Speaker unverified: belief

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…d lessons, they got to work at SpaceX and they knew all the lessons and they'd seen everything and still a lot of them have struggled. I haven't heard you espouse a theory as to why they've struggled. It's got to be really hard. Yeah. Well, I know that a lot of people leave SpaceX and a few of them are like, “I'm going to start my own company and I'm going to try what it's like to be Elon.” And then they get a horrible experience. And some of them are like, “I'm glad I got a horrible experience.” But I think a lot of them are like, well, “I always disagreed with this particular technical choice.” And then they make it differently and then the rocket explodes. And maybe it's because that choice was actually correct and they didn't understand it. And maybe it's because it's unlucky and maybe the organization didn't work well enough. In the space sector at least, it's quite astounding the extent to which SpaceX is dominant. This is not the case that Apple has, 20, 30, 40% market share on smartphones and Pixel has 10% and Huawei and so on has… This is like SpaceX has 95% market share for the entire world. And then the second place getter is China or something. And then the next closest was 15 years ago the United States' main launch company. And then it's very much what I'd call an “anomaly in the matrix”. (00:45:41): Solar getting cheaper every year is also another anomaly. It's like a big wave that can be surfed and people don't really recognize it or how to use it or how to lever it. What advice do you have for highly technical youngsters? Say someone who's in college listening to this. Damn. Well, don't validate my life choices by repeating them. But realize that your life is on a spectrum—a continuum. And certain things are easy now and they'll be hard later, and vice versa. And if you see yourself as someone who's the technological elite, you should challenge yourself as much as you can. You should go out and find a worthy challenge and just level up. Don't go to someplace that puts you in a holding pattern for 10 years. You've only got 40 something years of really good work ahead to level up as much as you can. Go work somewhere that's very demanding. t go to someplace that puts you in a holding pattern for 10 years. You've only got 40 something years of really good work ahead to level up as much as you can. Go work somewhere that's very demanding. As much as you can take, for as long as you can take it. Yeah, probably more than a hundred people have asked me over the years, “Oh, I got into grad school and I got into SpaceX, what should I do?” And I said, well, the psychic damage is the same, but the pay is better at SpaceX, which is hard to believe but true. And I really believe that. You want to go and work with the best people on the things that you care about. Whoever they are, wherever they are, whatever it takes. Don't settle for second best. On the other hand, if you've recently graduated or you're about to graduate, it's more important that you get a job and you kill it. Do really, really well straight out of school then that you sit on the job market for a year and then compete against the next round. I see a lot of resumes. No doubt you've seen a lot of resumes over the years, and really you're only as good as your most recent job. And if your first job out of school is super important to set the foundation upon which you can build the rest of your career. Even if it sucks, stick it out for 18 months to two years and make sure everyone there has something nice to say about you. and then you can build on that. But yeah, it's really sad when you see someone with an ostensibly decent degree out of decent school and they kind of failed to launch in some way. As Casey is describing, and as we've heard a lot about on Cheeky Pint, prototyping is easy but production is hard. 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How are you planning to educate your kids? Mostly benign neglect, I think. No, but actually. Well, they're in the local school. But presumably that's not the limit of your plans. l Stripe Press books. How are you planning to educate your kids? Mostly benign neglect, I think. No, but actually. Well, they're in the local school. But presumably that's not the limit of your plans. Yeah, I mean so, I'm not worried that they're going to find an uninspiring academic environment at home, right? We have a house full of books—that's going to be fine. So why do we send them to school? To get the stuff they can't get at home, like how do you deal with people who aren't like your immediate relatives and as obsessed with space as you are? That said, it seems not entirely unlikely to me that at some point the schooling system will, I don’t know, not be quite sufficient in some way. But in particular, the Bloom 2 Sigma effect is one of the biggest effects in education. The idea that you get way better outcomes with one-on-one tutoring focused on mastery learning, where you only progress through topics once the student has mastered the prior topic, and you move your way sequentially through things. And schools almost definitionally can't do that. They can't do that. Yeah, I actually think that maybe the Bloom 2 Sigma effect, you can achieve it on your own if you're able to follow your areas of curiosity and have access to resources and learn. So actually in my case, probably the reason I'm not a chemist for example, is that I didn't have access to chemistry textbooks until I was in late high school. What I want for my children, especially in a world with AI and all kinds of nonsense coming, I don't really care what they do as long as they love it and they're as good as they can be. They have to love it and they have to try. They have to sweat, they have to contend with the material because incredible privileges have come to them and to me and to some of my more recent ancestors. And I feel like you do have a social obligation to not waste that opportunity. Do you buy the explanation on the falling fertility rates that we've just made it too expensive to have kids? Have you seen the “booster seats as contraception” paper and all these? I just forwarded that to one of my Congress people actually, when they were saying, “Come to a California Highway Patrol session on fitting your car seats.” And I was like, “How about we just tweak the law? So if you have three or more kids, you don't get them taken away for putting them in a sedan.” For reference, something like 58 children's lives are saved in the United States every year, statistically, by car seats and something like 10,000 births are averted by families who cannot afford to upgrade their cars, which is a bit of a problem. Even if you add to lose 10,000 additional births, it still wouldn't reverse the demographic decline. Well, but that's one example of where, just I think people don't fully internalize the barriers to having kids. So car seats is, again, it sounds like almost an oddly trivial one but it does have a measurable impact. And that's before you get to housing, education—…

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