Eric's book is about the actions, philosophy, and what we can learn from Elon, which has driven all of those exceptional outcomes.
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It has nothing to do with Elon's personal life nor his politics, which, although there are aspects of him that I don't understand, and especially regarding the politics in his personal life, even in some cases, respect, but Elon is altogether for me one of the most inspiring risk takers and wealth creators who's ever existed.
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And on that point, I would suggest that you get the book just to read Naval's forward.
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Naval Ravakant wrote the forward for this book, where he defines wealth creation as I've used it above here.
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The book is available now via the top link in the description.
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And before I play the episode, please consider leaving this podcast a review on either Apple or Spotify wherever you're listening to it.
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And with no further ado, here is Eric Jurgensen.
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Across Biology, Naval, the Elon book, have you noticed what sales in Australia have looked like relative to Europe and North America?
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The Naval book has done well there.
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Um I I really underestimated how well Naval was sort of translated, uh uh not just across, you know, cultures or countries, but age ranges and people.
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I mean, you know, the desire to be uh wealthy and happy is is uh pretty much human universal.
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Um and I I tried to find that in in Elon too.
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I sort of knew going in that this book would be about like how does he do it?
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How does he why does he win?
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Like what seemed to be the explaining factors of him as an outlier.
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And so I knew sort of his methods of success would be a big contributor, but I was not I sort of discovered along the way that purpose was the other pillar of this book.
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And I do think, you know, a desire for purpose and a desire for success are also timeless and universal human desires.
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And I think, you know, Elon actually has fantastic things to say about those.
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Um, you know, not not I don't think he would consider himself a sage of those things, but his life sort of exemplifies the power of of both of those.
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Aaron Powell You wrote at the beginning of the book that your sort of dream outcome would be one million musks.
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Um I think so.
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Did I frame that the wrong way?
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No, that's a it's a little uh it's a little bit of an overly pithy summary, but I like to have kind of a crisp, clear goal.
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Like I don't I don't literally mean everybody should go do what he did, but I I would really I yearn to see a million people sort of authentically and individually follow the example that he set as in terms of like going after extremely big, seemingly impossible civilization level challenges, uh, you know, with with a mix of like engineering and and physics rigor, unprecedented speed, risk taking, and make a dent, you know, make a dent, like accelerate human progress.
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Yeah, that's Jobs' line to make a dent.
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And I uh saw as in a part of the meaning part of the book, there was a quote about a useful life is one worth having lived, um, which obviously resonates quite well.
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There's quite pithy from Elon there.
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And since he's probably the most exceptional entrepreneur since Jobs by many metrics, Jobs famously wasn't the greatest husband or father.
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It appears Elon is the same.
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Can can you be Musk or Jobs?
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Can you be one of these million Musks you want to create, but also be decent and good to your family?
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Is there evidence of it?
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I think there is.
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I mean, uh uh Elon is is singular in the same way that you know, and and Jobs is probably singular in the same way that like Napoleon or Gandhi or MLK, like many of the most famous characters of history were extremely spiky and had challenged personal lives.
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Like it's you know, it's not polite or fashionable to remind people that MLK cheated on his wife or that Gandhi was a horrific father.
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Uh we think of those people as as saints.
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Um but there are, I think, trade-offs all over all over the place in life.
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Um and the people who are the most well-rounded tend not to become the most talked about.
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Um, you know, it's it's it there's probably like a personal analogy, uh, a human individual human analogy to the sense of like there's a lot of history that's written about the wars and not a lot that's written about the peace.
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And I think, you know, the people that make the most headlines and the people that make the biggest waves are often, you know, uh there's the most to say about them, and they're the most divisive, which means they're the most disgust because everybody has a different lens on that person.
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Um, and some people absolutely have a blinders, uh like a rose-colored glasses hero version.
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And some people will never see anything good in that person because you know that there are negative attributes about them, and and that's the source of the endless conversation.
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Um everybody sort of uses them as a foil to project their own opinion, and the people who are well-rounded, you know, just don't attract they're not the lightning rod.
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Um, but I think there's a there's so many people, we all have these people in our lives who are who are well-rounded and successful.
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Um, and for all the things that I think we can learn from Elon, like he is not my my bloop.
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I don't want to live his life.
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I don't want, you know, uh, you know, a fractured family by a b across a bunch of different women.
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I don't want uh to frankly to suffer as much as he has.
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Um I know I'm not, you know, I'm not that much of a risk taker.
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Like I th I think there's a lot to learn from him without feeling like you have to actually, you know, run your train down those tracks.
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And a lot of progress can be made in in degrees.
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Speaking of risk taking, the book was compiling, curating thousands and thousands of hours of interview footage, things written about Musk, etc.
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What are the best stories of Musk taking risk that pop out?
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I mean, the the canonical one that probably characterizes him the best.
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Uh this is the late 2008 story.
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And anybody who's like deeply familiar with Musk will know this, but it's it's almost lost to history, I think, for the people that only kind of know him as he became a household name over the past few years.
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And a lot of people have this model of him as just being like, you know, financially motivated.
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Um, and and this this story I think reveals his character better than anything anything else.
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So to set the scene, you know, 2008, he had exited PayPal with about 200 million dollars.
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He was going into starting SpaceX with you put 100 million into SpaceX and I think 50 into Tesla.
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He was down to his last, like, you know, his last 40 million, if you can imagine, you know, uh being so so backed into a corner.
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Um, but you know, six, seven years into both Tesla and SpaceX, and these were both deeply non-consensus companies.
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They were both considered quixotic, stupid, foolhardy companies that couldn't possibly have succeeded um in categories that didn't even exist.
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Like there was no precursor.
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And Elon funded these.
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He took generational wealth and he plowed it into basically as the sole funder of both of these companies for their first, you know, five, six, seven years.
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And at this point in in the story, he Tesla was on the the brink of death.
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Tesla was on life support, days from bankruptcy, uh, going into the end of the year.
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It was, it was Christmas.
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Um, they did not have money to make the next payroll.
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The model, the original Roadster, had a bunch of orders for it that they had didn't have enough money to build and deliver.
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The Model S was sort of designed but not for sale.
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Uh, there was no loan from the DOE, there was no Daimler deal.
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Like the biggest previous investor was just ghosting them as they were trying to raise money.
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Uh, and at the same time, SpaceX had failed its third launch, uh, and his his he had funded it for three launches.
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And rather than, you know, he's sitting there with 40 million looking at two companies on life support, and his friends were sort of coaching him to like pick one or the other, like, you know, pick SpaceX.
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Tesla's never gonna make it, it's it's closer to death.
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Um, just put the money into SpaceX, you know, get yourself a couple more launches, that'll be safe, and and you'll get to kind of contain your risk.
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And he describes himself as feeling like he was holding a child in each hand like over a cliff.
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Both of these companies have deeply important existential missions to him, which is one is like addressing climate change and electrification and automation of transport, and the other is making us multiplanetary and preserving life as we know it, consciousness.
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And he couldn't bring himself to choose, and so he took what was the riskiest possible path that gave both of his missions at least a narrow chance for success.
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So he split the money and bought them both just like a little bit of time.
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And that fourth launch at SpaceX is the one that worked, and then immediately, you know, that NASA deal came in.
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Um, and then uh he put he had investors at Tesla who said they would match what he put in.
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And so he put in his the entire remainder of his net worth into Tesla at the last hour of the last day that it was possible on Christmas Eve, 6 p.m.
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And uh and and some of the investors, I think uh Peter Thiel, Steve Jervitzon, Antonio Grassi came in at the same level, and Tesla survived, and that let them like get those first cars out the door that that uh really set the snowball going.
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But these are that wasn't just a risky decision, it was the maximum risk decision.
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And this goes to his sort of like purpose-driven nature, and and uh frankly, I think the returns that are on the other side of being purpose-driven and the counterintuitive and kind of paradoxical decisions you make when the money was meaningless to him.
