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Founder's Story
The Elon Musk Playbook, Space Mining, and the Next Wave Nobody Sees Yet | Ep. 390 with Eric Jorgenson CEO of Scribe Media
00:24:19
Daniel Robbins sits down with author and Scribe Media CEO Eric Jorgenson to unpack how he “curates, not writes” books that feel like mentorship from the world’s most consequential thinkers. Eric explains why he built a book on Elon Musk’s thinking, why purpose is Musk’s real unfair advantage, and why the next massive wave may be AI plus biology, CRISPR, and nanotech. They also dive into the collapse and rebuild of Scribe, why books are becoming even more valuable in an AI era, and why writing one great book can be the lighthouse that changes your entire life.
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- [00:00]
A
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- [00:52]
B
From Geico Subconscious News, I'm Tammy. Racing thoughts broadcasting from your brain. You think you live in a pretty safe place, but you just heard about a break in four miles away, which isn't close, but it isn't far either. You know Art Palpitations is on the scene.
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C
I sure am, Tammy. And I don't even know why I drove out here, because as you know, you got customized renters insurance through Geico, so your stuff is covered.
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B
Oh, well, that's great. Any sign of crime there, Art?
- [01:14]
C
Just some light littering, Tammy, but like they say, a little litter can lead to a lot.
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B
Wise words. It feels good to worry less. It feels good to Geico.
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D
Okay, so Eric Jorgensen, AKA Eric Jorgensen. I never start with people's names, but I feel like because you have a dual name, I'm just gonna start there. Right? You wrote this book about Elon Musk, and I've heard, I've read other books about Elon Musk, but why the heck did you write this book about Elon Musk?
- [01:49]
E
Because he's the greatest entrepreneur of our generation and maybe the greatest of all time. Like, there's so much to learn. Because I think social media would have happened without Zuckerberg. Search engines would have happened without Larry and Sergey. E. Commerce would have happened without Bezos. Like, Elon is alone in going balls to the wall, Max risk at the craziest companies on earth and making them work even at the risk of financial ruin and public embarrassment and tackling these, like, grand problems that humanity faces. Like, I think he's just absolutely singular.
- [02:24]
D
So, you know, when people do movies and they, they portray characters, right? What is it like character acting? I forget the name. Did you kind of become the same like you had to almost like become Elon Musk? I know you've read for five years everything he've done. How did you get in where you really understood him enough to write this book?
- [02:41]
E
Yeah, so the weird thing about my books is I don't write about people. I build books that feel like they're talking to you. So I want it when you read this book, for it to feel like you're sitting across the table from Elon and he's like teaching you everything he knows. I want you to have a highlight on every page. I want you to feel like you are being personally mentored by this incredible entrepreneur. And so what I do to create that is I don't, I don't write. I. I curate. And so I collect everything he's ever said publicly. I got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of sources and I spent thousands of hours going through all of them, pulling out all the best nuggets and building this like mosaic, like a jigsaw puzzle that reads really smoothly and all the ideas kind of go together and it's easy to reference, it's easy to understand. All the stories and examples are really tight and try to edit it to be real smooth, like simple, easy read that is just jam packed with ideas.
- [03:30]
D
Was there any aha moment when you were reading through all this stuff where something clicked and you're like, wow, I never thought about this.
- [03:37]
E
Yeah, everybody knows that he's like successful and he finds a way to win. But what I didn't appreciate, I knew this was going to be a book like how Elon does it. I didn't know how big of a role purpose was going to play. And the fact that he's been trying to solve these enormous civilizational problems that he came up with in college. As a college kid, he's been thinking about space travel and humanity becoming multi planetary and electric cars. And it wasn't until years later that he saw the technology sort of fall into place and had the resources to go after these crazy companies. And that's a big part of his secret sauce is that he's just has this higher mission that he's serving and he makes all these like decisions that are insane from a financial point of view and that are so risky. But he's. Because he's mission driven and he attracts this incredible talent and he gets so much more out of them. He drives people harder and he pushes himself harder than just to generate profit because he's got these big crazy goals that he's trying to achieve.
- [04:35]
D
I, I, I think we could say that he's become a very polarizing figure the last few years where half the people I talk to absolutely love him, think he's a genius. The other half, the people are very nervous about him. Do you think there's a misconception that you learned?
