The Book of Elon with Eric Jorgenson

Summary

Podcast Summary: "The Book of Elon" with Eric Jorgenson

Podcast: David Senra (Host: Scicomm Media)
Date: March 24, 2026
Guests: Max Olson (Author), Josh (Interviewer)
Episode Theme: Deep dive into ‘The Book of Elon’ — Elon Musk’s most useful ideas in his own words, and what makes Musk singular among modern founders and builders.

Episode Overview

This episode explores Max Olson’s new book, The Book of Elon, distilled from thousands of hours analyzing Elon Musk's interviews, public remarks, and biography. The conversation revolves around Musk’s contrarian mindset, leadership style, product-making philosophy, ability to endure and leverage pain, obsession with speed, and foundational maxims that guide his companies. The hosts discuss not only Musk’s methods but also their broader implications for aspiring founders: why the world needs more people making real things, and what we can learn from Musk’s approach to progress and risk.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Importance of Making Over Dealmaking

• Main Idea: Society needs more people making products and fewer focused solely on making deals.
• Elon’s Viewpoint:

  “I do not start companies with the standpoint of what is the best risk adjusted rate of return...I just find things that need to happen and I try to make them happen. If the money was lost, okay, it was still worth trying.” (00:30, Elon quoted in book)

• Olson’s Context: Musk’s motivation is solving uniquely valuable problems for humanity, not just pursuing wealth.

2. Mission-Driven Pain Tolerance

• Musk’s ethos: Excellence is the ability to take pain.

• “My way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you’re doing and take the pain.” (04:29, Musk quoted via Olson)

• Unlike most founders, Musk is all-in with not just his money but his entire reputation and stress tolerance:

  “I don’t ever give up. I’d have to be dead or completely incapacitated ... Come hell or high water, we’re going to get this done.” (08:47, Musk quoted)

• Olson: This total commitment and resilience, bordering on the “edge of sanity,” sets Musk apart.

3. Finding & Empowering Excellent Engineers

• Hiring Philosophy: Focuses on young, unproven engineers, gives them major responsibility, and finds out quickly who’s exceptional.
• Quote:

  “He really biases towards hiring young, unproven engineers and giving them a shocking amount of accountability and responsibility.” (03:05, Olson)

4. Cultivating a Culture of Aggressive Problem-Solving

• SpaceX’s operational meme: “Tip of the spear, focus. Always identify and attack the biggest limiter.”

  “Laser in on the single constraint that if removed, would unlock everything downstream.” (06:47, Olson quoting colleagues/essays)

• Problems are solved by rapid, cross-company “flash mobs”; people from diverse teams swarm bottlenecks.
• Iterative failure: Creating small failures quickly is rewarded; failure is irrelevant unless catastrophic.

5. Musk’s Five-Step ‘Algorithm’ for Engineering & Company Building

• Detailed at various segments, especially (28:18–47:00)

  1. Question Requirements:

     “The most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn’t exist.”
     Attach every requirement to a named individual for accountability. (28:23, Olson)

  2. Delete/Simplify:

     “The best part is no part. The best process is no process.” (30:35, Musk/Olson)
     Delete relentlessly before optimization or automation.

  3. Simplify/Optimize: Only after removal can you improve and optimize the remaining system.
  4. Accelerate:

     “Maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle ... Once you’re moving in the right direction and efficiently, go faster. If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster. Stop digging.” (42:10–43:26, Musk via Olson)

  5. Automate: Only automate after all unnecessary complexity has been eliminated.

“Speeding up something that shouldn’t exist is absurd. If you’re digging your grave, don’t dig it faster. Stop digging.” (43:24, Musk via Olson)

6. Vertically Integrate to Move Faster

• Why vertical integration?

  “We vertically integrated because the pace we need to move was much faster than the supply chain could move ... to the degree that you rely on the legacy supply chain, you inherit the legacy constraints, including their speed, costs and technology.” (97:08, Musk quoted)

• Musk’s goal: Control every important part to eliminate delays and push tech to its physical limits.

7. Financial and Operational Maxims

• Combine extreme cost discipline with urgency:

  “I often tell the team, it’s okay to scrap equipment or money. It is not okay to scrap time.” (75:11, Musk quoted)

• Solo Decision-Making as Leverage:

  “Finance and engineering are in the same head; the same in most companies — it’s separated. It’s him. So he wants to make something they want under the cost or the potential growth in revenue. ... I can move faster because it’s in one head.” (69:11, Josh/Olson)

• Hyper-focused, high-leverage decision-making (meetings where a half-hour can add $100 million in value).

8. Living the Mission: Leading from the Front

• Musk demonstrates through visible self-sacrifice — sleeping on the factory floor, enduring the same pain as his team.

  “I was living with the team. I slept on the floor...so the team, going through a hard time, could see me on the floor and knew I was not in some ivory tower. Whatever pain they experience, I experienced more.” (94:14, Musk quoted)

• Extreme accountability and expectation-setting:

  “I told them we have to go ultra hardcore.” (94:14, Musk quoted)

9. Obsession with Speed — The Fundamental Currency

• Speed is both offensive and defensive advantage — like the SR71 Blackbird, which “was never shot down, not even once. Over 3,000 missiles were shot at the SR71 Blackbird and none hit. All it did was go faster.” (62:35, Musk as quoted by Josh)
• Companies that iterate twice as fast are functionally equivalent to having twice as many factories.

10. Failure, Learning, and the Value of Direction

• Fail fast, fail small:
  “The longer you do anything, the more mistakes you will make cumulatively.” (78:15, Musk quoted)
• Directionally correct > precisely correct; being too early or wrong in predictions is fine if you are moving in the right direction.

11. Encouraging a Generation of Builders

• Overarching hope:

  “I hope this book can generate like 1 million Musks. I don’t mean go follow his life blueprint. ... Figure out a unique problem that nobody else is working on and dedicate your life to solving it. ... We are all capable of so much more than we think.” (14:34, Max Olson)

• Societal value of making:

  “If we don’t make stuff, there is no stuff. Technological progress is not inevitable. It’s not some kind of abstract concept. Humans make technology. If we don’t do it, it will not happen. Somebody has to do the real work.” (80:29, Musk quoted)

• Too much talent and capital flows into finance and law; more should be building real products.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

On Pursuing Useful Work:

“Don’t start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur...it’s better to approach from this angle: what is a useful thing you could build that you wish existed in the world?” (01:47, Elon via Olson)

On Talented People:

“Excellence is the capacity to take pain.” (04:01, Josh summarizes Musk/entrepreneur maxim)

On Culture:

“It’s not good enough to just go start a business somewhere. You have to work on the biggest limiter. ... Find the most important thing to work on and go ape-shit on it immediately.” (07:33, Max Olson)

On Fear and Motivation:

“Feel the fear, do it anyways. Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear. The nature of fear is that people don’t look at it directly...If you believe in [your mission] enough, you do it in spite of fear.” (13:14, Elon Musk quoted)

On Constraints:

“Excellent engineers are the fundamental constraint on building and growing civilization and the constraint on advancing these companies. ... The constraint is not capital. The constraint is truly excellent engineers.” (02:24, Olson)

On Experimental Iteration/Fault Tolerance:

“He’s designing these organizations to create small failures as quickly as possible ... If you’re not engineering your organization to have these small failures, you’re creating this sort of fragility and inefficiency.” (24:37–24:57, Olson)

On Accountability:

“A single individual’s name has to be attached to every [requirement] ... So many times requirements were created by an intern who left a company two years ago.” (38:21, Olson)

On the ‘Idiots Index’ in Traditional Aerospace:

“[Musk] realized that 98% of the cost of a rocket was not from what it was made out of...it was contractor after contractor after contractor. ... America makes great shit and we make it great and cheap. Why can’t we do the same thing for [rockets]?” (54:52–55:49, Musk via Olson)

On “Edge of Sanity” Levels of Effort:

“I work to the edge of sanity.” (96:04 & 96:08, Musk quoted)

On Vertical Integration:

“To the degree that you rely on the legacy supply chain, you inherit the legacy constraints, including their speed, their costs, and their technology.” (97:46, Musk quoted)

On Maximized Effort:

“Maximum effort always everywhere.” (96:36, Josh summarizing Musk)

On Building Over Deals:

“There is an over allocation of talent in finance and law. Too many smart people are going into finance. We should have fewer people doing that and more people making stuff.” (83:09, Musk via Olson)

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Key Timestamps for Important Segments

| Time (MM:SS) | Topic | |--------------|-------| | 00:30 | Musk’s purpose-driven approach to company-building | | 03:05 | Musk’s approach to hiring and empowering young engineers | | 04:29 | Dealing with pain; mission and resilience | | 06:47 | The “tip of the spear" focus and meme propagation in SpaceX | | 08:47 | Musk’s refusal to give up, even at enormous risk | | 13:14 | On fear, mission, and doing it anyway | | 28:18–47:00 | Detailed breakdown of the ‘Algorithm’ (5 steps) | | 55:49 | Musk’s analysis of cost in the rocket industry (“Why aren’t rockets as cost-effective as American appliances?”) | | 62:35 | The power of speed (SR-71 Blackbird analogy) | | 94:14 | Musk’s approach to motivating teams through personal sacrifice | | 96:04 | "Edge of Sanity" — Musk’s maximum effort and work ethic | | 97:46 | Vertical integration and its rationale | | 102:31 | Simplicity, bureaucracy, and the need for continuous deletion/simplification | | 109:14 | Capitalism, building real things, and Musk’s advice for entrepreneurs |

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Themes to Apply (for Listeners & Builders)

• Attack unique, overlooked problems with world-positive impact.
• Be willing to risk everything—wealth, reputation, comfort—if the mission is vital.
• Push yourself and your team to the “edge of sanity” in service of the mission.
• Obsess over speed, iteration, and moving the bottleneck.
• Vertically integrate—control your fate, costs, and progress.
• Communicate simply, repeat maxims, keep teams focused on one metric.
• Engineer for constant small failures to avoid catastrophic ones and iterate fast.
• Be a builder—making real things is the fundamental driver of human progress.

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Final Takeaways

Max Olson’s The Book of Elon, as reflected in this episode, is both a reverse-engineered field manual of Musk’s methods and a broader call to arms: Stop over-indexing on finance and dealmaking—go make things. Experiment. Ship. Build the future.

“If you create great products and services which create wealth that should be applauded, you increase the standard of living of the country and perhaps the world.” (109:21, Musk quoted to close)

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Further Action

• Check out Max Olson’s The Book of Elon for distilled wisdom and direct Musk quotes.
• Reflect on which “bottlenecks” in your own work you can attack today.
• Remember: “If we don’t make stuff, there is no stuff.” The future gets built by those who do the work.

Transcript

[Josh]

All right, so I have an advanced copy of your book, the Book of Elon. Elon Musk was Useful ideas in his own Words. You just said something that there's only four of these copies in the world. Who has them?

[Max Olson]

It's, it's a pretty special list. It's like Naval Ravikant, Mr. Beast, Ivanka Trump and you.

[Josh]

Okay, so the idea for this is you spent five years, thousands of hours studying Elon. He's been a hero, a personal hero of yours for a very long time. I just want to, like, I obviously read and reread the book. I'm just going to like, run through a bunch of highlights and ideas like that I thought were interesting and just kind of throw them to you and you see, like what, like what you find interesting about it or like add additional context. So something we were talking about when we were having coffee this morning is the importance of encouraging as many people as possible. Like, we have enough dealmakers. We need people making products and building companies. You don't need to be doing deals all day long. And that is like a main theme that Elon talks about all the time. And the. And so he says this quote in the book, which I loved. I do not start companies with the standpoint of what is the best risk adjusted rate of return or what I think could be successful. I just find things that need to happen and I try to make them happen. I thought these things needed to get done. If the money was lost, okay, it was still worth trying. What is his mindset around what he chooses to spend his time and energy on?

[Max Olson]

He seems to attack problems that nobody else is working on that have a positive impact on the future. That's his philosophy and mindset going into everything he does, which is, I think, unique. A lot of people assume that he's money motivated or a lot of people are money motivated. And you hear entrepreneurs all the time talk about like, oh, like, this is a great business model. This is a good place to go in. I'm going to go start self storage because, like, the failure rate is so low and it's just not how he thinks in any way, shape or form. He literally says nobody else is crazy enough to try space. So that's the company I have to go build because nobody else is working on it and I can't.

[Josh]

He has a great line in here. He's like, don't start a company because you want to be an entrepreneur, because you want to make money. It is better to approach from this angle what is a useful thing. You could build that you wish existed in the world.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, I think there's a paradox there of like, the thing that you can do that nobody else is working on is actually more likely to be successful. Like it forces you to try to do something unique that also ends up being more valuable for everybody else because, you know, solving a problem, you're adding a capability to humanity. You're not just starting another commodity business of some sort.

[Josh]

Yeah. I think it's important to point out the context in which he started. Like SpaceX and Tesla.

