Oct 25, 2026 · 56 min · 12 segments
What makes Elon Musk capable of building companies that attempt what others consider impossible? Eric Jorgenson, author of The Book of Elon and The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, has spent years…
will um eric let's chat about elon's biggest drivers for success Is there a formula? What did you find when you were researching all of this for the book?
There's a few that are kind of like his personal traits and then a few that are selectable.
And so I think if you're a young person who's sort of like, all right, who do I need to become in order to accomplish something incredible? So Elon is very multifaceted.
So he's an engineer, he studied economics, and he has this very fundamental sort of physics understanding, not just an engineering education, but the physics understanding underneath it.
And he's been working in teams to build products since he was, I don't know, 22.
He's got a really well-rounded sense of the trade-offs that are necessary when making a product and then has experience building companies.
In terms of the problems that he tackles, because I think this is also important, he picks things that other people aren't working on that are key capabilities for the future.
And it was because he had this very zoomed out view of what technology could exist in 20 years.
would support a really big company that would be you know adding a new capability to humanity is kind of how i think about it like what powers do we wish humanity had um do we want to live to 120 do we want to be able to travel the solar system do we want to have flying cities do we like do we want to cure cancer do we want to eradicate all disease like all of these things that are like you see them portrayed in social media or in sci-fi but people are not actively yet working on yeah But you can conceive, especially with the rate of change increasing that you talked about, the good news is that the future arrives ever faster, right? And so these people who are plotting out these curves of like, okay, if we continue to work on life expectancy, if we continue to cure diseases, if we continue to advance robotics, if we continue to improve the cost of energy, where can we be? We can live through another industrial revolution, which is just this incredibly wonderful and fascinating thing i mean you know our grandparents and great-grandparents got to be like born using an outhouse literally no indoor plumbing yeah and live to see the moon landing totally um and and see you know hundred story buildings built a mile high like that is an that's course living through that rate of physical change is unbelievable and in our lifetimes the last you know 30 years we've basically seen computers in the internet but we haven't seen and so this this wave of like robotics entering our daily lives i think is going to kind of kick off this next like oh we have a whole different standard of living now totally because of these technological changes and it's going to unlock all these other opportunities
what do you think that standard of living will look like in in 10
years time 10 years is harder to predict, I think, in some ways than 30, because the human element of how quickly do we adopt things is really pivotal in the 10-year period and less pivotal in the 30-year period, because it'll just be more obvious that people will adopt it.
Okay, let's go with 30 years.
What do you think 30 years will look like?
I think we'll have a lot fewer people, fewer human beings doing dangerous or dirty or highly undesirable physical labor.
There might be laws against humans operating like dangerous physical machinery.
I think we will have cheaper food, cheaper energy, basically infinite entertainment.
will um eric let's chat about elon's biggest drivers for success Is there a formula? What did you find when you were researching all of this for the book?
There's a few that are kind of like his personal traits and then a few that are selectable.
And so I think if you're a young person who's sort of like, all right, who do I need to become in order to accomplish something incredible? So Elon is very multifaceted.
So he's an engineer, he studied economics, and he has this very fundamental sort of physics understanding, not just an engineering education, but the physics understanding underneath it.
And he's been working in teams to build products since he was, I don't know, 22.
He's got a really well-rounded sense of the trade-offs that are necessary when making a product and then has experience building companies.
In terms of the problems that he tackles, because I think this is also important, he picks things that other people aren't working on that are key capabilities for the future.
And it was because he had this very zoomed out view of what technology could exist in 20 years.
would support a really big company that would be you know adding a new capability to humanity is kind of how i think about it like what powers do we wish humanity had um do we want to live to 120 do we want to be able to travel the solar system do we want to have flying cities do we like do we want to cure cancer do we want to eradicate all disease like all of these things that are like you see them portrayed in social media or in sci-fi but people are not actively yet working on yeah But you can conceive, especially with the rate of change increasing that you talked about, the good news is that the future arrives ever faster, right? And so these people who are plotting out these curves of like, okay, if we continue to work on life expectancy, if we continue to cure diseases, if we continue to advance robotics, if we continue to improve the cost of energy, where can we be? We can live through another industrial revolution, which is just this incredibly wonderful and fascinating thing i mean you know our grandparents and great-grandparents got to be like born using an outhouse literally no indoor plumbing yeah and live to see the moon landing totally um and and see you know hundred story buildings built a mile high like that is an that's course living through that rate of physical change is unbelievable and in our lifetimes the last you know 30 years we've basically seen computers in the internet but we haven't seen and so this this wave of like robotics entering our daily lives i think is going to kind of kick off this next like oh we have a whole different standard of living now totally because of these technological changes and it's going to unlock all these other opportunities
what do you think that standard of living will look like in in 10
years time 10 years is harder to predict, I think, in some ways than 30, because the human element of how quickly do we adopt things is really pivotal in the 10-year period and less pivotal in the 30-year period, because it'll just be more obvious that people will adopt it.
Okay, let's go with 30 years.
What do you think 30 years will look like?
I think we'll have a lot fewer people, fewer human beings doing dangerous or dirty or highly undesirable physical labor.
There might be laws against humans operating like dangerous physical machinery.
I think we will have cheaper food, cheaper energy, basically infinite entertainment.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