- [04:53]
E
Yeah, I think that's, that's generous to say they're, they're nervous. I think it's very, I don't know, it's a little sad. I lament the fact that no one can do anything political without becoming immediately polarizing. And I understand Elon was probably going to be polarizing any because he's one of the most fam and wealthy people on earth. But I think it's actually a great thing that the richest person alive is an entrepreneur, an American immigrant, an engineer who risked his own money over and over again to solve new problems. Like throughout all of history, the richest person alive has been like a monarch or a conqueror or an heir or like an oil, you know, chic or something like that. You know, a lot of the controversy seems to come from, from headlines or political enemies or you know, about these relationships with his father or people who make judgments about his personal life that's none of their business without any information. And I think we all have something to learn from somebody, from everybody. And there's a lot to respect and appreciate about what he's been through and what he can teach because he's lived this absolutely singular life. We need to be able to disagree with people in part and appreciate and respect the parts of them that are good. And I think I've already seen people read this book who were deep Elon skeptics and really update, enrich their understanding of why he does what he does, how he thinks, what he does it for. And there's already a few of the Amazon reviews, honestly that say that and people that came in really close minded and an Elon fan sort of in their life like gifted this book to them and just said like, just read it, just give it a few pages, tell me what you disagree with in this book. Like just you're an open minded person, I know you to be reasonable. This person is not like, you know, the pure evil that the headlines are claiming. So please just give it a chance, give it a read and see what you think and we can talk about it. And I'm so encouraged to see some of that like that open minded, sane center, like having that conversation again, like that's not the goal of the book. But I'm really. My soul is encouraged that that happens sometimes.
- [06:50]
D
Yeah, I've read stories that his mom has said and his brother. And when I heard this stories, I'm like, ah, that kind of explains some of the characteristics I can totally see. If you were the richest person on earth right now, what problem would you solve?
- [07:05]
E
I would be working on nanotechnology. I think that's when I ask myself that kind of what important thing is nobody working on? I think energy. A lot of people are working on it, but it's still underrated. The thing that I just do not see enough time, talent, money and energy going into in like the venture and tech community is nanotechnology. And I think the combination of AI and CRISPR is going to really create this massive sort of wave breakthrough that's going to happen over the next couple of decades. And so I think in the same way that if you were really smart about getting really smart about machine learning and reinforcement learning and AI over the past 10, 20 years, this is your moment to get insanely rich and be like the center of everything and solve all these incredible problems. I think that moment is coming. It's hard to predict when, but that moment is coming in the next 10 or 20 years in biology, nanotechnology, genetics.
- [07:54]
D
I feel like I'm the only one that's recently talked about crispr. I was thinking about this the other day. I was telling someone, I'm so excited to see what happens with CRISPR and AI and all this. I don't, I don't feel like there's. Because there's so much LLM talk and energy and data centers, there's not enough public talk around health and AI. And I've talked to, I mean, the people that I've, I've heard from and the things that they're doing is amazing. Is there something, though, that scares you right now? That you're like, wow, you wake up in the middle of the night, you're like, I wonder if AI is going to do this.
- [08:27]
E
No, I'm more, I'm much. I'm very optimistic, like maybe to a fault. I'm not an AI doomer. I'm worried. The thing that worries me the most is what a small number of unhinged, insane humans will do with AI, Right? Like high leverage terrorism, basically, or like extremists empowered by AI. That's what worries me. Not. I'm not worried about the alignment problem. Seems really abstract.
- [08:54]
D
You've talked to some. I know you've had three books, obviously. Well, this is Your third book of a unconventional, successful thinker, like some of the most successful unconventional thinkers of our generation, some might say. Was there a common thread among these three people?
- [09:12]
E
I think that they're all forward thinking. I think that they were underrated as teachers. Maybe that's the common thread. I think Naval is this incredible gift for distillation and he's extremely well rounded. I think biology sees around more corners and has a real gift for articulating sort of uncomfortable and unconventional truths that help you navigate the world. And I think Elon is the greatest builder and the greatest visionary, frankly. Like, he zooms out and picks big problems that seem absolutely impossible. He's got a gift for. I wrote this in the introduction for dragging the impossible into the possible. And I want so many more people to appreciate that that's possible. And we are surrounded every day. We use miracles of the past, right? We use things that were previously impossible and absolutely take it for granted every single minute of the day. And when you open your eyes to that and you stay amazed, there's a really different way that you go through life, and it's a really different way that you tackle things that other people tell you are impossible.
- [10:22]
D
Well, I'm excited for the SpaceX IPO if that happens in June, supposedly. I'm pretty excited for that. I. I met with this firm recently. They've raised $2 billion and they're putting a lot of emphasis on space and space technology. And the stuff that they were saying was insane. Like there's like rare earth minerals on the moon that are could be worth trillions of dollars and like all these other things. But then they were also talking about putting hotels in space. And I'm like, what space? Obviously Elon's talking about data centers in space. Are you excited about anything with space?
