Speaker 1: Heyto five the fifty five karase De Talk Station. Happy Friday, Eve,
Speaker 1: Great time to be tuned into the fifty five Parassee
Speaker 1: Morning Show, which would argue it always is. But I
Speaker 1: am pleased to welcome to the fifty five Fatasey Morning Show.
Speaker 1: Someone the many of my listeners probably already know Dennis Neil,
Speaker 1: Award winning journalist, media strategist, advisor to senior executives. A
Speaker 1: lot of my listeners maybe listened to his What's Bugging Me? Podcast.
Speaker 1: He was formerly the anchor at CNBC and Fox Business Network.
Speaker 1: After serving as man My Favorite Newspaper, senior editor at
Speaker 1: The Wall Street Journal, as well as managing editor of Forbes.
Speaker 1: He helped write The Wealth Management of Wall Street Insider
Speaker 1: on the Dirty Secrets of Financial Advisors and How to
Speaker 1: Protect Your Portfolio. Author of the book we're going to
Speaker 1: be talking about today, the leadership genius of Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: Welcome to the Morning Show, Dennis Neil. It is a
Speaker 1: distinct pleasure to have you on my program.
Speaker 2: Same here, Brian, and thanks so much for that very loquacious.
Speaker 3: Kind intro.
Speaker 1: You're well deserving of it. You do great work and
Speaker 1: you have been for a long time and a little
Speaker 1: jealousy on my part because I dearly love the Wall
Speaker 1: Street Journal, and I'm so glad it's one of the
Speaker 1: few papers that's still in business and speaking about business,
Speaker 1: Elon Musk, the wealthiest guy on the planet and immune
Speaker 1: from the class warfare arguments. He's a minimalist. He doesn't
Speaker 1: own all kinds of stuff and things. I mean, you
Speaker 1: see these billionaires and there are five hundred million dollar
Speaker 1: yachts floating around the world, and you're thinking like, wow,
Speaker 1: uh okay, but that's not Elon Musk. He almost he
Speaker 1: like thrives on minimalism and that's part of his business
Speaker 1: strategy and what made him so successful.
Speaker 2: Am I right, Yeah, You're totally right. That's a very
Speaker 2: good ie on your part. You know, my book offers
Speaker 2: eleven lessons of Elon that fuel his success and that
Speaker 2: maybe we could use.
Speaker 3: To build a better life.
Speaker 2: And lesson number two is reduce, reduce, reduce.
Speaker 3: And that's what he's doing a doge.
Speaker 2: That's what he did at Twitter, cutting eighty percent of
Speaker 2: staff in about two weeks. That's what he does in
Speaker 2: the Tesla car where he tells engineers to take out
Speaker 2: so many parts, reducing it that it can't run.
Speaker 3: They got to put something back in.
Speaker 2: So the Tesla has about ten thousand parts in the
Speaker 2: ford has I think it's thirty or forty thousand parts
Speaker 2: in a ford and so that runs across. He sold
Speaker 2: all his homes, six homes, for like one hundred and
Speaker 2: twenty million dollars.
Speaker 3: And he believes in mind with lifestyle.
Speaker 2: At the same time, once that guy moved into mar
Speaker 2: A Lago for a few weeks with Trump, I imagine
Speaker 2: Trump was wondering, is he ever going to leave? He
Speaker 2: does stay in the lap of luxury with friends.
Speaker 1: Well, with friends, they've invited him into their multimillion arm
Speaker 1: dollar homes, not his. He lives in a tiny house,
Speaker 1: doesn't he is?
Speaker 3: Does he owner?
Speaker 2: It's this forty thousand dollars foldable house that he rents
Speaker 2: that SpaceX bought from this company that specializes in it,
Speaker 2: and it's a you know, it's just a tiny little thing.
Speaker 2: And when he's in town for SpaceX launches and stuff,
Speaker 2: he'll stay there.
Speaker 1: Well, and as you you point out in the book,
Speaker 1: he adheres to this eighty twenty rule. The perception is
Speaker 1: that eighty percent of the work done by twenty percent
Speaker 1: of the staff, which he proved when he acquired X
Speaker 1: and in his motivation for acquiring it, I don't think
Speaker 1: was to make himself any better or anything, but it
Speaker 1: was in the name of freedom of speech, which he
Speaker 1: holds dearly. But getting rid of that.
Speaker 2: Was the most amazing thing, Brian, because this guy's an
Speaker 2: adopted American.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 2: You know that a third of America, Americans, they believe
Speaker 2: that hate speech is so bad that it's more important
Speaker 2: to prevent hate speech and stop it than it is
Speaker 2: to have free speech. And another third of Americans not sure.
Speaker 2: That's terrible. But Elon Musk because he is an adopted American,
Speaker 2: he has the zeal of the convert right, and he
Speaker 2: loves the First Amendment and lesson six in my book,
Speaker 2: it's one lesson per chapter. Is free speech is everything
Speaker 2: stand up and be heard.
