The Exchanges

Q What do you think Elon Musk would say about mistakes?

A They're an absolutely vital part of long-term success. If you stack up a few of the kind of aphorisms that you hear him say a lot of times, he's actually encouraging these small failures. He's mandating small failures because that's how you find the limits of what works. Um, you don't know if you have something really an elegant design until you've taken away more things than you need to. You see what breaks, then you add back the essential, right? He says, if you're not adding back 10% of what you removed, you're not removing enough. So you have this clutter, you have mess, you have over engineering, you have redundancy, and it's only when you push things with something to the point of breaking it that you learn what's really vital. Um, he also says in hiring, he's asking for people like, what problem did you solve and what mistakes did you make along the way to solving it? What walls did you have to bounce off? He wants to work with people who understand how to make a mistake and iterate because reality is the ultimate teacher. And so the organizations are designed to Iterate quickly, move fast, uh, fail almost intentionally, and then learn from that failure as quickly as humanly possible.

AI assessment note: “They're an absolutely vital part of long-term success.”

Q I just love, like the amount I torture myself is next level. You need to have some kind of rage demon in your skull that drives you, or I am wired for war. I mean, they just make you want to just pound your chest and tag your spreadsheet, you know, as I do. But like, what do you think are the craziest stories of Elon going into hardcore mode?

A Uh, these insane surges that he does, um, sometimes warranted, sometimes unwarranted, but there's, there's many, many stories, and a lot of them are small, but it sets the culture. There's one about the, uh, building dome for Starship. They'd spent months trying to, like, weld a dome for Starship that fit over the, this, like, uh, stainless steel cone that was gonna go over the top of the rocket, and they hadn't gotten it done for months, and he just showed up at the site, was like, we're gonna have a dome done by Dodd. Cancel everything. You're not going fucking home. Stay here. And they're like, well, we don't have this, this thing that we need. And he's like, improvise, grab that thing over there, measure it out, approximate it. Like, and they failed, but they had a dome done by nine AM instead of dawn. And so, you know, a, 12 hours later, they solved this thing that had been unsolved for months. And whether that was the bottleneck at any given time, probably not. Um, but those stories add up and they propagate through the culture. Um, you know, he famously stacked Starship, like, months before it was even close to launch, and it wasn't because it needed to be done, it wasn't because it was a bottleneck, but he said now people started sharing photos of this absolutely behemoth rocket, and it started to feel more real and become this thing, and so it seemed right. Um, but the…

AI assessment note: “There's one about the, uh, building dome for Starship.”

Q What would Naval say about how to become luckier? Like, how could you become luckier?

A I think the, the path towards luck is, you know, you can follow those things up. You can, Sort of go from one level to another. You can do luck through persistence and effort that then becomes a little bit more of luck through, or I have a feel for the, the dynamics. Um, and if you really, if you gain enough information through the persistence and reputation through the persistent luck, you'll have better information on where the luck might be heading and you can sort of meet it there and position yourself for it. And if you do that enough times over time, like You become the only person who can do it. So if we use the real estate example that uses for leverage and just like take that as like, you know, if you're a, if you're starting off as a general contractor or handyman, like you don't just wait around for jobs, you go knock on doors. If you knock on doors and do a great job, you'll start working more and more and get higher and higher quality referrals. If you are doing a bunch of work in one particular neighborhood, you start to learn like maybe that neighborhood is up and coming and a new development is going to move in. And then you can, You can buy land ahead of the development, or you can invest in the person who's coming in to, like, renovate this neighborhood, and if you do that a few times, then you become, you know, the person who builds the developments in the ci…

AI assessment note: “You can do luck through persistence and effort that then becomes a little bit more”

Q If we were gonna get really tactical with it, and somebody wanted to hone their desire plus their courage, what would you tell somebody listening right now? How do you, how do you get more courage, and how do you listen to that little voice inside of your head more often?

A This is not a Navalism, but I, I know people who swear by this, which is just like a morning brain dump on paper. Um, the process of externalizing these thoughts, um, somehow helps you evaluate them and it forces you to be honest. And so if you see what sounds like absolute certain reality in your head of like, I have to be this or become this or get this, or I will never be happy. As soon as you write it down, you're like, that's stupid. But if you just live with it in your head the whole time, you're like, you could feel your body responding to it. Um, and that, that practice of externalizing it just helps you observe it, uh, ration rationally. And it's, it's a, it's a shortcut to doing that. Meditation is the same way. It helps you separate sort of, um, the evaluator, like the observed from the observant, like see your own thoughts from above, but writing it is, is a shortcut to doing it. And that's, Um, a helpful method. And, and by the same token, like doing that over time, like you can only write, I hate this job. I want to quit so many times before you're like, Oh my God. You know, you will respond to observing that over time. Um, you know, whatever it is, like if you stay present with it, uh, the courage I think will eventually sort of culminate and you will manifest that in some ways.

AI assessment note: “which is just like a morning brain dump on paper”

Q feedback, and reality. He also has this take of, like, maybe some people think he's anti-empathetic, or he's too tough on feedback. Like, in your, in your studying him, what parts are you like, we should all emulate this? And what parts are you like, I think even he would have regrets on this, or are there any? And it's just public, you know, sort of, uh, perception of him.

A I think the, one of the things he, I mean, he is unique in the fact that he is on the spectrum, right? He has Asperger's, he's been public about this, and to some extent he has a little bit of a biological advantage in discounting sort of like the feelings or emotions of others, right? And Peter Thiel has an interesting tape, it's like, We should ask ourselves why all of the great business builders seem to have some sort of this pattern. There's a thing in the valley of being like fashionably autistic. Like, it's so weird. Like, why does it take that, uh, that type of person to like be an innovator? Uh, we should be celebrating these people. We should be socially rewarding them. But when they're disrupting something, you know, the status quo, everybody's sort of attached to the status quo in their own ways. And I think what Elon does, which is so He has a knack for it, but anyone can do it in the proper context is have empathy at the level of the mission, not empathy at the level of the individual. Right. And so that goes back to the, like, are you firing too slow, too fast? Do you have the right team? Like if what you really care about, the most important thing in the world that you bet your life on is, you know, getting, making life multi-planetary. That is a mission. That's very easy to be like, I'm so sorry. You're not cutting it. There's a better person for this seat. And …

AI assessment note: “have empathy at the level of the mission, not empathy at the level of the individual”