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Not meaningless, but like uh he was willing to risk every dollar of massive generational wealth that he had.
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He never had to work again in his life.
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He was willing to risk public embarrassment uh on multiple levels, willing to risk every dollar he had in his entire reputation for a chance of success at these two missions.
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And uh, you know, there's not many people that will ever get to take that test, but there's a lot fewer than will that will ever pass it, right?
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Like you see a lot of people donating, you see a lot of great founders who had exited, started, you know, starting other companies, starting side projects, but you don't see a lot that risk going back to true zero and true public embarrassment after reaching that level.
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Elon's the only one I yeah, all in over and over again.
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You know, this is this is the biggest example, but he did the same thing in PayPal.
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He rolled all of his winnings from his first company, nearly all, back into back into PayPal.
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Um, you know, it this is the risk tolerance, the sort of gambling mentality, or the purpose-driven nature.
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And I think it I think it is um it is the combination of those, actually.
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I think there's like a clean, there's a beautiful motivation and uh and a psychological compulsion that sort of work together to to create his singularity.
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I think he he is shown through evidence, given his behavior over time, rolling Zip2 into PayPal, rolling PayPal into Tesla and SpaceX, and then all the myriad projects he's done since, uh, that money isn't the motivating cause.
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So how exciting is it going to be when he's a trillionaire and he rolls that into whatever the next project is going to be?
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Yeah.
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I mean, I think you we could apply the same thing.
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Like Tesla and SpaceX are now like a series of startups, right?
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You could tell the same story about it's it's a little less visible because it's inside of a company.
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But um, you know, my friend Max Olson wrote a great essay about about SpaceX and the culture of it.
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And he points out like SpaceX could have stopped with the Falcon 9 and been one of the greatest companies of all time.
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They could have been an absolute cash geyser, and it would have been 30 years before anybody ever caught him.
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And Elon could have been a trillionaire probably on that company alone.
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Um, but he was immediately, it was already he was already years into plowing resources into Starship and like trying to climb that next S-curve.
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And Tesla has done the same, right?
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Um, from Model S to Model 3 to humanoid robots to robo taxis to solar panels um or to batteries, like and the and vertically integrating back into lithium mines.
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Like there's just um he is all all go um in a way that like, yeah, I I agree.
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I can't imagine what the next you know 10, 20 years is gonna look like because I do think this is just gonna keep continuing.
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And so many people are so excited to see it.
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Well, maybe already seeing it.
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He's taken his expertise in building factories and applied it to Colossus, and now somehow he's also involved at the frontier of the artificial intelligence game.
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Starlink is just this 10, 20, 30 billion dollar company that comes out of SpaceX.
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It is absolutely mind-boggling.
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You can take one of these companies and it's a generational entrepreneur, and it it's like each additional company you add should make it maybe twice as hard, which means after five companies, it's a hundred times harder that you've done all this, but somehow it still happens.
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Yeah.
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Um and he did create that culture, or so I I don't want to take that away from him.
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Um, but I do think we we we risk uh we risk mythologizing or veering into like the superhuman, which just then things stop being helpful.
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Um, and it becomes very easy to sort of dismiss some of what I think are really powerful lessons.
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Uh if you forget that like look, this is these cultures are 30 years in the making.
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Um, and there are many, many, many people that contribute to and snowball uh, you know, it reinforce these these cultures, and the culture and the system is actually what's producing these incredible wins.
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It's obviously not one person, but this still using him as a symbol um and a lesson, uh like a source of these lessons is really, really useful still.
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Yeah, that that's a good point.
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Uh suppose one can get swept away with the yeah, the great man theory, like it's all from him, it's all downstream of him.
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But you do write about in the book uh Elon's ability to attract talent.
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And it seems he has this enviable position where people aren't going to get onto his radar unless they meet two criteria, which is they're exceptional and they're willing to work insanely hard.
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And maybe they don't really care that much about money, which is just the dream combination of people that you want working for you.
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Yeah.
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The the ability to like, you know, I just I just tweeted about this today.
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He talks about the a company as being the vector sum of the of the team, right?
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Like that's the the whole thing boils down to how good are the people, how aligned are they, and how hard are they working?
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Um, you know, that that is the the simplest possible formula for describing kind of the output of a of a team, the output of a company.
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And if you see what he does kind of through that lens, um, a lot of the stories sort of start to to click in.
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Even the even the the stories, whether whether he's seeming great or seeming cruel and stupid, um if you see that as the algorithm that he's sort of running and trying to increase alignment, increase the quality of the people, remove anybody who's not carrying their weight, and get more out of the people who are there, you know, and doing that in a very like Asperger-y, like deeply intense, incredibly hardcore way.
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Um and and remembering that he's selecting for people who want to be there.
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You know, like there are people that show up and say, like, I want to get as much as possible out of this experience.
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I want to be pushed to the limit, beyond my limits.
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I want to find out what I'm capable of.
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Um, and then the people who are like, but shouldn't you just work 40 hours a week?
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are like, well, just don't come work here.
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Go work somewhere else.
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This is the place to work if you want to work on one of humanity's most important missions and work 100 hours a week alongside some of the smartest people alive.
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And if that's not what you're looking for, the whole rest of the world is there for you.
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But if you are one of those people, you know where to go.
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Is there any evidence that his politics has affected his ability to hire people and the uh reputation that his businesses have?
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That's a good question.
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Um Probably to some extent.
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I imagine there are people who are uh who when he was kind of like f less of a lightning rod, um, just even if they did disagree with him, they didn't uh it didn't feel as front and center.
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It didn't feel like as much of a like a political stance to go work at a company um that sort of represented him.
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And and I hope it I hope that that fades in time.
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I do think I think that the like uh you know the 2025 sort of political kerfuffle will will become like a historical footnote in time.
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Um and I think it's easy to forget like uh that he was a hero to the left because he was one of the like the biggest climate climate change impact uh drivers in history.
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Um and so I think you have this whole set of people that were like attended a climate rally in 2022 and then you know firebombed a Tesla dealership in 2025, and you're like, wait a minute, like what what is happening here?
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Um which you know when you when you sort of live in the uh in the changing tides of of the present uh sort of consensus, uh it's easy to it's easy to lose sight of that broader perspective.
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Yeah, it seems he's so pragmatic because he clearly believes in climate change and is motivated by saving the planet and therefore continuing humanity, um, but obviously is willing to compromise on some of the people that he might be doing business with or doing politics with because it serves a different agenda.
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But we don't have to get into that.
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I just remember that you've for sure seen it.
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By the way, you're probably the person who's viewed the most Elon tape ever, but he did this Paris conference where he spoke about climate change, and it really clicked for me then just how uh what the problem was and how humans could solve it, just talking about the carbon cycle and that we dug out this dense carbon and release into the atmosphere and it offset the carbon cycle.
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And it's like it's so uh typical of that first principles thinking that is so understandable.
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Um, but yeah, there's no question underneath all of that.
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Just sorry.
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Well, I think Elon Elon is very um I think this is often underrated or or missed because he's he's not a polished presenter, uh, like or a particularly persuasive speaker, like in his delivery the way in the way Jobs was, right?
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Jobs was like hypnotic and polished and incredible uh on stage.
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And Elon is still kind of uh just unpolished, right?
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He's a little a little stilting, just kind of repeats himself.
00:21:02.480 --> 00:21:14.720
I don't think he's like worked on his presentation or you know, being an overly charismatic showman, but he has a really, as you point out, powerful uh ability to explain things clearly and memorably.
00:21:14.880 --> 00:21:22.799
And my hope is that that comes through really well in writing in a way that it doesn't always if people are trying to kind of listen, just listen to him talk.
00:21:23.359 --> 00:21:27.039
How often does Elon recognize his own luck?