[Max Olson]

He's been thinking about these problems since he was in college, literally even younger. As a kid he was very influenced by sci fi and thinking about things that are possible. He talks about engineering as magic. He's like, if you build something that couldn't previously exist, that's like being a magician. And who wouldn't want to be a magician? There's a whole section, not just a chapter, like a section in this book about the value of engineering and the fact that excellent engineers are the fundamental constraint on building and growing civilization and the constraint on advancing these companies. He's like, I have all the money I need. The constraint is not capital. The constraint is truly excellent engineers.

[Josh]

Does he go into detail how he finds truly excellent engineers?

[Max Olson]

Yeah, his interview process, I mean, part of it, a lot of it just comes from him being really good engineer himself. Right. So you can take the questions like he looks for evidence of exceptional ability. He, he says he looks for people who've really solved a specific problem and he asks detailed questions about a hard technical problem that you've solved in the past. And he's got a good bullshit radar. You could ask those same questions or I could ask those same questions and not have the same ability to scrutinize and determine who's truly excellent that he does because he's so close to all this all the time. But that's his advantage. He really biases towards hiring young, unproven engineers and then giving them a shocking amount of accountability and responsibility. And that's part of the benefit of the iteration rate of these companies is you can figure out who knows what works. You know, it's like in wartime how you get these like skip level promotions. You just find competent people and like give them more responsibility as fast as you can. Like, that's how these companies operate.

[Josh]

I was just talking to Luca Ferrari, who's the founder of Bending Spoons, and he said something was interesting. He wants to hire young, like young interns or young people. And he says once you find somebody Competent you. You just saturate their capacity. Which I thought was an interesting description. This idea of finding people that it's better to have somebody that has no habits than bad habits. So recruiting from existing incumbents, that's something that reappears throughout the history of entrepreneurship. Another thing that reappears throughout the history of entrepreneurship, maybe my favorite maximum of all time from the history of entrepreneurship is that excellence is the capacity to take pain. Elon has a great way of saying this. He says my way of dealing with mental problems is to make sure you really care about what you're doing and take the pain.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. I think it's so funny that the most productive person on earth does 000 of the like meditation, journaling, morning routine. Like he wakes up and picks up his phone and goes to war every day. Like that's his routine goes to war. Yeah.

[Josh]

In this book we have Isaacson's biography of Elon which you and I both have read and reread. I've done an episode on that book as well. Yeah. He has this great thing that he

[Sponsor/Ad Reader]

would repeat for decades that he is wired for war.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. Like we were trying to come up with any sort of analogous founders and like the closest thing we can come to is like Napoleon. He's not analogous to other founders. They're sort of like operating companies as though like with standard best practices of today. He is like moving around, constantly moving people between companies, like moving the fronts, looking at supply lines. Like it is a very unique operating situation. He fired his scheduler because he's like I want complete perfect control of my time. I want to be able to like work on the most important thing immediately. I want to be able to move whenever I want to. The problem physically, that's like one of the big tenets of its productivity. I think there's so much to be said about doing the right work at the right time. It is a multiple order of magnitude productivity increase. Not a percentage.

[Josh]

Say more about moving around resources and people.

[Max Olson]

I mean one of the underrated advantages like all the time you see problems getting solved by people from other companies. And so when there was a real constraint on Raptor engine productivity at SpaceX, the guy who, the engineer who was in charge of that, a young really talented engineer brought in the head of production from Model 3 and that like walked the line with that guy and he was just like sobbing because like the aerospace best practice even at SpaceX was like way, way, way, way behind how they thought about production. The guy from the Model 3, he was just like, how is this your most efficient thing? Like, we can. There's so much room for improvement because of what they Learned on Model 3 production, which is like produce or die very, very quickly. And that's why SpaceX has reached this volume production that nobody in aerospace ever has.

[Josh]

So we have a friend named Max Olson who's writing a book on SpaceX that is not released yet, but he just did this excellent essay that me and you both love and we actually printed out. There's a bunch of notes in front of us. He calls this, these memes that spread through Elon's companies. And at the end of the essay, he has these five memes. Number one was tip of the spear. Focus. Always identify and attack the biggest limiter. Don't spread effort across secondary problems. Laser in on the single constraint that if removed, would unlock everything downstream. This is my favorite line from this section. This is true at Every level. Each SpaceX site has a single dominating objective, right? To simplify prioritization, a NASA manager who visited SpaceX observed that when a new problem appears, it looks like a flash mob appears in the hallway.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, that essay is excellent and it asks a really important question, which is, you know, a lot of people have talked about in this book is really an answer to, like, how does Elon get so much done? This essay in this book is really an examination of, like, why is SpaceX so special? Like, how has nobody been able to replicate what they've been able to do? The path that they've been on has been proven for years. Like, there's lots of people with more engineers and more money. So, like, why can't they catch up? Like, they're not even really getting closer. There's been more mission failures at Boeing since SpaceX. Like, this is not. It's not good. And so this is unpacking that. And the answer, the deepest answer, is like, the culture and the habits and the routines, the selection of the people, and then the memes that spread through the organization, how they work and how they attack problems. And so I think that is a great description of like, the whole organization learning to operate like Elon does, which is a combination of two extremely important skills, which is like, find the most important thing to work on and then absolutely attack it. Like, what's the limiting factor? Go ape, shit on it immediately.

[Josh]

I know he's mission oriented. He's like, I have a mission in life. This is what I want to do. But does he talk about anything other than, I'm going to do this. And essentially Persevere through pain.

[Max Olson]

Oh, he's got some absolutely killer lines about this. Like, I don't, I don't ever give up. I'd have to be dead or completely incapacitated. Um, the one you just read about, like, my way of dealing with mental problems is to just care what I'm, care about what I'm doing and take the pain. Come hell or high water, we're going to get this done. Like, there's so much unlocked when you have a mission that you know you would never give up on. Like, so few entrepreneurs, I think, would make the bets that Elon has made because they're not truly purely as ideologically and philosophically motivated as he is. Like to think about this third company, Tesla and SpaceX, fourth company, to start with $200 million and put your entire generational wealth and reputation, maybe even more importantly on the line is how many entrepreneurs that you know that have risked going back to zero and public humiliation once they reach a nine figure net worth. He's the only one I can name. And that happened at the lowest of the low point. And he was all in before he asked anybody else to put in any money, $200 million into these own companies. And that ability to not give up and not even think about giving up and just burn the boats and keep pushing and keep pushing comes from this maniacal devotion to the mission because it is a truly important mission. Getting us to a new planet could mean the difference between consciousness continuing or not continuing. If you are truly in on that mission, of course it's worth risking public humiliation. Of course it's worth risking $200 million. Of course it's worth working 100 hour weeks and living in the factory and recruiting anybody that you possibly can and demanding the most of them and firing anybody who feels like they're slowing down progress. It's a really incredible test actually to give yourself that. If you can imagine giving up on what you're doing, should you even start it. I know you talk like this all the time. Death is my exit strategy. You'll pry this mic from cold dead hands. You are unquestionably on the mission of your life. And that's a really, I think it's a really interesting question to reflect on.

[Josh]

He talks about burning the boats constantly and he did this from day one, even with zip two. I do think there is some kind of very advanced understanding of human nature that if you truly are putting your back against the wall and not giving yourself any options, like you will come up with ideas or like Push yourself to, in a manner, into an extreme manner in which you just can't. If you, if you're optimizing for like, optionality or it's like, oh, if this doesn't work out, I have like a plan B. I love Jeff Bezos quote on this. Bezos is like, the plan B should be to make plan A work.

[Max Olson]

Yes. I think, like, Schwarzenegger says the same thing and I think it's worth, like, Zip2 is a good example. Most people don't, like, remember that he started a company at whatever, 20 and went all in on it. Unbelievably hard. It was a little. He was a little, actually. But, like, he was doing these insane, like, surges and deadlines and things. He set their initial launch date for PayPal on like Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. And he's like, get your ass in his office. Like, we have a deadline. Like, why do we have to launch on things? Because I said we're launching on Thanksgiving weekend. Like, get in here, work 24 hours. Like, let's get it done. So it's been an operating principle that is an outcome of who he is and has been consistent through all of these companies.

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[Josh]

in the book, or you profiled him in the book about fear. He says, feel the fear, do it anyways. Look fear straight in the eye and it will disappear. The nature of fear is that people don't look at it look at it directly and it will be gone. These are direct quotes from Elon. When something's important enough and you believe in it enough, you do it in spite of fear. It is normal to feel fear. If you don't feel fear, you definitely have something mentally wrong. Just feel it and let the importance of your mission drive you to do it anyway.

[Max Olson]

I think the purpose driven nature of these businesses is a extremely powerful piece of their success because that's not just Elon. It attracts people who feel the same way about the mission and who want to be pushed. Like, how many people go into their jobs and they're like, I really, I want this company to just wring all of the potential out of me. I want to give everything possible to this mission. It's not how most people think, but it is how the people who go work at these companies think. And that's an incredibly powerful thing to drive the success of the company. But it's also great for the people who want to opt into that environment. Like, that's why Tesla's kicking the rest of the auto industry's ass. Like, and will continue to.

[Josh]

Yeah, that was interesting. When I asked you, like, what, what do you hope people take away? Like, you know, they buy the book, they, they read it or they give it to somebody else, like, what is the point? Like, what do you want to happen at the end? And what was your answer to that?

[Max Olson]

I have many hopes for this book, but the overarching one is like, I hope that this book can generate like 1 million musks. Like, I don't mean go follow his life blueprint. I don't mean start an electric car company, but I mean figure out a unique problem that nobody else is working on and dedicate your life to solving it. Like a thing that adds a new capability to humanity, build a new thing. Biggest lesson of Elon's life to me is like, we are all capable of so much more than we think.

[Josh]

That is what you said to me.

[Max Olson]

He's special, but he's not superhuman. He's just figured out how to get an unbelievable amount out of himself. And he had a lot of disadvantages. Like, a lot of people listening to this are going to have a lot of better hand to start life with than Elon did.

[Josh]

Explain some of the disadvantages because a lot of people think that he like came when he was like, privileged is something you'll hear. Like a lot of his critics say,

[Max Olson]

yeah, I don't think that's a particularly, like, well informed take. His dad was an Engineer and an entrepreneur, and he had ups and downs in his career. But the more defining trait of his dad was that he's. I don't know. I've never met the dude. But, like, by all accounts, in the Isaacson biography, he did have, like, a lot of surface area with him. And from accounts from Kimball and Elon, he was a, like, a narcissistic, abusive, manipulative, grandiose.

[Josh]

I think I just can say, like, compulsive liar.

[Max Olson]

Compulsive liar. Yeah. Fabricated a lot of things. He had brilliance, but he was also really dark. He's unreliable, and he would lie to the kids all the time. I mean, elon, at, like, 8, would stand in the living room and be berated by his father for hours. Is not just, like, a mean comment. He'd scream at his face and call him worthless and useless and stupid. And, like, as a young, young boy, like, imagine what that. The fuel that. That fills you with as a kid. And the. I mean, Elon figured out how to, like, make the demons pull the plow. Like, he turned that into something really productive and really positive for the most part. And there's another case where he got beat up very badly. Like, this is not, like, lost a fight, like, stomped by a gang of kids and was in the hospital for, like, a week. Unrecognizable face. And his dad sided with the bullies and, like, called him stupid for picking a fight. And that is. That is an unbelievably brutal place to start. And so I think some of these rumors about, like, how privileged he was actually come from his dad lying and trying to take credit for some of his success. And they've had a strained relationship, and all kinds of weird stuff has happened over the last couple decades. But Elon arrived as an immigrant to Canada at 17, paid his way through college, graduated with student debt, dropped out of Stanford graduate school to start his first company in the early Internet boom and, like, basically made. I forget the exact first number. 22 million. 22 million, he says.

[Josh]

A great line in the book because they sold for 307 million in cash to compact computer.

[Max Olson]

Yep.

[Josh]

And he goes, my bank account went from $5,000 to 22 million and $5,000. Yeah.

[Max Olson]

So which is just, like, he's, like, standing in the mailbox holding this check, being like, wow. And, yeah, that, like, paid off his student debt. And so he made his first, like, fortune by himself. And in that era was, like, he said he couldn't afford an apartment and an office, so he leased an office. He showered at the ymca, like worked constantly. All I have is a laptop and like some books and student debt. Like that's his starting place. And he earned his first seed money from everything. Most of what he made from Zip2. He rolled right back into starting like the week later starting x.com, which became PayPal.

[Josh]

Yeah, there's a great line in the book, I think he might have been in college where he's like, he figured he's either going to be broke or wealthy, but nothing in between.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. And he rolled that dice like a bunch of times.

[Josh]

You do a really great job of breaking down the ideas and essentially under these headings of maxims and you know, I'm a sucker for maxims. One of them actually came from founders podcast, which I appreciate and it says if you know your business from A to Z, there's no problem that you can't solve. Why did you apply that to Elon?

