Hi Friends :)
I’m a couple of days late with this issue. Any time spent reading about Elon takes you through innumerable rabbit holes of interesting people, ideas, and events. Let’s just say it took a while to compress these ideas :D
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Issue 2
We think in decades, Elon thinks in civilizations
Take any argument on climate change and people talk about how it is going to impact our lives decades from now. We can barely see a few hundred years into the future. Here’s Elon talking about building a sustainable energy future that will be good for a billion years.
We've essentially designed civilization to be super sensitive to climate change. The important thing to appreciate is that we are going to exit the fossil fuels era because at a certain point we will simply run out of carbon to mine and burn. So the question is really when do we exit this era, not if. The goal is to exit the era as quickly as possible. That means we need to move from the old goal, the pre-industrial goal, which was to move from chopping down forests and killing lots of whales to fossil fuels, which actually in that context was a good thing. But the new goal is to move to a sustainable energy future. We want to use energy sources that will be good for a billion years. The best case is simply delaying that inevitable transition to sustainable energy. The worst case is more displacement and destruction than all the wars in history combined. This is why I call it (burning fossils) the dumbest experiment in history. Why would you do this? The issue we have right now is that the rules fundamentally favor the bad outcome.
Learning by reading and talking to people
Childhood: I was always really interested in reading when I was a kid. And I read everything that I could get my hands on. I read the encyclopedia, probably at age 9 or 10. I ran out of things to read. So in desperation, I read the encyclopedia. I really wanted to learn. I got bored easily unless I was doing something like reading or playing a video game or watching TV. And we had terrible TV in South Africa. I liked watching TV. There just wasn't that much of it. So boredom led to a lot of reading.
SpaceX: It was very hard to recruit people because I had not bought any physical hardware before. And I kept being called the internet guy for the longest time. Nobody who was good was willing to join. And there was no point in hiring somebody who wasn't good. So I ended up being chief engineer. The first three launches failed, and probably if I'd been better then I would have gotten to have it (successful launch) sooner. I learned from books and talking to people.
Multi-planetary life is a natural Darwinian evolution of life on Earth
So, why is this important? Well, how do you say that anything is important? If you look at things on a historical timescale, and you look at the span of life's evolution on Earth, you can really point to about half a dozen major steps in the evolution of life. There's obviously single-celled life, multicellular life, differentiation to plants and animals, life moving from the oceans to land, mammals, and consciousness. And on that scale also would fit, I think, the extension of life to multiple planets. So if you have something which arguably could fit on the important scale of the evolution of life itself, then it is reasonable to say it should get some of our resources
Consumption vs Capital allocation
The government is not good at running things. There's a fundamental question of consumption versus capital allocation. What you actually care about is the responsiveness of the feedback loops to maximizing the happiness of the population. More resources (should not be) controlled by entities that have a poor response in their feedback loops.
How Elon thought about the internet
NFTs, DAOs, Web3 … things are going crazy, and it’s difficult to understand these technologies looking from the outside in. I imagine things must be crazy in the 90s too when the internet was going global and eating up industries. The sheer simplicity with which Elon explains the internet is amazing.
If the internet is the nervous system, what is web3?
The internet would fundamentally change humanity because it's like humanity would become more of a superorganism because the internet is like the nervous system. Now suddenly, any part of the human organism, anywhere, can have access to all the information. Imagine if you didn't have a nervous system. You wouldn't know what's going on in your fingers. And the way information used to work was really by diffusion. One human would have to call another human or write them a letter. Inefficient, extremely slow diffusion. The internet was a fundamental and profound change.
Cross-pollination of ideas: SpaceX and Tesla
There have been tons of criticism about Elon running multiple companies. Less focus on how it has helped both companies.
It's been quite difficult to run SpaceX and Tesla but there have been good ideas. For example, Model S is the only aluminum body and chassis car made in North America, and very few cars are all aluminum. In the aerospace industry, that's the default. In order to offset the fairly heavy battery pack, we had to make the rest of the car light, but it still achieves a five-star safety rating. I don't think it would have been possible to do that if we use steel, which is the traditional method. And what helped SpaceX has been that the car industry is really good at making complicated objects at a low cost. I mean, it's actually quite incredible that one can buy a decent car for $20,000. So at SpaceX, I hired a bunch of people from the auto industry to run manufacturing, which is worked out reasonably well.
EV is not a design problem
Tesla is a hardcore engineering company. And Fisker is kind of just based on styling. Styling is important but that's not the reason we don't have electric cars. If you think like, what's the point of a company existing? It's a group of people that have gathered together to create a product. If the product is good, the company should exist. And if it is not good, the company should not exist. That seems fundamental to companies. So one should focus on making the absolute best product. You can otherwise reduce the probability of success. But a lot of companies focus on things that don’t really have to do with the product. That's kind of strange.
Money is an information system for labor allocation
Money in my view is essentially an information system for labor allocation. So it hasn't got power in on itself. It's like a database for guiding people what as to what they should do. And so you can think of banks as a set of heterogeneous databases that are actually not very secure. And it's all mostly bad pricing. Banks are high latency, low security, cloud collection of databases. And so just from an information theory standpoint, there should be something that can be much better. That’s what x.com was.
Why cheap space travel is fundamental to multi-planetary life
It should be possible to move to Mars for less than half a million dollars, which I think is an important threshold. Because if people can sell all their stuff on earth and move to Mars, well then that's the fundamental thing needed to have a growing colony on Mars. Kind of like the way the US was formed. When it became affordable for people to sell their stuff in England and move to America, it grew really fast. In the absence of that, it would just require humongous amounts of government support, and I think it probably wouldn't result in a self-sustaining civilization. So the economics of it is extremely fundamental.
We’ve reached saturation on lifespan
The thing that would most profoundly affect people would be to be able to recode genetics, which is obviously a dodgy situation. We're close to saturation on lifespan. It's sort of pretty much leveled out. And so even if you solve say any one particular disease, you may slightly improve life expectancy, but not a lot. It's just like, you kind of have a genetic programming, any given species for a certain lifespan, like, like, you cannot make a fruit fly live for 10 years, no matter what you do. I mean, no amount of healthy living vitamins or anything.
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The next issue comes on 10th Oct - We go into the intellectual software of Kris Jenner. I’m deeply interested in how she built the Kardashian Empire from scratch and her interviews are really cool. She’s way smarter than she gets credit for.
- Abhishek