00:21:27.279 --> 00:21:30.240
So he's exceptional, obviously.
00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:38.799
But you take the 2008 example with 40 million left on the table and splitting it both on the most risky parts for both SpaceX and Tesla.
00:21:38.960 --> 00:21:53.839
You know, uh Taleb famously says that mild success is due to hard work and skill, wild success is due to variance, which is this sort of luck and randomness of history that accelerates someone a hundred X more than what the next person might be.
00:21:54.000 --> 00:22:04.079
So I just wonder how often Musk himself recognizes the luck that he's had, or whether he believes that that's a part of what the human experience.
00:22:05.039 --> 00:22:08.559
I think uh that's a that is a another fascinating question.
00:22:08.640 --> 00:22:12.160
It's one I'd like to ask him actually because I'm sure his answer would be better than mine.
00:22:13.119 --> 00:22:24.000
My my indication just from the the things I've picked up is I think he's certainly aware of it and wouldn't deny that there is some.
00:22:25.200 --> 00:22:33.920
The frame that I would use is probably a little more uh the Napoleon idea that like history hangs great events hang by a single thread.
00:22:34.640 --> 00:22:38.960
And so there's there is this like luck surface area.
00:22:39.599 --> 00:22:44.319
He's pushed luck he's he's taken more chances.
00:22:44.480 --> 00:22:56.640
He has um he's been in the arena for longer more hours going harder rolling the dice longer and that has sort of compounded in a lot of different ways.
00:22:57.279 --> 00:23:17.920
And he also he does not give up like that is one of the most maybe one of the most unexpected um kind of lessons from this that I think is is really generalizable is how he talks is like a it's almost like David Goggins, right?
00:23:18.000 --> 00:23:22.799
It's like this refreshing level of like you just can't make me quit.
00:23:22.960 --> 00:23:26.960
I don't understand I don't even understand what you mean by like a decision to quit.
00:23:27.119 --> 00:23:31.119
Like I picked a mission that is so important I can't fathom quitting it.
00:23:31.279 --> 00:24:13.920
I will burn every boat I will take every chance I will spend every dollar I will risk every embarrassment because this mission deserves that level of sacrifice and you know I I just read a great line he asked the universe for something in a way that the universe understands and to me it's I think it's a great line and I and I you know I immediately thought of Elon is like if you sacrifice absolutely everything to the cause uh because you believe enough in that cause that it is obvious to you to do so like do you call it luck if you just stay in the arena so long that everyone else quits and and dies of attrition and walks off and you just like we're still standing there fighting.
00:24:16.960 --> 00:24:18.880
It's kind of an interesting way to look at luck.
00:24:19.440 --> 00:24:27.519
It's like if you simply don't quit eventually enough things happen that it that it looks like luck.
00:24:27.839 --> 00:24:38.960
That's really well said on a on a timeline long enough, you know, how much can you keep forcing the luck to the point where it's not just the role of randomness that's dictating your outcomes here.
00:24:39.279 --> 00:24:40.720
It's your exposure to it, right?
00:24:40.799 --> 00:24:50.319
Like you know uh Peter Thiel said, you know, trying to describe most he's like Elon does seems to understand something about risk that the rest of us don't um and like what like what is that?
00:24:50.559 --> 00:24:55.359
And uh a p an overly quippy version is like that it doesn't exist.
00:24:55.599 --> 00:25:02.799
You know, a line Elon has on this is that you know uh failure is essentially irrelevant unless it's catastrophic.
00:25:03.039 --> 00:25:05.519
Like there is such thing as catastrophic failure.
00:25:11.039 --> 00:25:16.640
But in the absence of that pretty much everything is either irrelevant or a massive win.
00:25:16.799 --> 00:25:28.640
And as long as you sort of expose yourself to enough of those positive nonlinearities and and cover the downside enough and continue taking enough chances um and I do think he manages risk and effort well.
00:25:28.799 --> 00:25:47.759
Like he he is we don't think of these often as he he it's gonna sound weird because he gets a lot of credit, but he does not get enough credit for being a scrappy low-cost operator because the things that he's achieved that were seemed impossible he did not do with massive budgets.
00:25:47.920 --> 00:26:00.319
Like a hundred million dollars seems like a lot until you realize that you know Boeing has spent 10 billion trying to accomplish the same thing, but not trying very hard because their incentives were misaligned, right?
00:26:01.759 --> 00:26:08.720
So the scale of what he's accomplished with the amount of money that he did it with is again staggering.
00:26:09.119 --> 00:26:29.599
On that thread perhaps you could tell some quintessential stories about say the engine design for the Falcon 9 and how they ended up or maybe Tesla's a better example, but just how along the supply chains of his various businesses they ended up building in-house despite the fact that that was from everyone else's opinion the wrong way to go about it.
00:26:30.000 --> 00:26:38.799
Yeah well so okay let's start with the um kind of the general rule that Elon has about like always be attacking the bottleneck.
00:26:38.880 --> 00:26:47.119
Like whatever the bottleneck for your pace is that's where you should be working um and that could take a lot of different forms.
00:26:48.000 --> 00:26:52.880
I'll use the Tesla kind of model three scale up example here.
00:26:53.119 --> 00:27:04.000
Like just because factory is the the classic way to sort of understand a bottleneck if you have 10,000 parts that all need to go into a car and one hasn't arrived, you're you're making no cars.
00:27:04.319 --> 00:27:14.480
Like no matter how much other how many other resources you have no matter what else is going wrong no matter how expensive the factory is like you're making zero cars until all those things come together.
00:27:14.799 --> 00:27:20.880
And the line that he has about this is you move as fast as your least lucky or least competent supplier.
00:27:21.119 --> 00:27:33.759
And so you know one I remember he's like there's a shootout the US Mexico border that delayed trunk carpet that became our bottleneck for like a week and that was why we missed our you know production target.
00:27:33.920 --> 00:27:40.640
And through that lens it becomes very obvious that like the best thing to do is minimize the number of of parts and the number of suppliers.
00:27:40.799 --> 00:27:53.680
So if you want to control as much of your pace as you can you inherit you inherit the if you use the legacy suppliers and the legacy sort of supply chain you're inheriting the the constraints of the legacy providers.
00:27:53.839 --> 00:28:20.160
You can't go faster than the suppliers and the supply chain allow you to um so you have to either find faster suppliers eliminate them become your own eliminate the part entirely or become your own supplier and you know in the in the sort of engineering process a lot of the parts are deleted or merged or combined and there's a lot of stories about sort of deleting as you know the the fastest possible way to improve a process or speed it up.
00:28:21.039 --> 00:28:31.839
But quickly after that is like all right if we can't delete it we need to combine them and we need to control as much of the process as we can so that we can control the speed and the throughput.
00:28:32.480 --> 00:28:39.440
And if you have that volume then it becomes a really powerful sort of way to become the low cost supplier.
00:28:39.519 --> 00:28:52.880
Like you need the volume to drive the cost down but if you have both and you are constantly reinvesting in lower cost and higher scale that becomes a sort of a self-reinforcing strategy that uh you you have to work your way there and it takes a couple flying leaps.
00:28:53.200 --> 00:29:22.640
But it is a tremendous moat if you can get a few billion dollars invested in one of the biggest factories in the world that goes you know yeah all the way from raw material through to finished product doesn't have you know a ton of external dependencies isn't particularly fragile because there's you know fewer uh fewer potential broken inputs um it's a really it is a powerful mode of thought and I think so few people actually iterate through their product that way.
00:29:22.880 --> 00:29:38.400
Perhaps because they might lack the confidence Elon has to and perhaps even arrogance to say that entire line of products which I've only just read a little book about and had a conversation with someone on, I know more about that than they do.
00:29:38.559 --> 00:29:45.440
I actually know what the bottleneck's going to be and I know how to fix it and therefore we'll take on the risk to build it in-house because fuck them, they're too slow.