[Max Olson]

I started with the, the full list of maxims according to me, which is like 107. And I checked, I went down the list and I checked all the ones that I felt like Elon was a good example of, which is like 75. And then I went down again and was like, what are the ones that he's like, could be an iconic exemplar of. And it was like 15 or 16. So I think that's a good testament to like the not just Elon as a well rounded entrepreneur, but also like the ability of the maxims to describe the traits that become an incredible entrepreneur. The business from A to Z. I think Sam Zimuri is the one who like best exemplifies this. Like the banana man.

[Josh]

Yeah, the book. So people know it's called.

[Max Olson]

Is it the Fish that ate the Whale?

[Josh]

The Fish that Ate the Whale. It's one of my favorite books. It's by Rich Cohen. I've read it like three times.

[Max Olson]

It's an incredible book of like high agency and deep expertise. And this guy was like running a banana empire from the farms in Hunter. And so Elon is the modern manufacturing example of that. He lives, lived on the line, he goes to the problems. He has a really deep understanding of not just the product, but the physics behind the product. There's so many stories of him having this deep intuition for what the materials thing can do, where the threshold is, and pushing engineers and designs over and over and over to get to that failure point and find what the true, true, most elegant, most simple, most efficient version of the product could be.

[Josh]

Can you give us some examples of

[Max Olson]

that one is the thickness of the stainless steel welds on Starship. Right. And so the design engineers gave one number, and then he went and talked to, like, the guys actually doing the welding. And they were kind of like, we think maybe like four and a half millimeters would be, like, getting to sketchy. And he's like, let's try 4 millimeters. And 4 millimeters worked. Even the move to stainless steel, like most rockets previously had been made with carbon fiber. It's just really hard to work with, and it's big. And he had this intuition and knew that stainless steel at low temperatures gains strength. And so once the rocket's actually up in orbit, it's stronger, which is an easy thing to forget. And so he's like pushing people over and over again to, like, use things that are cheaper, use things that are easier to work with, reduce the moving parts. My summary of Elon is David Goggins level, like intensity. He's Richard Feynman's level of unconventional technical brilliance and Napoleon's strategic genius and insane bias to action. Those three traits combined make him just incredibly singular. And the volume of time that he puts in, even if you put in this amount of time to know your business from A to Z, as without that deep technical intuition or sense of the fundamentals of the physics and the materials, you couldn't make the calls that he's making or you couldn't push on the things that he's pushing out. And of course, he's not always right. And of course the engineers are always the ones, like, doing the highest volume of the real work. But as you say, like, the founder is the guardian of the company soul, and he is there to raise the bar and push people. And I think he has this really keen sense of, I love the line so much. Failure is essentially irrelevant unless it's catastrophic. And so he pushes these things to the breaking point, pushes the materials, pushes the designs. He wants to reach the point where he knows for sure that it's the most efficient version of the design. Because the mistake or the failure that reveals that information is going to pay off a million times. We're going to make 10,000 of these engines. And I don't want an inefficiency in there that we're going to replicate 10,000 times. I want to make the failure. I want to fail 500 times on every single design decision so that I know that we have the most elegant thing as we scale up and ramp up.

[Josh]

Yeah, I think one of the things that will surprise people is Just how much, like I said in the Isaacson. The episode I did in the Isaacson book, it's like, half the book is just him yelling at people to simplify and to delete. And there's a maximum for this. It's just like, genius has the fewest moving parts. And you see this with the. There's that meme of, like. I think that's the Raptor engine design. And there's, like, three different ones over time. And it's, like, this convoluted mess. And it just gets to, like, this simple, this beautiful simplicity. You just mentioned it where, like, I was reading about the decision to do stainless steel instead of carbon fiber. And, like, well, to do carbon fiber, it's more expensive. It's harder to work with. You have to build in, like, giant autoclave. He's like, we can weld stainless steel in a tent. Yeah, yeah.

[Max Olson]

Literally building these rockets in a tent in a parking lot, you know, which is a very. It's a very Elon thing of, like, let's do just what we have to do to make progress on the product. I want to linger on failure for a second because I think it's a really underrated piece. I think some of these maxims and some of these taglines that Elon uses, if you kind of put them next to each other, show this pattern of. He's like. He's designing these organizations to create small failures as quickly as possible, right? So if you're not adding back in 10% of the things you removed, you're not taking out enough, right? So, like, fail. That is. That is a. A mandate to go create something that doesn't work and then figure out why it didn't work and just add that little bit back in so that we know it's the most efficient version of the design. When he sets deadlines, he's like, I want to pick a deadline that I'm 50% likely to make. We're going to miss half our deadlines, and I'm totally fine with that because it means we'll be moving as fast as we possibly can, and we're going to make some deadlines that nobody thought we were going to make. If we're making 100% of our deadlines, then they're way too far out, because we'll always consume at least the amount of time that we give ourselves. And I think people have this inherent bias, especially, like, if your job is on the line or if you want to look good in front of your peers or you just want your company to work. You don't want to be seen as failing. You make so many decisions. Engineers in general. I don't want my product to fail. I don't want my part to fail. And he's so much of what these cultures reinforce and these sort of maxims reinforce is like, you should be failing. He says when he hires people, like, if you don't. If you can't tell me the four ways you fuck something up, then you weren't the one doing the real work.

[Josh]

I was literally searching for that quote right now. Yeah, it's a.

[Max Olson]

It is a great one. But all of those kind of line up behind. Like, if you're not engineering your organization to have these small failures, you're creating. This is the antifragile idea. Like, you're creating this sort of fragility and this inefficiency in the global thing. If you don't learn to fail along the way and iterate extremely quickly towards a better product.

[Josh]

I had a conversation with Michael Dell. It's one of the first episodes of the show, and he was talking about that, too. He's like, listen, when you're inventing a new business using new technology and a new business model, there's no playbook. You can't go read a book and says, here's how you do it. He's like, and you can't even hire people from adjacent industries because they're just going to do it the way they used to do it. So he's like, the only way to do it is to experiment. I think he used the word intuit yourself. He's like, you have a hypothesis, and then you test the hypothesis. And the point he was making is like, so therefore, you want mistakes. You actually want to make mistakes because that's the way you learn. But you want to make them small, and you don't want to make the same mistake over and over again. Which, again, is like an echo of what you were just saying about Elon. I guess this ties to the part of the book that's right in front of me where it's clear that Elon's companies. He wants to use reality as a validation tool. So he talks about that. He's like, getting to the truth is really important. So he says, in business and personal life, wishful thinking causes a lot of mistakes. You have to ask whether something is true or not. Wishful thinking is a natural human tendency. Again, these are direct quotes from Elon. It is a challenge to tell the difference between believing a new idea and persevering. Or pursuing an unrealistic dream. The real test of any startup is how well it responds to adversity and adapts. When most things start out, they don't make much sense, but as long as you adapt quickly, you can make the company work. Being tenacious and super focused on the truth is extremely important. You should look for feedback from all sources.

[Max Olson]

The iteration towards reality as the teacher is it was another great element of Max Olson's essay. Naval is super articulate about this as like a applying David Deutsch's ideas to company building. It's like your goal as a company is to discover new knowledge, which means interact with reality and then instantiate it into a product. And this cycle of iteration and experimentation is how you check against reality. Right? This is how all knowledge is created. It's gene mutation and selection. It's scientific hypothesis and testing. But people don't usually think about their organization in terms of how much new knowledge is being created, how many experiments are we running, how quickly and how cheaply can the failures be created.

[Josh]

He has another great line. If you have beliefs that are incompatible with the rocket getting to orbit, the rocket will not get to orbit. Physics is a harsh judge. The NER left myself. He repeats over and over again, like, physics is a law. Everything else is a recommendation.

[Max Olson]

Another branch off of that is like, physics doesn't care about your feelings. And so that is a line that he repeats over and over again when people are like, how can you be so quick to judge people or to fire people or to get the team? And he's like, we have. We have one test, we have one bar to clear. Like, does the rocket fly and how much payload can we get to orbit? Like, there is one metric that we're optimizing for and I will do what I have to do to march us towards that piece to clear that bar. I mean, this is where the Asperger's comes out, you know, like in a truly advantaged way. Like he says, being the need to be liked is like this huge disadvantage that so many people have. And I do not have that. He straight up says, like, I do not have that weakness. And Peter Thiel has an interesting observation about this. Why are so many of the successful tech founders seem to be somewhere on the spectrum? Why do they all have this sort of biological advantage in dismissing the opinions of others? What does that say about our society? That that's a skill that you need to have in order to be an innovator and build something new and build a great organization.

[Josh]

So I guess that leads into the next thing I was going to ask you about, which is the algorithm, which is the first step of the algorithm

[Max Olson]

is what question requirements make your requirements less dumb is like specifically how he says it a lot. And there are so many requirements. I think it's a really. That was a hard earned first step. Yeah.

[Josh]

Explain what he had to go, like

[Max Olson]

how he learned the most common error of a smart engineer is to optimize something that shouldn't exist. And there are many places that requirements come from, Right. Sometimes they come from inside the organization, sometimes they came from a team, sometimes they came from legal, sometimes they came from a design partner like NASA. Like, if you're going to shoot up a rocket and the capsule of the vehicle is going to like dock with the space station, they have all kinds of requirements about your latches and like how things go in. If you're going to launch from a specific pad, you've got requirements around sound or timing or all these things. And he, he's like, so much money and time and effort is wasted trying to accommodate requirements that don't make any fucking sense in the first place. So the first thing to do is shorten your list of design requirements so that you've got the maximum possible space to play in. And there's so many times, many stories, and the latch is like a true one that's in Max's essay, which is like the requirement said you got to buy this specific Omni latch from an aerospace company made of these materials and it was like super expensive. And they sort of questioned that requirement and they were like, all right, well, it's fine as long as it does this and this, it's fine. And so they bought off the shelf parts from like McMaster Carr and they did the job just fine, which were like two orders of magnitude cheaper. There's also times when the requirement is legal or regulatory. And he'll assign somebody like, go, it'll take another year or a year and a half to like get this permit. And he's like, assign somebody's like, go, fly to this office and sit in this office until you get permission. Like, sign on this sheet, come back, don't come back without a signed sheet or get fired. Like, that is a way to question the requirement or a dismissal or a waiver of this requirement because it doesn't make any sense. And there's things that he's like, we are forced to comply with so many regulations from 20 years ago, 50 years ago. They just don't make any damn sense. And they're not helping the consumer. So let's remove as many of them as we can so that we can design the best possible product for the cheapest possible price.

[Josh]

What's the second?

[Max Olson]

Delete, delete, delete, simplify. There's a. I mean, the canonical line about this is like, the best part is no part. The best process is no process. And I don't know exactly the number, but the number of times combining parts has happened over the course of the Model 3 or eliminating them. I think when he started, there were over 10,000 parts. And that has come down steadily as these combined parts. Because every time two things need to be attached, not only are there two things that need to be attached, but maybe they need to be glued, maybe they need to be screwed, bolted, riveted, whatever. The way the metals interact needs to happen, they need to be actually assembled. And then there's like a tolerance that could change whether other things fit. It's like the number of expenses, changes and risks that come from additional parts or additional attachments is so, so, so high. Simplicity gets you both reliability and low cost. That is the best part is no part. Simplicity delivers both reliability and low cost. And so between those two things, you have to delete as much as humanly possible. And so he goes to great lengths to combine parts, simplify things. He says, go ultra hardcore on deletion and simplification. That's how you see that, like, Raptor meme, where things get more and more and more simple. And that's how the Model 3 has gotten simpler, more reliable, cheaper to produce, and better. Maybe the most famous example of this is his decision to cast entire the front third and the back third. And he got that idea from toy cars. Like, toys are cheap, reliable scale, quickly. How do they make them? Like, let me. Let me steal an idea from this industry. And it turned out that nobody had ever made casting machines that big. And so he.

[Josh]

Okay, so this is an important part because then he combines these ideas together. So we just talked about first principles, thinking, which I think he was the one basically popularized it. Now everybody talks about it. Very few people actually do it. But in that book. And actually made Eclipse from one of my episodes, because that was so interesting, where he's like, at Tesla, he's just playing with, like, a little toy Tesla. And he's. And he talked about, like, learning from Legos and, like, how precise it has to be. And they're like, why can't we just cast the entire, I think, underbody? And he was like, because there's no casting machine that's that big. He said, well, how many companies, how many companies make casting machines? I think there was like something like six in the world. 5. He's like, well, let's go talk to him about it. Five said, no one said maybe. And Elon goes, I took that maybe as a yes.

[Max Olson]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And it greatly simplified. Simplified like the production. There's another story from the books, and I think he talked about this on a couple of podcasts too, where it's like the. They had a. When they were trying to solve production. Hello, Tesla. They had to literally knock a wall. They were throwing out so many robots and disposing them so fast. They knocked a huge wall in the side of the factory. Just threw out like, I forgot how many hundreds of robots. Yeah, because he found weird strangers. Weird shit. Like, hey, this one robot picks up this piece, hands it to another robot. That robot then turns around and hands it to another one.

