Lex Fridman: evaluation

Transcript context

…Read the Constitution and read Abbey Road, look at Abbey Road, they’re both good, but they’re in a different league. Yeah, a different league. Okay. So one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management. Is there’s something you could say about Ben Franklin and about Steve Jobs? I think interesting with Elon is that he, as you write, runs six companies, seven, it depends how you count with Starlink ’cause its own thing. I don’t know. What can you say about these people in terms of time management? Well, Musk is in a league of his own in the way he does it. First of all, Steve Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while, but Musk every couple of hours is switching his mindset from how to implant the Neuralink chip and what will the robot that implants it in the brain look like and how fast can we make it move? Then the heat shield on the Raptor or switching to human imitation, machine learning, full self-drive. On the night that the Twitter board agreed to the deal, this is huge around the world. I’m sure you remember like, “Musk buys Twitter.” It wasn’t when the deal closed, it was when Twitter accepted his offer. I thought, “Okay,” but then he went to Boca Chica, to South Texas and spent time fixating on, if I remember correctly, a valve in the Raptor engine that had a methane leak issue and what were the possible ways to fix it. All the engineers in that room, I assume, or thinking about, “This guy just bought Twitter, should we say something?” Then he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing really him being there. One of his strengths and sort of weaknesses in a way is in a given day, he’ll focus serially, sequentially, on many different things. He will worry about uploading video on to X.com or the payment system and then immediately switch over to some issue with the FAA giving a permit for Starship or with how to deal with Starlink and the CIA. When he’s focused on any of these things, you cannot distract him. It’s not like he’s also thinking about, “I’m dealing with Starlink, but I’ve got to also worry about the Tesla decision on the new $25,000 car.” Now, he’ll in between these sessions, process information, then let off steam. For better or worse, he lets off steam by either playing a friend in Polyopia or fire off some tweets, which is often not a healthy thing, but it’s a release for him. I once said he was a great multitasker and that was a mistake, people corrected me. He’s a serial tasker, which means focuses intensely on a task for an hour, almost has a, what do they call it at restaurants where they give you a-…

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