Speaker 3: Not enough of.
Speaker 2: Us stood up and pushed back when the nation was
Speaker 2: tilted toward craziness for the last four years or even
Speaker 2: longer if you want to trace back to Obama in
Speaker 2: the eight years there and free speech, and he really
Speaker 2: believes in it, and it's cost him dearly. You know,
Speaker 2: no other entrepreneur Brian puts billions of dollars of his
Speaker 2: own money into a new venture. That's that's for other
Speaker 2: people to do that you use other people's money. But
Speaker 2: he took I think it was twenty five billion of
Speaker 2: the forty four billion he paid for Twitter came out
Speaker 2: of his own pocket. And it was down sixty percent
Speaker 2: after a year, and all the media said.
Speaker 3: He's destroying it. And today don't you think it's.
Speaker 2: One of the most important media platforms in the world.
Speaker 3: It is.
Speaker 1: And we just had a terrible illustration of the of
Speaker 1: why you I mean, we need to protect free speech,
Speaker 1: and all speech is protected in the United States, including
Speaker 1: idiot Nazis on a bridge and even Deeugh here locally,
Speaker 1: and you know, you got to defend the rights of
Speaker 1: individuals to peaceably congregate as well as spread their message.
Speaker 1: But the great thing about that is when you have
Speaker 1: free speech and people espouse craziness, you can call them
Speaker 1: out on it. And the left, in their right their
Speaker 1: constant narrative that they're right and all of these woke
Speaker 1: ideological rules are right. And that's the the only thing
Speaker 1: that can be projected prevents alternative thought from being interjected
Speaker 1: into the exchange. So logic and reason can rule today,
Speaker 1: So you got to put up with stupid messages. But
Speaker 1: that's where you find out where the stupid people.
Speaker 2: Are exactly, And instead of trying to limit and muzzle
Speaker 2: bad speech, simply drown it out with more of your own,
Speaker 2: really really.
Speaker 3: Good speech, you know.
Speaker 2: I mean, it's just awful that our politicians on both
Speaker 2: sides of the parties. You know, there's the Twitter files.
Speaker 2: I was a journalist with more than thirty years and
Speaker 2: the biggest scandal I've ever seen in my life. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the Twitter files, And I wonder, where the hell
Speaker 2: is the media?
Speaker 3: Why aren't they more upset about this?
Speaker 2: I did more columns on the Twitter files and the
Speaker 2: scandal of government suppression of the First Amendment rights of
Speaker 2: thousands and millions of people. I did more stories than
Speaker 2: the New York Times in Washington Posts combined. And then
Speaker 2: you see what they're doing with dough and you see
Speaker 2: millions of dollars in payments to journalistic outfit.
Speaker 3: I think they said there's something like six.
Speaker 2: Thousand journalists getting some kind of money from USAID. And
Speaker 2: you suddenly wonder where you bought off? Is that why
Speaker 2: you said nothing didn't care? No, they didn't care because
Speaker 2: it was conservative speech. But the Trump administration Brian, they
Speaker 2: requested during their reign the fifty five hundred accounts be silenced.
Speaker 2: So Republicans and Democrats alike will stifle speech if we
Speaker 2: let them, if they let them.
Speaker 3: Elon Musk has just blown a huge hole in that
Speaker 3: effort to stifle speech.
Speaker 1: Dennis Near, the author the leadership genius of Elon Musk,
Speaker 1: I think, if I could read the concept of this
Speaker 1: book correctly, you wrote it not just for everybody, but
Speaker 1: it seems that you wrote it for entrepreneurs, business people,
Speaker 1: folks that are trying to improve the function of their
Speaker 1: own business and bring about some greater success for themselves.
Speaker 2: Bingo, absolutely, because I really think even though he operates
Speaker 2: at a huge scale, there are lessons you can learn.
Speaker 2: You know, always better on yourself and double down. He
Speaker 2: kept doing that again and again and again. It's better
Speaker 2: to launch and burn, yeah, than it is never to
Speaker 2: launch at all. Five one failure, yeah. So there's a
Speaker 2: lot of advice there for anybody trying to build a
Speaker 2: better career or build a company.
Speaker 1: Well, and I'm glad you brought up it's better to
Speaker 1: launch than burn and burn than never to launch at all,
Speaker 1: because I was going to ask you about that Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: You know, the rockets always didn't always fly, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes you send one up and it crashes and burns
Speaker 1: to the ground. Now, some might take experience Shodenfreuda because
Speaker 1: they don't like Elon Musk for some reason. But he
Speaker 1: always seemed to take it and stride. He would chuckle
Speaker 1: about it and use that as a learning opportunity.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: You know, you have you know, I had that devastating
Speaker 2: I was fired from Fox Business Network and fifteen minutes notice, security.
