00:34:19 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:34:19] S1: Yeah. And and so the bucket that I would sort of put this in for maybe the average person is I think most people... We we all need meaning. We all want meaning. And I think that there's this sort of slow motion crisis of meaning happening between, like, fear of AI taking our jobs, lower trust in institutions, more confusion around, like, you know, declining religiosity in in folks. And so if the answer to, like, how do I live a meaningful life? Like, Elon is actually... Puts forth a really compelling answer to that. He has a worldview that is like, we are trying to figure out more about the universe. We're trying to answer more questions, like, on a scientific basis and understand why we're here and what opportunities are before us. We're trying to preserve the only consciousness that we're aware of. We're trying to preserve all of life as we know it. We're the only conscious things on this planet. It's our responsibility to act on behalf of all forms of life to try to preserve them. That's environmentalism at the highest possible level, right, is is not just how do we conserve what we have, but how do we expand it? How do we protect it? And that's a really meaningful thing. That's why these people sort of show up in droves to work at these companies and try to solve these missions. He's starting from how do we make the future better, and that is worth... That kind of mission is worth dedicating your life to. And so, you know, I I love anybody who reads this book, but I really think getting it into the hands of, like, 12 to 18 year olds is so massively impactful and important because though so many dominoes are still yet to be knocked over. Like, what you think is important will determine what how hard you work to go to a great college. It'll determine what companies you apply to. It'll determine what major you choose. It'll determine the industries that you think are exciting. It'll determine how hard you work at your job and the the level of priority you give to it. And a shocking amount of the most important work being done at these companies is being done by really young people. Like, you know, the cadre of folks that you hang out with and interviews, all like people in their twenties building unprecedented things.
00:36:23 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
Like, these are incredible miracles, and so many people are told or implicitly or explicitly, no, no, you gotta, like, go pay your dues at a... The old company for forty years before you even know what you're talking about. And that's just so obviously wrong through the lens of of history and practicality, especially in California these days. One of the [00:36:43] S0: things that Elon does, which he's, he will basically give anyone the ability to hang themselves at his organizations, and so you can pretty much just absorb and ask for as much responsibility as you want. [00:36:54] S1: Yeah. You know? This is another answer to your question of, like, how do you thrive at these companies? You get shit done. [00:36:59] S0: Yep. You get shit done. Think And then you ask for more on your plate. Like, ask to be served. [00:37:02] S1: Yeah. The reward for Work. Is more work. Is more work. Right? And so if you achieve things, will be given more responsibility immediately. That's all that anybody's running a company is trying to do. Find somebody who's competent at executing things and give them more responsibility and more responsibility and more responsibility until they break. Like, that's the game. And if you are trying to rise up in those companies and be as useful as possible, that's your goal too. It's like, wanna I wanna solve the problem in front of me. I wanna build more stuff. I wanna get things done, and I wanna do that at the highest level that I possibly can for as long as I can. Let's talk about
00:37:02 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[00:37:02] S1: Yeah. The reward for Work. Is more work. Is more work. Right? And so if you achieve things, will be given more responsibility immediately. That's all that anybody's running a company is trying to do. Find somebody who's competent at executing things and give them more responsibility and more responsibility and more responsibility until they break. Like, that's the game. And if you are trying to rise up in those companies and be as useful as possible, that's your goal too. It's like, wanna I wanna solve the problem in front of me. I wanna build more stuff. I wanna get things done, and I wanna do that at the highest level that I possibly can for as long as I can. Let's talk about [00:37:31] S0: the algorithm. Elon didn't have this for a very long time. I'm not sure exactly when he created it. I think it was, like, twenty nineteen ish after the, 2018 model three production ramp where he was just realizing all across over the course of many months. Yeah. That there was a bunch of automation that didn't even... Like, automating processes and parts and stuff that didn't need to exist. And he had been super all in on automation, and then he started going just line by line and trying to tear out as much of... As many of the machines. He would just, like, take a, like, an orange spray paint can and just on a machine, and then they would haul it out in the parking lot, and they, like, apparently bored a hole through one of the sides of the, I think, the Fremont factory [00:38:13] S1: Yeah.
00:38:13 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[00:38:13] S1: Yeah. [00:38:13] S0: To do this. But, yeah, how did how did the algorithm actually come together? Like, when did he figure that out, and how did he kind of, like, rank which one made sense, you know, which part or process made sense first?
00:38:24 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:38:24] S1: Yeah. The algorithm was the loot box for surviving Fremont. You know? Like, he he says that he learned this by making all of the mistakes in reverse order. Right? So I'll I'll explain. The algorithm is a five step process that he installs in all of his engineers and all of his engineering companies. He's got signs on the thing. He'll repeat it in meetings. It's his method for breaking bottlenecks. Right? And so it is start by questioning the requirements. Question every requirement. Doesn't matter how smart the person is, except no requirements from departments. They have to have individual human names attached to them. You get requirements from all over the place, right? Because some come from government partners, customers, internal, whatever. So question every requirement. You want the fewest possible and highest quality requirements, delete all the ones you can. The second step is to delete, simplify, like, delete anything you possibly can, delete, delete, delete. The most useful heuristic here is that you have to over delete. And if you're not adding back 10% of what you delete, you haven't been deleting enough. But the reason to simplify is simplicity gets you both reliability and low cost. You want fewer parts, you want fewer lines of code. So complexity is recursive, like each additional element that you have causes more complexity and causes more effort and causes more work. Right? So those first two steps actually in my mind carry 80% of the weight because number three is just optimize, which is sort of the typical engineering work that we think of as, like, making the right trade offs and optimizing the system. The fourth is accelerate, which is go faster. And the fifth is automate. And the problem is that almost everybody, Elon included, and he says this is the mistake he made at Fremont over and over and over again, is doing all five steps in reverse order. So he would automate something. His original vision for the Fremont factory is we're gonna automate the whole production line from the very beginning. It's gonna be amazing. No humans at all. Super low marginal cost. Everything will be great. But... And then he'd try to make it go faster, then try to optimize. So there... There's many parts that he would try to automate, then try to make the robot go faster, then try to optimize the path, that the robot was following.
00:40:35 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
Then it would turn out you could delete the product, and you didn't need the robot or the or the particular part because nobody had questioned the requirements in the first place. Yep. And that is just... Like, figuring out one of those epiphanies is a... Maybe a $10,000,000 win because... But it just comes from deleting something that didn't need to exist in the first place. And once you have that experience of, like, addition by subtraction, like, [00:41:00] S0: when the [00:41:01] S1: answer is deleting something and the upside is is eight figures, you're like, oh my god. This is mana from heaven. Like, I've gotta delete everything that we possibly can. And it is it is shocking. Once you sort of start to try to run this in your own company or in your own life, it is unbelievable how frequently... Like, how hard it is to do, how different your mental pattern is from actually how that works. And as we talked about with the Starlink story, like, there's huge benefit to doing it and doing it well. And this is, I think, a very generalizable, not just engineering process, but way to approach problems in life. [00:41:38] S0: I love this quote. If conventional thinking makes your mission impossible, then unconventional thinking is required.