Why Elon Musk is The Greatest Entrepreneur Ever with Eric Jorgenson

I think it's more important actually to change your prioritization engine than it is to change your total work volume. And so, that's maybe even a better takeaway that you don't have to go to 100 hours a week. If you got a family, you've got hobbies, you're trying to stay fit, you're trying to date, I'm not an advocate for living the way Elon lives. I don't actually think the majority of people can or should attempt that. But even if you act with insane urgency on the limiting factor within 40 hours a week and then just go home, you'll be twice or 10 times as productive as everybody that just kind of like shows up and flops around on like whatever the most obvious thing to do is, right?

Eric, welcome back to the Book Thinkers Life-Changing Books podcast. I'm excited to have you on today because you are in the process of launching a brand new book, The Book of Elon.

Yes, sir.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you for having me back. I love what you've done with the place.

Yeah. Well, I tell people all the time that The Almanac of Naval Ravikant is one of my favorite books of all time. And so when I was contacted about this book, The Book of Elon, and I saw that Naval wrote the foreword to the book, I said, of course I've got to jump on this. And what I thought was really interesting is that Naval kicks off the foreword by saying, you're holding in your hands the only book an entrepreneur needs. Bring me back to the moment that he submitted that to you and you had a chance to read through it.

I mean, it was such a battle to figure out who was the right person to frame this book in this particular moment, like of all the people who know Elon and can speak to him well. But Naval, I think, carries this unbelievably powerful powerful sort of ability to bestow wisdom. Like, he's just so thoughtful. He's, he's, I think, our generation's Munger, which is of course why I wrote the Almanac on him. And I think his hit rate for just correctly identifying things is so high. And I still remember exactly where I was the first time I got a draft of this foreword that he wrote. I was sitting on a plane, embarrassingly enough, and as I was reading it, I literally teared up because it's— I'll be curious to hear what other people think about it. I think it's an incredibly moving and powerful, you know, few hundred words. But to me, it represented— he absolutely nailed everything that I hoped that other people would see in this book. And to have somebody that I respect and appreciate so much and have learned so much from and look up to see that and articulate it so powerfully for other people to frame this book for new readers was just this beautiful, like, full circle moment for me. So I'm sitting there, like, looking at WhatsApp with my— like, on a plane with a tear rolling down my cheek, a single solitary masculine tear, um, being like, man, this is just so cool.

Yeah, one of the great things about Naval is he— you're right, he spends so much time thinking before he Articulate something. And so to put this much thought into the foreword and to have such a strong stance on Elon, I think is a great way to kick off the book. Was there anything surprising about what he wrote or was it exactly what you had anticipated?

I mean, it was surprisingly perfect. And I think, you know, if you haven't been paying close attention to Naval recently, it's actually the perfect timing for him to do it because Naval is very, You know, wildly successful. He's been a great investor. He's been a great founder. He doesn't have to do anything. And he actually credits Elon with basically inspiring him to get back in the arena, keep doubling down, start a new company, and attempt an impossible thing. So, what Naval's building right now is, I think, is still in stealth at the moment, but it's literally called like the Impossible Computer Company. And he's doubling down in the same way that Elon does over and over and just keep reinvesting the winnings to try to, you know, drag the impossible into the possible. And there's so few people who have the experience and the resources to do it, but so many people just kind of kick off and retire and call it a day. And Elon is like the patron saint of doubling down, right? Like, no matter how well he's doing, he just keeps fighting and just keeps trying to go on to that next level.

Yes, he does. Yeah. And just for the audience, on page 66, there's a quote pullout here. It's a highlight and it says, This is from Elon. It says, quote, impossible is a strong word. It's just a strong word. I approach things from a physics standpoint, and the word impossible is more or less banned in physics. And so I love that philosophy. I mean, go out there and get it. Now, Naval says in his foreword that Elon is the greatest entrepreneur since Steve Jobs. Do you agree with that?