[Max Olson]

He's like, why don't this robot just

[Josh]

hand it to that robot? Why is this guy in the middle? And adds complexity. He's like, just rip it out of there.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. And that's in the production system. Yeah.

[Josh]

I mean, he.

[Max Olson]

This is why Automate is the last step of the algorithm.

[Josh]

Because he used to do that first, right?

[Max Olson]

Yeah. His original vision for Tesla is like, we're going to automate everything. This is going to be like a pure robot, you know, Dreadnought autonomous line. And he's like, that was a huge mistake. We didn't, we didn't have it refined. Like we, we didn't have the design refined, we didn't have the manufacturing design. We hadn't questioned the requirements. We hadn't deleted enough parts. We should not have automated until all of these other steps had been gone through. And he said there's many times where he did every step in exactly reverse order. Something was like automated and then tried to done faster and then optimized and then ended up being deleted because nobody had questioned the requirements. That's why we do these things in this order over and over and over and over again. And oh, there's a great story of taking Starlink was like a mess, right? It was 10x too expensive, and they were building one tenth of how many they needed. So like two orders of magnitude off success. He's like, I've had it. I'm fixing this. This is now the bottleneck. He grabs Mark Giancosa, which is one of his super talented early hires from SpaceX. This is a rocket scientist. This is not A guy who's ever worked on satellites, he grabs a team of engineers that he trusts, they fly up to Seattle, they fire the entire Starship leadership or Starlink leadership team and they sit down in a war room, which I think is an underrated like tactic, and they start running the algorithm. What is the first principles of like satellite design? How simple can we make this thing? Why, why, why, why? Why does this exist? Why are these two things so far apart? Why do we need this much energy? Why do we need this manufacturing process? And over the course of like a few months they make this two order of magnitude leap. Like Martin Cosin is people who had never encountered this design before. But just by applying the algorithm and working with maniacal urgency towards this extremely high design bar, they created this product that's now you know, if it was a standalone business, it'd be worth tens of billions of dollars.

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[Josh]

I did this episode of Founders called How Elon works and I think in the description, maybe even the intro I was like listen, I can usually, I've read 400 of these fucking biographies. Like I can usually find an historical analogy to an entrepreneur living today where like that person was very similar to this person maybe 50 years ago, 100 years ago. I think Elon Singular and I think he said he was like singular living or dead. I can't really find a Historical analogy to it. It's like, if that's the case. And he repeats, he says this direct quote. Well, not. It's a paraphrase of a quote from Elon in that book where he's just like, I would say the algorithm so much and I repeat it so many times that people in the meeting would start to be able to predict what's coming out of goddamn mouth.

[Max Olson]

Yeah.

[Josh]

So why don't we think about. This guy doesn't have. He's a singular character in the history of entrepreneurship. And he repeats this over and over again like, maybe we should spend a little bit more time and we should think about this over and over again to the point. That was a great illustration of the story. I think the maximum here is like repetition is persuasive. You have to repeat one thing that is reoccurring throughout. A lot of these founders, they identify a handful of principles. If we go through all the notes, all the books, everything we have in front of us, it's not 25 ideas. He's got a handful of principles that he uses over and over and over again. And I love this idea that he built like this, almost like this. It's almost like another form of a meme. It's like this operating system where these, these four steps and we can apply it in space, in cars, in tunnels, and everything else. Let's go to step number three.

[Max Olson]

Step number three is simplify and optimize, which is, I think that's what most engineers just do as a standard. But that is the thing that like you should only do after you know for sure that the thing exists. And you know for sure you've got your requirements as clean and short as you possibly can. The other thing that's actually really important about the requirements is that a single individual's name has to be attached to every one of them. He's huge on direct individual accountability. And so there's no such thing as like a requirement from Legal. There's like a requirement from Jan in Legal so that you can go ask her and be like, why does this requirement exist? Please explain it very thoroughly. Can we throw it out, Et cetera. Right. So many times you found requirements that were like created by an intern who left a company two years ago or a department where nobody in the department actually agrees with the requirement. So once you get there, it's like the very normal engineering work of like, let's figure out the trade offs, let's optimize this thing.

[Josh]

Yeah. There's a great story from Tesla where You had the battery pack and then it had something like a layer on top of it. This was for sound. And one part of Tesla thought it was for sound and the other thought it was for, like, fire prevention. Am I remembering this correctly?

[Max Olson]

Yeah. Like the fire prevention team thought it was for sound baffling. And the sound team thought it was for fire protection. And like, once that was established, they actually, they tested it. They put a mic in the car and like, nobody could tell the difference. They're like, delete. Okay, but it was the bottleneck at that particular time.

[Josh]

But like, again, it's like this department said this and this department said that. They're not agreeing. But then I think not to skip over this part because I think it's the most important part. Elon's solution is very, like, simple. It's like, well, does it reduce inside the cabin? Is it louder? If this thing's not here, how are we going to figure it out? Let's just put a fucking microphone. Yeah, and we'll test it.

[Max Olson]

We'll test it. And six hours later the part is deleted. And like this whole thing that was slowing down, you know, they pulled more robots off the line and it sped up and that increased the throughput of the entire production line. Then it was a millions, maybe tens of millions of dollars worth of decision. Like he, he says, there are times single half hour meeting has added $100 million to the enterprise value of Tesla. Every single minute of thinking is like, worth a million dollars. A high quality minute of thinking. And these tools are the things that he does in those minutes that actually have that kind of effect. Which is to your point of like, this is a singular greatest entrepreneur of our generation. This is the thing that he talks about most often. Maybe it's useful.

[Josh]

Well, I hadn't made that episode in probably like six months. And I was listening to it again to prepare for this conversation with you, and I'm like, I should listen to this every month? Like, yeah, it's just like, it's an hour and a half. You can listen at one point, it's an hour. If you're at 1.5x speed or whatever it is, it's like, oh, I forgot, like, some of these ideas. And I think that's where the repetition is so important.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, I mean, that's why I really design all my books to be read and reread. Like, I want them to be handbooks and reference guides. And I love when I see like, just a beat to shit copy that's been in and out of somebody's backpack like every day for years and is like dog eared and flagged and all the highlight on every page. Like these ideas, repetition doesn't spoil the prayer. Repetition is persuasive. Like you have to work to install these ideas in your head so that they're there when you need them, so that you ask the right question or have the right instinct as an operator when you're confronted with one of these decisions.

[Josh]

Are there any other interesting stories that you can think of that come from the third step of the algorithm?

[Max Olson]

I think the third step is the least interesting, honestly. I think the like question requirements and Delete are probably 80% of the lift. I think to simplify and optimize. The accelerate and the automate are the things that people leap to naturally. And the algorithm is really designed to get them to, you know, sharpen the axe before they start chopping down the tree. Or be sure you're chopping down the right tree. Be sure chopping down the tree is the right next step at all. Anyway.

[Josh]

What's step four in the algorithm?

[Max Olson]

Accelerate. Go faster. However faster going. You can go faster.

[Josh]

Is there anything else to it?

[Max Olson]

Not really.

[Josh]

So just go faster. He has that line where we, what do you say? A maniacal sense of urgency is going to be our operating principle.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, but like the example here I would use is probably going to the tunneling machines. He's like, if you want to accelerate, like the machines that are currently tunneling, even in state of the art tunneling are nowhere near their power or thermal limits. So just like crank them up, go put, make them go as fast as they can, like can the rope. The interesting thing about when everything is actually automated is like how fast can the robots move is a way higher limit on that than how fast can humans move. And so if you actually do accelerate everything. He's been talking about this a bunch with AI, like, if you can remove the human element and then you can automate everything, you can do it to a degree that is like superhuman level of speed.

[Josh]

You have a great way to describe this in the book I'm just going to read. This is Elon's description of step four from the book, which I love. And so he's talking, he's like, then and only then. Step four, accelerate cycle time. Once you're moving in the right direction and moving efficiently, you're moving too slow. Go faster. You can always make things go faster. But do not go faster until you've worked on the other three things first. I mistakenly spent a Lot of time accelerating processes that I later realized should have been deleted. Speeding. This is hilarious. Speeding up something that shouldn't exist is absurd. If you're digging your grave, don't dig it faster. Stop digging.

[Max Olson]

This is in the Designing the organization section of the book. And I feel like it is really underrated that he applies the algorithm to his own companies. Like, he minimizes the distance between the designers, the engineers, the manufacturing engineers, and gets rid of as much stuff in his companies as he possibly can. He makes the companies go faster. He questions the requirements of the companies and the structure themselves. And he talks about it. You can see the flaws in the organization, in the product. So if there's a battery team building a box for the battery, but a chassis in the car right above it, like, they'll put a lid on the battery because it makes sense to design a complete battery with a lid. There's a car on top of it. So you don't actually need a lid on the battery case. You end up with, like a box in a box where the most efficient thing to do is, like, have enough interactions between all those people that you are not duplicating parts or responsibilities or materials. Because if you allow individual pockets to make too many optimization decisions, they'll optimize for their own tiny unit, but not how the unit exists in part of the broader system. You'll have like a bunch of disparate metals that have to come together or a bunch of insane design decisions that don't make the full system optimal as a whole product.

[Josh]

Yeah, he talks about the opposite of that. I think he calls it ivory tower engineering. He's like, I'm going to design a product or process, I'm going to throw it over the wall, and you can engineer and manufacture it. And he's like, no, you have to be able to. The engineer and the manufacturer should be able to call our designer. Like, why you do it this way?

[Max Olson]

Yeah, going back to the iteration speed and the number of failures that you can correct and identify. You know, moving the. The Raptor production, he had their whole team move their desks to the Raptor production line. So as they're like, sitting there designing or working on it, whatever they're working on, they're like watching the machine, the engine get manufactured, like, right next to them, and they're like, dialoguing this. Like, the feedback, the bandwidth between the people actually moving the atoms and the people designing the product are super, super, super high. I mean, think. He talks about traditional aerospace as, like, designing a file that then gets parted out. That gets goes to subcontractors and those subcontractors delegated to subcontractors. And you have to go five companies down before you find a guy who's actually like cutting metal or touching the material. And then it kind of goes all the way back up. And everybody's adding like complexity and confusion and overhead and cost and profit. And that's part of the reason why SpaceX was able to do something. There's like orders of magnitude more efficient and cost effective. And that's before you even get to the fact that they're like, iterating so quickly on the design that they're removing all this unnecessary stuff.

[Josh]

All right, let's go to step five. I think I mistakenly said there's four steps. I've done 10 episodes on this guy notice by now. So let's go step five.

[Max Olson]

Step five is automate. It is the holy grail. But you want to be sure you're automating the right thing, because automation itself, the process of creating the automation, is expensive and difficult to adapt. So yes, things should be automated, but then it should only be automated after you've rigorously applied the other steps of the algorithm all the way through.

[Josh]

You just mentioned something I think is a huge theme that runs throughout his entire career. That he wants to control everything, always.

[Max Olson]

Yes.

[Josh]

Can you talk about why that is so important?

[Max Olson]

Well, he had a tough experience in the early days of Tesla. I think sharing responsibility or power over this company and the beginning of Tesla was kind of a messy experience. He was the main investor and chairman, but he wasn't actually CEO. But he spent so much time getting deeply involved in the product and trying to drive a good outcome there. That reached the bar that he had for his vision for electric cars, that it just didn't really work in the long term. And the company was heading down this tough path and wasn't really making the kind of progress that it needed to. And so he talks about his reluctance to step in as CEO of Tesla. If I didn't do that, the company would have died. I provided most of the money. I've been as involved as you could be in creating the actual contributing to the product. But eventually he's like, if this is going to work, I've got to. I've got to take control of it and I've got to go all in on it.

[Josh]

Yeah. He talked about the mistake of trying to. Because originally they used like the Lotus, right? Yeah, the Lotus chassis. I think what it was. It's like we should just design this from a blank sheet of paper. It's always better if you're going to do something new, like just design from a blank sheet of paper.

[Max Olson]

It is a really good lesson. And actually a big theme of his is like, go for the strong form of the technology. Don't try to adapt what came before. Try to think in limits, go to first principles, and build a true leap in technology that totally leaves behind the constraints of the past. Not just the past sort of designs, but the past entire supply chain. Even if you were counting on the existing suppliers in the industry, it's going to be really tough to fully innovate in the way that is possible. If you start with a truly clean sheet of paper, you question every requirement. You start with the platonic limit of what is the maximum ideal possible product and then work backwards from that. How close can we get to that? Not start with an analogy of how can we be 10% better than what exists in the field? How can we do 20% better? What does perfection look like? What is the absolute ideal and how close can we get to that? And if anybody gives you a reason why you can't do that, start asking why. Start drilling down. Start question requirements. Start pushing on those assumptions.

