252: The Book of Elon by Eric Jorgenson

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1. 00:00:00 Okay, Mike. Welcome back. We are going to talk about Elon Musk or Elon Musk's ideas or I will figure that out as we go, but this will not be a controversial episode at all. Not at all.
2. 00:00:14 But before we do that, let's talk about follow up. So I told you last episode that I was not going to do this follow up by the next time we recorded. I have successfully not done my follow up by the next time we recorded. That wasn't the point.
3. 00:00:28 What's think you get a green check mark? Yeah, exactly. I told you what I was going to do.
4. 00:00:33 My follow up was what's the sign I put in the engineering lab that communicates culture, the culture that I want. And my deadline for this is just by the time the semester starts.
5. 00:00:43 I want to have the sign up and I'm going to actually probably make the sign on one of our carvers. So I'll get a big piece of wood and I'll actually carve it out and I'll make it look pretty fancy.
6. 00:00:52 So that's the goal is I want to communicate the culture by essentially August 1st. That's kind of my deadline on this. So I don't know if you're with it enough to set a reminder.
7. 00:01:02 I probably won't remember, but maybe we'll get around August 1st. You can ask me about it. How about you? What was your first follow up item?
8. 00:01:10 Find the opportunities for unreasonable hospitality in my business. I think I also said that I wasn't going to complete this one by next time here, but I haven't thinking about this.
9. 00:01:22 I don't have a concrete list of these are the ways that I want to do this, but I think the overall strategy is move more towards emphasizing the community as my signature product.
10. 00:01:39 So not that life HQ is going to go away, but that's not the thing that I talk about. I get people in the community and once they're in the community, it's sort of like you recognize it when you see it sort of a thing.
11. 00:01:55 You can see someone asking a question and they are expecting a short type of response. And so if I record a quick video and I walk through my answer, that's the kind of thing that people really love.
12. 00:02:08 I have done stuff recently, like when you join the library now, there's a quick start guide like the videos that walk you through how everything works.
13. 00:02:19 There's a link to schedule a welcome call with me, which is just like a 15 minute get to know you, you know, how can I help sort of a thing.
14. 00:02:28 And I know for a fact, I've done a handful of those calls already that people absolutely love those and they don't expect that when they join, which probably says something about my pricing, but that's okay.
15. 00:02:42 We'll figure out how to blow people's minds first, then we'll figure out what it's actually worth.
16. 00:02:47 But yeah, so I've been thinking about it, but nothing concrete is like this is exactly what I'm going to do as a result of reading that book, but it is on my radar and it's a lot of fun to consider the possibilities for this sort of thing.
17. 00:03:04 And I've been thinking about the unreasonable hospitality and just kind of like how it impacts different things. That's one of those that kind of was, you know, one of those stew in the back of your mind books. So it's been, it's been fun.
18. 00:03:17 That's cool. It's going to be cool to see how you implement it in your in your world through your creator stuff.
19. 00:03:24 All right. Well, let's get to our book today. The Book of Elon. Now this book is interesting. And we're going to, before we even get into like all the details of it, we need to talk about the notes on the book first, because it's an important thing to understand the way this book was written.
20. 00:03:45 I'm intrigued because Mike, I didn't read the almanac of Novall, Robocont. So I don't know if it was the written the exact same way like you might have known what to expect here.
21. 00:03:55 I didn't. But here's what I'm talking about. There's a paragraph in this book where basically Eric Jorgensen, who is the right, who's the author of this also wrote the almanac of Novall, Robocont, which we've done an episode on before.
22. 00:04:10 He explains the fact that like everything in this book are quotes from Elon Musk, but they are possibly like paraphrased or recontextualized or, you know, like you basically have to hold them loosely like they get to the same gist of what Musk was trying to say.
23. 00:04:31 And he even says in here, I can't be certain of every source of authenticity, like their potential fakes, edits, misquotes. Like, I almost read this and go, well, that's very honest and that's very authentic.
24. 00:04:44 And I'm like, but how do I know that it's actually true? The caveat to that would be there are like over a thousand citations for this book.
25. 00:04:54 Like, I mean, it is 20, 30 pages of citations for this book. So it's like, he definitely did the work to go gather all these quotes to go gather all these little clippings to organize them in a way.
26. 00:05:08 But he does clarify at the very, very beginning to create this book. I recontextualized ideas in an attempt to make it more accessible, useful, and memorable.
27. 00:05:17 And know that going in that it's basically all of the Musk quotes, and his ideas and where he's talked about him or written about him, but then.
28. 00:05:26 Jorgensen has like kind of packaged them in a way that makes it more compelling to read. I guess that's the best way I can describe it.
29. 00:05:33 Yeah.
30. 00:05:34 Yeah. And the subtitle, I don't have the book in front of me, but it's something like Elon's best ideas in his own words.
31. 00:05:42 Elon Musk's most useful ideas in his own words. Right.
32. 00:05:47 So they are cherry picking a bunch of a bunch of different things. There's a section at the very beginning where he talks about, I forget how he frames it.
33. 00:05:58 I didn't write it down. Well, it wasn't planted. I'm going this direction, not necessarily.
34. 00:06:03 But if you disagree with the idea, how did he phrase it? All the mistakes are probably mine. All the great ideas are probably Elon's.
35. 00:06:17 But it is like, yeah, you're interpreting what the person is saying. I think it works, to be honest.
36. 00:06:23 And this is kind of what the almanac of Neval Ravakant is like as well. I feel like the almanac of Neval Ravakant kind of got a little bit.
37. 00:06:36 Like it's just kind of got real, real far reaching in a bunch of different directions towards the end.
38. 00:06:42 This one felt a little bit more focused. Like there was a single thread that pulled it all together.
39. 00:06:47 But also this one's much longer. And maybe that's because there's a lot of stuff to draw from that Elon has posted on social media.
40. 00:06:57 I think at the beginning, I'll share here for people who are thinking like, well, this book is about a terrible person.
41. 00:07:05 Reserve judgment. And I'm not trying to defend Elon, but really let's just talk about the ideas because I think he is a very brilliant person.
42. 00:07:16 Maybe some of the things he believes are a little bit crazy. But there are some really powerful ideas that are worth unpacking here.
43. 00:07:25 And actually, Neval kind of hits on that squarely in the forward when we get there.
44. 00:07:29 I was shocked about how little this book was about Elon and about how much it's about the ideas he shares and the way he approaches different things and things about things.
45. 00:07:42 So there's a little bit of stuff in here that's like biography type stuff, but it's more to communicate an idea.
46. 00:07:49 It's less to tell the story of Elon Musk. In my mind, that was not the nature of it.
47. 00:07:54 There's no narrative here. Here's what Elon thinks about this. Here's what Elon thinks about this.
48. 00:07:59 But again, it's packaged in a way that I think there's some good stuff here to unpack.
49. 00:08:05 Getting in the pro show, we talked about authors we want to interview. This is a two-part question. One, Mike, who's the author of this book?
50. 00:08:15 Eric Jorgensen. No, no, no, no. Is Eric really the author or is Eric the editor?
51. 00:08:21 Because I would say he's the author, but I get what you're saying.
52. 00:08:25 He's compiling all this information and putting it together. I can't think of another example of something like this other than the Almanac and the Volravicon to compare it to.
53. 00:08:38 But there is a lot of writing that Eric does. He connects a lot of these random dots. I think that that's the work of the writing.
54. 00:08:50 Illustrations by Jack Butcher, by the way, which are very cool. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Jack Butcher in his brand, Visualize Value.
55. 00:09:00 I'm not, no.
56. 00:09:02 Those illustrations that I appear every so often, that's a very Jack Butcher style. I have a coffee mug that's inspiring to me because it's kind of like you've got to do the thing over and over and over again.
57. 00:09:11 And then finally, success comes and it's like the hockey stick curve, but it's a really tiny little lines and all of a sudden at the end, it goes way up. Basically, every time I take a drink out of it, it's at the co-working space.
58. 00:09:21 It's a reminder to just keep going.
59. 00:09:24 Okay, so would you want to interview Eric or would you want to interview Elon?
60. 00:09:33 I would more want to interview Eric than I would Elon. I feel like talking to Elon would be interesting, but it would be all over the place. This could be true. This could not be true.
61. 00:09:43 I don't know, but I feel like what Eric did here was a huge favor to Elon Musk because I feel like if you're just what I see online with Elon is he's just like all over the place.
62. 00:09:53 And I can't handle those types of conversations. It's like, please, just focus on what we're talking about. I think Elon would have trouble with that because his mind's going in a million different directions all the time.
63. 00:10:05 I'm in the same boat. I would much rather interview Eric than I would Elon. Okay, let's move on to the forward case.
64. 00:10:12 So the forward, as you alluded to earlier, as you stated earlier, was by Navall Ravakant. And basically, you know, he's just trying to introduce the fact that like the big pull I had out of here was Elon's methods are copyable in matters big and small.
65. 00:10:30 So he's trying to motivate the idea of there is something here to the way Elon Musk operates, to the way this guy runs his life, and it's worth reading this book to try to figure out what those are and how they apply to you.
66. 00:10:49 I can tell you that like we're going to get there later but like some of these things apply a lot more readily than others. Like there are some that I'm just like wow that's just not anything near my life like multi planetary, you know, travel and the emphasis on that.
67. 00:11:03 But like there's other things that I was like tag on it like that's a really good principle and I need to think about how that incorporates into my life so I think that's the main takeaway I got out of the forward I don't know it sounded like you had more that you wanted to talk about with the forward.
68. 00:11:17 Yeah, a little bit so like the vol makes the case right at the beginning.
69. 00:11:21 Why you should read this book like why Elon is a character that's worth paying attention to even if you don't like him.
70. 00:11:27 He says that hard work is common intelligence is uncommon courage is rare Elon has all three.