Yes. And I might— I mean, this is the LeBron-Michael Jordan debate that reasonable people can disagree. I think Elon may be, and he's still on the court, right? But I think he will be the greatest entrepreneur in history. He's certainly the greatest living entrepreneur. I think Steve Jobs is the only other recent one that even holds a candle. I think you basically have to go back to the Industrial Revolution and the robber baron era to find somebody that's even Yeah, I think so too.

I mean, you think— I think you wrote this or he did, but like Henry Ford, car culture, and then you go Steve Jobs, computer culture, and then you go Elon Musk, literally everything else modern day, right? Physics and engineering and space and the new car culture. I mean, everything in between. So, you're right. I mean, Is he, is he the greatest entrepreneur of all time? He's still on the court, so you never know.

Yeah. And, and we are gonna enter, I mean, I think the next 10 years is gonna be really interesting. Like people in tech are kind of already asking like, whoa, whoa, whoa, this guy's special, right? Like, so you see Marc Andreessen and Brian Armstrong, the founder of Coinbase, openly talking about like, hey, the most important question in tech right now is actually how is Elon Musk so productive? Like, why is what he's doing at a happen at a totally different level? And that this book is really an answer to that. It's like something special is happening, and it's continuing to happen. Right? You know, you see Jeff Bezos sort of step aside at Amazon, and like Zuckerberg is still on a great run. But Elon, I think, and it will become more clear in the next five years, maybe ten, is like if Zuckerberg had also started. Google at the same time, had done Google and Facebook and had 2 companies in the top 10 mega-cap companies that he funded, led, and was the visionary working actively on at the same time. And that's just, it's just unbelievable. Like it's an otherworldly kind of thing if you charted all this out. And it really bears scrutiny. Like what does he do that's so different from what everybody else does? And, and what can we learn from it? Frankly, like I'm not, I don't put this forth to say like, go be Elon. And most of us couldn't be if we tried and shouldn't, and we'd self-destruct along the way. But there is, even if it's, you know, you take 1% or 10% of what he does and what he can teach and bring it into your everyday life, you will find yourself more effective, better off, getting more shit done on a way more reliable basis, and just seeing things that other people don't see.

Yeah.

You know, that's, uh, he's got a really, really unique perspective.

Sorry, we've got my dog Pickles running around in the background here.

I love, I love a dog and I love Pickles, so this is a great addition.

Yes, the 3rd member of the podcast today. I, um, I want to unpack a couple of the things that you just said, and I think we will over the course of the next 20 minutes or so, but I'd like to highlight that as a student of nonfiction business and personal development. And as a young entrepreneur, somebody who's grown a company from an idea in my head to 7 figures over the last couple of years, when I read a book like this, it motivates me. I mean, I want to run through a wall. I want to work the 80 to 100 hours a week that Elon consistently talks about. And then I'm hit with the sober reality that in his own words, from 2007 to 2022, it was a very painful experience for him pulling a rabbit out of the hat every single day. And if a rabbit doesn't appear, he's dead, company's underwater. And so do I want to be Elon Musk? No. But can I take a little bit of that philosophy and improve the quality of my business and my individual output? Of course I can. And so you're right. I think that's the primary message that I'm getting so far out of the book. I'd also like to just back up a little bit and tell you, Eric, that my business Book Thinkers is in the process of implementing EOS. Are you familiar with EOS?

Yeah, we've implemented it at Scribe actually.

Okay. So you know exactly what I'm talking about. And as we're going through vision building day 3 and we're talking about the core values inside of the business and who the people we look up to are, all the members of my kind of you could say executive team, it's a small team. We're all talking about the people that we really look up to, and all of us had put down Elon Musk as well as a few other entrepreneurs that have this intense capacity for work. It's something that we all admire. And I think today's generation, specifically millennials and Gen Zs, a lot of us are so distracted. And so Elon seems like He can do all of this while tweeting at the same time, and it's just an anomaly for us. But I think one of the major lessons that I've had so far is just that he works more than the rest of us, and it's painful, but he does it anyway. So my question for you, I guess, and then I'd love a reflection on, on that subject specifically, is has studying Elon and putting 1,000 hours into collecting and organizing all this content Has it increased your own capacity for work?