Speaker 3: Guard escorted me out out of the office. You'll pick
Speaker 3: up we'll ship your stuff to you. I mean, it
Speaker 3: was devastating.
Speaker 2: It was as if I'd slept with the president's wife
Speaker 2: or something at the network. And how do you even
Speaker 2: recover from that? You know, it's kind of tough. And
Speaker 2: I forgot where I was going with that, Brian, in.
Speaker 3: Terms of the outcome that came out of that. Actually
Speaker 3: I forgot that point. Well go ahead, you didn't stop.
Speaker 1: You had a bump in the road, you know, And
Speaker 1: I tell you, in my life, the worst things that
Speaker 1: happened to me have turned out to be the most
Speaker 1: beneficial things.
Speaker 3: You're like, you know.
Speaker 1: I dated this girl in college and I thought I
Speaker 1: was in love with her. It didn't work out, and
Speaker 1: law and behold, I ended up meeting my now there
Speaker 1: will be thirty three years in June wife in law school,
Speaker 1: and I was like, man, I look back, and I think,
Speaker 1: how miserable would I be as a human being had
Speaker 1: that quote relationships quote unquote worked out.
Speaker 2: We have to learn that even in the most horrible
Speaker 2: things that happened to us in our lives, good things
Speaker 2: can come out of them.
Speaker 3: When I got escorted.
Speaker 2: Out of that building, I met a few days later
Speaker 2: with a CEO and I told him, the thing is,
Speaker 2: I feel awful because I feel like I failed. And
Speaker 2: he said to me, you haven't failed, you learned. And
Speaker 2: that's exactly how Elon looks at every failure.
Speaker 3: You know, the space that's took, you know, a couple
Speaker 3: dozen explosions.
Speaker 2: Covered heavily in the press, laughing at him, making fun
Speaker 2: of them, and every time they gained thousands of new
Speaker 2: insights and made hundreds of changes to the next iteration.
Speaker 2: Just fix it on a fly, keep going, keep going,
Speaker 2: and just I love that about him. Yes, the guy
Speaker 2: could have left after his first twenty five million dollar score,
Speaker 2: and he just kept going.
Speaker 1: He kept going, and now that's the last best hope
Speaker 1: for those stranded astronauts. Apparently we need to rely on
Speaker 1: Elon Musk to get him back because apparently Boeing's not
Speaker 1: capable of doing it. Now, I want you to dive
Speaker 1: on into this because some people may not know this
Speaker 1: about Elon Musk, but his philosophy of life drives a
Speaker 1: lot of his decision making. And so let's talk about this.
Speaker 1: All may be fake, so just go for it.
Speaker 3: Yes, I love this part.
Speaker 2: And the publisher, the wonderful Harper Collins Broadside Books, kind
Speaker 2: of warned me, you know, you may not want to
Speaker 2: lead with.
Speaker 3: That because it's so weird.
Speaker 2: But Elon truly believes I think he truly believes this.
Speaker 2: That the odds are billions to one in favor of
Speaker 2: the idea that right now, even as we speak, we
Speaker 2: are living inside one or more massive computer simulations operated
Speaker 2: by someone else, somewhere else.
Speaker 3: Maybe in another time.
Speaker 2: And at the more I started to look into this,
Speaker 2: the more I came to things that it's actually quite plausible. Yes,
Speaker 2: exactly like the matrix. I mean, if we look at
Speaker 2: how pong and this is the explanation.
Speaker 3: Elon uses me, look.
Speaker 2: At pong, two little paddles and a ball and a
Speaker 2: black screen against it. I played against and that was
Speaker 2: only fifty years ago. And you look at where we
Speaker 2: are now, where you're down in the three d Mays,
Speaker 2: and it looks so super realistic. The thought that ten
Speaker 2: thousand years from now you could have a simulation so
Speaker 2: good you don't even know it. That's entirely believable. But
Speaker 2: then you think that the Earth is almost four billion
Speaker 2: years old. That means you have something like four hundred
Speaker 2: thousand different sets of ten thousand years. Well, really, in
Speaker 2: four hundred thousand different chances of ten thousand years, we've
Speaker 2: never made it to that advanced thing.
Speaker 3: It's only in the next ten thousand years that we'll
Speaker 3: get there. I don't know.
Speaker 2: Maybe it is a little simulated, but then what it
Speaker 2: does for us is if you think it might be plausible, well.
Speaker 3: Then you live louder, you love out loud, You.