00:29:45.759 --> 00:30:29.759
Yeah and this is uh you know there's a ton of good stories in SpaceX about this uh it is the the ability and willingness to call bullshit when you see bullshit you know um his tool for this is the the idiot index and so uh a a kind of an algorithm that he's constantly running in his head is like how much of the raw materials components of this part cost uh and then how complicated is it to manufacture right so the the story in the book I think is this you know a half nozzle jacket for the uh Raptor or the Merlin engine and it's like$13,000 to buy from a supplier and he's like if you weigh that it's a one it's made of steel it's just one material and if you weigh that steel it's only$200 worth of steel.
00:30:29.920 --> 00:30:37.200
So like why the hell is that does it cost you know$10,000 more to get that amount of steel into that shape?
00:30:37.359 --> 00:30:38.160
What is going on?
00:30:38.319 --> 00:31:04.240
And what actually if you if you ask why why why why why why why and go all the way through that it turns out that like you're buying the part from a supplier who subcontracted the manufacturing to a designer who to a subcontractor who designed who subcontracted the design to a different subcontractor and there's like you know 40 people and layers of profit in between the part and the person who's actually doing the work and he's like well this is madness.
00:31:04.480 --> 00:31:18.720
Like I'm gonna buy the machine I'm gonna get the guy and I'm gonna put him in my under my roof and I'm gonna put him right there and he's gonna just take the steel and bend it into the shape and hand it to that other guy and now it costs$400 instead of you know$13,000 and oh look we just gained an order of magnitude and cost.
00:31:19.039 --> 00:31:36.559
Um so you know there's there's stories about you know NASA aerospace latches that cost thousands of dollars that he's like we adapted a bathroom latch like literally you know uh went to Home Depot and bought a part and combined it with something else and that worked.
00:31:36.720 --> 00:31:48.640
And so it is just this willingness to like not take the sort of um best practice status quo like this is how everybody else does it and kind of start from the very fundamental like how good could good be?
00:31:48.799 --> 00:31:50.400
What's the cheapest way to solve this problem?
00:31:50.480 --> 00:31:51.759
What's the scrappiest thing?
00:31:51.839 --> 00:32:00.079
Let's just try this for now kind of like duct tape and bubblegum like garage shop sort of scrappy engineering.
00:32:00.319 --> 00:32:27.599
And it seems weird to like build rockets that way but a lot of the decisions were made in that in that mode right like forget the first version of Starship he built in a tent he put up a tent in a parking lot and started welding like stainless steel um because they were like we know this this material is robust and we can just like do advanced rocket manufacturing in a in a parking lot um because we're choosing to use this material and not carbon fiber and all this stuff.
00:32:27.920 --> 00:34:39.360
So yeah asking those questions you know why why why why why why why why can't this be done cheaper what's the limit of efficiency on this how have you seen that attitude influence entrepreneurs over the last few years especially as those stories from Isaacson and Vance's biographies became mainstream yeah I mean I think I think uh hardware is much more demystified than it used to be I think we're already kind of seeing you know working towards this this million musks I think there's a couple um so I think there's a few categories in which this is happening one is is more people are tackling hardware and they see um they see that as a viable route and they're because you don't necessarily have to raise a ton of money and go to the factory you can just like build a garage shop and so we've invested in some of these companies you know um somebody's building the the heaviest lift quadcopter uh drones and another team that is building uh like building robots that build houses like Adobe houses in this really um sort of extremely low capex way uh like shockingly cheap cheap dwellings um another category is is just the value of manufacturing in general so the we call it the reindustrialized movement in the US um the you know A16Z doing the American dynamism trying to like reshore manufacturing I'm seeing even software companies building amazing tools for factories uh in design for production like Dirac and Stell Engineering are both companies that we invested in that are kind of working along these lines um but it is sort of a after the last few decades of at least in tech value being primarily driven by software and apps and moving to the cloud I feel like the pendulum is swinging a lot more towards like whoa whoa whoa like we got to make stuff we got to make physical stuff we got to shape atoms we got to produce energy um we've got to build new computers we need chips like these really fundamental base layers of technology and that's one of my sort of theses for the next 10 years of investing is like startups as a startup culture is coming for the biggest markets in the world now.
00:34:39.519 --> 00:35:04.559
Like one of the companies I'm most excited about that we that we're producing is is Terraform which is you know basically a petrochemical company that's doing exactly what you talked about pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and producing synthetic uh natural gas, methane and and methanol and producing raw materials uh you know those these things were not really on you know the venture radar 10, 20 years ago.
00:35:04.639 --> 00:35:08.960
And I feel like a lot of that is sort of this next wave of entrepreneurs following Elon's example.
00:35:09.679 --> 00:35:14.400
A part of the reason they weren't on the venture radar was because they were so expensive.
00:35:14.719 --> 00:35:23.599
Yeah right there wasn't and there isn't necessarily the power law outcomes that you can get in those types of manufacturing and hardware companies which you could get in software.
00:35:23.920 --> 00:35:27.440
Well I think uh there's a I think there was a bunch of reasons.
00:35:27.599 --> 00:36:00.400
One I think there there weren't as many sort of uh startup cultured startup-minded hardware engineers I think that was one of the constraints I don't think there was the willingness to fund these companies on the investing side until it was clear how big you know SpaceX Tesla and some of these other hardware companies had had become I think the other is is that we've had this narrative not a correct narrative but sort of a it's almost like a wives tale of like oh software is so low capex and hardware is high capex.
00:36:00.719 --> 00:36:06.880
And actually like when you really do the math, Leo Polovitz of Sousa Ventures did a great post like actually questioning both of those assumptions.
00:36:06.960 --> 00:36:10.159
He's like in theory software is low capex.
00:36:10.400 --> 00:36:12.719
It actually ends up being much higher capex than you think.
00:36:12.960 --> 00:36:35.920
In theory hardware yeah in theory hardware is high capex but in practicality it's actually much lower and there's a bunch of different reasons for that that um we're sort of still sorting out and you know we'll see how it all plays out these are slow feedback loops uh but I think it's a really good and healthy kind of broadening of what we consider addressable markets and addressable problems by tech.
00:36:37.360 --> 00:37:15.760
Just quickly shifting you back to the supply chain question, I wanted to ask you whether Elon has ever mentioned or spoken about Martin van der Brink and ASML just because I would love to hear him talk about the success of this company because they've created this hyper insanely you could argue the most complex machine ever created in the EU V machine and they work with a giant network of suppliers so have done this sort of opposite um process but had an equally impressive outcome and Thunderbrink is as well this Jobs Musk type technical leader.
00:37:15.840 --> 00:37:34.719
So I just wonder in all the tape has Elon mentioned them not off the top of my head that I recall if he did it was probably more recent as like XAI uh has sort of come to the fore and he started working much more on like chips and AI I mean the the core stories in this book are primarily like SpaceX and Tesla.
00:37:35.119 --> 00:37:48.800
There is a little bit of the kind of uh XAI data center scale up but not any of his more recent stuff which is like actually getting into like you know chip design and solar uh space compute and and things like that.
00:37:49.119 --> 00:38:16.320
But I I it's it's good for the world he's getting in there because I do think you know he he has talked recently I think cheek Cheeky Pint uh on the podcast with the Collisons he did get into you know some of their theory for building out you know Tesla building out chips and and uh XAI starting to build some of their own chips and you know I think the energy and computer are going to be some of the biggest markets in the world if they're not already and they will continue to get bigger there's basically infinite demand for both energy and intelligence.
00:38:16.559 --> 00:38:46.000
So great markets to get into and the cheaper and more abundantly available it can get the more people that are competing the better off we're all going to be totally it would be it'd be fun to understand just how much the chip manufacturers and fabs are shaking in their boots either because when the with when Musk turns his attention towards your industry obviously there's so much hubris and there's so much arrogance but over a long enough timeline it ends up working.