71. 00:11:33 That is absolutely true and you will see that throughout the rest of the book and I feel like that for me separates what I think of the personality from the ideas really effectively right at the beginning.
72. 00:11:46 He also is just kind of like says the quiet part out loud you know he's like envy says more about the envious than the envied people who are worth impressing will be impressed.
73. 00:12:00 And then he asked this question or he's not actually just a question it's like a whole big lead up to this but essentially all of the the hate for lack of a better term that Elon gets he's saying like that's fine you can dislike him.
74. 00:12:15 But he also is sort of championing these these things that are like really really big ideas could really change the world right the electric vehicles multi planetary species like these are things that you can make fun of him because oh that's crazy
75. 00:12:33 but he asked like when humanity did amazing things and you look back were you cheering or were you jeering and I feel like that's at least worth keeping an open mind about you know I don't I personally don't like Elon Musk.
76. 00:12:47 He killed my beloved Twitter. Although now I've ever read this book and seeing how he thinks about about things and he talks about like I just do these things and I know that the right thing to do and people are going to hate on him.
77. 00:13:01 I see some of the things that he describes in Tesla and SpaceX and the narrative that people put around that when he took over Twitter.
78. 00:13:10 I feel I've always felt that we weren't really getting the whole picture about just how bad a shape Twitter was in when he sort of accidentally bought it because he's like I'm going to buy this now I don't really want to buy it and they're like oh no you put your bid.
79. 00:13:25 He's like okay crap now I gotta now I gotta do the same thing I did with my other companies with this and actually figure out what's going on here.
80. 00:13:33 And he does he is pretty extreme but one of the things that I think pops up over and over again is that he's not asking anyone to do something that he's not willing to do you know he's crashing on the the factory floor because it's so important
81. 00:13:48 that people see the leader you know on the front lines that sort of thing.
82. 00:13:52 So I don't know I think there's there's definitely some stuff we can learn from this.
83. 00:14:04 Because you were willing to share I would make choices very differently than Elon Musk makes choices now granted he is he is he is a billionaire like a Uber Uber billionaire I don't is did he make trillionaire yet I don't know if he did or not but anyhow he's like an Uber billionaire.
84. 00:14:21 And it's like so his life and my life are very very different they've always been very very different but like that does not mean in any way shape or form that he you that you can't look at what he's done with these companies and look at what
85. 00:14:37 he's done with industries and with advancing technology and go wow what could I learn from that right so the other one is like I'm I'm a kindred spirit with him in terms of like the engineering brain.
86. 00:14:47 And I thought about that when he's describing engineering like oh this is Corey's world yeah because I get portions of that now he takes it to a level that I don't take it to like he takes it to an extreme level that I don't take it to but like I kind of resonate
87. 00:15:01 with him on on some of those type of things so like understanding as you're as you're thinking through this like what can we pull from what good insights can we pull from a person who has clearly impacted the world like let's put it that way.
88. 00:15:14 And separate that from you know the personal opinion of do you I guess do you like him or don't you like that's the you know the kind of high level way to say it.
89. 00:15:25 So the book is four parts.
90. 00:15:27 Okay you're going to get pursue purpose the foundations of a unique life ultra hardcore work mindsets and principles for achieving the barely possible building companies stories and strategies from PayPal Tesla and SpaceX.
91. 00:15:39 On behalf of humanity that's part four how you can be part of elevating the future of humanity.
92. 00:15:46 Okay so it's going to break into these four parts what's weird about this book and what makes it hard for us doing a podcast on this book is in each of these parts we're now going to have like a second level header.
93. 00:16:00 So if part one is the first level header we're gonna have a second level header but then we have a third level header and there are like a ton of them like if you look at the table of contents for this book like there's a ton of these third level headers.
94. 00:16:13 And so it's like it's hard to parse this book out so the best way Mike and I are going to try to do this is basically we're going to look at this in parts.
95. 00:16:20 So probably I'm going to say definitely probably going to hit like the second level headers we will not try to hit all of the third level headers because that would I mean this would be a six hour episode if we tried to hit all the third level headers
96. 00:16:33 and I don't have stuff to say on every third level header so I think what we're going to do is we're going to look at part like the part and then we're going to look at these three level these three second level headers in like the first section and we're going to go from there.
97. 00:16:44 So let's get started on this pursue purpose. Oh one other one other thing here regarding the book on the Almanac and the Volrava kind of this way too.
98. 00:16:54 If you're interested in this at all you actually don't have to buy it.
99. 00:16:57 You can download the PDF for free off the website so I want to call that out before we get into the content.
100. 00:17:03 Okay so part one pursue purpose living a purposeful life is the first header that we're going to talk about. And basically it's just an aggregation of things Elon has said about purposeful life so this is where Eric has kind of packaged all these things together.
101. 00:17:20 I think it's funny how he like kind of just launches right into it like it they're it's such a weird I can say it's weird it's such a strange book from a it's different than every other book that I've read and I haven't read the almanac of
102. 00:17:35 the volrava so but we get into this idea of you know what is Musk's core personal competence well he thinks it's technology. He's not trying to be a savior that's not his goal. He just wants to do obvious things that could add value to the world.
103. 00:17:52 He is basically like obsessed with you know trying to be successful if you're not doing something important in life like there's all these little like blips and blurbs.
104. 00:18:05 And then he talks about the fact that it's like he hasn't had the most glamorous life in the world like he he's had periods of his life where he's he's done different things that he probably would do differently.
105. 00:18:15 This is the phrase rage demon you need to have some kind of rage demon in your skill that drives you and I'm like man who describes this as a rage demon and I think this is where the nature of the book is so interesting because you speak so differently
106. 00:18:31 like I think most people do anyhow where when I'm writing something I process it a lot longer it takes I can review it I can edit it when I'm speaking on a podcast or when I'm being interviewed by somebody or whatever it is things will come out that like
107. 00:18:47 probably wouldn't write that down the same way. And I wonder if like would rage demon you know would he describe you know rage demon in writing like he like he did there so but like and then last one I'll say Mike and then I'll turn it over to you for this for
108. 00:19:04 this first section. This is he he describes this is the foundation of my philosophy this is must describing the foundation is philosophy.
109. 00:19:11 I'm curious about the nature of the universe. And the reason why I'm going to I want to call that one out is because that structures why he's interested in physics and engineering that structures why he wants to start companies.
110. 00:19:25 And I can't wait until we get to talk about the companies because you think about Tesla as a car company but it's not you think about SpaceX as a rocket company it's not like he's got these bigger goals that he's trying to do.
111. 00:19:37 And this company is just a way to achieve that thing and all of that comes down to this idea of he's curious about the universe and he's trying to understand the universe and he's trying to understand how to do more and how to do more and how to do more.
112. 00:19:50 So I think that's like a really good way to set the stage of if you don't understand this you're kind of missing something about about Elon.
113. 00:19:59 Tesla says if you need an encouragement don't start a company. So he recognizes that it's going to be going to be lonely it's going to be hard.
114. 00:20:09 He does share some things that I disagree with right at the beginning here like he has this fanatical idea that you have to work every waking hour.
115. 00:20:18 It makes sense if you understand that he views his way of living a purposeful life making a contribution to the humanity as building these companies.
116. 00:20:29 The way I interpret that is he's so connected to his why that he sort of lets it go wild sometimes.
117. 00:20:38 Maybe all the time. But there is some useful stuff in here like he asked the question how can I be useful today I think that's really that's a really great great question.
118. 00:20:48 He says to create more than you consume I agree with that 100% don't agree with the needing to work every waking hour.
119. 00:20:57 But also like the encouragement that it's normal to feel fear. I think I shared this not too long ago in a pro show but like I went to the growth intensive and kind of was dealing with the four horsemen of fear.
120. 00:21:11 I've got a blog post I'll put in the show notes for people who want to dig deeper in that but fear is one of those things that can creep in and then it sort of impacts everything that you do and you don't even realize it.
121. 00:21:23 So I think that's a really powerful way to start the book and I really like the fact that the very first chapter we get into here is living a purposeful life.
122. 00:21:33 Elon Musk is not the person that comes to mind usually when you think about how do I live a life of purpose but that's kind of what I like about this.
123. 00:21:42 It's different advice it's not necessarily better advice than like the Bill Burnett and Dave Evans book that we we read not too long ago.
124. 00:21:53 Which I think was actually how to live a meaningful life if I remember right on the title.
125. 00:21:57 Like I'm not going to recommend go learn from Elon instead but what this does is it kind of provides a different perspective and you do have to kind of pick through it and decide what you're actually going to apply from this but it's so different.
126. 00:22:08 It's framed so differently that it actually is is kind of fun to read and there's there's some nuggets in there if you look for them.
127. 00:22:15 Yeah and I'll say this now I think this was a super easy read like it was fast like I don't know if it was because it was in like the smaller chunks or it was broken down the way it was but like this was not like a sifting through heavy material thing it was like oh that's
128. 00:22:31 an interesting idea oh I disagree with that oh that's an interesting idea so like I was engaged I think that's probably the best way to describe is I was engaged more than I've been with other books.
129. 00:22:40 All right if we're ready to move on to the second kind of sub sub bullet here in part one think like a physicist.
130. 00:22:46 Now this gets to the idea of basically essentially where he's laying the groundwork of musks like philosophy musks background musks thinking so in the first one we were thinking about purpose and what was his purpose.
131. 00:23:00 This one you know we're thinking about like essentially the way his brain works at a core right and it works thinking like a physicist and the best way I got or the best way I described this is this idea first principles thinking.
132. 00:23:14 So he breaks everything down in the most fundamental units starts by asking one of my most confident is true at a foundational level and I think about like what is a scientist trying to do what is a physicist trying to do.
133. 00:23:25 They're trying to understand nature they're trying to understand the universe right like they're not necessarily trying to apply all that much.
134. 00:23:32 You know he'll he'll he'll say later in the book that like scientists try to understand things engineers try to create value or engineers try to like advance it and move it forward.