Yes. Yeah. And it does. It absolutely like fires me up. It changes my relationship with doing it even though it's hard. You know, like that's really, I feel like it's easy to work when you're energized and, you know, you've got everything set aside and everything else is taken care of and it's, you know, your main 9 to 5, like that's easy. What is not easy is like, you know, going from 40 to 60 hours a week or 60 to 80 hours a week or 80 plus, like those get incrementally harder. Or if you're sick or if you're tired or if you're traveling, like there's always an excuse for that kind of like marginal hour. And how Elon uses time actually, and his compression of time and his bias to Not just a bias to action, but like he calls it, and there's literally a section, not just a chapter, a section in this book called Maniacal Urgency. And he says a sense of maniacal urgency is our operating principle. And how urgently he acts is one of the load-bearing pillars, I think, of like why he's so successful. You know, if he's addressing the limiting factor, that's one. And if he's doing it Really quickly to then like the, the, that's an order of magnitude improvement, not like a 10% improvement in productivity. If you're just doing the same thing for an extra hour every day, like that's a small, that's a small improvement relative to are you working on the right thing with intensity at the right time as soon as humanly possible? And so it's really changed. I think it's more important actually to change your prioritization engine than it is to change your total work volume. And so, that's maybe even a better takeaway that you don't have to go to 100 hours a week. If you got a family, you've got hobbies, you're trying to stay fit, you're trying to date, I'm not an advocate for living the way Elon lives. I don't actually think the majority of people can or should attempt that. But even if you act with insane urgency on the limiting factor within 40 hours a week and then just go home, You'll be twice or 10 times as productive as everybody that just kind of like shows up and flops around on like whatever the most obvious thing to do is, right?

Yes. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that takeaway of priority over volume. And if you can shift your 40 hours a week onto the, you know, the 80/20, onto the 20% that's driving 80% of the backend results, then You will grow exponentially, right?

Yeah. And it's not even 80/20, it's, you know, it's a fractal 80/20. It's the 80/20 of the 80/20. It's the 99 to 1. And so if you hear Elon in interviews and you ask, you know, what's your daily routine? What's your— how do you decide what to work on? He's like, I, I drill down to the limiting factor and I attack it. I attack the limiting factor on speed over and over and over and over again. So he's just constantly running a new triage of what's the most important thing, what's the most important thing. And he talks about, you know, if everything's going great in your department or your company, like, you're not gonna see me. I'm not like filling up my meeting, my calendar with like status meetings. I am like running to the fire or the bottleneck at all times. And like that, on the one hand, that sounds like chaos. And there are, I think, people around him who are operating, you know, the inverse of that, who are, you know, the steady, the steady hand on the wheel, but like he's the Eye of Sauron who just like deploys into wherever the limiting factor is, you know, like a battlefield general, right? He's just like driving people with greater urgency to solve the limiting factor. And he always has a sense of where that is across all of these different companies, which is wild. You know, the, the memory and the working capacity to keep track of all that stuff is incredible.

Did studying Elon and then writing with such an emphasis on his love of physics as like a first principles operating system or a language to look through or a lens to look through, did it make you want to go and study physics at a deeper level? Because I kind of had that itch. I'm like, maybe I'm not looking at things through the correct lens because I don't have a degree in engineering or something like that.

It did. And I've done some, like, you know, Charlie Munger talks about the physics mental models and stuff too. And so I've done like a very surface sort of like at the mental model level. But I'm also aware that like, I don't work on physical products that engineer at the limits of physics the way he does. And so I think there's utility to it. But like, I'm writing books and running a publishing company.

Yeah.