[Josh]

Well, I think it's important to, like, hammer on this point, though, because it's obvious if you read, like, if you just study history, skills, entrepreneurs, like, they're all. They all line up at the same place. It's like, as vertically integrated as possible. They're going to control as much of their business, the raw materials and everything. And. And what I couldn't help but notice is this is how the car industry started. Like Henry Ford, they made almost all their parts themselves. Obviously they were making it by hand. This is before he figured out how to mass produce a car. And that was like, his main idea.

[Max Olson]

There was no auto supply chain.

[Josh]

Oh, you start doing it and then you have control. He's also obsessed with control. Wind up buying out his investors. I think in 1919, Henry Ford owned 100. By 1919, he owned 100%. A Ford motor company. It was just like the equivalent of you owning 100% of, like, a 20 to $40 billion company today. He was so obsessed with control. He. He bought a railroad like he bought a rail. It's like, not only do I want to, like, control all, every single, like, design and part that goes into the Model T and all my cars, it's like, I want to make sure that all those parts get to me, and I want to control the Logistics of them getting to me and what's fascinating about Elon is like he just went and like buck the trend of the American automobile industry at that time, which was like subcontractor, subcontractor after subcontractor. He talks about this over and over again, like they're just not even making their own shit. And it's like, I'm just going to go back and do it the way it used to be done. But I think the reason that it's so important is like, not only do you have control, but it's like how you make a cost efficient product. Because if you're having subcontractor after subcontractor. I think when he did the initial calculation, he wasn't calling it the idiot index, which we could talk about, but at the time with the rockets, he realized that like 98% of the cost of a rocket was not from what it was made out of. He's like, where the hell is the money going? And he was like, oh, it's going from this contractor who's this subcontractor actually hired another subcontractor who hired another subcontractor who hired another subcontractor. Before I get to the actual person, like you said, bending the metal or making the thing, there's actually a very

[Max Olson]

important like a meta to that which is he has a completely different vision and set of incentives. So the whole aerospace industry to date and basically been supported by call plus contracts from the government. And so what is their incentive? Their incentive is to spend as much fucking money as they can because they make a percentage of the budget and they're not actually incentivized to succeed. They're not incentivized. Well, maybe they're incentivized to succeed, but they're not incentivized to succeed economically. And they're not necessarily incentivized to succeed. On the original deadline, what Elon did is went to the people actually awarding these contracts and said, we want an outcome based contract. I want to be incentivized to drive down the cost. I want to be incentivized to hit the deadlines. He wanted to compete on low cost. For all the talk that happens about him doing things that have never been done before, the things that he's doing that have never been done before are because he drives cost down and he drives cost down. Because the vision is not make as much money as I can. It wasn't start a new aerospace company that's as profitable as possible. It was get us to Mars, which means drive down the cost of getting a payload off Earth as low as possible, which means we, I want to be incentivized to build a system that is as low cost as possible. And once he did that, he did start winning all these contracts and winning these actual outcome based things, which by the way, better for the government, better for taxpayers. That is a heroic thing to go in and say, I know I could get paid X to do mediocre work or to do marginally better work, but I actually want to take the risk, I want to burn the boats, I want my back to the wall. I want to know that we have to clear this threshold that nobody has ever crossed before. And I want to go tell my team that, because that's how we're actually going to achieve this objective that everybody thinks I'm crazy for setting, which is get us to Mars, which is make this very massive orders of magnitude leap in the efficiency of the human engineering system. It is such a different approach. And that goes all the way back to his, his sci fi dream and his purpose driven nature. It's the same thing with Tesla that he didn't go out and say, I want to make a profitable electric car company. He's like, I want as many human beings as possible driving electric cars because that's how we're going to solve climate change. That's how we're going to put a dent in this. And so all of his decisions are not how do I maximize profits while making electric cars, it is how can I get as many people as possible driving electric cars? They have to be as cheap as possible. I have to drive that down. I need to simplify the product, I need to get a massive volume so that the scale of the manufacturing supports a really, really, really low price point. And so he just keeps making these principle driven decisions from a very long term view. His view is so zoomed out that it's actually really difficult to relate to. And he keeps doing these things that seem crazy or stupid or visionary or counterproductive, but isn't counter to the, the prevailing wisdom of the industry, but it's not from a sense of like they're doing this, so I'm going to do this. It's not even from a sense of like this is a strategically optimal local thing. It is like I am working on this gigantic mission and I will make every decision possible through the service of this gigantic mission. And that's why he's so strategically differentiated. Like it is, it is back to the paradox of like when you're doing something that shooting for a target that nobody else is even shooting for. You are incentivized by these completely different set of systems. And those incentives drive all of these decisions. And that's why Tesla and SpaceX both have the same dynamic where they're doing things that nobody else is doing.

[Josh]

There's two things that come to mind when you're talking about that one. I want to talk about that. I think people should heavily invest and maybe practice on their ability to distill ideas and communicate like something complex in a simple way. And I think Elon's, you know, maybe arguably one of the best people in the world at doing that. The second part, which is a theme throughout everything especially, and I think it's most notable in SpaceX, is like cost. Making cost control an obsession is not something you like graft onto the organization after it was there, before the organization even started.

[Max Olson]

Yes.

[Josh]

When he has this idea where he's just like, why the hell are these Russian ICBMs so expensive? And he starts doing the first one's, first principle thinking, which is, you know, everybody knows this story, which is interesting, but then him describing it in another way, which I found was way more memorable, he's like, why would Russia be the only way they can make a cost effective rocket? And you go, and it's in your book. And he goes, do we drive Russian cars? Do we use Russian appliances? Like, there's just no way that they, this country, figured out how to make the most cost effective launch vehicle. And he goes, America's a pretty competitive place. We should have the most cost effective launch vehicle. Which obviously now he's like absolutely dominated in that. But again, speaking in that manner, it's like you could say, okay, well I broke down from first and foremost taking all the parts and looked up what it was on the commodities exchange. Or you could say, why aren't we driving Russian cars? Is your dishwasher at home? Is your fridge Russian?

[Max Olson]

No.

[Josh]

America makes great shit and we make it great and cheap. Why can't we do the same thing for this domain that I want to operate in?

[Max Olson]

The answer is because it had been a government contract driven oligopoly for the last couple decades, basically. And NASA was amazing in pioneering, but hadn't really applied themselves to this project. That is a thing that people forget is the original vision for SpaceX was not start a launch company. Elon's original goal was to increase NASA's budget and he was willing to just burn $100 million on a philanthropic mission. To display a greenhouse on Mars. So, like shooting greenhouse to Mars with existing rocket technology. Get this photo on the front page of every paper. There was like a little plant on the red planet the first time life had transferred to another planet. And he's like, that'll probably increase NASA's budget and, like, spur this wave of exploration and interest in space. And when he tried to do that, he discovered that the space launch market was so expensive and uninnovative and hadn't been moving forward. And that's actually how he discovered the opportunity to start SpaceX. It was like, that's what's actually going to move this market forward. And then he sort of ended up almost accidentally, but as a byproduct of making that progress, moving into Starlink and now moving into solar compute in space.

[Josh]

So the Starlink thing is interesting. It's in the book and it's also in the Max Olson essay that you and I keep referencing, which, like, if you're not on the frontier, like, Elon obviously wants to operate on the frontier and the domains that he's operating in. And the reason that is important is not only because he wants to push his missions forward, but you also unlock opportunities you can't see unless you're on the actual frontier. And if they didn't have the ability to put up the idea to have. I think there's like 9,000 satellites in the Starlink constellation now somewhere around there. It's like an insane number and obviously increasing. That couldn't have happened when you're launching at the time. And when he founded SpaceX, I think they said they were launching, what, like, two, four launches a year or something like that. And I think there's now a SpaceX launch every, like two days.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, this is a concept of, like, induced demand of, like, people have this perception that, like, the demand, the size of a market is always going to be the size of the market. And he's like, well, if you lower the cost like two orders of magnitude, there's a lot more use cases that are suddenly valid. And as Max talks about in the essay, like, reaching volume, production of rockets is actually a core part of SpaceX's strategy. Like, you need iteration and volume to cover the fixed cost. And so you come up with new use cases to drive the volumes. What are you going to do with new tons of launch capacity every year? And the first thing, most obvious thing was like, all right, Starlink. And now the next most obvious thing is, yeah, this solar compute, like, build a Dyson sphere, build a moon Base. Like all kinds of crazy stuff is going to happen. Like there's stacks of S curves here that are going to continue and that Elon deserves a lot of credit for not sitting on his laurel. You could have sat on Falcon 9 and just absolutely raked in cash for decades. Like there's nobody else who can do it. And it's a super profitable business. But he is like all aggressive. As soon as that was even beginning to be obvious and probably before he was already onto Starship again. Back to this purpose driven nature of we are going to. This is the business and the technology and the team that's going to get us to multi planetary.

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[Josh]

I want to go to some more ideas directly from Elon. Again, the subtitle of your book I think is super important. Elon Musk's most useful ideas in his own works. It's like when I was describing to friends like what I was reading. I was like, it's 200 pages of just Elon talking to you. Directly to you.

[Max Olson]

Yep.

[Josh]

And like you're gonna be able to like you can read it straight through if you want or you can just go to a certain chapter and like I think keeping this book on your desk and reading, you know, a few pages every few days is like a great idea, like a tool for your career.

[Max Olson]

It's set up as a like dialogue. I want it to feel like you're out to dinner with Elon Musk.

[Josh]

Actually again I, I like, I want to hammer on this idea like he's just completely, you know, he, he came to the same conclusion that most efficiency based entrepreneurs did, which is like vertically integrate. Vertically integrate control much as your business as possible. That also ties in. And they said it wasn't like a philosophical thing for him. It was these other companies move too goddamn slow. And I'm in the section of your book where he talks about time and this was fascinating to me. The reason I invited you and I wanted to have this conversation with you is like I said, I've read every book I could find on Elon. I've read countless books on the history of SpaceX. I've done 10 episodes on the guy. And yet I found stuff in your book that I've never found anywhere else. Which again goes to. I think how thorough you are. But I want to go to just read a couple things and throw it at you. See if it has any thoughts. We already mentioned this. A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. And his whole thing is like don't waste time. Get rid of all large meetings unless you are certain they're providing value to the whole audience, in which case keep them short. Also get rid of frequent meetings unless you are dealing with an extremely urgent matter. Meeting frequent. This is so good. Such a good observation by Elon. Meeting frequency should drop rapidly once the urgent matter is resolved. That makes me think of the observation by the guy at NASA who's observing SpaceX like wait, there's a problem. It looks like a flash mob. Flash mobs don't stay there forever. Why are you having this recurring meeting? Walk out of a meeting or drop out of a call as soon as obvious you aren't adding value. It is not rude to leave. It is rude to make someone else stay and waste their time. This is. I've double underlined several things in your book. This is one of them. The only true currency is time. And then he tells this story because he talks about that speed is both offense and defense. And this was a fascinating story that I didn't hear, I haven't heard anybody else talk about. He says the best offensive defense is speed. The SR71 Blackbird is a military plane with almost no defense except acceleration. It was never shot down, not even once. Over 3,000 missiles were shot at the SR71 Blackbird and none hit. All it did was go faster. The power of speed is an underappreciated as a competitive factor.

[Max Olson]

This is actually, I think Both Tesla and SpaceX's core advantage is like how quickly they iterate and design new technologies. Like he open sourced the patents for Tesla. Go ahead, go copy it. Like, good luck. Because by the time you're producing the things that they've open sourced, like they're going to be five, 10 years ahead. And there's a bunch of stuff in that book about what he's learned from military history. And he's like the decisive factor in most certainly every modern war, but many wars, is the speed of technological innovation. Not tactics, not size, but this technology asymmetry. And the longer the war, the more important the speed of iteration becomes. Not where you started, but how quickly you're developing something new.

[Josh]

He continues, A factory moving twice the speed as another factory is basically equivalent to two factors. Yeah, and I love this. I have a running triage of what I do at each company, constantly thinking what is the most useful thing I can do? Which goes back to that tip of the spear meme. That's tip of the sphere focus. Like what is the limiting factor? Literally get on a plane, go and go to where whatever the limiting factor is and don't leave until that is resolved. Which is another form of speed.

[Max Olson]

It's speed of identifying the bottleneck and then going to it and attacking it and resolving it. Like every one of those steps is an increase in speed that pays off. And there's so many things like this is a tiny story, but I love it because I think it's an example. It's a thing that happens in single company that usually takes two weeks that he does in an hour. Right. So he's like interviewing a machinist and 20 minute, 30 minute interview. He wants to hire the guy. So he asks him how much he costs. Haggles right there, come to terms. Somebody's like standing beside him with a offer. It's like, all right, fill in the blanks, here you go, signs. It goes to work, same day, same day. And by the way, it's Saturday at like 6:00pm yeah. So like your, your description of like how he uses time, like uses all of it immediately. Like that's such an important insight. And he is, it's why these, not just he, but also these companies move so quickly. Like when you combine. I feel like a lot of people talk about the tactics of like, yes, he moves fast, yes, he has first principles thinking, yes, he works on the bottleneck. But when you combine these things, it's, it's like a lollapalooza from Charlie Munger.