135. 00:23:42 And like it's truly the idea that he's trying to break everything down to the most elemental level that he can and he's trying to start there.
136. 00:23:51 And like that's where his physicist idea comes in and he gives an example here about like making a rocket and how like we have these assumptions but if you break it down and you break it down and you break it down.
137. 00:24:02 You know like it it really changes the way you you think about it. He then throws out the idea here of truth and trying to be less wrong within this within this topic.
138. 00:24:15 And basically it's you know like how do we learn how do we figure out what actual true true truth I'm going to say is and like where and how do we go to first principles to try to find those things.
139. 00:24:26 So it really kind of gives you an idea of like where he starts all of his thinking that he builds the rest of the foundation off of.
140. 00:24:33 So it's a shorter section but I thought it was it was good to help him understand or help us understand kind of Elon.
141. 00:24:38 The other thing last comment about the way Mike and I are going to talk here.
142. 00:24:42 We're going to say he and normally when we say he we would mean the author of the book.
143. 00:24:47 But when we say he here because it's all musks like quotes and stuff we're really talking about what Musk says we're not really talking about what what Eric Jorgensen says or how he packaged it so just make sure you think about that as you're as you're listening to us talk about it.
144. 00:25:01 Yep 100 percent.
145. 00:25:03 Yeah so a couple of details I'll call it from here he mentions that he played a lot of civilization in this chapter agreed respect.
146. 00:25:14 I never played it.
147. 00:25:16 Oh come on.
148. 00:25:17 Maybe like once or twice but I was like this is not for me like this game is not for me.
149. 00:25:21 Greatest video game franchise of all time.
150. 00:25:24 Easy.
151. 00:25:25 Sorry Mario.
152. 00:25:26 Sorry Zelda.
153. 00:25:27 It's civilization.
154. 00:25:29 I remember getting civilization to box software from like comp USA back in the day.
155. 00:25:36 I can picture it but I only played it once or twice.
156. 00:25:40 Yeah well that's the thing you gotta put in a little bit of time to figure it out.
157. 00:25:44 Civilization to I remember going in there as a little kid I was fascinated with technology.
158. 00:25:49 So I was just like I'm going to buy a computer game I don't even care what it is I'm going to get a computer game.
159. 00:25:54 And they're like oh this one looks okay you know walk out with it little did I know I was going to drop thousands of hours on that.
160. 00:26:02 And I've played every iteration of civilization since then.
161. 00:26:05 It's a it's a pretty cool game.
162. 00:26:07 I don't agree that it is a way to understand how civilizations rise and fall.
163. 00:26:13 Yeah I would agree with that.
164. 00:26:14 I would agree with that.
165. 00:26:15 But he also says to read a lot of books which I yes I agree.
166. 00:26:21 Do you read a lot of books.
167. 00:26:22 That's shocking.
168. 00:26:23 I can't believe you agree with him on that point.
169. 00:26:26 Yeah and then a couple other things which I think are just I have a bunch of just like tiny little anecdotes which jumped out to me.
170. 00:26:33 You know how no matter how smart you are you will make mistakes.
171. 00:26:36 So I feel like that that kind of gets back to the fear of failure thing a lot of people myself included don't want to be wrong.
172. 00:26:44 So they won't do stuff.
173. 00:26:46 One thing you can say about Elon Musk is he doesn't care if he's going to be perceived as wrong.
174. 00:26:53 He also says that most people self limit their ability to learn I agree with that.
175. 00:26:57 There's no difference between I think it was Mark Twain said there's no difference between the person who can read but doesn't and the person who can't.
176. 00:27:05 Oh wow.
177. 00:27:06 And then talk to people from different walks of life.
178. 00:27:09 I mean this idea in and of itself is probably worth an entire book because it's so easy to surround yourself with people in the echo chamber.
179. 00:27:20 I feel like if you were to dig into the lives of most of the people who just they hear Elon Musk and they recoil they would struggle with this particular point.
180. 00:27:35 And it's not conservative liberal Republican Democrat it's on both sides but the information culture that we live in just tends to kind of feed you stuff that is going to reinforce your beliefs.
181. 00:27:52 And then whenever somebody says something contrary like oh they're crazy.
182. 00:27:57 And it's very easy because of Elon Musk's personality and he doesn't care if he's wrong and he's part of on this larger purpose.
183. 00:28:06 So he's just going to say whatever pops into his head that he thinks is going to advance the mission regardless of what people think about it.
184. 00:28:12 Real real easy to paint him with those broad strokes and say oh this guy is crazy.
185. 00:28:17 This gets it why this talk to different people or people from different walks of life gets to why I'm so obsessed with interview shows.
186. 00:28:27 That's why talking to the internet was an interview show that's why I asked you in the pro show today about who you would interview.
187. 00:28:33 I think it's fascinating to talk to other people and just see where the conversation goes.
188. 00:28:39 I think it's really really fascinating to do that.
189. 00:28:42 Now is it the best always no but it's like I think it's really really fascinating.
190. 00:28:47 Okay so let's go to his next fundamental philosophical and or way of thinking is the value of engineering.
191. 00:28:54 So I love that I'm going to give you a third level.
192. 00:28:57 Hold on can I start this one because you have an engineering background so you can correct all of my wrong assumptions here.
193. 00:29:05 So the value of engineering there are just a couple of things I jotted down here but one quote in particular Arthur C. Clark I feel like this quote kind of opened up to me.
194. 00:29:14 Made engineering much more interesting I'll say.
195. 00:29:17 A sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
196. 00:29:21 I was like okay so engineers are magicians now that's kind of cool.
197. 00:29:25 He also talks about how there's never a shortage of ideas and that you only build value in a company if you do hard work to solve tough problems.
198. 00:29:32 I feel like this kind of just lays the foundation for well obviously the rest of the book but you kind of see what makes him tick after this chapter.
199. 00:29:43 He loves the big problems that people think are impossible and then figuring out how to make them work and he doesn't care if he fails along the way because that's part of the process.
200. 00:29:55 He hopes he doesn't go bankrupt and runs out of money and that these companies actually work but he's willing to throw everything into it because he's so fascinated by this process when it works and how it seems like magic to everybody else.
201. 00:30:12 I think that's pretty cool yeah and this is where I think Eric Jorgensen does a really really good job in the way he structures the book and the way he assembles everything is because like it gives a natural way of thinking about you on like okay so he's
202. 00:30:28 going to do something that has purpose.
203. 00:30:30 He's going to break it down to first principles and then he's going to figure out a way to create out of that right in my mind like those are the first three, three sections here that Arthur C. Clark quote about like it's in this thing.
204. 00:30:41 It's indistinguishable from magic.
205. 00:30:43 I feel this every time I fly on a plane like I get on a plane and I go something this heavy should not be able to do this like it doesn't make any sense why this is why this is true and why this can happen.
206. 00:30:57 If you think about like a maglev train I know I'm transportation heavy right now like a maglev train what are we going to do we're going to float a really heavy train and then we're going to like adjust the electricity within the track and make it go like hundreds of miles per
207. 00:31:12 hour like that's incredible like that's insane to me.
208. 00:31:14 So yes like this is what what drives me like as the like the why do I care about engineering what what makes engineering interesting to me is you're really doing essentially magical things.
209. 00:31:26 And then it gets to the other part where I said about you know I'll give you the full quote now but science is discovering the essential truth about existing universe engineering is about creating things that have never existed before.
210. 00:31:35 So you take this idea of like borderline magic and then what do you do you add value to the world and like human flourishing like come comes out of that.
211. 00:31:43 And I think oh my gosh like what a cool why would you not want to do stuff like that like I just that's just the way my brain works so I'm very much I'm very much kindred spirit here when it comes to this.
212. 00:31:56 The last one I'll call out here is he talks about prototypes are easy and production is hard man oh man oh man is that is that true like granite prototypes are not really quote unquote easy like getting something that actually works the way you designed it
213. 00:32:11 or want it to work in the real world is super hard but compared to then actually producing that and heaven forbid you would want to mass produce it because mass producing we have a thing in our world we call design for manufacturing.
214. 00:32:24 And it's like you actually change the design so it can be mass produced right like it's not the ideal thing in the world it's the ideal thing that can be made 100,000 every hour you know I mean like and it's just a very different way to think about things so
215. 00:32:39 I love the way jorgensen sets up this first section I think part one gives us this idea of the way musk kind of operates like his core operating system, which leads us into to part two are you ready to go ready to go to part two.
216. 00:32:53 Okay so part two is called ultra hardcore work and the four, yeah the five sections we're going to talk about here is what it takes building exceptional teams designing the organization maniacal urgency and we must make stuff.
217. 00:33:07 So this is where like you start to see where the start is where I start to see like differences in the way like I would operate in the way musk operates but but we'll get there as we go so what it takes.
218. 00:33:20 He talks about the idea that he studied business.
219. 00:33:24 Because if he didn't study business he was going to have to work for somebody else and like the last thing he wanted to do is work for anybody else.
220. 00:33:30 He's really really like he'll drive home here. He's really passionate about the engineering side in the physics side. He does the business because he has to.
221. 00:33:39 And like and if he doesn't do that he can't do the engineering side I can't remember it's here if it's later.
222. 00:33:44 He talks about the fact that like to work on the problems he wanted to work on he had to be the CEO, or else he would have to work on somebody else's problems and he'd have to work on stuff that other people want to work on.
223. 00:33:55 He talks about sleeping on the factory floor. And he talks about it here and he talks about it later he spends like three years living in a factory.
224. 00:34:04 And all I think about is like oh my gosh, that's crazy like that is absolutely wild and crazy could not could not do it.
225. 00:34:13 He's got the leaders eat last principle.
226. 00:34:15 Leaders should always take care of the team before they take care of themselves supervisors there to serve the team not the other way around.