I do some tech investing. And so, it's helpful for that to get gut checks around what's possible and what's not. But I did not pause my life and go pursue a physics degree just to have that. But it would— if you're asking the question, if you could go back and change what you studied at 18, would you? Yeah, I would actually work much harder to get these fundamental ideas in my head at an earlier stage. And one of the big takeaways for me in this book was the value of the engineering mindsets. It's really easy to self-educate as an entrepreneur in the world, right? Like you can pick up, you know, you could learn business as you go. You can learn economics through reading a lot more easily than you can just learn engineering through reading or math through reading, things like that. So it would, it does change sort of the advice that I give others of like, don't, necessarily do as I do in terms of like what you're studying or what you prioritize.

Uh, I, I, forgive me for not knowing the answers to this since we've talked a couple of times before, but do you have a family? Do you have kids? I do.

I just had my first kid. Uh, yeah, so I, we, we got a young baby in the house.

Oh, congratulations. Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I have a 16-month-old son and—

Congratulations.

Yeah, thank you. And congratulations to you as well. And, you know, I love the advice for parents that your role is to help your kids become who they are, right? So of course, if there's a natural talent or passion that they'd like to pursue, I think it's our responsibility to help them along with that. But also looking at the traditional education system and seeing how people like Elon defy it, And all of the skills that they think are important are missing in the traditional education system. Like, it begs the question, as our children grow up now, do we put a gentle nudge towards things like an education in physics or engineering because we see how important they are for an entrepreneurial life if that's something that a kid wants to pursue?

Yeah, it's a personal question for the parent and the kid probably, but I think we're going to see Huge value. I think we're gonna see the pendulum swing sort of away from pixels and back towards atoms pretty considerably for the next couple decades. Like, that's how I'm investing. That's how I'm thinking about it. And, you know, the software explosion is gonna continue and a lot of value's gonna be created, but AI's gonna change it a lot. And a lot of competitiveness in the future is gonna, you know, move back to factories and energy and moving stuff around in the physical world. And I think that's good and healthy actually, right? Like, because that's the fundamental driver of wealth and comfort and prosperity for people and their quality of life.

Yeah, I think so too. So, back to the book, 1 Million Musks. What does that mean to you?

Yeah, it's kind of my cheeky like North Star goal for this book. And this goes back to my, like, I am a self-labeled techno utopian nut job. So, like, my previous book actually really moved me along this path, the Anthology of Biology, and a lot of the reading and investing and founders that I've met. You know, when you look at what actually drives quality of life and improvements in society, right? Like, what prevents high infant mortality? What lengthens lifespan? What makes people safe and comfortable? It is almost always an innovation in technology that You know, make something cheaper or more available or safer. You know, we take electricity for granted, but it's actually a very recent invention. And like the industry living on this side of the Industrial Revolution, our lives are much, much, much better. And looking at what one person— and I don't mean to like overcredit Elon with this— thousands and thousands of people work at these companies. They're extremely talented engineers, many, many, many people.

Yeah.

