In the Arena

On Elon, iteration and agency
Welcome back to the Naval Podcast. I’ve pulled out some tweets from Naval’s Twitter from the last year, and we’re just going to go through them. Inspiration All the Way Down  Here’s actually my first question. You told me that you got an early copy of the Elon book from Eric Jorgenson. More

Find the Simplest Thing That Works

We’ve all seen the pictures of the Raptor engine for the SpaceX rockets, and if you look at the various iterations, they go from easy-to-vary to hard-to-vary. Because the most recent version just doesn’t have that many parts that you can fool around with. The earlier versions have a million different parts where you could change the thickness of it, the width of it, the material, and so on. More

Good Products Are Hard to Vary

I think reading Deutsch across all the different disciplines is very useful. Even when he talks about memes and meme theory—that comes from evolution, but crosses over straight into epistemology, conjecture, and criticism. And it reaches far beyond his definition of wealth: the set of physical transformations that you can effect. More

It Is Impossible to Fool Mother Nature

You have to take responsibility for everything bad that happens to you—and this is a mindset. Maybe it’s a little fake, but it’s very self-serving. And in fact, if you can go the extra mile and just attribute everything good that happens to you to luck, that might be helpful too. More

Hiring a Podcast Editor and Personal Chief of Staff

We’re hiring an editor for the Naval Podcast, and Naval is also hiring a personal chief of staff. If you’re not interested in either of these, you can move on to the next episode. Let me give you some details on both of them. First, the editor for the Naval Podcast, which as you already know, is the most timeless and overproduced podcast in human history. More