00:38:46.239 --> 00:39:21.679
And so you know the assumption is is that these machines are the most delicate and hard to work at scale um but if someone's gonna do it maybe he could anyway that's I think Elon's got a knack for uh finding a new equilibrium like I think you know yes they're delicate and fragile and you know uh these sort of clean room structures but he's talked about like look I think there's a way to create this manufacturing process that is a little less precious and the outcome it might be slightly less optimal but it it it it is just a different equilibrium.
00:39:21.760 --> 00:39:39.199
It's optimizing for different things on a different on a different scale if it's cheaper to manufacture um but if it's you know 30% the cost of manufacture but 80% is performant we still have a you know it might not be the chip that's in your iPhone but it certainly could be the chip that's in your car and definitely could be the chip that's in a data center.
00:39:39.360 --> 00:39:50.320
So we have a ton of different use cases for compute um and and chips will sort of specialize I think in a bunch of different directions with a bunch of different trade-offs and and that is you know good and healthy.
00:39:50.639 --> 00:39:54.159
Did you see Mark Andreessen on David Sener early this week?
00:39:54.639 --> 00:40:14.000
I I haven't watched the whole interview yet no okay there's a moment in there it made me think of you immediately probably because I was interviewing you today but Mark opens up and says um he's just framed the managerial class where before a founder would get a company to a certain point and then a professional manager would come in and grow their business from there.
00:40:14.159 --> 00:40:19.760
And then founder led the entire way the founder keeps innovating the founder has to learn managerialism.
00:40:19.840 --> 00:40:26.480
But then he says Elon has created his own type of management which is probably the right way and probably the way that we're going to be moving forward.
00:40:26.800 --> 00:40:32.000
Yeah Mark has been really eloquent about like about this question of why is Elon so effective.
00:40:32.559 --> 00:40:37.280
He's been on a few podcasts and has a a few kind of different good lines about this, I think.
00:40:37.599 --> 00:40:45.280
And and I think there's merit too I think probably not every company is going to work that way and certainly not every leader can lead that way.
00:40:46.159 --> 00:40:51.039
There's there's obvious downsides to it as well and you have to be a really unique individual in order to do it.
00:40:51.199 --> 00:41:14.800
But I do think over the last you know 10, 20 years even the most sort of skeptical like hardcore capital allocator like Wall Street minds are sort of coming around to the fact that there's really there is alpha in founder led companies and those are pretty reliably outperform the sort of next generation stewardship that comes along.
00:41:15.199 --> 00:41:17.760
You saw that Dylan's permission to publish the book.
00:41:17.920 --> 00:41:29.679
What's the story behind that um I really wanted to I just wanted to know that uh he was okay with it and it was not going to step on anybody's toes.
00:41:29.760 --> 00:41:48.239
Uh so I reached out to my friend Brent Bishop who I knew knew Sam Teller who had been uh Elon's EA through you know kind of at his side through some of the craziest times of his life um and and I owe Sam a huge debt of gratitude for being willing to kind of put a brief of this project in front of him.
00:41:48.639 --> 00:41:50.159
I did not ask for any special access.
00:41:50.239 --> 00:42:16.079
I didn't get to follow Elon I didn't interview him I built this all out of like public sources but I I did just want that thumbs up that like he knew this was happening was okay with me doing it and was was supportive um and he's been retweeting me a bunch over the last couple weeks so uh I'm excited to like get this in his hands and people at all of his companies have have bought copies and been in touch with a lot of uh a lot of people around him so I think uh I think it's starting to resonate which is great.
00:42:16.320 --> 00:42:21.599
That's absolutely incredible man I mean I remember when the Navalmanac came out I was following you on Twitter.
00:42:21.760 --> 00:42:25.760
I'd probably listen to you as a guest on several shows because of it.
00:42:26.159 --> 00:42:29.840
And um it's not like you created this genre.
00:42:30.000 --> 00:42:39.760
I think you took inspiration from poor Charlie's almanac but you've definitely defined this genre going forward now with your third book of this style.
00:42:40.079 --> 00:42:58.079
Yeah I I still don't really know what to call it um I I just I just I love doing these and I especially after the feedback from Naval I feel like the the feedback is just so good and I think it really the format really puts the reader at the center and the it gets me out of the way.
00:42:58.239 --> 00:43:08.400
Like I I get to sort of shine a light on what I think is is the best and most useful thing about Elon um but I'm not it's not about what I think about it.
00:43:08.480 --> 00:43:17.360
It's it's just putting this forth for your sort of for the reader's consideration in as tight and elegant and useful of a package as I possibly can.
00:43:17.519 --> 00:43:39.599
And I'm I'm rewarded in um I just went on Chris Williamson's podcast uh a week or two ago and they looked this up live uh that almanac of Duvall is in the top 100 most densely highlighted books in all of Kindle which is exactly the metric that I would want to optimize for to just as an indication that like this is a this is a high value per minute read.
00:43:39.679 --> 00:43:46.800
There's an idea useful idea on every page you're gonna take something away from it that can change your life and that's the bar that I want to hold for myself when I write one of these books.
00:43:47.039 --> 00:43:47.760
That's fantastic.
00:43:47.920 --> 00:43:52.159
How does it feel to sort of hear that statistic or read that statistic?
00:43:52.480 --> 00:43:58.000
I mean I'm I'm delighted by it and now I'm like oh I hope I hope this book takes another one of those spots.
00:43:58.079 --> 00:43:58.559
We'll see.
00:43:58.800 --> 00:44:03.760
And as the CEO Of a publishing house called Scribe Media.
00:44:04.159 --> 00:44:13.360
What's your eye and taste for what other opportunities within publishing and books there is some type of appetite for?
00:44:13.519 --> 00:44:20.639
Because you've you you've clearly discovered one lane here, but you are in the position where you could test and experiment with others.
00:44:20.960 --> 00:44:21.760
I am, yeah.
00:44:21.920 --> 00:44:27.360
And I I have like a little bit of a pet list of of books that I wish existed, um, as I'm sure most people do.
00:44:27.519 --> 00:44:37.599
But my role at Scribe is really to is not to opine or um project what I think will will sell or or should exist.
00:44:37.679 --> 00:44:40.559
It is really to just help the authors realize their vision.
00:44:40.719 --> 00:44:46.639
So when authors come to us with an idea or or with a manuscript, it's to help it is like more like Rick Rubin, right?
00:44:46.719 --> 00:44:55.440
Like I'm here to help you find the best version of your idea, the most authentic, um, the most well-honed, the most elegant version of what you want to achieve.
00:44:55.599 --> 00:45:07.360
And so it's actually a lot of uh it's a lot of questions and effort that pull out that author's sort of true desire to help them find the boundaries of like this particular project versus maybe maybe they have two projects that they're mashing together.
00:45:07.519 --> 00:45:15.039
Um sometimes people lose sight of the they come with what they they want to say rather than what a reader wants to hear.
00:45:15.119 --> 00:45:23.760
And so bridging that gap and just helping them sort of get out of their own head and consider uh the person sitting across the table from them as they're as they're writing, reading, or speaking.
00:45:24.000 --> 00:45:34.480
Um and then just like, you know, the whole team's effort to help them stay organized, stay on track, and and publish at a truly professional, polished level.
00:45:34.639 --> 00:45:50.480
That's kind of our our niche in the industry, is we allow we publish at the traditional publishing house level of quality, but the authors retain full rights uh legally, financially, creatively, uh they keep all their royalties forever, and they completely control their message.
00:45:50.639 --> 00:46:05.039
Uh we're we're just sort of here as um domain experts and stewards and shepherds to help people move through the pup the maze because publishing a book is really hard emotionally and logistically, uh, and it can be complicated for people kind of going through it for the first or second time.