[Josh]

Right.

[Max Olson]

It is like this is not a 10% on a 10% on a 10%. If you're working on the most important thing with manic intensity and you're doing that 100 hours a week instead of 40 hours a week, you are orders of magnitude beyond the productivity of somebody else. And he's been doing this for decades, so no wonder he's so far ahead. Yes, he's smart, yes, he's intense, but he's not superhuman. He's not orders of magnitude smarter than his competitors, but the way that he works and the, the, the methods that he uses, the mindset that he has puts him orders of magnitude ahead.

[Josh]

I love that you, you described it as a lollapalooza. I think that's what I'm trying to get across from like the podcast I've been doing on Elon, the conversation I want to have with you, the conversation we're having right now, your book, it's like you have to use all the ideas because then combined and they could be applied. They can apply to like, anything. I'm not building rockets. Literally, like, right before we started recording, like, there's this idea of like finding a limiting factor. Even for like the show. Me and my partner Rob was sitting over there. It's like we've identified. There's two. We want to go faster and increase production.

[Max Olson]

Well, what are being bottlenecks?

[Josh]

We have two of them and we're attacking both of them. I was just. You heard me talking to another team member right before we started recording. I was like, there's one thing that I'm not happy about. It's like, we need to drill down on this over and over and over again. It's like, you can use this for anything. There's something that you have in your book, which I read for the first time. I think I read this guy named Ashley Vance wrote this biography of Elon, I think in 2013 is when I first wrote it.

[Max Olson]

The first one.

[Josh]

Yeah, yeah. It's the first episode of founders ever. In 2016, I did an episode on it.

[Max Olson]

Everybody should go listen to that. David will hate it.

[Josh]

No, the way I think is like, so we're talking about speed in terms of building products, companies, everything else, but he even applies it, and you just mentioned this, that he has this weird long term view that if you don't have that, you're not really going to understand the decision he's making. It's like, so the way I describe this paragraph when I'm reading you is like, this is How Elon thinks about money and this I've never heard anywhere else. In early SpaceX I told the team everything we did was a function of our burn rate. We were burning through $100,000 per day. In the same way I expected the revenue in 10 years to be $10 million a day. Every day we were slower to achieve our goals was a day of missing out on that revenue. So this is, there's a story in the Ashley Vance book where they're like, I don't get Elon. It's like I just went to him and try to get him to spend, you know, $25,000 in a part. He said no because he thinks I could build it for 2000 because the idiot index, that's that part should be 2000 to figure out how to do it. Yet he just let us use his jet and burn $60,000 of jet fuel to get a part to Hawaii. That would save us a workday. Yeah. And so that makes perfect sense if you spend 60 grand because that's that day. 10 years from now is 10 million.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. And you unlock an entire team and all the infrastructure value. So a thing that's underrated about Elon in my view is like this, this hyper fluency across domains. Like he, this is a simple example but he studied both physics and economics as an undergraduate. He has been like running his business and functionally being head of product at all of his companies. It's an extremely wide like multivariate set of trade offs that he's looking at. And he deeply understands to your point, the zoomed out view of opportunity cost and compounding. So thinking about where a business could be in 10 years, where the bottleneck is today, what the burn rate is of all the money and equipment and time and attention and what gets unlocked not just today, but the potential future value of that is really, really interesting. And that's I think a powerful source of the maniacal urgency is because he's like hair on fire all the time. There's billions of dollars at stake every single hour of the day. We can be working with such greater intensity and the rewards for doing it go up every time we are able to move faster.

[Josh]

I just flipped to this, randomly flipped to this page in the book, which I think speaks to what you were saying before I read it. I think what you were referencing there is he talks about the fact that finance and engineering is in the same head.

[Max Olson]

Yes.

[Josh]

The same in most companies. It's separated. It's him. So he wants to make something they want under the cost or the potential growth in revenue. It's like, no, that that discussion is taking place with me. So again, I can move faster because it's in one head.

[Max Olson]

A sole decision. I mean, how many of the great founders of history are like that kind of sole decision maker?

[Josh]

Yeah, there's not many committees that make great things. In fact, I'm reading. I've never read Atlas Shrug before. And the funny thing is, I'm reading it. I actually might do an episode on it. I think it's an interesting thing. But in beginning of the book, there's one person that is very much like an Elon character. And her brother is kind of her partner and he's the opposite. And she's made a decision to do something. She's like, well, how did you decide that? She's like, I just decided.

[Max Olson]

Just decided.

[Josh]

But we have to check with the board and all these other people. It's like, no, we don't. We're just going to make the decision.

[Max Olson]

There's actually over. You'll see this a pattern as you read. There's like a pattern of responsibility. And there's a chapter in my book called, like Internalized Responsibility. And over and over again you'll see the hero characters in Atlas Shrugged. Everybody else is sort of trying to find someone else to make a decision or shove risk. And Dagny is like, I am responsible. This is me making this decision. I'm responsible for this decision. If it's right or wrong. Hold it against me later and you'll hear Elon do that in launch rooms. It's kind of like, hey, we've identified a risk factor. Go or no go. And him in that moment standing in front of like a rocket worth tens of millions. And the public watching him in a launch is like running a calculation of the physics, the risk, the economics, the market value, the speed of the company. When the next launch window is. And it'll be like, take the risk, launch the rocket. Let's go over and over and over again. So many of those decisions that he's just solely responsible for. And that's why I think these lessons are so valuable. Who else has lived this kind of experience and honed these lessons to deliver to us?

[Josh]

So going back, let's extend this idea of, like, how Elon thinks about money, says Tesla is getting to the point where every high quality minute of thinking has a million dollar impact. You referenced this earlier. That is insane. That's Elon talking. If Tesla is doing 2 billion a week in revenue, that's about 300 million a day, seven days a week. There are many instances where a half hour meeting improved the company's financial outcome by $100 million.

[Max Olson]

This is the highest leverage man on earth. Like how many tens of thousands of engineers, how many billions of dollars of capital, billions of dollars of Capex factories that he says it makes it hard to sleep. There's always something important to go do. And he's constantly running a tree. That's what's the most important thing he can do. That's why he runs no schedule. His jet is him flying all over the world. Whatever the most important thing is to do.

[Josh]

Yeah. I think there's a story in the Isaacson book where I think he's dating Grimes at the time. And she talks, she was interviewed by him and she's like, I've caught him up in bed. Like I'm sleeping, I wake up and he's just sitting there in like the thinking man's pose.

[Max Olson]

Yeah.

[Josh]

And he was thinking like when we went to sleep, he's in the thinking man's pose. I wake up, he's still in the thinking man's pose.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. There's, I mean there's hours of like many stories of like dressed to go to a party and he's like, I'm just gonna go look at this. And then ends up like spending the night under a rocket. Like working in a tuxedo.

[Josh]

You know there's a great. Those are early days of, of SpaceX history where he shows up. I think it's like a Christmas party. And he's like fancy leather shoes or something. And then like they're like, you know, we're an hour later when we tour, like we're not going. And now my fancy shoes are fucked up.

[Max Olson]

Yeah.

[Josh]

Because I'm like literally trying to help build the rocket. Yeah. Just some random quotes from him. I think this is great. This is almost like a Maxim. Avoid serialized dependencies.

[Max Olson]

I mean the most obvious one is just like who starts SpaceX and Tesla at the same time? Like that's insane. But both of these things are important so I'm going to like try my best to do them both. The story from PayPal is like a little more generalizable, which is we have like these regulatory boxes we need to check. We have these partnership integrations we need to run and we have a product we need to build. And the same things to do is like do one after the other. And these end up being like three year things because you're not like wasting time building a product if you don't know you're going to get the regulatory clearance you need. And he just attacks us like, we're going to do it all in parallel. Maximum risk, minimum timeline. Do it all in parallel and launch in a year. Ready, go. So these things are, you know, Warren Buffett's quote, you can't get a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant. It's like this sense of like, how many things can you do in a row to minimize the overall timeline? And yes, it comes with additional risk and yes, it's more expensive. But back to the fundamental currency of time being the most valuable thing. Like that's actually the thing you should do. And that's a big part, I think, of why the pace of these companies, the velocity of them, is so high and over. And many great entrepreneurs talk about how underrated velocity is. And Elon talks about it too. Not just the pace of the company, but the team itself. So he talks about the team as being a vector sum. And so imagine every employee as an arrow. How big the arrow is, maybe how high quality the employee is, how long the arrow is, is how fast they're moving. And then Elon's job is to align them all on the same thing. And so he talks about how good the team is, how aligned they are and how hard they're working. That is the vector sum of the team and that is what's ultimately going to determine the progress of the company and how successful they are.

[Josh]

I want to bring up a couple

[Max Olson]

things you just mentioned about.

[Josh]

He's just constantly hammering on time, not wasting time. But I can't help but notice that in an episode dedicated to Elon, you mentioned getting nine women pregnant. I don't know if you slip that in there intentionally or not, but we're just going to move on.

[Max Olson]

I haven't slipped anything in intentionally.

[Josh]

The one thing. Direct quote from Elon here, thank you very much. The one thing you cannot replace is time. He goes on a few pages later. I often tell the team it's okay to scrap equipment or money. It is not okay to scrap time.

[Max Olson]

Minimizing the waste of each other's time, especially once you've identified that like exceptional entrepreneur or exceptional engineers are the fundamental constraint. The next is like, how effectively are you using them? How effectively are they aligned? And this is a thing where Elon is underrated, actually as a communicator. Like he's not a super polished presenter like Steve Jobs, but especially when you read him and read a well edited transcript of him, the clarity that he communicates with is like extremely high. And he's got his amazing habit. You know, you talk about often about how clear and how repetitive. Good CEOs need to be good leaders. Good founders, like need to communicate super clearly and align the team. And he's got the power of one, like one metric that the entire team is working towards. And he's really methodical about like the beginning of every meeting we are going to. This metric better be on the first slide. It's the thing that we're optimizing for. So when it was working on autonomous cars, it was like how many miles are driven without interventions? When they're working on neuralinks, like how many electrodes are you installing per minute into a brain? So there's always a single key metric that the team is driving towards that every decision is run through. Like, does it drive this metric forward? Does it drive this metric forward? And that's a really good way of aligning all those arrows. And for him to sort of know that the team is working on the objective that he's identified as the most important and doing it as most effectively as they can and for themselves to all keep, keep each other honest and not get distracted by these like secondary objectives.

[Josh]

Yeah, I think that's again, world class communication. It's like there's so many limited things that a human being can remember. And so if you can organize your entire, you know, company.

[Max Olson]

Yeah.

[Josh]

Around one single thing is like, is this getting better? Like this is how we're going to judge our success.

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[Josh]

So you and I have been talking a few months. You were kind enough to give me an early Copy of the book. So we've been talking about Elon for a few months, and you brought it up, I think already in this conversation. You brought it up earlier this morning when we were having coffee. You've brought it up on the phone. This idea of, like, failures almost meaningless, as long as it's not catastrophic. There's a line in the book that I thought was interesting that he says, the longer you do anything, the more mistakes you will make cumulatively.

[Max Olson]

He's talking about his sense of prediction, but it's also cultivating these failures. He does not mind being too early. He does not mind being wrong in a specific prediction. And he talks often about. He's like, I'm rarely correct specifically on the timing of a prediction, but the direction of the prediction is almost always correct. I might be a year off, I might be two years off. Sometimes I'm five. But, like, being directionally correct again, once you're zoomed out about the heading of the future and what we're working towards is massively more important than the specific breakpoints.

[Josh]

I want to jump to something else that you and I have talked about a bunch, which is one of your goals, stated goals for making this is like, you want to encourage more people to make stuff, to actually make products, services that make other people's lives better.

[Max Olson]

To make stuff, to make important stuff, to make it as cheap as possible.

[Josh]

I talked to Toby Luque on this podcast, which was one of my favorite conversations I've ever had in my entire life. It was very interesting. I didn't even think about it in these terms. At the end of the conversation, he's like, oh, me and you actually have the same job. Our job is to increase entrepreneurs, to create more entrepreneurs. He's doing it through Shopify. I'm obviously doing it through reading all these biographies, taking this collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs and pushing it down, like the generations. So in many cases, I do think there's going to be people that pick up your book and your series of books and be like, wait, I can do something, too, and take these ideas and apply it, even if it's in a small way. This section, there's only two pages here. It's like a page and a half. I think it's really important. I highlight almost the whole thing, but it's like, yeah, again, these are Elon's words that are super important. He says, we must make stuff. Manufacturing is underrated. It is hard. I've got mad respect for the makers of things. That's my favorite Sentence on this book or in on this page, he says, and this is why it's important. Some people have an absurd view of the economy as a magic thing that just produces stuff. Let me break it to the fools out there. If we don't make stuff, there's no stuff. Some people have become detached from reality. This notion that the government can just send out checks to everybody and everything will be fine is not true.

[Max Olson]

Obviously.

