00:11:59 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:11:59] S0: Do you wanna touch on basically how he lives his life? I remember seeing a picture of a bunch of Diet Coke cans that are un... Like, uncaffeinated Diet Coke cans and just like a gun on his bedside table. And it's just like that's... You know, in the Chris Williamson episode, you were talking about Eight Sleep, and of course, he apparently does use an Eight Sleep when he sleeps. I don't know if he has one on his private jet, which he spends like a third of his life on. Yeah. How does he actually operate his day to day life? Like, what is he what is he doing when he wakes up in the morning? [00:12:28] S1: Yeah. I mean, my my caveat is that I've not gotten the opportunity to, like, follow or shadow him or anything, so this is all sort of trying to reconstruct from, like, what he said publicly, which is the main source of, you know, my, inputs for the book and everything like that. But I do think it's interesting that he does none of the sort of traditionally, like, quote unquote productivity stuff. Like, the most productive man on earth does not follow any of the productivity rules or gurus. [00:12:50] S0: He wakes up and goes to war.
00:12:51 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:12:51] S1: He wakes up and goes to war. He, like, wakes up, picks up his phone, looks for emergencies. There's usually an emergency, and he tackles the emergencies. The answer probably most directly is he goes wherever the problem is. He goes physically to where the problem is, which is why, you know, his private jet sort of view for the year of all these trips is just, like, bouncing all over the world all the time. I'd be really curious to compare his calendar or schedule or or kind of a retrospective on how he spends his time compared to other... Just say, Fortune 500 CEOs or tech CEOs who, it seems to me, tend to run a pretty regimented schedule of, like, alright. I meet with these people this week, these people this week. You know, we got a board meeting. We got this. We got that. And it seems that Elon, I think at one point, like, fired his his scheduler Assistant. Yeah. His assistant who did the scheduling, and it was just like, I just... I need to respond to wherever the fire is. I need to go wherever the most important thing is. And maybe many CEOs can't operate that way because they don't have the infrastructure in place. I mean, he's surrounded by experts and professionals and incredible managers and leaders and engineers who are making sure that everything else stays on the rails. But the the founder or the CEO or this kind of this person, the guy, whoever that is in the company or girl, has a a unique power to sort of bestow, like, energy and attention on the bottleneck. And so to just parachute in and use that charisma, that force of will, that attention, that, like, eye of Sauron to just zoom in on wherever the bottleneck is, wherever the problem is, and just push that solution through, push that solution through and break through anything, that's holding them back from solving it.
00:14:29 · Ty Morse, Eric Jorgenson
[00:14:29] S0: Yeah. I think the founders have a unique ability or, like, they're allowed to make decisions that other hired gun CEOs are just not allowed to make because they've seen... They've basically grown... You know, raised the baby. [00:14:43] S1: Brian Armstrong talks about that. I think in his... Your interview with him, he talked about, like, being totally unafraid to go back to zero because he knew he built this whole house brick by brick. And he's like, you know, that gives me this incredible, not just moral authority, but personal confidence to, you know, renovate the company at a moment's notice.
00:15:02 · Ty Morse
[00:15:02] S0: I would like to spend some time on basically how Elon starts companies. He's got this famous thing where he will basically try to get a mock up of whatever the thing is that he is wanting to do as quickly as possible, and then he wants to bring that into the real world so that he can actually show something again as quickly as possible. I was listening to the Walter Isaacson biography this morning and hearing him basically, you know, when he was thinking about boring company, he just calls up Steve j... Davis, and he's like, how is this currently done? And he's like, oh, you can just buy these things, you know, these boring machines for $5,000,000 each. He's like, cool. Buy two, and they go, you know, we're gonna dig a hole in this parking lot. And some guy comes back with, it's gonna be two weeks, and he's like, no. We're gonna have this done by, like, Sunday, which is two days from now. And then they have this big unveiling literally two days later, and it's like, we're creating a new company. A lot of people probably think that he moves incredibly fast on companies, but if you actually look at, like, how long these things take to incubate, it's, you know, it's decade on and a boring company. It's a decade on and a Neuralink, but he also has incredibly fast, like, startup timelines. How does he kind of, like, do those two things?
00:16:06 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:16:06] S1: Yeah. The demo is a really good thing, and we should come back to that. But even before that, I think sort of what you're hinting at is the feasibility study where... And he did this for SpaceX even before PayPal exited. He was just kind of interested in this problem of space launch costs, and he ran over a series of Saturdays at his house. He just gathered up engineers who'd worked on all the major launch vehicles over the last couple decades, and he's like, I have a hunch that we could make a massive improvement here, that this could be, you know, 10 x, a 100 x better. Let's just push on it. Let's, like, whiteboard and and do some math and just see, is there something here that we can push to that a fundamentally new kind of design is possible? And I I don't know if that went, you know, ten weeks or fifty weeks, but right around the time that they were sort of coming to the conclusion that, yes, a massive breakthrough is possible here, PayPal sold. And so he was like, Okay. Like, let's let's actually turn this into a company now and get to work. I think a lot of people sort of have the perception that you start the company to run the experiment, and that story is a good example of like, just take a while to do some some feasibility and some studies, and some of the best investments I've made have come from, you know, two years of conversation with the founder as they sort of map the maze and met the people and figure out the dependencies, and then they say, like, okay. I've got the game plan ready. Like, here we go. We're gonna flip the switch. That's not always how it works, but some of the ones that have been able to move fastest after they founded and brought in the capital and then, you know, delivered the highest ROI because they did as so much research and understanding ahead of time before they actually got started. And then SpaceX, of course, didn't leap straight to, alright. Great. We're gonna build, you know, Starship or even Falcon nine. They built, like, the grasshopper. They built one engine and tried to demonstrate that reusability with a small hop, with a relatively small amount of money in the scheme of things. And, you know, that was... It wasn't an all consuming thing for Elon at that time. He was just kind of like, I have a hunch that we can move this thing forward.
00:18:14 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
So I'm gonna hire, you know, Tom Mueller and these other incredible rocket engineers and just fund them to run these experiments and try to prove that this is possible with a small demo. But over and over and over again across, you know, both Tesla and SpaceX and even before that in in PayPal and Zip2, he has a sense of the kind of a theatrical demo or even just like a a basic kind of way to grok it that you just can't get from a slide deck or a memo that really catalyzes people. And it's it's a really powerful thing that I think gives Elon, advantage after advantage. It still seems pretty underused by a lot of founders, a lot of CEOs. You know? I see a lot of slide decks and not that many demos in the world. [00:18:54] S0: Yeah. I think Brian Armstrong even talked about this during the interview that we did where he basically said, if you want people to go, like, join a company or something or start a company, it's much easier to just get them to agree to a dinner than to like say, hey, let's go start a startup. Because sometimes I think this, I was listening to, how OpenAI was started too recently and they just got a bunch of the best people together on some like, I don't know, camping trip or something and just had them all talking and then they just enjoyed it. Yeah. They were like, oh, this is kinda cool. People kind of vastly underestimate how powerful having, like, a visual cue of, like, seriousness is for, I don't know, like, evangelizing action.