- [10:57]
E
We were investors in the first commercial mission into deep space, which is astroforge's space mining asteroid mining company. This is one of those things that sounds a hundred years away until you understand the unlocks that have happened. So there's three things and I learned this from the founder, like Matt Guy. He's an incredible on podcasts and they share everything that they're learning. So I do recommend people ch out astroforge and learn about it. But basically we used to think there are only a few thousand near Earth asteroids. And now with the increase in quality of telescopes, we can see that there are millions. And we can see them with high enough resolution to be able to tell how fast they're moving, what composition they are by the light that they reflect and how many axes they're spinning on, so how difficult they are to land on. And then at the same time the launch costs obviously have come way down and there's a much more rich supply chain of parts for satellites and spacecraft. And so all those things combined, you know, there was a company 20 years ago that tried to do asteroid mining, but they raised and spent $300 million without really making a ton of progress. And now these sort of enabling background switches have flipped that change the context. So I think we are going to have metal from space on Earth in 10 years probably, and this is the right time to start in earnest building that company and that capability. But it's nowhere on most people's radar. They don't appreciate the next leap, that they don't appreciate the leaf that SpaceX made, let alone what Starship is going to do, let alone that there's companies like Longshot that are building like ground based, near zero marginal cost launch things.
- [12:27]
C
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- [12:57]
B
From Geico Subconscious News, I'm Tammy. Racing thoughts tonight. You just left for work and had a non specific feeling that something was happening to your place and it wasn't good Dan.
- [13:06]
C
Exactly, Tammy. It could be smoke damage, theft or, or just too much caffeine, but you can't stop thinking about it.
- [13:12]
B
But with renters insurance through Geico, your stuff is covered so you don't have to worry.
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C
And that's great. Cause the weekend is coming up and it's chock full of social obligations that are ready to fill that void.
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B
Oh boy, will they dad. It feels good to worry less. It feels good to Geico.
- [13:27]
A
We all prefer things a certain way, like groceries. If you want groceries just how you like them, you gotta try Instacart. They have a new preference picker that lets you pick how ripe or unripe you want your bananas. Shoppers can see your preferences upfront, helping guide their choices. Because when it comes to groceries, the details matter. Instacart, get groceries just how you like.
- [13:48]
E
Think about very first principles, you know, to borrow neonism, like most of the Raw material in the solar system is not on earth, it is in space. And so like most of the economy in the long run is going to end up off Earth, not on earth is a long term view, but it's also hard to argue with.
- [14:07]
D
It's like long term, but things come by fast. Like it's crazy even just thinking about generative AI three years ago to now or whatever technology, right? Like the advancements now is so fast. I didn't know that too about all the minerals and all the things. I was just thinking too about the SpaceX phone. Like I'm like, that's going to kill like every phone carrier. I mean every time I'm on a plane and I have to use the satellite Internet, that sucks. I'm like SpaceX. I actually, I'm sorry. Starlink. I have Starlink, by the way. I have Starlink in Southeast Asia. It's amazing.
- [14:43]
E
Yeah, I think there's a lot of books are Lindy basically like they've been around for thousands of years. It's a really unique, powerful format. There's a lot of studies that say that you remember things better when you read them in a physical form. Also, like we stare at screens so much all day, every day that, you know, sometimes it just feels good to read. And reading expands your mind in a way that, you know, passive consumption even through, through audiobooks doesn't. Like I say, books are powered by your attention and you actually have to like pull the words into your mind in a way that, that really stretches and improves it. I think. You know, David Senner says serious people read and like they always will. There's, there's a lot of good that can come from, you know, writing a book, creating a book. There's still like this bizarre prestige arbitrage in writing a book that like I'm experiencing personally that I find very interesting. But yeah, we helped hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people write and publish books.
- [15:36]
D
I love that it's like democratizing the ability for you to tell your story. Because I think before there's only if you went to major publishing, it's very hard to get a deal. Only a certain people could do it. You had to be famous. But what about all these other incredible people that I feel deserve to get their tories their story told? So it is a very traditionally old industry. As an entrepreneur and executive, how do you look at it in terms of what's broken and what problem you're solving?