00:46:05.199 --> 00:46:13.039
And I I'm I run the company now because I published with them as an author back in 2019, 2020, and I loved it and had a life-changing experience.
00:46:13.119 --> 00:46:18.559
Um, so I'm I'm still a customer, even though I'm also on the inside of the company, and that's how I publish this book today.
00:46:18.880 --> 00:46:22.480
So the business model is fundamentally different from a random house.
00:46:22.960 --> 00:46:26.800
Yeah, we we take basically the opposite tack of the traditional publishers.
00:46:26.880 --> 00:46:32.960
They sort of have come in with this 150-year-old business model of like they take control and they take the majority of the royalties.
00:46:33.360 --> 00:46:49.519
Um and I think, frankly, like in the era of Amazon and social media and authors having their own audience, like the assumptions that the publishing industry sort of formed in, the ecosystem, the environment that they were built for, all of those assumptions have flipped 180.
00:46:49.679 --> 00:46:55.679
And so that that's why we are, you know, sort of maximum author freedom, maximum author upside.
00:46:56.480 --> 00:47:02.639
Say I'm I've got a hotshot new fiction novel and Random House have said that they will pay me.
00:47:02.800 --> 00:47:04.239
Why would I go to scribe?
00:47:05.119 --> 00:47:08.320
Uh my my triage here is like it depends how much they want to pay you.
00:47:08.480 --> 00:47:14.559
Uh if my rule of thumb, this has caveats depending on like how big your audience is or something like that.
00:47:14.639 --> 00:47:16.880
But if you get offered a six-figure advance, take it.
00:47:17.039 --> 00:47:22.880
Like that's a really good expected value, and that that displays some level of investment in your process.
00:47:23.039 --> 00:47:28.239
What a lot of authors, what a lot of publishing houses are doing these days is like throwing out a 10K advance.
00:47:28.400 --> 00:47:33.599
And that is just not that is not particularly meaningful for them or for you.
00:47:33.760 --> 00:47:37.440
It doesn't signify any large investment in you or effort on your part.
00:47:37.599 --> 00:47:45.519
They're taking a free option on you and they're not going to do that much work, but you're going to have this kind of lazy majority partner like sitting on your rights and your freedom and your pricing forever.
00:47:45.679 --> 00:47:46.960
And there's no way out of that.
00:47:47.039 --> 00:47:48.239
Like that's a one-way door.
00:47:48.400 --> 00:48:00.800
Whereas, like, if you if you self-publish, it does cost a little bit out of your pocket to get going, but then you can be really creative with your rights and your royalties and how you change things and what distribution channels you want to go down.
00:48:01.119 --> 00:48:06.400
And if you if you want to go with a traditional publisher, you always have that option, right?
00:48:06.480 --> 00:48:08.480
Like scribe is a scribe is a two-way door.
00:48:08.719 --> 00:48:14.320
We just want to help people move forward and they they maintain full optionality about kind of what they do with their book in their future.
00:48:14.559 --> 00:48:14.960
Totally.
00:48:15.199 --> 00:48:21.599
So I just realized um publishing probably took a bit more transition back into Musk and the book of Elon.
00:48:21.920 --> 00:48:31.519
Uh, I remember when you were promoting this book, I think as much as a year ago, year and a half ago, it may have even been the launching tweet, like this is a project that I'm going to be going down the path of.
00:48:31.679 --> 00:48:38.880
It was something along the lines of um Vance and Isaacson have missed it.
00:48:38.960 --> 00:48:46.239
Or all these books have been written about Musk, but they've sort of missed the operating manual or the philosophical operating manual.
00:48:46.320 --> 00:48:49.840
It was something along these lines, but it's just a way to preface the question.
00:48:50.079 --> 00:48:57.519
Um, what did Vance and Isaacson miss about Musk that leaves room for this book to um have an appetite for?
00:48:57.840 --> 00:49:03.199
I will caveat this with I um I think there's plenty of room for many books.
00:49:03.280 --> 00:49:05.599
Like there should be hundreds of books written about Musk.
00:49:05.679 --> 00:49:09.119
Uh I don't think I don't think it's like an exclusive competition.
00:49:09.280 --> 00:49:10.639
I love both of their books.
00:49:10.800 --> 00:49:11.920
I've spoken with Ashley.
00:49:12.000 --> 00:49:15.440
I respect the hell out of him and his work and everything that he's doing.
00:49:15.519 --> 00:49:18.159
He's doing really cool podcasts and videos these days.
00:49:18.239 --> 00:49:23.519
Um I was like also Eric Berger's books on on SpaceX in particular are great.
00:49:23.760 --> 00:49:29.519
Um and Isaacson did a really unique thing, which is like you get to follow Elon around for two years.
00:49:29.599 --> 00:49:32.000
And Isaacson is one of the best living biographers.
00:49:32.079 --> 00:49:33.360
Like he's an incredible writer.
00:49:33.440 --> 00:49:35.679
He's he did really thorough, comprehensive research.
00:49:35.760 --> 00:49:38.880
I mean, he pulls Elon's grades and interviews all his family members.
00:49:39.039 --> 00:49:43.760
It just has a level of access that like I didn't have, right?
00:49:43.840 --> 00:49:49.360
Um, but he also really his his sort of vision for that book is it's this comprehensive record.
00:49:49.760 --> 00:49:55.679
Most of the book is this comprehensive record of either his life or in particular the two years that he was following him.
00:49:55.760 --> 00:50:10.800
And so there's a lot of great detailed stories about how Elon made decisions in that room, um, the people that he worked with, the effect that he had on people, uh, but it really focuses on sort of like late stage SpaceX and that Twitter transition, which is when you know he was following him.
00:50:12.000 --> 00:50:16.880
The value that I would say my book has is one, it's in Elon's own words.
00:50:17.039 --> 00:50:18.719
So you're hearing directly from him.
00:50:18.880 --> 00:50:23.360
It's not through a lens of what a biographer is interpreting.
00:50:23.519 --> 00:50:26.480
Um, two, is it's it does not contain much fluff.
00:50:26.559 --> 00:50:31.039
So I think Isaacson's book is, you know, 150, 2,000, 200,000 words.
00:50:31.280 --> 00:50:34.880
It is a 40-hour listen, not an audible, right?
00:50:34.960 --> 00:50:37.199
Like mine is extremely tight.
00:50:37.360 --> 00:50:43.360
Um, and it focuses on either much shorter, tighter versions of the stories that have like a real moral.
00:50:43.519 --> 00:50:56.320
Um, but I I I think journalists and you know, Isaacson has a journalist background, tend to sort of come in with the goal of like, how can I be maximally comprehensive, balanced, put this person into historical context?
00:50:56.400 --> 00:51:00.000
I want to put this person forth for the reader's judgment in full.
00:51:00.159 --> 00:51:01.280
And that's just not my goal.
00:51:01.360 --> 00:51:09.360
Like, my goal is to put the most useful things someone has ever said on a page and hand them to the reader.
00:51:09.519 --> 00:51:15.519
Like it is maximum utility, is my goal, like per minute read or per word on the page.
00:51:15.760 --> 00:51:21.360
Um, and I'm not shooting for comprehensiveness, I'm not shooting for journalistic correctness.
00:51:21.599 --> 00:51:26.639
And, you know, if if you are a Elon hater, you can very reasonably claim like this is propaganda.
00:51:26.800 --> 00:51:28.719
Like, well, it is what he said.
00:51:28.880 --> 00:51:30.000
He definitely said it.
00:51:30.159 --> 00:51:34.559
I don't know, fact-check every single word, and some of the things that he says turn out to not be true.
00:51:34.719 --> 00:51:39.599
Um, but if I think it might have a chance to be useful, I put it in there.