are sort of building the things that Elon Musk's name gets credited for. But if I look at what the next generation values, right? And what problems they choose to tackle and how they choose to tackle them, I think that there's something really amazing that could happen if Elon is the hero that people look up to and the model that they choose. And they say, oh, I'm gonna study physics and economics. I'm going to start a company that really does value the quality of the product over just capturing as much value as we can. I'm going to pursue impact, not necessarily profit on the, on the, like, the first degree. I'm going to continue to take risk and double down and start my new, you know, a new company, not just retire after my first that gives me generational wealth. Um, And I'm gonna tackle problems that make humanity better off in the future, right? Like, each of Elon's companies has been this like grand vision, this tackling a massive problem. Each one has focused on the product and making customers' lives better. Each one has taken massive risk. Each one has been very focused on, you know, engineering new things, like driving a breakthrough that nobody has done before. And to me, there's something incredibly Beautiful about the richest person on earth now being one, an American, two, an immigrant, three, an entrepreneur and an engineer who built his wealth through building products that grew companies, right? Previously, you know, it was Warren Buffett for a while, and like, I'm a huge fan of Warren Buffett, but he's ultimately a financier and a capital allocator, not a builder, not an engineer. And before that, it was you know, largely monarchs or oil sheikhs or something like that. There was like inheritability to it. And so somebody who built something that humanity had never seen before, uh, and spread it out around the world and made people's lives better, I think that's an incredible thing. And so making him the blueprint, and I imagine these 18-year-olds all around the world trying to figure out like, what is important in life? What is worth dedicating my life to? What are the missions that I should go after? Um, How should I go after them? Like, that's why the subtitle to this book is A Guide to Purpose and Success. We all crave meaning. We all crave a North Star that we can dedicate our lives to. And so I, I'm not saying go start an electric car company. I'm not saying like go work 100-hour weeks. You're never gonna walk in Elon's footsteps exactly, but picking up enough of him as a model to emulate. I mean, can you imagine what the world looks like in 100 years? If a million brilliant people pick up this book or pick up this idea or pick up this notion that they can add capabilities to humanity through mastering physics and engineering and economics and build something cheaper for more people that makes people's lives better and keep pushing the envelope and pushing the envelope their whole career, like, that's so, it defies imagination where we'll be if that actually happens. So, that's why 1 Million Musks, that's why I make the books free. That's why I get so excited about telling the story. That's why I evangelize like the best parts of him is because I think it's just such an exciting, it's a symbol almost like more than it is a person to just go after, go after these big problems with, with all you can and recognize that like, even if you fail, we collectively will have made progress towards these great goals. And that's the mindset he's had going into all of these projects.

Well, what a great answer. And I can see your passion for that North Star bleeding through in the response, which is a lot of fun to hear and see. How do you balance Elon's example of constantly innovating and creating brand new things where there is no demand? In fact, Inside of the book, he says, nobody was asking for electric cars, but I went out and made them anyway. Like that kind of, I see it better than everybody else versus oftentimes in the world of publishing or authoring books, you hear things like a great, a great way to know whether or not you should write a book is if there's a clear inbound demand for it.

Mm-hmm.

So that's like, Writing about something that people know they need versus writing about something that people don't know they need yet? Like, how do you reconcile both of those things happening at the same time?

Yeah, it's a really good question. Um, I think books are— I mean, books are a market where there's millions of books published every year, and that's been true for a long time, right? So that's a much more competitive thing where, you know, people are already out there looking for this, um, and they're looking sometimes for a very specific Like, you've already got those signals. Like, if I have followed you for many years and I've resonated with your content online, like, I, you know, that that book is going to sell because it contains those ideas and I already have the trust there. What Elon does is so singular and so new, right? Like, it requires this leap of imagination. And he talks about it, he talks about it as like the Platonic ideal of a product. And there's a useful like thought experiment around this is like, if all cars were already electric, would we wanna switch back to gas? And so like the, a well-instructed electric car has, you know, a few hundred moving parts relative compared to a few thousand. It runs off cleaner energy, it's quieter, it doesn't have combustible fuel inside the car with you. It doesn't require going to a gas station. It runs off of a utility that's already at your house.

Yeah.