[Josh]

You can't just legislate money to solve things. If we don't make stuff, he says, again, there is no stuff. Technological progress is not inevitable. It's not some kind of abstract concept. Humans make technology. If we don't do it, it will not happen. Somebody has to do the real work.

[Max Olson]

This is the clip. I believe he was on the Joe Rogan podcast, where I was like, I must write this book.

[Josh]

Say more.

[Max Olson]

It identified to me that he is like, such a clear communicator and this is such an important idea. And I think about my generation of entrepreneurs and the leaders that we had, the people that we look up to, the content we created. And that's just something that I want to install in as many people's heads as I can. Like you and Toby. Talk about, like, your job is to create as many entrepreneurs as I can. As you can. Like, I believe in creating entrepreneurs. I believe in spreading good ideas, spreading useful ideas, spreading correct ideas, like expanding knowledge into as many people as we can. And this is an unbelievably important meme. And if we all run around, like, creating info products or charging as much as we can while delivering as little value as you can, or starting commodity businesses, or worst of all, like, trying to do as little as possible while getting as much as possible, or legislating yourself universal basic income and never working again or whatever. Like, this is not how we advance. This is not how we grow. This is not how we take care of each other. We have to produce stuff and build stuff. I think the first sentence in the book is, like, don't aspire to glory. Aspire to work. Like, aspire to be useful. Do something that is a benefit to all of your fellow humans. Elon has both really hard and really positive motivations. He burns clean fuel and dirty fuel at the same time. Right? Yes. He's trying to escape this really hard childhood he had and prove to himself that he has this incredible value. But he also has these really beautiful, massive aspirations. And he's inspiring so many people to do great work and helping them learn how to do it in a most effective way like he's raising and educating this whole culture, all these entrepreneurs who are going to come out of these companies. We're already seeing SpaceX founders do incredible things and the intensity and pace and vision that these people are working with I think is going to usher in an incredible next generation of entrepreneurs. And I hope this book helps people gain these ideas into their head and choose what they think is important and what they work on, who they work on it with and how they work on it.

[Josh]

I do, I do agree with you. I think it's one of the most important ideas in Max Olson essay. I love what he said. He's like the output of SpaceX in particular is not cheaper rockets. It's people being trained to do difficult things and taking those ideas and putting them into different domains. And I think the important thing is like making more things, not doing more deals, not going into finance. Like you have the best entrepreneur on the planet, maybe the best in history telling you. What did you say? There is an over allocation of talent in finance and law. Too many smart people are going into finance. We should have fewer people doing that and more people making stuff. That is a dark hope. We should have few people doing finance and more people making stuff. This is so important. Manufacturing used to be highly valued in the United States. These days it hasn't been as much, which I think is wrong. Making cars is an honest day's living, that's for sure. Making anything or providing a valuable service like good entertainment, good information, these are valuable things to do. And then I'll close the section with again that the quote which is my favorite part. I've got mad respect for makers of

[Max Olson]

things going back to the kind of like founders archive in your head. Like how many of the great founders were making things, Manufacturing, building, moving physical stuff around.

[Josh]

I mean if you think about like the most famous like just go through like the robber barons where their names are known. It's just like like there's only one. There was essentially one robber baron that did finance and that's like Jay Gold

[Max Olson]

but like JP Morgan.

[Josh]

I have a different take on that where like if you read. I've read every single book I can find on J.P. morgan. You know, it's interesting character. I found his dad to be much more of a formidable individual than, than he was. And there's a funny thing, when JP Morgan dies they his size of his estate is revealed. I forgot the number. It was like 50 million which is still a ton back then. But Andrew Carnegie goes, oh, it's a think he wasn't even a rich. But like Carnegie and Steel, Rockefeller and oil, Vanderbilt and Transportation, there's not, you know, they were building things, they were creating. I mean, they were creating essentially entire industries. If you really think about. They were building the best company inside the industry, but they were really creating the industries.

[Max Olson]

The closest analog for Elon is, is. Are those names. Like, I don't think there's anybody else going back to, like, why he's singular. Like, we would have social networks without Mark Zuckerberg. We'd have search engines without Google. We would have operating systems without Bill Gates. Like, yes, they're some of the biggest companies on earth and they were incredibly well executed. But I don't think they were singular. And I don't think we're going to see quite the same longevity that we see out of like, both of these companies.

[Josh]

It's just refreshing for him to talk about how important manufacturing and building physical things are. I mean, he says in the book manufacturing is the moat. Two things define manufacturing, competitive economies of scale and technology. If you maximize your level of technology and maximize your level of scale, that is obviously going to be the most competitive situation. That's why these plants are so freaking giant.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, I mean, Tesla is building a lot of things in the US and now working backwards into their own supply chain. Like, they can't get enough lithium, so they're starting a lithium refinery in the United States, spinning it up. They're now, you know, starting to fabricate their own chips because that's become a bottleneck. Like, they just keep attacking like up and down the supply chain as much as they can in order to be as efficient as possible and drive the product cost down.

[Josh]

So we've already touched a few times on the fact that he wants to take technology to its absolute limits and like be operating on the frontier. You again, you did a great job of finding quotes of somebody like, studies Elon for years that I've never heard anywhere else. And he was just talking about the fact that, you know, if you're developing technology, it should be pushed the maximum level possible. And then he gives an example of somebody not doing that. And he's like, it was like building F22 fighter jets and then selling them to people who roll them down the hill at each other. That's not the way to use the technology.

[Max Olson]

Ye. That was the outcome of his Zip2 experience where he was like, he was building software and then selling it to legacy media companies to kind of move newspapers online like way back in the day. And he was Just super frustrated by having to sell to a slow moving, old school company that was between him and customers. And that's where he came kind of. There was an early lesson that he's carried with him forever, which is like, go straight to the consumer, own everything and let the customer is the one who's going to make the final determination. You want to take the technology straight to the customer.

[Josh]

The way I think about Elon is like, there's no work about work, just work. So he has this great quote. Better to pick a path and keep moving than just vacillate endlessly on a decision.

[Max Olson]

Also a PayPal thing, like, make the decision as quickly as possible and then just like keep moving like the back to like velocity. Speed is everything.

[Josh]

What matters to me is winning. And not in a small way.

[Max Olson]

He's a competitive guy. Like, loves, loves to win. We are lucky that he's working on the things that he's working on. His inherent personality would dominate whatever industry he went into. And how lucky are we that he's working on some of the most important problems that humanity faces?

[Josh]

Yeah. He could use his talents for evil.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. Which goes back to the incentive system. Thank God for capitalism. Napoleon didn't do a lot of good with his massive energy and brilliance. Right. He won a lot of land, lost a lot of land. A lot of people died.

[Josh]

Did you ever read Jimmy Sony's biography of Claud Shannon, man?

[Max Olson]

Not yet.

[Josh]

I think it's called A Mind at Play. And Claude Chainman made famous for coming up with information theory. But he gives this great talk in this biography where he wins this award and he's like, it's really weird that history celebrates conquerors and politicians. He's like, we should actually celebrate innovators, inventors, engineers. And he gives his whole speech. And that was probably like 60 years ago.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. And Claude Shannon's an incredible example.

[Josh]

Here's another thing we've already talked about, but I think it's really important. This is Elon. A lot of entrepreneurial talent and financing goes to the Internet. Other sectors like automotive, solar and space don't see new entrants. Not a lot of entrepreneurs go into those areas and not a lot of capital goes into those startups. This is a problem because innovation tends to come from new entrants to an industry. In an oligopoly, no one is forced to innovate. New entrants drive innovation more than anything, which is why I have devoted my efforts to building new companies in those industries.

[Max Olson]

There's actually a great story that I think is a really replicatable tactic that's underrated, that I think people can really use actually, which is when he was considering starting SpaceX. So this is after he sort of had his bad experience in Russia and he's thinking about entering the launch market. He doesn't just say like I'm starting a company, what he does is do. He calls it a feasibility study. So he pulls in a bunch of engineers that have worked on the great launch vehicles. He starts reading all the books, as you say, like devouring the entire shelf, talking to all the people that he can. And he sets up a series of meetings with these engineers who are experienced to basically vet the idea of how good could launch be. Let's start with first principles, let's start with a clean sheet of paper and what's possible in this market. And almost at the same time that they sort of came to the conclusion through this work that massive order of magnitude breakthroughs were possible was when they actually sold PayPal. And so he's kind of like, all right, I got a bunch of cash. We've vetted this idea with these experts. But I think it's really worth drilling down on the fact that at this point he was almost 30, if not more. He had only worked in software. He studied physics in undergrad, but had not built hardware. And he just learned how to become a rocket scientist essentially just by reading the books, talking to people and going after. And he says most people self limit their ability to learn. I never studied rocket science, but I picked it up along the way. He's a powerful example of what is possible. Once you've identified a meaningful mission, you just become who you need to be in order to accomplish that mission.

[Josh]

He's obviously very high agency. What I loved about the story from one of the biographies is how dismissive everybody was. It's like, oh, this is just a software guy playing with expensive toys. That's how he was described.

[Max Olson]

I mean that was the press, but also his friends. I'm sure that many of them would deny it now, but they were all trying to talk him out of it. There's only a great. In this particular place, people were like showing him rocket videos.

[Josh]

Who.

[Max Olson]

It's not that nobody had ever attempted this before, it's just everybody had failed.

[Josh]

Well, there was a lot of failed. I mean one of. I find this guy fascinating because there's so little known about him, Andy Beal, but Andy Beal was. He made money independently in other industry and then tried to do a rocket company wind up burning I think a couple hundred million of his own money. And then the reason it's related to Elon is because when they trying to find a place in Texas to set up, turns out they could lease this property that was previously utilized by Beal. I think it was Beale Aerospace. And so it kind of like jump started them.

[Max Olson]

It was actually a big motivation of Elon's is like, even if I fail, even if I lose this money, and that is the most likely outcome. Not just by a little, like by a lot. He's like, I will have moved the ball forward, like this is an important mission. And going in with the idea that he'll burn this money on the Mars mission, he's like, even if I waste my money on advancing progress in space launch technology, at least I will have made progress in the same way that like Andy Beal, you know, left some infrastructure behind that helped SpaceX, like these things do build and compound. And there's, you know, back to the sort of fragility sense. Like even when entrepreneurs fail trying to move the ball forward, the ecosystem like moves forward. Like that's part of the beauty of the human system that we have.

[Josh]

Another great quote that I haven't seen anywhere else. I have a habit of biting off more than I can chew and just sitting there with chipmunk cheeks.

[Max Olson]

That's a great visual.

[Josh]

Yeah. You think he's doing that right now?

[Max Olson]

Yeah, yeah. I mean he keeps an underrated piece of him again. I think he keeps doubling down and taking massive risk. He took what seemed like that impossible pay package trade off at Tesla that everyone was like, oh my God, this is never going to work. He did it, got the biggest comp package in history because it was the riskiest. And now he's doing it again. He'll get a trillion dollars if Tesla becomes a $10 trillion company, but nothing if it does it again. Just all on the line over and over again. Burning the boats, putting his back to the wall, putting himself in a situation where there's no option but forward at max speed.

[Josh]

So as I'm here listening to you talk, I'm just leafing through the book to see what other interesting stuff comes. What you said just matches up perfectly with the subheading of the page I just happened to randomly turn to, which is called the Edge of Sanity. I just need to read some of this stuff to you because he's hilarious. Question. How do you prioritize with so many things going on at once? He goes prioritizing has usually made out of desperation, not selection. It's not, oh, let's sit back and leisurely decide how we should spend these resources. It's, this isn't working. If we don't make it work, we're going to go bankrupt, so we better make it work. And then he goes, I felt like Indiana Jones running down the temple. There's a huge boulder chasing you, and you need to jump across a giant, giant pit in the ground. If you slow down, the boulder will crush you, and if you don't make the leap, you'll die in the pit. That's prioritized.

[Max Olson]

It is how Scaled entrepreneurs feel. Like when, when you interviewed Brian Armstrong, that is how it sounded. You know, he's like, we hit product market fit. And all I could do for years was just wake up and, like, stay alive. Just try to keep up. Like, the servers were on fire, the support tickets were coming in. Like, oh, my God, I just have to stay on top of it. Like, I just got to keep running and jump across a pit.

[Josh]

How do you motivate the team? I told them we have to go ultra hardcore. It's just funny to me. I lived in the factories for three years. He's talking about the Tesla production. Hell yeah. I lived in the factories for three years, running around like a maniac through every part of the factory. I was living with the team. I slept on the floor. This is actually smart. I slept on the floor so the team going through a hard time, could see me on the floor and knew I was not in some ivory tower. Whatever pain they experience, I experienced more.