00:51:39.679 --> 00:51:53.519
Um, but there's not a lot in there about his family, there's almost nothing in there about his family life or his politics or any of the things that I feel like are distractions from what he can teach us in terms of how to be more effective and better in our own lives.
00:51:53.679 --> 00:51:54.719
Like that's the goal.
00:51:55.039 --> 00:52:01.039
I mean, regarding the Elon Hayden, Naval's intro puts that to bed straight away.
00:52:02.159 --> 00:52:07.360
How did it feel getting Naval to come back and contribute uh firsthand for a book?
00:52:07.679 --> 00:52:18.800
Uh when I the I I remember I still remember where I was when I read that that foreword that Naval wrote, and I I shed a single masculine tear.
00:52:18.960 --> 00:52:38.079
Like that was uh it it said everything that I wanted people to see in this book, and the fact that he saw it and he said it and was willing to sort of you know put his name uh and his words at the front of this to to frame the book and the project meant meant the world to me.
00:52:38.239 --> 00:52:47.760
Um it it it really I do really think he he absolutely hit the bullseye like th three darts on top of each other in the bullseye.
00:52:47.840 --> 00:52:52.079
It is it is a perfect, you know, six, seven hundred words.
00:52:52.400 --> 00:52:56.400
Um I was yeah, I was blown away.
00:52:56.800 --> 00:52:57.519
Congrats, man.
00:52:57.599 --> 00:52:59.920
I mean, how much did the Navalmanac change your life?
00:53:00.079 --> 00:53:05.679
Because when you set out on this, I think you were in your early 20s, if I'm not mistaken.
00:53:06.079 --> 00:53:06.960
Say 25 years.
00:53:07.280 --> 00:53:14.400
I published it when I was I published it when I was 30, I think, but it took you know, it was three plus years of writing.
00:53:14.559 --> 00:53:15.199
Yeah.
00:53:16.320 --> 00:53:18.239
Um but how much did it change your life?
00:53:18.400 --> 00:53:21.280
Publishing that and then it being sold over two million times.
00:53:21.679 --> 00:53:30.239
Uh miss this certainly, aside from like my wife and my kid, you know, the single biggest inflection point, I think, of my career.
00:53:30.320 --> 00:53:33.119
Like the the it became the thing I was known for.
00:53:33.199 --> 00:53:39.039
It led to my job at Scribe, it led directly to a bunch of relationships, or led directly to, you know, this book.
00:53:39.199 --> 00:53:47.840
Um it is it became uh like writing a book is like building a lighthouse in a way that it like collects your people to you.
00:53:47.920 --> 00:53:56.800
And it is this like projection of your your values that has a way of helping accelerating your ability to find your people and build trust really quickly.
00:53:57.039 --> 00:54:01.280
And so when I meet people now who are like, oh my god, I love that book, I'm like, oh, we're fast friends.
00:54:01.440 --> 00:54:18.480
Like, because that book was so authentic to me, because it it contains so much of my worldview, um like that's a really underrated part of putting a book out into the world that I I knew intellectually, but still underestimated.
00:54:18.639 --> 00:54:22.639
Um, and obviously, like, you know, it it is it is done well financially.
00:54:22.719 --> 00:54:28.400
It has helped just kind of be a calling card of like being a person who has put high quality work out into the world.
00:54:28.559 --> 00:54:46.960
And I that's advice I I end up giving to young people sometimes is like, I don't know exactly what it'll be for you, but there will come a threshold where like you do you do one thing so well that you you have this like step function of credibility in the world.
00:54:47.119 --> 00:54:52.880
Uh for some people it's exiting a company, you know, for some people maybe it's investing in a in a particular company.
00:54:53.119 --> 00:55:06.079
Uh some people maybe it's reaching a particular role or or doing putting some piece of work out into the world or achieving a gold medal or a championship or you know, being on a D1, like some sort of athletic feat.
00:55:06.320 --> 00:55:09.760
Um but there's a real inflection point that happens.
00:55:10.079 --> 00:55:11.599
It happened for me with that book.
00:55:11.679 --> 00:55:13.679
Um I think you can take many, many forms.
00:55:13.840 --> 00:55:20.079
But you know, Elon says when he is when he's hiring, he looks for evidence of exceptional ability.
00:55:20.400 --> 00:55:33.440
And I think you can invert that and say, like, how quickly in my career can I demonstrate exceptional ability in and and like create an artifact um or achievement that does it?
00:55:33.519 --> 00:55:35.760
You know, can I become number one in the world in a video game?
00:55:35.920 --> 00:55:43.039
Can I, you know, can I write something uh that's really, really excellent that capitalizes on my thing, on my expertise?
00:55:43.280 --> 00:55:46.480
Um, you know, I think that's a really good question to reflect on.
00:55:47.039 --> 00:55:48.880
Very inspiring question, too.
00:55:49.280 --> 00:55:51.679
Uh at least personally, how I felt there.
00:55:51.920 --> 00:55:55.280
Um you mentioned that your worldview shines a lot through the Navalmanac.
00:55:55.440 --> 00:56:01.280
Where is particularly, there's about 50 small chapters, is your worldview most present in the book of Elon?
00:56:02.559 --> 00:56:04.559
That's a fantastic question.
00:56:04.800 --> 00:56:14.239
Uh I mean it is sort of invisible, but everything everything in this book I chose to put in it, right?
00:56:14.320 --> 00:56:23.119
Like you could set out and follow the exact same number the exact same steps I did and try and shoot for the exact same format, and you would have curated and built a very different book than I did.
00:56:23.360 --> 00:56:26.320
Um, I don't think there's like one correct collection.
00:56:26.480 --> 00:56:31.840
This is just happens to be my collection of what I think Elon says that is useful and important.
00:56:32.159 --> 00:56:43.519
And through that lens, um, you know, I I I've been kind of distilling describing this book in in you know two to three words as high effort optimism.
00:56:43.760 --> 00:56:52.320
And I so I think I really want this to be a a pill of optimism.
00:56:52.480 --> 00:56:55.360
Like I think that the future can be really, really, really amazing.
00:56:55.519 --> 00:57:01.440
It's a thread that I carry through my investing, through my writing, through the books that I write, through the people that I want to work with.
00:57:01.599 --> 00:57:05.039
Um, but uh, we also can't just sort of Jesus take the wheel.
00:57:05.119 --> 00:57:12.079
Like it we have to pair optimism with extremely high effort uh and and excellence and execution.
00:57:12.239 --> 00:57:15.360
And so I think that this book troublably carries both.
00:57:15.440 --> 00:57:26.239
I I want it to, I think there's a some crisis is a strong word, but uh uh a challenge, a contemporary challenge of meaning and purpose.
00:57:26.400 --> 00:57:31.360
Like I think the number of people being like kind of looking around, like, what what am I doing?
00:57:31.519 --> 00:57:32.880
Like, what matters?
00:57:33.119 --> 00:57:52.159
What you know, whether that comes from collapse of trust of institutions or declining popularity of religion, or like the age of AI taking away some of the maybe the dignity of our our like intelligence as being like our defining trait of all us all being online now, realizing how big the world is, realizing how competitive it can be.
00:57:52.320 --> 00:58:02.079
Like there's a lot of contributing factors that um I think could cause people a little bit of uh just challenge in finding a meaning and a purpose.
00:58:02.320 --> 00:58:18.320
And I think what Elon puts, what I put forth in this book that is like some of Elon's ideas, is actually a really compelling, coherent, comprehensive answer to like what matters, what problems are worth solving, what what should I dedicate my life to?
00:58:18.559 --> 00:58:24.800
Um, that is something that I think I did not go in expecting Elon to have great answers to that, but actually he does.
00:58:24.880 --> 00:58:44.320
And I think it's part of his secret sauce of his success, and it's part of the secret sauce of why so many people rally around him is because he is carrying this flag um of of massive and glorious purpose uh to you know preserve life and solve problems and expand, you know, our ability to engineer solutions to these problems and just keep human progress moving forward.
