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.
00:41:45 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:41:45] S1: It it is an amazing quote, and it summarizes Elon's sort of intolerance of obstacles. One of the stories that he ascribes to that quote is the building the tent in the Model 3 parking lot is basically like realizing that the production line that existed was not gonna be able to meet their number. And so he's like, fuck it. We're building the tent, and we're gonna, you know, buy some more tools, buy some more robots, hire some more people, and we're gonna build a second production line in the parking lot. And I think I'm sure they ended up getting, like, tickets and permit fees and all kinds of stuff for that. But he's like, we had to we had to make the number or Tesla will be dead. Unconventional thinking. Like, this is over and over again, like, the intolerance of obstacles, the questioning of requirements is, I think, some of the source of his his magic and mystique. Another one is like, you know, oh, it's gonna take a year and a half to get this permit. He's like, alright. Grab somebody, sends him to the permit office, and says, do not come back until we have this permit. Like, I refuse to believe it takes eighteen months to get this permit. And time after time, it's like, oh, it comes back three days later with a permit. Unconventional thinking, that accelerates your timeline and saves you potentially like a year and a half of burn and potential bottleneck. Like, that kind of unconventional thinking, that kind of high agency, is just so... I think to people who seek to be effective in the world, those stories are so encouraging and inspiring and refreshing and just like, oh, thank god. Like, somebody who's... Just tears down all the walls, all the false perceptions, all of the cruft, and just, like, cut straight to it and gets things done.
00:43:28 · Ty Morse
[00:43:28] S0: Something I think a lot about is how Elon might play the game if he was born at a different point in time. I think you've referenced him as similar to Napoleon and a bunch of these other characters. I would think of him in a similar vein, but I kind of wonder how, you know, the the Napoleon of today wouldn't necessarily go kill a bunch of people. Same thing with like Cornelius Vanderbilt. He wouldn't necessarily hire some assassin to go kill someone and take back his ships. And I wonder how Elon might have played the game if he was born like three hundred years ago.
00:43:56 · Eric Jorgenson, Ty Morse
[00:43:56] S1: I think there are different, archetypes of great founders, you know, like, Tobi Lütke is a very, like, engineering minded founder. Elon is more of a conqueror. Like, I think, you know, the the extremely willful. And, you know, Napoleon, I I think, like, Naval referenced Napoleon in his forward too. Like, Napoleon's ability to be... To his instant bias to action and, like, strategic brilliance, I think, are both traits I see, Marc and Elon. And I know Elon studied a lot of military history. He also talks about... In the book, he talks about the tendency people have to use their contemporary morals to judge the historical actions of others, which... Who existed in a, like, completely different moral environment. And so, like, you know, it's not that long ago, the the fish that ate the whale, like Sam Zemurray, overthrew the Honduran government, like, hired assassins, like, you know, in the robber baron era, the industrialist era, like, you know, there were violent protests and people were, like, putting down picket lines with mercenaries. Like, the the tools of the trade are are different at different eras. I expect that Elon is the kind of person who would win in the domain that he chose to play in. [00:45:10] S0: Do you want to talk about empathy at the, like, individual level versus empathy at the mission level?
00:45:16 · Eric Jorgenson
[00:45:16] S1: It's it's sort of one of Elon's maxims that empathy is not an asset. And I think a lot of leaders over index on empathy for the individual rather than empathy for the team or for the mission. And and this is what a lot of people, I think, criticize jobs for. They criticize Elon for is like, oh, he he should have given that person another chance. He shouldn't have fired them so quickly. And the reality is that 99.9% of firings probably air on the side of caution, not on the side of, well, you should have given them another chance. You should have, you fired them too soon. And we, as people, just always want... We feel like we deserve another chance, and so we put ourselves... We we put ourselves in the shoes of someone that we feel is on the receiving end of an injustice, and we feel like Elon perpetrated an injustice to an individual maybe by not giving them, you know, a second or third chance. But in a situation where there's billions of dollars of capital and equipment and the whole rest of the team is performing, it is empathy for the mission and empathy for the team to make sure you've got the right person in that seat and get rid of anybody who's not, you know, an a player and a plus player. He says, this is like the special forces, like excellence is the passing grade. And that's why these companies are some of the most effective places on Earth. You know, Marc Andreessen has talked about what makes Elon effective, and he says, like, going to SpaceX is like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence. Like, the bar is just so high for everybody there, and, yeah, everybody knows the quote about a players wanna work with a players. That becomes self reinforcing, and that culture becomes self perpetuating. And it does filter for people that wanna be really excellent, push to be even more excellent, and work as hard as they possibly can.