It's cheaper if made at the same scale. So there's all these different things that sort of make it obvious that it is a better product. And so this is, you know, this kind of— Henry Ford has a famous quote, if I asked people what they would've wanted, they would've said faster horses. And if you ask people what they want, they can really only— most people only analogize from where they are today. It's like, oh, I want this additional feature. I want this, additional range. I want a bigger truck. I want a smaller, you know, more fuel-efficient car. But if you have— if you start with like the clean sheet of paper, this first principles approach that Elon talks about, then it's just really obvious that an electric car is ultimately a better thing. And it's a question of like, can you make the thing good enough, fast enough, cheap enough, and survive as a company long enough for it to become obvious that And like run that adoption curve through people. The SpaceX example, like, you know, I'll give the first principles example. Like he tried to buy a rocket and by like flying to Russia and trying to buy an intercontinental ballistic missile, and they were not kind to him and that pissed him off. And then he tried to like reframe the problem. But in doing the math, he realized that like the raw material value of the rockets were only 2 or 3%, like the actual metal that makes up the rocket is only 2 or 3% of the total cost, which signifies a very inefficient manufacturing process. If you go buy a car or you go buy an iPhone, you know, the raw material value is about 25 to 30% of the value of what you're buying. And so that's a much more high-scale, efficient manufacturing process. And so he saw that and said, well, there's an order of magnitude improvement potential right there. But not that many people were thinking about like, how much does it cost to launch something into space? And how would the market expand if you could reduce the cost of launching something into space? And so that was like, he was more familiar with the market. It takes a little bit of leap of imagination. And, you know, I think this is where him reading sci-fi for his entire life comes in, where he's like, I can think of a lot of stuff to do with cheaper rockets and getting stuff into space. Like to imagine the whole space economy unlocking if you, if you reduce the launch costs. I think it was a big driver for him. And just then realizing that Mars was like a possibility and all the human good, not just human good, but like ecosystem good. You know, if we get to Mars, we don't just save humans, but it's Noah's Ark. Like we save, we can save all of biology and consciousness as far as we're aware in the universe by just getting a little redundancy and getting some other life forms on Mars.

Did you read, uh, and are you excited for Project Hail Mary, the movie coming out soon?

Um, so yeah, I read it. Um, it's actually an incredible audiobook if you're an audiobook person.

Yeah, I listened to it.

Dude, it was so good. And yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm really excited. The early reviews for that movie are awesome. I love Ryan Gosling. Like, I think this story will lend itself really well to a movie.

Yeah, I think so too. And, uh, my wife is really excited about it. I'm not much of a sci-fi reader. I mean, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy because Elon recommended it and a couple of other books in that category. But my wife listened to the audiobook multiple times and she said, hey, you have to check this out. And so I listened to it and I agree, amazing book. But, but it's that kind of, it's that kind of movie that helps a generation think in a different way. And it's this kind of person or persona like Elon that helps an entire generation think in a different way. So. I'm so happy that you wrote the book. As we get ready to wrap up here, I wanted to ask, in spite of politics, like that subject of Elon Musk, I mean, he— it seems like today in the United States, about 50% of people can't stand him because of politics. And even though there's so much to learn, they might not be willing to have a conversation with somebody who's recommending the book about it. So just talk to me a little bit about Why you decided to write this even with all of the messiness happening today?