227. 00:34:21 And then the last one I'll call out before I turn it over to you Mike is this staring into the abyss right that basically there's two principles staring into the abyss and then eating glass and staring in the abyss is like the idea that more than likely you're going to fail.
228. 00:34:35 If you're doing a startup you're going to fail and you're staring into this this abyss or this train coming at you that is failure and it's coming and here it comes.
229. 00:34:43 The other one's eating glass is basically you need to you need to do the thing nobody else wants to do you need to work on the thing that nobody else wants to work on.
230. 00:34:51 And it's going to be longer than you want to do it and it's going to hurt more than you want it to hurt and it's going to be terrible.
231. 00:34:57 And guess what this is what you sign up for when you when you commit to the kind of work that that Musk wants to do and then that fits his things.
232. 00:35:06 And I just think it's a really again we're seeing this idea of the way he thinks about solving problems and the way he thinks about starting companies and and doing work so just an interesting first section.
233. 00:35:18 Yeah I like it a lot one of the things he mentioned at the beginning of this is most of the time I get way too much credit or attention for what I do.
234. 00:35:27 He says something in here that I think kind of I'm not going to say justifies but it explains why he doesn't care what people think about what he says because he was a nerd he got beat up.
235. 00:35:44 And he says that people who worry about the impact of words have never been punched in the face.
236. 00:35:52 I'm like well you're right I haven't been punched in the face let's keep it that way but.
237. 00:35:58 And then he asked this question what's the worst that could happen.
238. 00:36:01 This is something that I think kind of it kind of gets into like the fear setting idea with with Tim Ferriss if you're familiar with that.
239. 00:36:11 But this is sort of the attitude he has with the companies that he's he's built like yeah I don't want to run out of money but if I do run out of money and the company goes bankrupt like what's the worst that that could happen.
240. 00:36:21 Like it's figure outable.
241. 00:36:23 And so I feel like that's a kind of a throwaway comment but is also a pretty powerful idea that we can definitely learn from.
242. 00:36:31 I asked this exact question to my wife when I was considering leaving the day job at the digital marketing agency.
243. 00:36:38 She didn't know we were launching into a fear setting exercise but like what's the worst that could happen.
244. 00:36:44 She's like yeah that's the attitude and I'm like no really what is the worst that could happen because once you name it it's not so scary.
245. 00:36:50 Yeah okay so the next section he's going to talk about building exceptional teams I don't have a ton on this one.
246. 00:36:55 He you know he describes a company in a very funny way here is cause a group of the goal which I think is a really funny way to just talk about a company.
247. 00:37:03 But then what stood out to me the most here is there are only a small number of excellent people that are hard to find.
248. 00:37:10 Find those small number of excellent people and like work with those type of people and when I think about this.
249. 00:37:17 I knew a guy who went and worked for SpaceX when I was in grad school he was an aerospace PhD student, aerospace engineering PhD student he went to work for SpaceX.
250. 00:37:26 And he came back to finish his PhD and basically like he said it was the craziest experience I've ever had.
251. 00:37:33 It was entirely too intense like I did not want to keep doing it like it was it was insane.
252. 00:37:39 He goes but without a doubt those were probably the smartest people I've ever been around in my entire life like it was just this assembly of like the craziest most excellent smart people that he'd ever been around.
253. 00:37:50 And then I like that he calls out the idea of like when hiring look for the right attitude skills can be taught.
254. 00:37:56 And this comes I think from him because you know he goes and starts SpaceX he doesn't know anything about rockets. He just teaches himself about rockets he's a computer software kind of guy and he teaches himself about rockets.
255. 00:38:09 I like this idea of you know hire for the attitude hire for the the non technical stuff and then we can teach the technical now that breaks at some point.
256. 00:38:21 There are certain things that are just too big of a lift for certain people to learn but I think if we went this route more than we went the other route because I see that I think we hire so much for check the boxes on the job description.
257. 00:38:35 You know like as a and we don't worry about the person enough if we think more about the person and then how do we how do we help them get those skills on the job description I think we're just be better off from a hiring standpoint.
258. 00:38:47 Those are those are my one of the things I got I haven't disagreed with a lot.
259. 00:38:51 This feedback over feelings thing. I think I think he goes a little too hard on the don't worry about other people's feelings right like just you know like tell them tell them the truth.
260. 00:39:02 I get that there's a there's a reality to that like people need to hear the truth and we can't be so so soft in this world.
261. 00:39:10 But I also think like we need to not just be a steamroller and just like absolutely run over everybody and I kind of get the vibe that he might be a little bit like that in a meeting to where it's like listen I'm gonna give it to you and I'm not going to worry about how you feel when we leave the room.
262. 00:39:23 Yeah radical candor Kim Scott he's an obnoxious jerk for sure yeah yeah yeah yeah.
263. 00:39:29 Yeah there's actually a lot in this chapter that I liked mentioned a company just a bunch of people come in together to create a product or service that is true if you get them aligned with the mission.
264. 00:39:38 A small group of technically strong people will always be a large group of moderately strong people 100% you gotta hire players be willing to recruit hard for excellent people.
265. 00:39:48 You can judge a person's character by their friends and associates that's interesting but I think it's 100% true and wanting to be liked as a weakness.
266. 00:39:57 Yeah I agree he can take that a little bit too far but I agree with the principal and I struggle with that myself.
267. 00:40:07 Okay you're ready to move to designing the organization.
268. 00:40:10 Yeah we should pick up the pace on these.
269. 00:40:12 There's a lot of chapters to get through here.
270. 00:40:15 So in designing the organization he's basically just describing kind of the way he would.
271. 00:40:21 I mean the way he would create an org communication to travel the shortest path.
272. 00:40:27 He gets rid of this idea of hierarchy which he's shown through going on to the factory floor and then simplicity is a winner the best part is no part of the best processes.
273. 00:40:36 No process which I think is a very funny like way to think about that is and we teach this in our thing is like how do we do it with less parts how do we do it with less operations.
274. 00:40:46 I like his algorithm this is the last one I'll say in this section but he's got an algorithm he calls the algorithm and it's make your requirements less dumb.
275. 00:40:54 Try very hard to delete every part of the process.
276. 00:40:57 Simplify or optimize accelerate and then automate and he says where you mess up in a company is when you when you don't do these in that order.
277. 00:41:04 When you when you don't look at those in that five step order so.
278. 00:41:08 Yeah had you heard of this before.
279. 00:41:10 The algorithm no.
280. 00:41:12 Yeah yeah I guess that's that's fairly famous like that's something that he's been championing for a long time.
281. 00:41:18 I like those steps as well kind of interesting to hear him talk about it in like a very short section of this book.
282. 00:41:26 And this is where I feel like if Elon were writing this what are the big things that he like the big ideas that he's contributed to the world.
283. 00:41:32 He would probably expand this a little bit because I have heard people talk about Elon's algorithm for years.
284. 00:41:38 Interesting and and yeah I feel like you could definitely dive deeper into that but I do like that I do like that a lot.
285. 00:41:44 He talks about the major source of issues being poor communication 100%.
286. 00:41:50 The way to solve that is to allow free flow of information between all levels.
287. 00:41:54 I agree with that and then also like when I was reading that was thinking about that applies to PKM too that's the whole idea behind everything I do with Obsidian.
288. 00:42:04 Is what's the shortest path for the information to flow eliminate all the friction add it back where you don't want it to go so you can channel it into the right places.
289. 00:42:12 And yeah the the best part is no part the best process is no process.
290. 00:42:18 I tend to want to make processes for everything. The problem with making processes for everything is that they have to be updated all the time.
291. 00:42:26 So that has kind of challenged me like what how can I figure out a way where like I don't have to create as many processes.
292. 00:42:33 I can just focus on the stuff that really is critical to the the business.
293. 00:42:39 And then he makes a comment about like ruthlessly cutting things.
294. 00:42:43 He says if you're not adding previously deleted things back in 10% of the time you're not deleting enough.
295. 00:42:49 I almost never do that I usually just expand the scope of the things that I end up working on.
296. 00:42:54 So that kind of challenged me I don't have an action item from that but a very different perspective and I think probably a healthy one for me to think about.
297. 00:43:01 I like that idea too that that get rid of more and then add stuff back in.
298. 00:43:06 I try to teach my engineers last one is a common mistake engineers make is to optimize the thing that should not exist.
299. 00:43:13 I wrote that down and I try to teach that all the time like when we're doing design projects I'm like hold on.
300. 00:43:17 Don't make it better until you're sure it's right like don't make it better until you're sure it's right.
301. 00:43:22 Okay so moving into maniac or agency this one is very like.
302. 00:43:26 You know hit the hit the button kind of a thing for me.
303. 00:43:29 I love the don't waste time section basically he talks about walking out of a meeting or dropping off a call as soon as it's not adding value.
304. 00:43:37 It's not rude to leave it's rude to make someone stay and waste their time and I'm like oh my goodness you're speaking my language Elon Musk like yeah absolutely.
305. 00:43:47 I like the law of gaseous expansion for schedules.
306. 00:43:51 There's another term for this I forget what it's what it's called is it Parkinson's law where the size of the task or the length of the task will expand to fill the time that you have to do it.
307. 00:44:04 That's exactly what it is.
308. 00:44:05 But the law of gaseous expansion for schedules whatever time you said it's not going to be less than that.
309. 00:44:10 Which gets why he if you think about his principles he'll set these incredibly aggressive timelines and that he won't meet them but like he's not doing it.
310. 00:44:20 He doesn't care like he's just trying to be faster than he thinks he can be.
311. 00:44:24 In like he's trying to do it.
312. 00:44:26 The other one the principal in here is do things in parallel.
313. 00:44:28 I don't think I do this nearly enough.
314. 00:44:30 Like I'm not good enough about saying okay I'm going to do this thing and it's going to take two weeks for somebody else to get back to me or a week for somebody else to get back to me.
315. 00:44:38 What am I doing in the meantime.