- [16:05]
E
Yeah, I think the first one is exactly what you said, which is just there's this huge, huge number of people that would really benefit from writing a book and that their books would benefit readers. But traditional publishing only cares about the books that they think can sell 100,000 copies, usually in hardcover and usually through traditional channels like bookstores. That's how the whole industry is set up. It's 150 year old business model and it relies on giving an advance and an author giving a manuscript and they take it out. But the context that that business model is created in has changed almost 180 in all of the key aspects. Right. You used to need a huge upfront capital run, upfront capital to fund a print run. But now most of these books are print on demand. So you as an independent author don't need somebody else to front your print run. You also don't need access to the special distribution networks because everybody can just post their books for sale on Amazon and IngramSpark. You also don't necessarily connections to these centralized media. It doesn't really matter if the New York Times writes about your book anymore because people just recommend books to each other on social media. And so the sort of democratization has. There's no gatekeeper anymore. There's not even a gate. But the traditional publishers are still sort of standing there trying to extract a toll. And we're just saying like look, we're here to help you facilitate your vision. We're a team of experts and professionals who can help you execute your vision where you keep 100% creative legal and financial control of your book. We're just here to help you do it at a really high level where you can be proud to put your book in front of anybody in your network and have it reflect well on you. Your book should be the very best of you. It should precede you. You should be exceptionally proud of it. And it's hard work and it's a big investment. So you know, I say if you're going to half asset, don't ask it at all. Just go do something else. But if you want to do a book, do it right. Your book's going to outlive you. Make it something that you can really put to work for you and, and see an roi because if you do it right, it'll be a multiplier effect on everything else you for the rest of your life.
- [18:03]
D
Best quote I've ever heard coming off this show. If you're going to half ass it, don't half don't ask it at all. Yeah, I'm going to put your face and like the quote you know, like they do on. On social. So what is, what is a realistic expectation of somebody? I know so many people, so many entrepreneurs and executives. They're like, I want to write a book. And I, I mean, I wrote this book right here. So to you, like, I know how much work and energy and effort goes into it.
- [18:30]
E
It's a lot.
- [18:31]
D
What do you think is a certain expectation people should be thinking about before they write the book or for planning during the whole process?
- [18:39]
E
I think you should just have a really clear understanding of your goals and be. Be honest with yourself about them going in. We have authors whose goal. They don't care how much money they make. They don't care how many people read it. They just want to impact one person. They want to save one life. They want to, you know, prevent one person from breaking bad. Like, literally, we have some of those authors. We have some authors who come in with career aspirations, right? Like, they want to transition into a speaking or they want to get out of executive. Out of an executive role and into a consulting thing. They want to. They're retiring and they want to just kind of be in their, like, tribal elder era and have this sort of codify their wisdom and give back to their community. All of those are. Are awesome things, but they, they mean a little different thing in terms of strategy and how you position the book and how you write it and how you take it to market and what marketing tactics you. You go after. So I always say you need a. A selfless reason to write the book. You need to be giving something to the reader, and you need a selfish reason. You need to be really honest with yourself about what you want out of this project. And then we need to just, like, align those things. The reader's interest, your interest, and the content and positioning of the book itself. And usually if we get all those three things right, everybody ends up happy at the end of the day. But everybody's got, you know, unique and individual goals. And there's a bad reason to write a book. Well, that's not true. There are bad reasons to write a book. But most people that I talk to and work with have a wonderful altruistic reason and a very reasonable and interesting selfish reason. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's a massive endeavor, and you should have a clear expectation of what you want to get out of it. And if you can't identify that or you don't feel comfortable with it, like, let's talk through it and figure it out.
- [20:15]
D
You came in to scribe at a Transitional time, a transitional period. And I think this is interesting for a lot of people. There's a massive amount of companies that are going out of business. People are retiring. They're shifting their business. I think it's. It's a great example of being able to go in and buy a business or buy business assets and be able to continue that business. Was there something you learned during that process?
- [20:43]
E
I learned many things. I learned turnarounds are hard. I learned that just trying to be kind of helpful pays off in surprising ways. Sometimes the full story is probably too much for. For this format. But extremely briefly, you know, I was a customer, a really happy customer of Scribe. I super appreciated, you know, the company that Tucker and Zach started. Tucker, Max and Zach Oberon. And then as they sort of transitioned out as. As founders, the person that they sold the company to mismanaged it. Google it for full details. But I was an author who got caught up in that bankruptcy as a customer, and I really love Scribe, and I thought what they did was super important and super valuable. And publishing my first book changed my life. And I love the people I worked with. So I just sort of showed up and started making phone calls, trying to help the company get out of a tough spot. And what ended up happening was, you know, the first incarnation of Scribe went. Went bankrupt. But some people that I knew started a new company and bought the assets from the bank and really set about rebuilding this. This incredible business. And to my surprise, called me and asked me to join a CEO after the transaction had been completed. So that was August 2023 that I came in, and I've been learning a lot since then. You know, it's my first CEO leadership role. And it's been extremely fun to kind of get to now work on a company that I was a customer of and an evangelist of. And, yeah, it's been. It's been an extremely exciting, like, and fun adventure. And it's so awesome to get to still use. You know, I publish my books with Scribe. I am an author with Scribe, and. And the CEO and get to really, like, eat our own dog food and feel what it's like from an author's point of view and come away with that with a million new ideas of how to do things, you know, new and better all the time.