[Max Olson]

It comes straight from his study of military history, right? Like, wherever generals lead from the front line, wherever the general is, the troops are going to fight better. These are Napoleon things that he exemplified. And he even says in there, like, not only did I sleep on the factory floor, but he slept outside the conference room. It's not like he slept at the factory. And I've talked to employees there. They're like, there's a hotel across the street. It would have been fine if he just went to the hotel and come back. His presence would have been the same. But he wanted people to see him sleeping on the factory floor. He doesn't just not have concern for his personal comfort. He sacrifices his personal comfort for leadership, for the credibility of his engineers, to build trust in that. And that is part of how he gets so much out of people is these conspicuous, visible, tangible, obvious displays of self sacrifice over and over again. He pushes himself so hard, the edge of sanity. He says, I've worked to the edge of sanity. You've talked about Tallulah riley in the 2008 thing. He's having like a night terror. She'd wake up screaming and puking like

[Josh]

Tuloua Riley was his wife at the time. So she's seeing this. They're in bed, he's trying to sleep and he's just yelling in his sleep.

[Max Olson]

And yeah, Edge of sanity is not a euphemism for I worked hard. It is like a Herculean test.

[Josh]

And a direct quote from him on the page I just flipped to. I work to the edge of sanity.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. It is a very like, I think a meta lesson from the book and from his life that anybody can take away. It is Goggins of entrepreneurship. It is. You are capable of so much more than you think. What you think is your best effort is maybe 30% effort. And you're actually capable of so much more if you make full, massive use of time, if you push yourself to the edge. And I'm not advocating that this is the right path for everybody. I think like some people are Jason, some people are Elon Musk.

[Josh]

I don't know anybody else that could withstand as much pain and torment as he. He has.

[Max Olson]

Yeah.

[Josh]

I think of another entrepreneur living that has no.

[Max Olson]

But. But people can probably take more than they're currently taking. If it's not a blueprint, is it an example of what's possible? Right. Like it also, I think it's a. It's an antidote to envy. Like, I don't want to live through what he lived through. And that makes it very easy to be like, I don't want to compete with that. But it does show you what's possible. That's what maximum effort really looks like. I think that's a really helpful lesson to know. Yeah.

[Josh]

Maximum effort always everywhere. It's the way I really think about him. I just came across another paragraph that I underlined. I think ties a lot of these ideas. We're talking about the fact that he's obsessive speed, obsessive control. And if you're obsessed with control, it's going to lead to vertical integration. And then you really should just design from a blank sheet of paper and do that in a first principles way. He says there's a lot of vertical integration at Tesla. We make the battery pack, the power electronics and the drive trains ourselves. We vertically integrated because the pace we need to move was much faster than the supply chain could move. That's a great line to the degree that you rely on the legacy supply chain. You inherit the legacy constraints, including their speed, their costs, and their technology. He's talking about Tesla. The exact same thing applies to SpaceX, though.

[Max Olson]

You can't make two orders of magnitude improvements if you rely on the existing supply chain. And one of the things we were talking about this morning is like, the most interesting thing is identify the limiting factor or work on the bottleneck is like almost so obvious that it's trite, right?

[Josh]

Like, but no one does it.

[Max Olson]

One, people don't do it. But two, it's a more nuanced thing than it appears at first blush, right? Like, if the limiting factor is energy, it's like, okay, what is the, what is the peak load? Where does it come from? What's the cost optimized thing? Like, oh, if, if turbines are the cheapest way to do it, what is the actual, like, who's manufacturing the turbines? Where do they come from? Where do they exist? If the piece, what piece of the turbine makes it more difficult. So he did this example and drilled all the way down. And he's like, there's actually one, like, machined part that is the fin of the turbine, that is the, like, portable piece of the generator that is the bottleneck of compute infrastructure for Xai right now. And so it's like, it's actually one part of a thing. Drilling all the way down and like identifying with super high specificity where the bottleneck is essentially.

[Josh]

Explain that to me again. So he's trying to find out the limiting factor for Xai.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, and the limiting factor is energy, right? Like, we bought the chips, we need the building. This is when he was running the first super cluster and somebody told him it was going to take like two years to get this building up and running. He's like, nope, if we don't do it, there's a breakpoint. If we don't do it in 90 days, like, we're dead. Or six months, maybe we're dead. And they spun up the whole thing. They found a building in Memphis, they bought the chips from Nvidia, then they needed cooling and they needed power. You can't get a grid interconnect done in six months. So what do you do? You go get these turbines, these gas turbines, which are like portable energy generators, and you just line them up all along one side of the building and you can't get that much cooling. Assault. So he, we went and hired mobile refrigerator trucks to line them up against the other side of the building. And so it was just like, what is the fastest possible way to get this thing done. And what's the limiting factor of the limiting factor of the limiting factor? Like drilling all the way down to figure out truly where to attack that kind of five whys. All the way down to figure out the limiting factor of the limiting factor

[Josh]

of the limiting factor kind of relates to a little bit about, like, just paying attention to the smallest details. This is something that I think is really important too. He's like, most people don't consciously notice the small details, but they do subconsciously. Your mind takes in an overall impression. You know, if something is appealing or not, even though you may not be able to point out exactly why. That sense is a summation of many details. Most of us experience this as, that's ugly, or that's beautiful, or wow, that's elegant, or but that. But we cannot break it down. Why pay attention to little details? Train yourself to notice them. When I read that section, I thought about what Steve Jobs was, I think maybe the best in history at. And he has this great way of describing this. He says that a great product is better than it has to be.

[Max Olson]

Yeah, I think Elon is underrated in his design sense, actually. Like, there's a lot of times when you. You hear Elon quotes that sound exactly like Steve Jobs would have said. There's an important piece of the design in particular for cars. And a lot of the. He thinks about it like an algorithm, right? Like, there's certain specific things, ratios, that have to. To exist between the product, or it needs to feel bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside that he just absolutely insists on. And there's stories, especially from early Tesla, of him being, like, unreasonable about design decisions that he just puts a finger on. It's like, it has to be this way or it's not good enough. It's not beautiful enough, it's not aesthetic enough in the same way that Steve Jobs was very much like. Like put a handle on that computer because it changes the relationship that somebody has with this, like, kind of new foreign machine.

[Josh]

Something I thought about when I was reading your book was, you know, the idea is like, we're going to have a single organizing principle to see, to track, like, the progress on this particular product or this particular company. It kind of breaks things down to, like, a singular objective or a singular something he repeats. There's a line in Sam Walton's autobiography which I thought was very interesting because. Because we're talking about, like, you know, Elon has not only started the companies, but now these companies are at scale. And Sam's like, listen, it's the human nature to over complicate things. As your company grows, you are going to add bureaucracy. And your job as the founder is to beat bureaucracy back over the line. And you're going to beat it back over the line and it's going to creep back up and you're going to beat it back over the line. That ebb and flow will never stop. And one way that Elon talks about this in the book that I thought was interesting, he's just like, for any company, you just ask yourself a very simple question. Are the efforts that we're doing right now, are the efforts that we're expending resulting in a better product or service? If they, they're, if they're not, then you stop those efforts.

[Max Olson]

It's a easily forgotten truth. Like Tesla doesn't advertise. There's all the money back into the product or all the money back into the next product. There's stories about the rift between him and his cousins doing SolarCity because SolarCity was a very like sales driven organization. So like door to door sales, they weren't as focused on product differentiation. And he just like he was on the board and he just came in like a maniac on their product and it's like, why do these clips exist? Why these roofs take so long to install? Why are they so expensive to install? And he was like adopting that super Steve Jobs, like make a beautiful product, make it an obviously better thing, get rid of these salespeople. Like I don't want this to be, I don't want the organization to be better at selling a mediocre product. I want it to be better at creating an excellent product that sells itself. That is who his whole ethos.

[Josh]

Yeah, I like the point that you made that like he applies the same idea to, at the product level and at the company level. So this idea where he's like please go ultra hardcore on simplification and deletion, it's like in the product and in the company is a great. He repeats the same idea in different ways too, which I thought was interesting. Like eliminate what isn't necessary to solve the key problem. And so he gives an example of what is he talking about there. Early versions of Starship didn't even have doors. We didn't need doors. We did need to be super focused on getting to orbit. Doors were just unnecessary complexity. The first 10 ships or more, we were not going to get back from orbit. So then again, understanding that failure is built into it, like we're seeking the limits or we are going to fail things. And then he talks about, again, the genius has the fewest moving parts. It's really hard to scale something that's complex. So he says scale has value in itself. For example, the same computer that controls a tiny rocket rocket controls the big rocket. The percentage of weight of the electronics is significant in a small rocket, but becomes vanishingly small in a big one.

[Max Olson]

Yeah. Which this is the same logic that he applies to factories. Right. Like the inherent value of scale. Just make something extremely big and diminish the fixed cost as much as you can and the value of volume, like making these leaps between, you know, that's why they started with Sportscar, because you can have like a unit profitable thing at small volume than the Model S, than the Model 3. The same thing he's doing with the rockets. Right. Falcon 1 to Falcon 9. The ability to sequence the strategy through different products, different escrows, and have it be profitable at each sort of stable equilibrium is a really important piece that I think for all the talk about how he's a visionary and builds these great products, he's still really economical about how he goes about it, which I think is very, very overrated or underrated piece of his genius.

[Josh]

Well, another thing you do a good job in the book of is you give multiple examples of the same idea. And again, all these ideas relate to each other. And so he talks about, like, why did they move, remove the landing legs. I think this is of Starship 3. And he says, again, here we try to think to the limit of physics. The problem with landing legs is they add mass. We have to protect them during reentry. And we have to get a giant rocket from wherever it landed back onto the launch stand. That is tricky. I was trying to think of the limit. What's the fastest way to achieve reusability? It would be to land on the launch stand. So he talks about, you know, planes land and then they immediately take off again. That's what we want to do with rockets. It would be to land on the launch stand. Why not just have it land on the arms of the tower it launches from? So again, which is a crazy thing, when we talked about it first, it sounded batshit crazy. Direct quote from Elon to custom build a giant tower to catch the heaviest flying object ever made with mechanical arms, pluck it out of the air. But we did it. It is an epic sight. Giant robot arms catching a giant rocket.

[Max Olson]

That is a great story because it exemplifies a few different things. Right. There's the thinking in limits part. Like, what is the Platonic ideal? How good could it be if we were just dreaming? And then it seemed impossible? And he's got a really specific tactic he does when he's exploring. He says what's possible within the absurd. And so he takes these crazy ideas and throws them out. And people are like, that's crazy. That wouldn't work. That would be absurd. And he asks, what would it take? Don't tell me. No, tell me. What would have to be true? What would it take to make it possible? What he finds and what this comes up over and over again is it stories is what first seems impossible. And people push back and he sort of gives it like a day. And then people start to churn on it a little bit. And then he asks more questions, questions, more assumptions. Ask what it would take again. And then within a week, people start to be like, wait a minute, this might be possible. And I think he's been through this loop enough times where people are like, no, that's crazy. They dismiss it. He pushes back. He says, what would it take? He says, do the brainstorm. Says, just spend a day or spend a week week designing it. Just assume that it's possible and start working on it to see how far you can get. And so many times, what seems impossible. There's no fundamental law of physics reason why this is impossible. And I think all of this actually goes back to his belief that engineering is magic and the laws of physics are the limit of the magic. And so not analogy, not what have we designed before, not what problems have already been solved, not what do our current methods let us achieve, but what is the limit of what's theoretically possible? And he's just going to be unreasonable in pushing as far as he can towards that. And he's seen over and over again that when he holds that line and asks what would it take? And says, keep trying. I know it's hard. Keep trying. You've just got to muscle through. There's no reason this isn't possible. Show me why it's impossible or keep working on it. And people respond to those pushes and do achieve things that. That seem impossible over and over again.

[Josh]

I think the book that you wrote is really important. What I want to do is I'm going to buy a thousand copies. I will leave a link down in the show notes, so maybe the first thousand people that click that link, I'll buy a copy of the book for them. Because I do think what you're doing is think about how crazy it is. Elon has a 35 year career as an entrepreneur so far, or something around that way. You spent five years and thousands of hours distilling the way he thinks about building companies and products and new technologies into a book somebody could read in five hours. Ten hours like that is insanely valuable. I do want to end our conversation with what I think is most important to you and I and what we're both trying to do with work. This entire reason I'm doing this new show is like a celebration of capitalism. It is a love letter to capitalism. It is. Hey, you know what? If you want a role model, how about somebody that started a company company that built a product, made somebody else's life better, that created wealth for their employees, that created jobs, they created wealth for themselves and their family. Like these things should be applauded. And it's exactly what Elon says here. So I want to close here. He says it is insanely hard to build and ship useful products to a large number of people. There's a hell of a lot of difference between a company that has shipped a product and one that has it. It is night and day. If you create great products and services which create wealth that should be applauded, you increase the standard of living of the country and perhaps the world. Thanks for writing the book. Thanks for taking the time to have this conversation.

[Max Olson]

Thank you for having me. I'm honored.

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I hope you enjoyed this episode. Please remember to subscribe wherever you're listening and leave a review. And make sure you listen to my other podcast, founders. For almost a decade, I've obsessively read over 400 biographies of history's greatest entrepreneurs, searching for ideas that you can use in your work. Most of the guests you hear on this show first found me through founders.