316. 00:44:39 And instead I'm going what should I be doing on that project right like whereas if I'm smarter about this I'm paralyzing those tasks.
317. 00:44:46 That's a very computer science thing that I think he gets from his software world for sure.
318. 00:44:51 Yeah so when he's talking about like I'm going to set these aggressive timelines I'm not going to make them.
319. 00:44:56 This is where I realize that he and I are very different people.
320. 00:44:59 And if it's very easy at this point to be like dude you are crazy.
321. 00:45:03 Why are you doing all this stuff that you know is wrong.
322. 00:45:06 But also I feel like this is something that I could probably benefit from.
323. 00:45:12 I remember being at Crafts at Commerce and somebody telling me like you have green light after green light after green light you just got to do stuff and I tend to just overthink things.
324. 00:45:21 Got to figure it all out before I do something and I could learn from you just go do this stuff.
325. 00:45:26 I don't like personally how aggressive he is about it.
326. 00:45:34 But I think it is useful in a sense because it forces him and his teams to move faster.
327. 00:45:40 I cannot picture myself even surviving let alone thriving on that sort of team.
328. 00:45:47 But I get it like there probably are people who like that sort of environment and more power to you I guess you know go terraform Mars.
329. 00:45:58 But it's like I'm calling it out because it's not just well I wouldn't like that it's disgusting to me.
330. 00:46:08 That's the exact place I never want to work I never want to set foot in that type of environment.
331. 00:46:16 And I think for a lot of people it's completely wrong but I also like see the other side now where I don't know he's got limited time on this earth he wants to leave this big contribution to humanity let's get to Mars no one's going to do it I got to do it like I kind of get it.
332. 00:46:33 I don't know it's a little uncomfortable. There's a dissonance there for me too because it's like I see that if I want to do big hairy audacious goal type things I have to be more maniacal than I am.
333. 00:46:46 But at the same time the idea of being maniacal just really rubs me the wrong way like I don't like it at all so I'm in the same boat you are in the same boat you are.
334. 00:46:54 Okay so let's move to we we must make stuff. So this is where this is where like the musk thing gets me.
335. 00:47:03 Now let me break it to the fools out there right like so he's like he says like that's the way he approaches this thing but basically saying if we don't make things things don't get made.
336. 00:47:11 And it's like yes that is 100% true like if we don't ag or if we don't farm food if we don't produce steel if we don't do these things they're not going to get done.
337. 00:47:19 I completely agree with the principal right it's just you know like the way he says it just kind of gets me.
338. 00:47:25 The idea of sometimes the product isn't the hard part it's making the product it's figuring out how to do it at scale it's figuring out how to increase your capabilities.
339. 00:47:36 And then this idea of attacking the constraint at the idea of what is the thing that's slowing you down the most and how do we very much address that because we can have 999 pieces going well but if that one piece is holding us back
340. 00:47:53 or if that one supplier is holding us back that's the constraint and how do we address that so this one I don't have a lot of stuff on other than like he's thinking about production he's thinking about taking something and ramping it up
341. 00:48:04 and the fact that he thinks we need to as a society making create more which is going to roll right into part three here in a second but that's my takeaway for you.
342. 00:48:16 Yeah he mentions that somebody has to do the real work that I think encapsulates how he thinks about this design is overrated manufacturing is underrated and again I get his I get his perspective there.
343. 00:48:28 As a chronic overthinker I probably fall into that more often than I should.
344. 00:48:35 The thing that really matters is the machine that builds the machines that was interesting to me because he's talking about the bottleneck for Tesla for example is the machine that makes the cars.
345. 00:48:44 And so that's the thing that they should be trying to optimize for and that's a oversimplifying of the problem but really it's not how do we tweak the individual things in the assembly line to move a little bit faster like the core materials
346. 00:49:07 that need to be generated for this thing that's where the real bottleneck is I think that's an interesting thing for me to identify in my own business.
347. 00:49:17 Probably the bottleneck for me is myself with a lot of the content stuff that I create.
348. 00:49:22 And I don't think it's in like a you're doing anything wrong it's a matter of you only have a limited number of hours in the day.
349. 00:49:28 And you know and I think so I think there's a there's a truth to that not not a detriment to you necessarily it's just a reality of life right so he would say that's a first principles thing right.
350. 00:49:39 I think about this with Kickstarter you know like this whole idea of pick people can create that one off prototype and they can put it on a Kickstarter and it can look really really good.
351. 00:49:49 And really what you're trying to figure out is can they make it like can you actually make the thing because I remember there was a coffee machine that everybody was like oh my gosh this is like the coolest thing.
352. 00:49:57 Ever and it's going to make amazing coffee it's going to do all this stuff and there was no way I had a buddy that was looking at the design he's like there's no way they're going to produce this.
353. 00:50:05 He's like you can't make that you can't manufacture that it's going to cost a million dollars and I was like okay.
354. 00:50:11 And sure enough it died in like a year or whatever like they were like yeah we can't produce it.
355. 00:50:15 Sorry guys like kickstarters.
356. 00:50:17 Interesting.
357. 00:50:18 Yeah.
358. 00:50:18 Okay.
359. 00:50:19 Let's move to part three.
360. 00:50:20 This is building companies.
361. 00:50:21 So now we get into more I would say this is more biographical this is more him explaining how he became a founder this is more him explaining how Tesla emerged how SpaceX emerged those are the three like kind of sub chapters we're
362. 00:50:36 going to talk about here becoming a founder I had no idea zip to even existed so zip to was a thing that came before I was familiar with this.
363. 00:50:44 Yeah see I this was new to me but then it turned into PayPal and then from PayPal he rolled into this next thing.
364. 00:50:52 The thing that I thought was funny in this one part is he talks about like you know we're developing this thing we're designing this thing and I forget the company that bought it was it compact.
365. 00:51:01 Whatever company bought compact the computers.
366. 00:51:04 Yeah.
367. 00:51:04 They paid 300 million dollars for it.
368. 00:51:06 And he's like I showed a check showed up one day in the mail he's like and next thing you know I had 21 and a half million dollars and I was like oh shoot.
369. 00:51:15 So so this this the story he the way he phrases this is I liked a lot he's like before I cash the check I had $5,000 in my bank account.
370. 00:51:24 After I cash the check I had $20 million $20 million in $5,000 in my bank.
371. 00:51:30 I just think it's hilarious kind of highlighting how ridiculous that is that they sent a $20 million check in the mail.
372. 00:51:37 But like but you think about this and everybody thinks about you know Elon Musk the billionaire he describes in here at some point where it's all it's all funny money.
373. 00:51:46 Like he doesn't have billions of dollars sitting in a bank account right now.
374. 00:51:49 It's all in stock it's all like it's all it's not yeah like he doesn't he's not you know Scrooge McDuck swimming in his you know in his pool of money.
375. 00:51:58 And like he is ruthless at putting money back into companies right and basically risking it all to do the next thing and risking it all to do the next thing.
376. 00:52:08 So anyhow I'm getting too too far ahead of myself but like because that's how that's how he accomplishes his purpose.
377. 00:52:14 It's it's so interesting to see how he lives out this idea of his purpose so he talks about you know better to pick a path and keep moving forward than just vacillate endlessly on this on this decision right chronic overthinkers
378. 00:52:30 watching me right as a chronic overthinker right like okay hey let's just pick it and let's go we might be wrong but that's okay we we need to move fast.
379. 00:52:38 He talks earlier in the book about IP and how he believes the best IP like intellectual property practice is just being faster than everybody else right like that that's that's how you succeed most of the time.
380. 00:52:51 He talks in here about like and this gets you to like coming to this discrepancy between his work life and his personal life and his pursuit of passion and pursuit of purpose I should say and like how it impacts his work his professional life.
381. 00:53:05 I remember a trip a combination of needing to raise money and I'd gotten married earlier in the year had not a vacation or honeymoon.
382. 00:53:11 It was kind of a combined financing trip and honeymoon also not a great idea.
383. 00:53:16 He's like looking back on this going well that was a choice probably should have made that one like that was that was kind of a bad idea.
384. 00:53:25 Well the the context for that is that when he came back he got muscled out of PayPal which was the company that he was running at the time.
385. 00:53:33 He says that he refused to be bitter about it life is too short for long term grudges which I think is a really profound statement there.
386. 00:53:42 And he backs it up because later on he says that he invested in somebody else's business who was one of those co-founders they invested in SpaceX right before it was going to go under.
387. 00:53:57 They put back and you can connect the dots and say oh it's a good thing I didn't burn those bridges but I feel like most people would just be so outraged that this thing that they worked so hard for they finally took a break.
388. 00:54:07 They come back and the company is ripped out from underneath them like there are a lot of people who would go nuclear at that point.
389. 00:54:13 And I think he just he just has such a different way of thinking about it he's like oh I have this purpose right and like okay that stinks but like I have this purpose and I'm going to go I'm going after my purpose more.
390. 00:54:25 He also says that negative feedback is incredibly valuable which I agree with but also the way he describes that.
391. 00:54:31 You kind of understand why whenever he does a demo whenever the SpaceX rockets blew up he was just like oh okay no big deal on to the next part part of the process.
392. 00:54:41 It's easy to say that but he actually believed it.
393. 00:54:45 Yes he actually lives it yep I wonder what his like stress level though if you like measured his stress level like I would just love to see it like on a chart.
394. 00:54:55 Gotta be through the years you know which is why he probably does a lot of the volatile things that he does and says a lot of the crazy things that he says he's super stressed all the time.
395. 00:55:07 Okay let's we'll roll to now building Tesla.
396. 00:55:11 So anyhow zip to zip to rolls into PayPal PayPal he gets another big payout they get acquired by eBay.
397. 00:55:20 And he gets another big payout he says in the one part he's like I could go buy one of the islands in the Bahamas but what's the fun in that we're going to put it back into another company.