Speaker 2: Take that job that you're too afraid to take because
Speaker 2: there's too much risk there. You say that thing in
Speaker 2: a meeting because you're feeling like everyone's going in the
Speaker 2: wrong direction, because you no longer are going to stay
Speaker 2: clients because what the heck, it all may be a
Speaker 2: game anyway.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a real wild way of looking at it,
Speaker 1: you know. And it's one of my favorite quotes. And
Speaker 1: it's interesting because I just put it up the other
Speaker 1: day because one of my friends had said, what's your
Speaker 1: favorite quote? I said, twenty years from now, you'll be
Speaker 1: more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by
Speaker 1: the ones you did. So throw off the bow line,
Speaker 1: sail away from the safe harbor, catch the trade winds
Speaker 1: in your sales, explore, dream discover from the famous Mark Twain.
Speaker 1: And I've kind of tried to live by that philosophy
Speaker 1: of my wife, and it sounds to me like Elon
Speaker 1: Musks as well, and I have before we part company.
Speaker 1: That fascinating conversation and just a fascinating man he is.
Speaker 1: And I appreciate you writing this book as a you know,
Speaker 1: sort of a guideline for folks in business, most notably,
Speaker 1: but going back to Starlink and how massive the growth is.
Speaker 1: And I think that desire to build this independent satellite
Speaker 1: network also springs from his embracing freedom and liberty. You know,
Speaker 1: Verizon or the government might flip the switch and shut
Speaker 1: your cell phone off. But there's Elon Musk with a backup,
Speaker 1: sure enough.
Speaker 3: And you know, I think he sees a synergy.
Speaker 2: Among these businesses that the rest of us don't see,
Speaker 2: you know, the Startlink satellite network. Brian guides the Tesla
Speaker 2: cars right, and then his EXAI engine ends up ingesting
Speaker 2: all of the data from Tesla cars. It's able to
Speaker 2: ingest the six thousand tweets put up every second on
Speaker 2: the X platform and get smarter and smarter and smarter.
Speaker 2: He's got the Olympus robot inside Tesla where one day
Speaker 2: you might be able to take an arm from the
Speaker 2: Olympus robot, attach it to an antitee and with the
Speaker 2: brain chip company's got neuralink, you know, the antute could
Speaker 2: operate the arm just by thinking about it. And you
Speaker 2: know we think that oh he wants to chip for QUADRUPLEG. No, No,
Speaker 2: he thinks in twenty years, thirty years, millions of us
Speaker 2: well walking around with these chips in our heads to
Speaker 2: talk faster to AI. So it all fits together, and
Speaker 2: it's just an incredible vision that really he has no
Speaker 2: right to have it all.
Speaker 3: It's just absolutely crazy.
Speaker 2: And yet if you were playing a video game, you'd say, well,
Speaker 2: what the heck, why not?
Speaker 1: Yeah, all that frightens the hell out of me. Though,
Speaker 1: I got to be honest with you, Dennis, I.
Speaker 2: Like be sad if it were a game, you know,
Speaker 2: I feel like this is life, this is real.
Speaker 3: Tomorrow we'll right here, you know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I couldn't agree more on that component, but just the
Speaker 1: idea that all that data is being gathered up, and
Speaker 1: I'm a privacy fan. I hate the hoovering up of data.
Speaker 1: That's why I recommend my listeners data hell away from
Speaker 1: TikTok because that just benefits the Chinese Communist Party and
Speaker 1: they're hoovering up of data. But at least knowing who
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is and this doesn't offer me is much comfort.
Speaker 1: But he seems to be wanting that data to advance
Speaker 1: and help us, as opposed to use against us, which
Speaker 1: is the antithesis of what tiktoks huge difference. And now
Speaker 1: he's being demonized like crazy by the media, by the Democrats,
Speaker 1: by Rhino Republicans, and suddenly he's publican Enemy number one,
Speaker 1: even more so than Trump, and they're just trying to
Speaker 1: take him down. What are they so afraid of why
Speaker 1: don't we all step back and just take a gander
Speaker 1: and watch what this guy does. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: if it is a simulation, you don't make a simulation
Speaker 1: for boring outcomes, right.
Speaker 3: Elon has another lesson Lesson eleven.
Speaker 2: My book is is you know, the most the most
Speaker 2: likely outcome in life is the most entertaining, one of
Speaker 2: the most ironic and opposite of what you expected.
Speaker 3: And look how entertaining life is. Ventilately, Oh my goodness,
Speaker 3: this it has.
Speaker 1: We live in interesting times and he makes them far
Speaker 1: more interesting. And he's the best troll on the Internet
Speaker 1: when it comes to cowing out his foes at Dennis
Speaker 1: Neil a real pleasure having on the Morning Share. Thank
Speaker 1: you for spending time by listeners to me this morning.
Speaker 1: Your book is now available on my blog page fifty
Speaker 1: five krsey dot com the leadership genius of Elon Musk.
Speaker 1: If you're a business person, get a copy, but everyone's
Speaker 1: welcome to read it and learn by it. Thank you
Speaker 1: for putting it on pay for Dennis, It's been a
Speaker 1: real pleasure.