00:58:44.400 --> 00:58:49.599
And that's why so many people have sacrificed so much and dedicated so much um to further these missions.
00:58:49.679 --> 00:58:59.679
It's not for Elon, it is for the missions that he is going after, which is why, you know, when I sort of um there's Elon the man and Elon the the cohort of group people, and there's Elon the symbol.
00:58:59.760 --> 00:59:15.119
And there's a lot of people that just want to go work and march behind Elon the symbol because he is the fit, the the individual person, the the Batman uh sort of symbol manifestation of this engineering talent and human progress and solving problems.
00:59:15.360 --> 00:59:21.760
Um and that's you know, whether you like him or like those missions, great, fine.
00:59:21.920 --> 00:59:28.719
But like choose your own missions, create your own alliances, marshal your own resources, solve the problems that you think are important.
00:59:28.960 --> 00:59:45.519
Um but no matter kind of what direction you head, I do think Elon can help us stretch the limits of imagination and you know, uh reminds us that what we thought was impossible very recently is now practical, and you know, those those can continue.
00:59:45.679 --> 00:59:47.840
We are surrounded by the previously impossible.
00:59:48.079 --> 00:59:49.360
Really well said, Eric.
00:59:49.519 --> 01:00:00.880
And that's a natural place to end it, but I do am gonna unnaturally ask one or two more questions uh because you've you've reviewed so much Elon game tape.
01:00:01.199 --> 01:00:08.159
So you mentioned earlier if I got to have dinner with him, you know, um I would ask something like that.
01:00:08.320 --> 01:00:10.079
But you've reviewed everything.
01:00:10.239 --> 01:00:11.840
What's left for you to ask him?
01:00:11.920 --> 01:00:17.280
What are the most pressing things which he hasn't yet revealed in public that you would wish to know?
01:00:18.400 --> 01:00:24.559
I th I have a lot of curiosity about the the deep details of his triage process.
01:00:24.719 --> 01:00:33.840
So I think it's one thing to sort of say, find the bottleneck, you know, search for first principles, find the most important thing to be working on, solve the most important missions.
01:00:34.159 --> 01:00:51.599
Um but I would really love to be in the room or in his head as close as possible and try to understand that in in extremely granular detail, because I think there's a lot of um generalizable lessons probably from that.
01:00:52.000 --> 01:01:00.800
One of my favorite quotes, at least, and this probably is a reflection of what I'm intrigued with, Elon, but it's don't aspire to glory, aspire to work.
01:01:01.360 --> 01:01:04.800
And so I wonder for you what that looks like now.
01:01:04.960 --> 01:01:09.039
You've got the book of Elon out, you've got Scribe, you've got your venture capital investing.
01:01:09.199 --> 01:01:10.880
What work do you aspire to?
01:01:14.000 --> 01:01:15.599
I mean, I aspire to be useful.
01:01:15.760 --> 01:01:18.719
I would like to believe I'm I'm useful in all of those things.
01:01:18.960 --> 01:01:28.559
Um it's it's giving me a sense I I think I am least fungible in the book writing because nobody would quite write the book the same way.
01:01:28.800 --> 01:01:39.519
Um and those have like a global and you know temporal impact, uh, kind of well beyond, you know, I'm I'm supposed to be deep in the shadows in investing, you know.
01:01:39.599 --> 01:01:48.559
That's not um I I'm a I'm a supporting character at best for the heroes uh of each of those individual stories.
01:01:48.719 --> 01:02:00.400
Um and so I try to play a useful role there, but uh, you know, the uh is a good question to always reflect on.
01:02:00.480 --> 01:02:02.800
Like what you know, where is your highest and best use?
01:02:03.039 --> 01:02:08.880
Um it it did, you know, it does inspire me to always just like stay grinding, doing the work.
01:02:09.039 --> 01:02:21.760
It's very easy when you've had some amount of success to get distracted by accolades or prestigious things or um you know, chasing greater visibility.
01:02:22.000 --> 01:02:25.920
And you know, I got I got two more books in progress right now.
01:02:26.000 --> 01:02:28.320
I've got a long list of books that I want to write.
01:02:28.559 --> 01:02:31.440
Um, you know, companies don't let you stray too far.
01:02:31.519 --> 01:02:34.960
Like you've you've always got, as Elon says, you got a lot of chores as a CEO.
01:02:35.039 --> 01:02:37.360
Um, and it's a high entropy endeavor.
01:02:37.519 --> 01:02:39.440
So uh you can't rest too much.
01:02:40.000 --> 01:02:42.719
You gotta you prepared to say what you're writing about?
01:02:43.760 --> 01:02:45.039
Uh one of them.
01:02:45.119 --> 01:02:52.320
I've got a book um in progress uh in collaboration with uh my both my friend Voucher and David Senra.
01:02:52.480 --> 01:03:04.320
So for people familiar with the Founders podcast, which I strongly recommend, um, we're working on sort of a collection of stories and maxims that is a is a distillation of the body of work that David Senra has done.
01:03:05.519 --> 01:03:06.000
Nice.
01:03:06.239 --> 01:03:07.599
You're just killing it.
01:03:07.920 --> 01:03:10.639
Yeah, and there's definitely a market for that.
01:03:10.880 --> 01:03:15.679
I mean, the success of the Founders podcast is all the signal you need.
01:03:15.840 --> 01:03:25.039
That that collection of that collected wisdom and pithiness, particularly in quotes and anecdote formats, there's an appetite for that.
01:03:25.199 --> 01:03:26.000
Anyway, that's amazing.
01:03:26.159 --> 01:03:27.039
Final question for you, Mr.
01:03:27.199 --> 01:03:28.400
Jürgensen.
01:03:28.719 --> 01:03:30.719
I have asked this to every guest so far.
01:03:30.880 --> 01:03:34.400
It is simply what is the role that serendipity has played in your life?
01:03:35.199 --> 01:03:42.159
Uh would you like to precisely define serendipity, or do you want me to interpret it as sort of like a stochastic luck?
01:03:43.519 --> 01:03:47.519
Yeah, it's technically it's it's um happy chance.
01:03:47.679 --> 01:03:55.760
So the upside of total randomness, total chance events, but a fork in the road events that you had nothing to do with, but it ultimately influences the life.
01:03:57.679 --> 01:04:07.360
I mean, the the biggest and uh probably longest leverage is just I feel extremely lucky to be born to my parents, you know, when and where I was.
01:04:07.519 --> 01:04:30.320
Uh they are the the launch pad of everything, and uh there are some people who I admire greatly who you know did not necessarily have the gift of being born to parents that they respected and admired, and had to really scratch and claw and rebuild themselves and cover a lot of ground before they they felt like they could really get started.
01:04:30.400 --> 01:04:47.920
And I was very lucky to have a, you know, a a loving mom and a brilliant dad and uh really feel lucky and supported and learned a lot of the things that I thought I still think were valuable and important early in life, um, and sort of get off on the right track.
01:04:48.159 --> 01:04:52.639
So um that is uh probably not a particularly massively useful answer.
01:04:53.760 --> 01:05:13.760
There's so many people I met along the way that, you know, I I could never have drawn up, but uh it was just kind of the luxe surface area bumping into the right people, trusting that intuition and the resonance with some people, and um you know, riding riding the right waves with people along the way has been um it's paid off over and over again.
01:05:13.840 --> 01:05:15.599
And I wouldn't have it any other way.
01:05:16.400 --> 01:05:16.639
Mr.
01:05:16.800 --> 01:05:19.119
Jugginson, thank you so much for joining me, mate.
01:05:19.679 --> 01:05:20.960
Thank you for having me again.
01:05:21.039 --> 01:05:22.320
It's been an honor and a pleasure.