398. 00:55:29 Tesla comes in and what's interesting here is the first kind of like subheading underneath the building Tesla one is the mission to protect the planet.
399. 00:55:40 And like we think about Tesla or at least I think about Tesla as a car company.
400. 00:55:44 And I don't think he ever thought about it as a car company he thought about it as an electricity company or as a reduced the amount of hydrocarbons we're using company.
401. 00:55:54 And how do we do that the purpose of Tesla is accelerating the use of sustainable energy.
402. 00:55:59 Right which is so like interesting to think how he really thinks about it versus how the rest of the world sees it right.
403. 00:56:08 So in here like we've got a lot of a lot of different ideas but he's going to talk about dumping all of his money into into this new company because he has this principle where new companies drive innovation like existing companies are just going to
404. 00:56:24 keep doing the thing that they're doing and they're not going to want to reinvent the wheel. Tesla allowed a new company to come in and kind of disrupt the automotive space or disrupt the, you know, the space, I guess the energy space.
405. 00:56:38 Building the first prototype, you know he talks about this idea and I think this is where he does it but he talks about this idea of like how he didn't really want to make a sports car.
406. 00:56:47 He needed something to fund the making of the normal car right and the sports car started with the roadster because they could they could charge a lot of money for it and it would fund the less expensive other versions that he wanted really wanted to build
407. 00:57:02 and he then talks about and he doubles down here we talked about it before but he's like I'm a physics guy and engineer, I'd prefer to be working on the products but I got to do this business stuff or else none of the other other stuff works.
408. 00:57:16 I'm trying to think of what else.
409. 00:57:18 Oh, and here's where he talks about living in the Fremont Nevada Nevada factories for three years.
410. 00:57:23 It's like my work for three years of hell from 2017 I experienced the longest period of excruciating pain in my life and it's like my goodness.
411. 00:57:32 Like you think about it's not glamorous at all like this like this is not glamorous about this guy is just grinding and grinding and grinding with his own money.
412. 00:57:41 Like he took his own money and he's grinding it's just it's just wild to me.
413. 00:57:47 Wild to me too. I like some of the stories that he tells in here so, for example, at one point he gave a test drive to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and there was a bug in the software and the car would only go 10 miles an hour.
414. 00:58:02 Yeah, exactly.
415. 00:58:03 And they still invest it.
416. 00:58:04 I promise you guys it goes way faster than this.
417. 00:58:06 They still invested right.
418. 00:58:08 Yep, yep, he mentions the most important part is to start somewhere and be prepared to question your assumptions. He says I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and sitting there with Chipmunk Jeeks guilty.
419. 00:58:21 I feel you on.
420. 00:58:23 Generally takes three major revisions for a technology to work really well.
421. 00:58:27 When he said that I was initially like, that can't be true. There's got to be exceptions to that.
422. 00:58:32 And then as I was thinking, I'm like, actually, I think he's probably right.
423. 00:58:38 And he also showed that only two American car companies have not gone bankrupt forward in Tesla, which is kind of amazing to think about, but it's true.
424. 00:58:49 I never really thought about Tesla as the vehicle for championing the sustainable energy, but it makes sense once he points it out.
425. 00:58:58 Because I remember coming across like Tesla as a brand selling like solar roofing panels.
426. 00:59:03 That was probably solar city influence.
427. 00:59:06 But like I actually was at the on the Tesla page at one point looking at those solar roof panels.
428. 00:59:12 Maybe I should put these in.
429. 00:59:14 Yeah.
430. 00:59:15 It's kind of on the one hand, you're like, why in the world would you pick a car as the first project for this sort of thing?
431. 00:59:26 And you can see in this section, like where that started because he says he first realized all vehicles would eventually be electric in the early 90s.
432. 00:59:34 So this is kind of like him in a nutshell. He realizes this is where it's going. Okay, let's accelerate it.
433. 00:59:42 Let's dump gas on this fire and get there as fast as we possibly can.
434. 00:59:47 Yeah. And if you look through here and we're going to not remember all the details, I don't even know if the book provides all the details of it.
435. 00:59:54 But you can kind of see like three different arms moving at the same time or like you got solar city that's trying to figure out how to gather solar from the sun.
436. 01:00:05 You've got Tesla that's building like the roof and like the power wall right to store this energy.
437. 01:00:12 Then you've got the car company and like and all these things are kind of kind of happening at the same time.
438. 01:00:17 But it's all around this idea, sustainable and energy and move into a different source of energy. So, are you ready to move on to SpaceX?
439. 01:00:26 Can we build SpaceX now?
440. 01:00:28 Yeah, so SpaceX is basically, let's get to Mars.
441. 01:00:32 And as he feels like that's so important.
442. 01:00:34 And the funny thing about it, right? Like he looks at this and he goes sustainable energy. Okay, like what would be like a first principles way to look at this? Well, cars.
443. 01:00:41 Right? Like that's a way, like a lot of people drive cars and if we can make cars more renewable, then that's a way to get to sustainability.
444. 01:00:46 And renewables. And he does the same thing with SpaceX. He's like, what's the problem with space travel?
445. 01:00:50 We haven't been there in 50 years, we've been in the moon in 50 years or whatever. He's like reusable rockets.
446. 01:00:55 So that's the way we're going to address this. If we can make the rockets more reusable, we significantly reduce the cost to travel to space.
447. 01:01:02 Boom, like that's what we're going to.
448. 01:01:04 So it's not just the reusable rockets. It's it's $30 million to build a rocket.
449. 01:01:09 There's got to be a way to do it cheaper than that. And they got it down to $5 million.
450. 01:01:13 And then they're like, oh, if we make it reusable, then we can double that.
451. 01:01:17 So or double the value of that. It costs half as much, essentially, if you can, you can reuse it.
452. 01:01:22 And I remember when SpaceX first launched their rocket and it blew up and everyone was making fun of it.
453. 01:01:27 And he mentions in here, like that was completely expected. He thought SpaceX was going to fail.
454. 01:01:33 Why would you dump so much money into a thing expecting it to fail unless you really believe in the mission?
455. 01:01:38 Is SpaceX, we talked about it like the 10% he's like, there was a 10% chance we were going to succeed.
456. 01:01:43 Like that's all that that's all it was. I think so.
457. 01:01:45 I think so. And he the three major revisions for technology work really well, like that was going into it.
458. 01:01:52 He's like maybe three, maybe more for the rockets. That's such a complex problem.
459. 01:01:56 So he shares in here that at some point he has just a little bit of money left over and he's trying to decide which one he's going to give it to.
460. 01:02:03 And he's like, okay, guys, we can do a fourth launch, but this one really has got to work.
461. 01:02:07 And we got to do it really fast because there's like not much money to work with and that's the one that actually worked.
462. 01:02:12 And it's kind of crazy to think about where things were at prior to all those failed launches.
463. 01:02:19 Because he wants to not just like send something up into space, have it fall down in the ocean like we've been doing it.
464. 01:02:26 He wants to make it easy to send it up to space, have it come back, land at the exact same spot, refill it real quickly and then send it again.
465. 01:02:34 Because the whole goal is to get like this transit system that is consistently sending people to and from Mars.
466. 01:02:44 That's such a big vision. That's such a crazy idea, especially when the rocket couldn't even get off the launch pad because it was blowing up.
467. 01:02:54 But you got to admire the, well, yeah, that's just part of the process, just keep going forward.
468. 01:03:00 He even mentions at some point, I didn't chat on the details, but everybody's disappointed, you know, the first launch was a failure.
469. 01:03:06 He's like, "No, guys, that was expected. Don't worry about it. We'll do better on the next one."
470. 01:03:10 Like, that's pretty cool.
471. 01:03:12 I just, seeing him, like this is where, and I'll talk about it later when I talk about action items,
472. 01:03:18 but this is where I get like an action item from is this idea of how do I apply some of these principles into my world?
473. 01:03:25 Like, am I going to go out and start the next SpaceX? No. I don't have that vision. I don't want to do that.
474. 01:03:30 Like, that's not in me. Like, I'm not, I'm okay with that. Like, I'm comfortable with saying that.
475. 01:03:35 But like, what is the version of this that's in my life? And what's the version of this that like I want to, I'm passionate enough about or I care enough about to have that purpose in my life in that area?
476. 01:03:46 And I don't know the answer. I just, I want to explore that. Like, I want to think about that.
477. 01:03:50 One of the things that comes out of this chapter is asymmetry. This idea of, I forget what the, there's another word there, but if you change, if you make a change and something goes wrong, you get a big punishment.
478. 01:04:01 If you make a change and something goes right, you get a small reward. And it's like, man, is that so true? Like, I've seen that in so many different areas.
479. 01:04:07 It's like, ah, you really messed that up. You know, blah, blah, blah, and like you feel terrible about it.
480. 01:04:11 Or you get it right. Nice job. And you get like this tiny little pat on the back and it's like, gosh, you know, what is it?
481. 01:04:17 There's also, we have this, at least I have this impression that there's like this narcissism. There's this like, you know, there's this aura of Elon Musk.
482. 01:04:30 But I've noticed in a couple of different comments throughout this book and a couple of different ways he says thing, there's also like a humility and like a humbleness that you don't always see or at least it doesn't talk about that online.
483. 01:04:41 Because he says there could be other solutions too. But this will work. The first order business was to get one that works, right? Like, he acknowledges like, I don't know everything.
484. 01:04:50 But I can tell you that this, there's no reason why this won't work. And we're going to give it a shot and we're going to go after it.
485. 01:04:56 It might be wrong. We might fail. Things might blow up. That's okay. Like, we'll move forward. I just, I don't know.
486. 01:05:02 I'm actually leaving this book thinking more highly of Elon Musk than I went into this book thinking of him. And it's just kind of the point, I think.
487. 01:05:13 You know, it's not to make everybody a fan of Elon Musk, but it is to recognize the value of some of his good ideas.