- [22:36]
D
What was the Hair Club for Men? I'm not only. I'm not only the president, I'm also a client.
- [22:41]
E
No, that's a tagline.
- [22:43]
D
Yeah, the tagline. That's. That's you. That's the 2026 tagline. I like that. Yeah. Which I think.
- [22:51]
E
Go ahead.
- [22:52]
D
No, no, you go, you go.
- [22:53]
E
I didn't realize that this is actually like so weird to people in traditional publishing who, like, refuse to publish their own books because they think it's like a weird ethical overlap. I'm like, oh, how would you not want to publish your own books? Like, from a, like, tech Silicon Valley point of view, it's like, of course you use your own product. You be. It'd be insane not to. How could you, you know, purport to like, really be a fan and believe in, in your product if you don't use it?
- [23:20]
D
I know all about the feeling. I tread lightly on what I like to say because I'm currently right. I just wrote a book that came out with Penguin, so I understand the traditional space of things. And I would highly suggest for people to check out Scribe and check out Stripe Media because I really feel like what you guys are doing makes most sense for most people. And I could say that. So I wrote this book Unlimited Possibilities, and it was inspired. Unlimited possibility is the moment in your life when you do something that you thought was a barrier that you never thought would happen. What was an unlimited possibility moment for you in your life when you achieved something or broke through something that you didn't think was possible?
- [24:03]
E
I mean, it is. I have a black and white line in my life between when that Almanaca Naval was published. You know, I was about 30 years old and I've been working in Silicon Valley for a long time. I worked at a company that was like, high flying, but didn't end up, you know, becoming a household name or a successful exit. But I've been like, tweeting and blogging along the way. And you know, when Elon Musk hires somebody, he looks, he says he looks for evidence of exceptional ability. And I think in retrospect that the almanac and of all being published was my first, like broad scale evidence of exceptional ability in my life is the thing that people now know me for. It is the thing that sort of became. It changed who I got introduced to. It changed what I got invited to. It changed how people saw me. It like preceded me in a bunch of important ways and it helped me. You know, I tell people writing a book is like building a lighthouse to gather your people. And so, like, the people that are attracted to that book and the ideas that I chose to put in it are almost inevitably my people. And I'm very excited to meet them and build relationships with them and talk to them. And it's just led to so many good things in my life, not least of which is like, you know, two more books. But the other is like, I'm CEO and scribe now because of that book and because of the experience I had there and studying naval in depth and writing the biology book is what informed, you know, my idea to start a small venture fund and like invest in some of the companies that we talked about. You know, the gene editing and the space mining and the space launch companies. It was absolutely a portal that I went through. And that's why I'm so passionate about getting other people to write books. I'm sure that there's many, many, many things that you could do that become your moment of unlimited possibility. But this was mine. And it's one that nobody can stop you from doing. And it's a big, long term creative endeavor, but one person can tackle it and can fit it in their head. And it's one file, one artifact can then use for the entire rest of your life if you do it right. And it'll outlive you. Right. We're still reading books from 2,000 years ago. And just from a, like, community and family standpoint, I think it's so important to work hard to preserve what you know. If you spend your whole life tweeting and then fall over dead like those tweets are dust. But I know, you know, I'm going to leave a bookshelf behind for. For my family. And there's no object I wish existed more in the world than a book written by my dad. And I, you know, I know I'll at least always have that.
- [26:24]
D
That's amazing. You're only one book away. You're only one book away for changing your life. Book of Elon, CEO of Scribe Media, Elon Musk. Book.orgscribe media.com Eric, it's amazing. Amazing.
- [26:41]
E
Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. I appreciate it very much.
- [26:44]
D
I've been wanting to talk to you for a few years because somebody had told me that you're incredible. And I'm like, I need to get Eric on. But thank you so much, by the way, for joining today. I can't wait to read the book. I'm sure it's epic. And now my next book I gotta. I gotta publish with Scribe. To be honest. I need to.
- [26:59]
E
We'd love to have you, man. Come on in. Water's fine.