Yeah. Well, I, I will say like I've been following and a fan of Elon for like many, many years through his kind of come up through the tech world. And he's been a, you know, a hero in Silicon Valley since he started Tesla. Right. Um, it's only really in the last few years that he's become more of a household name and it's been, yeah, it's been turbulent. Like there were definitely days where I was like, oh man, Like, I, I'm, I'm worried that the book will be received not in the context that I meant it. Um, cuz it, you know, it's truly a collection of his most useful and timeless ideas. Like, I, I think anybody on earth can get something useful out of learning from this unique entrepreneur who's lived this incredible experience and had to go through so much pain and strife and struggle. And those are the people who refine these ideas really powerfully. Um, So I've been working on this book for years. I've had a lot of conversations about like what it would mean and how to couch it and just to be sure that it was like received with the right intentions. I'm really hopeful that anybody who's sort of just open-minded and open to developing themselves will pick it up and crack it open and kind of make up their own mind. You know, I don't expect anybody to agree with everybody about everything, but this book is a really pretty pure distillation of like his entrepreneurial operating lessons. It doesn't get into his politics. It doesn't get into his family life. There are great, I mean, if you want to go deep on Elon, like reading his Isaacson biography is really good. Like it's an amazing book. It's, yeah, it's super thorough. And what you'll see if you go there, you know, 'cause Isaacson got to follow him around for months, if not years. And so he had a level of access and did a level of research. This is just beyond like me and the scope of this project. But even reading the Isusin biography quickly debunks a lot of the kind of common headline stuff you see of like, oh, he inherited all his money. It's like his dad owned an emerald mine. It's like, no, his dad is actually like a manipulative liar with a track record of very adversarial relationships with him who was like deeply abusive to him as a kid. And that shaped a lot of who Elon is. And so like, if you want to go kind of into his psychology and That what is true or not true, like there's great resources to do it. But, you know, I know enough just from my experience to see that like a lot of what you see in headlines is just crazy. And it's, it, I think it's really unfortunate, frankly, that like as soon as you enter the political arena, like you make an enemy of 49% of the population. And, you know, 100 million people just like start saying anything that they can to discredit you. And that's a really You know, it discourages people from doing what they think is right, um, or, or getting involved. And that's a shame. Um, but regardless, I, like, I've been really encouraged by the early sort of interactions I've had with readers about this. I, uh, I'll close with a story and then, uh, that, that is like about this kind of open-mindedness. So I hired an editor to help me work on this book. Um, and his dad had been sort of in this camp of like, just read the headlines and read the articles and was like, disgusted that his son was like working on a book about Elon. He's like, I'm not reading it. I'm not touching it. I can't believe you're doing this. And over the course of months, like, uh, finally like shared just one page with him. Um, and he was like, huh. And like a couple weeks later, like shared just one other page with him, just like a chapter about his mindset around starting companies and, and then really coming from a place of love of humanity and a desire to solve a genuine problem that humans have. And so, he read that and was kind of like, huh, all right, I'll take a look at the book. And so, he read the book and then he started reading a little bit more about Tesla. And like a month later, he goes out and buys a Tesla and he's like, I don't agree with him on everything. We can fight all day about like particular policy decisions or whatever, but like I respect and appreciate him as a founder and an operator. And he's clearly built an incredible product and I want that product in my life. And I just, I really, I was really encouraged by that to see somebody who started off so staunchly against just have an open mind, be willing to come around and be, and then live in the nuance of like, yeah, I disagree, but I love this product. And I'm very happy to sort of like live in that contradiction. I think, you know, that's a healthy place for all of us to live. It's hard to find your way there in kind of a tribal time. But, you know, I hope that this lifts some of the fog and brings people together and can help you like just take something away from, from this unique person's unique experience.

I love that story. And I love your answer. And I think we could all benefit from a little bit more openness and a little bit more curiosity And I've always been a fan of learning from people that I don't agree with across the board, you know, the ability to separate the player from the game and understand that people that are in the limelight typically have done something very successfully.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, and that's true in politics, that's true in business, that's true in so many different facets of life. And, uh, so yeah, a little bit more openness, a little bit more curiosity, and we could all do with that. Um, last question before we end the podcast, Eric, and of course I'll have links to everything in the show notes. If this book was deleted but you could leave the world with just one message from it, what would that message be?

Um, That's a really good question.

And I know I didn't give you any time to prep for it, so we'll— whatever comes out is the right answer.

That's okay. I'll just, I'll just take the time to prep live. You know, if I put— if I were to put it in one word, it would just be optimism. I think, uh, I think that is The most pertinent takeaway is that humans are capable of making incredible progress, that through a really broad lens of both history and the future, we are on this incredible trajectory. Like, we've solved so many problems, we've made life so much better. And when you see what one person who is extreme, but what one person is capable of, You know, in our lifetime of the changes that we're able to make. And then you look at how far we may be able to go, right? If we make it to Mars, if we make it, you know, to the rest of the solar system, if we make it outside the solar system, like all of these problems are solvable if we just keep, you know, valuing the engineers, the entrepreneurs, the science, like the progress and appreciating how far it's gotten us. And that, that's the process for continuing to make life better for For everybody, whether you're working on it directly or not, just respecting that as a craft. So yeah, optimism and that you're capable of more than you think are probably the 2 most like distilled messages for this book.

Oh, what a beautiful way to end the show.