488. 01:05:20 Okay, let's move on to part four. All right. So part four is called on behalf of humanity. And Mike, I'm going to freely admit, I'm going to tell you this up front. This is where the book kind of went like, all right.
489. 01:05:33 Like, we're, we're, we're getting to it now. Like, this is a little bit too much for me. I'm intrigued to see what's going to happen here.
490. 01:05:40 Because this is more the pie in the sky. Like, you know, shoot for the moon kind of stuff. Like, I don't know how else to say it, but like the sections here are called building our future, the age of abundance, our existential risk and then becoming
491. 01:05:56 multi planetary. And it's these really, really lofty ideas, these really, really like, get out there. So he considers companies philanthropy like they're a way of giving back to humanity.
492. 01:06:10 The idea of like companies raise the entire economy. And like they're, they're helping everybody get better. So it's a very different way of thinking about kind of how we drive society forward and he gets into civilization.
493. 01:06:27 I don't remember which, which section of this he gets into civilization. But like this first section, he starts out a little bit. Yeah, he starts out with the companies and how companies are the way to build the future.
494. 01:06:38 Motivating people or at least Eric Jorgensen's motivating people to go start companies and to go create the thing you want to see in the world essentially is the way I took it they didn't say that but that's the way I took this.
495. 01:06:51 Yeah, so building our future talks about how profit is a good thing.
496. 01:06:56 I've heard it said on a smaller scale that profit is permission to show up and do the thing again tomorrow.
497. 01:07:03 Yep, yep, yep. He says I can't emphasize this enough as long as we push hard and are not complacent. The future is going to be great. So he's very optimistic. In fact, I think in the last section he talks about how we should be optimistic because being pessimistic does absolutely no good, which is a very pragmatic way of looking at that.
498. 01:07:20 I actually appreciated that. Yeah, so building our future is kind of like build companies. The age of abundance is really where he gets into, let's see, the AI stuff is our existential risks.
499. 01:07:36 The age of abundance is more the automation in general talks a little bit about AI in terms of augmenting our intelligence, things like that.
500. 01:07:47 Essential risks is the way he brings in the civilization stuff and there's a life cycle. Everything rises and falls.
501. 01:07:55 And then the becoming multi-planetary is really his case for why we need to terraform Mars. There's so much crazy stuff in here. I think we got to talk about it together.
502. 01:08:04 Because I think it's sort of like builds together, ties together. I agree. Let's start with the end, the multi-planetary thing. Essentially, he believes that any species that does not become multi-planetary is simply waiting around until their extinction event.
503. 01:08:17 This is the one I maybe disagree with. It's not worth really arguing about. Maybe he's right, who cares. It's sort of how I feel about it.
504. 01:08:27 I agree. We have fundamental differences in opinion on how long Earth has been around and how life got here.
505. 01:08:36 He is also thinking on the billions of years timescale. You have to think on that timescale or else this doesn't make any sense.
506. 01:08:45 If you think of a generation or two or four or whatever, you don't really grasp what he's thinking. He's thinking the billions of years timescale.
507. 01:08:53 If you extrapolate that out, there's a chance of me, you're just going to hit the Earth and everybody's going to die.
508. 01:08:59 If that's your starting point, is the billions of years timescale, that makes sense. That seems plausible that there's a non-zero probability that would happen.
509. 01:09:11 The AI stuff I actually thought was pretty interesting. I don't know that he's necessarily right about that, but he has another company, NeuralLink, which is trying to use technology and artificial intelligence to do some pretty...
510. 01:09:33 You can almost describe it as noble things, like people who can't see rewiring their brains so that they can actually see.
511. 01:09:42 I grew up, well, I'm not grew up, my beginning work life. I worked full-time for the family business and it's a special education.
512. 01:09:50 I would go to the conferences and I would see the assistive technology that people were using to give people the ability to live independently.
513. 01:09:59 That was something I always really appreciated about that work that I did. I think that's really cool.
514. 01:10:04 I think I'm maybe a little bit uncomfortable with the whole idea of we're rewiring genetics in order to do it.
515. 01:10:14 But I think he probably is right in terms of his approach to AI is going to be generally useful.
516. 01:10:22 He does talk about we're moving towards artificial general intelligence. The machines are going to be smarter than us, but it'll be okay because they'll like us.
517. 01:10:33 There's a 10% chance that they'll turn on us. I don't know what to do with that sort of conversation.
518. 01:10:40 How do you... Who cares? He's very much a techno optimist.
519. 01:10:46 When it comes to AI. He does talk about political is probably the wrong word, but you get some of his ideas about regulation, his ideas about where he stands on.
520. 01:11:03 Is this a good time to be alive? The population change and what he thinks about population and why he's got 12 kids.
521. 01:11:12 You get into some of this more nuanced stuff about Elon Musk, but what I wonder is where does Eric Jorgensen's editorialization of all this? Does it play into this at all?
522. 01:11:27 I don't know. It plays into it. Maybe it's the lack of editorialization, which is the editorialization.
523. 01:11:44 The fact that Elon has 12 kids with three different moms. I view that as you have failed as a father.
524. 01:11:53 We have different priorities. He's trying to keep the human race going. Get us to Mars. Earth can support so many more people than we have right now.
525. 01:12:04 I don't know. He's got lots of crazy ideas. Maybe they're right. Maybe they're not. I don't really know.
526. 01:12:10 That's not what I'm optimizing for. I want to show up for the five kids that I have with one wife who hopefully that's the way it's going to be from beginning to the end.
527. 01:12:25 I feel like just not making a judgment call on that is making a judgment call on it. Hey, this is okay. I don't know. I think that's necessary for a book like this.
528. 01:12:43 You can't provide context, but there are some things in here where the ideas are so... I'm not going to say crazy because essentially, every idea could be considered crazy.
529. 01:12:56 But counter-cultural, maybe? Some of these things, if I'm writing this book, I feel like I've got to have a little bit of an explainer for why he said this.
530. 01:13:08 In fact, that Eric Jorgensen doesn't do that, I feel like is a little bit of a choice. I don't know. Does that make sense?
531. 01:13:16 It makes total sense. I think the one that gets me is you want to aggregate all this stuff, but at the same time, the book isn't about you, and it's not about your thoughts and your perspectives on this.
532. 01:13:30 You don't want to come too hard on that realm. In order to not come too hard on that realm, you kind of don't do anything with it, or you just make the disclaimer that you make at the very beginning of the book that we talked about earlier.
533. 01:13:44 But what I like about it is, I think you do get to see why and where this thinking comes from. And I think Jorgensen did a good job helping me see, like, "Oh, that makes sense why Musk thinks that.
534. 01:14:01 That makes sense why Musk would do that. Do I disagree with it? Sure. I'm allowed to. Do I agree with that? Sure. I'm allowed to.
535. 01:14:08 I just think it's a really interesting thing. The population collapse thing, and where he talks about the fact that if we look at civilization, when birth rates decline, the civilization declines, I can't argue with that.
536. 01:14:23 That's a really interesting take on that, that once people stopped having kids, civilization stopped on that. Does that mean I think we should all go out and have as many children as possible with as many different people as possible? No, I don't, but that's a personal philosophy thing.
537. 01:14:37 And so the thing I think that makes it editorializes, there are parts where there's a Q&A that happens in the book that's got to be Eric asking questions to Elon, getting additional context.
538. 01:14:50 And just the fact that he chose to ask certain questions and doesn't choose to ask other questions. There's Q&As for some things, but not on other things. That is the editorialization, I think.
539. 01:15:00 You're picking the parts that you feel need more context.
540. 01:15:04 Yeah, and I would say to round out part four. Part four, I would say, is what does Musk think are the important things that we should keep thinking about and keep working on into the future.
541. 01:15:19 And I think it's a really interesting thought experiment to wrestle with those in my head and go, "Do I agree with this? Do I agree with this? Do I agree with this?"
542. 01:15:27 For example, I think AI is coming. I don't know what form it's going to take, but I think he's absolutely right. It's coming, it's going to get more advanced. I don't think we're putting the cat back in the bag on that one.
543. 01:15:37 Do I think we need to be multi-planetary? Not really. I just don't. I get his point that in the billion-year timescale, there's a chance that there's an extinction event that happens.
544. 01:15:49 But do we need to populate another planet to save it? No, I'm not as passionate about that one. That's my take on it.
545. 01:15:58 If we can, cool. Yeah, I'm not as passionate about that one. It's a great way to summarize it.
546. 01:16:04 Okay, so there's one last section in this book that's not one of the formal parts, but it's called Bonus. So, Jordanson calls it Bonus. It's basically a distillation of what he calls the 69 core musk methods. And it's the things we learned about throughout the rest of the book kind of just as one liners.
547. 01:16:20 They're very quick one liners. I'm not super interested in going through those, Mike, unless you are. I highlighted some of those, but I'm not super interested in going through those.
548. 01:16:30 He gives it basically for people who didn't read the book. Yeah, it's a summary, right? Yeah, so then he gives a timeline of musk's just life and starting companies and doing all those things. It's very just timeline.
549. 01:16:44 It's a couple-page timeline. That's interesting, yep. And then I think the most interesting part of the Bonus material is Elon Musk's recommended reading.
550. 01:16:51 So, he gives the books that he's recommended reading, and I'm not going to go through the books, although he does have Victor Frankl's book on there. But I'm not going to go through all the books that I thought were interesting and weren't, except for at the very end, he puts his mom's book in there, and he just wrote my mom wrote this, which I thought was awesome.
551. 01:17:11 I mean, go ahead. It's your book. I was actually a little bit annoyed by that reading list because I was interested in the books, but a lot of this is like the book, the author, and then a bullet or like a sentence usually about why he recommends it.
552. 01:17:28 And a lot of those were exactly the same. This is a really good book. This is a really good book. This is a really good book.
553. 01:17:34 And a lot of them didn't even have additional context. It's like, dude, come on, give me a reason. Yep, I agree. I agree.
554. 01:17:42 Okay, so that concludes it. Oh, and then the last thing is all the references, which there are over a thousand citations and references for where all this stuff came from.
555. 01:17:53 So like you could spend weeks digging into all these things and putting them back into context and doing all that stuff. But like Mike said, if you ever listened to a Musk interview, they're all over the place.
556. 01:18:05 So like, were they ever really in context to begin with? I don't know. That's a great question.
557. 01:18:11 So it's like, well, well, Jorgensen took them out of context. Were they ever really in context? I mean, I don't know.
558. 01:18:17 That's fair. That's fair. So let's roll to action items. It's my book. I'll start with my first action item.
559. 01:18:23 Basically, the only one I'm going to commit to and the only one I want to think about is I want to think about how, like, how do we take some of these principles that Musk has used in very dramatic scenarios, starting these major
560. 01:18:44 companies, pouring in millions of dollars into something, you know, living on the shop floor, all that stuff. And how do I think about them and like, what is the value for my more
561. 01:18:56 limited, and I don't mean that negative way, my more limited, my more constrained, personally, like, intentionally constrained life?
562. 01:19:04 Like, what does that look like? And how do I apply some of these principles? And I think it's going to be, all I'm going to commit to is maybe like a 30 minute thought session
563. 01:19:12 that says, like, what is, what do I take from this book and how do I apply to my life? And it's just going to be an obsidian note that comes out of comes out of this book. That's all I'm going to commit to.
564. 01:19:23 I got nothing. It was an interesting read. I don't know that there's anything specific. I want to take away from any of Elon Musk's ideas. I do want to kind of chew on some of this stuff. But we'll see what comes out, basically.
565. 01:19:39 That's good. Good. All right. So let's go to style and rating. So how Mike, this one is a weird book for me, because the style is so different.
566. 01:19:50 But I didn't hate it. Like, I really kind of liked it. Like, I thought it was interesting. I thought the way Jorgensen, like, weaved things together. It all made sense.
567. 01:20:00 There wasn't a part where I like, I read a thing and went, well, that came out of left field. Like, I have no idea why that's in that section. Like, this doesn't make any sense.
568. 01:20:08 Yeah. Looking back as we've talked about this, I think it flows well from, like, Musk's core ideas to how he rolled into this thing, how he rolled into this thing, and now kind of his future.
569. 01:20:20 I mean, he's writing a book about a guy and about this guy's thoughts and ideas and, like, the way he's doing things.
570. 01:20:26 And he, like, he did what he said on the tin, right? Like, this is exactly like, I don't, I don't think about the book after the fact and go, well, shoot, like, he sold me to Rob Bill. Good.
571. 01:20:36 This wasn't what I was expecting. It's what I was expecting, you know, of the book.
572. 01:20:41 I'm a little bit nervous because it's like, I just don't know how much editorializing Jorgensen actually did. Like, I would love to know if Musk read this book, if he said, oh, yeah, he represented me well.
573. 01:20:54 Like, all that makes sense. Like, and he did a good job. Like, I would love to hear Musk's take on Jorgensen's book, right? And, and if he gave me, like, like, yeah, like, that actually did what I did.
574. 01:21:07 I mean, this is an easy five star book to me. Like, I just think it's interesting. Like, I think there's stuff to glean out of here. I think he's interesting.
575. 01:21:15 I don't think I agree with everything. And I definitely don't agree with all of Musk's philosophies and worldviews and ideologies, like, by no means, but that wasn't what I was trying to do with the book.
576. 01:21:26 And that's not how I'm going to rate the book. Like, the book isn't me rating my agreement with Elon Musk. The rating is me rating Jorgensen telling me about Elon Musk and communicating ideas to me and structuring it in a way that makes sense.
577. 01:21:41 It's a quick read. I think if people were remotely interested in Elon Musk, it's worth it. Like, I don't think you're wasting your time to do it. I actually think even if people don't like Elon Musk, it's worth it.
578. 01:21:54 Just to, like, edify yourself and go, yep, these are all the reasons why I don't like him. And here he did is he proved it to me yet again of why I don't like him, or to just hear some of his thoughts and ideas.
579. 01:22:05 So while this might be somewhat controversial, I have no idea. This is a five-star book to me. Like, I'm rating this a five-star book. I thought it was good. I enjoyed reading it, and I think I got a lot out of it. So, it's a five-star book. How about you?
580. 01:22:19 I can see the argument for the five-star book. And I agree that even if you don't like Elon Musk, you should probably read it. Maybe, especially if you don't like Elon Musk, you should read it.
581. 01:22:33 I remember a Jim Rohn making a comment at one point about building your personal library, and he just makes these comments. He's like, "You need a book from there on, you know, insert the most magnanimous person you want to be like Gandhi." I think it's an example he used, right? And then you also need a book on Hitler. You gotta have, "This is what to do. This is what not to do."
582. 01:23:02 I think there's value in getting all the different perspectives. And yeah, I don't think I like Elon at all. It's a person. But I also respect some of the choices from a business perspective.
583. 01:23:17 That's what this book did, I think, is it kind of helped you understand the core motivations. And I know there are people listening to this who are going to be like, "This just painted him in a positive light. That's not who he is. He's a complete jerk. You can't trust anything that he says."
584. 01:23:32 I always think that there's more nuance than that. You gotta understand the whole picture, and really what value does that add? That's that perspective. Like, "Oh, I'm not going to listen to that person. Okay, we're not going to have a dialogue. How do things ever get better if we can't have the conversation?"
585. 01:23:54 So I think there's a large number of people who are just not going to read this, and that's fine. But I do think that if you go into it with an open mind, you will like this book.
586. 01:24:04 That's the key, though. You do have to go into it with an open mind. You have to disassociate what you think about what you think you know already about Elon Musk, because he gives you all sorts of anecdotes that you can use, all sorts of dots that you can connect to create a picture, which may or may not be true.
587. 01:24:21 But we tend to believe that stuff is. This is true. This is my experience. Everything else that contradicts that must be wrong. And so those people are going to hate this book.
588. 01:24:33 I also think if you are an Elon Musk fan, this book might actually shift your perspective a little bit the other way. Maybe you're going to see a little bit more clearly some of the flaws.
589. 01:24:50 Maybe you'll hear a couple things that, "Oh, I didn't realize that's what he actually thought about these things, and that makes me a little uncomfortable." So that's good, too.
590. 01:25:00 You can get the book for free, so go download the PDF, check it out. There's no reason not to.
591. 01:25:08 I am struggling with this one. As I said, I get the argument for the Five Star book. I actually like the Almanac of Naval Ravacomp better than this one.
592. 01:25:19 I feel like this one had a more clear narrative from beginning to end, but I also feel like the Almanac of Naval Ravacomp was a little bit more useful.
593. 01:25:29 So using that as my pillar, I feel like this one's not quite as good. So I'm going to rate it as four stars, but I don't blame anybody for rating it five stars.
594. 01:25:38 And the goal of the rating here, like this book in particular, is not an endorsement of "I agree with all the ideas." It's the package of presenting a bunch of ideas to you that you can decide for yourself what you think about these, but the ideas that are being presented to you will stretch you, and that's kind of the whole point.
595. 01:25:59 Yeah, I agree. I agree with you. All right, Mike, let's put the book of you on on the shelf. What's next?
596. 01:26:08 Next is something completely different. We're going to read "How to Try Again" by Steve Cam. Steve Cam is somebody I met at Crafts in Commerce. I started going through this one.
597. 01:26:15 The very first chapter he's talking about failure. He has a reference to the Museum of Failures, which has a bunch of products from companies that completely flop.
598. 01:26:24 Like Apple has this Pippin video game system that they built back in the day. That was a complete failure. So that's in there.
599. 01:26:31 And then as you walk out of the Museum, you have all these sticky notes that people grab a sticky note right down a way that they failed and stuck it on the wall.
600. 01:26:37 It's got a picture of one that says, "I farted a yoga." But the end result is like you're walking through this tunnel with all these sticky notes.
601. 01:26:46 The whole point is we all fail. What are we going to do with that failure?
602. 01:26:51 So it seems like it'll be a very entertaining read. Looking forward to that one.
603. 01:26:56 After that, we're going to do "Inside the Box" by David Epstein. So David Epstein wrote a bestseller called "Range" before author.
604. 01:27:06 And this one's about basically can we benefit from narrowing down our options. So that'll be the book after Stephen Cam's book.
605. 01:27:14 Do you have any gap books, Mike?
606. 01:27:16 I do not. I hope to by next time. I've got some picked out that I want to read, but nothing yet.
607. 01:27:23 Including "Alchemy," which Martin mentioned in the chat by Rory Sutherland. I've had that on my list for a while. I want to dig into that one.
608. 01:27:31 Nice. I also don't have any gap books right now. I'm going to do some traveling between now and the next episode.
609. 01:27:37 Extra reading is just not going to be on the docket for a while. Well, thank you to everybody for listening.
610. 01:27:46 We just want to let you know that we did a pro show. The pro show this time was "What Authors Would We Want to Interview?"
611. 01:27:52 So we talked about some of the authors that we thought would be interesting to interview.
612. 01:27:56 If you're interested in that, it's additional content for the show.
613. 01:28:02 We also released the bootleg right after we record, so it's usually about one or two weeks early.
614. 01:28:07 You can get a wallpaper. Mike has shared his reading masterclass, which is about three-ish hours of additional content on reading.
615. 01:28:16 It's $7 a month. It just helps us with the operating costs of running the show, and we appreciate everybody who's willing to sign up for that.
616. 01:28:23 If you're interested in that, you can go to bookworm.fm/pro to become a pro member.
617. 01:28:28 Alright, if you're reading along with us, pick up "How to Try Again" by Steve Cam, and we'll talk to you in a couple of weeks.