Link's To Eric Jorgenson

• ejorgenson.com (personal website)
• scribemedia.com (company)
• elonmuskbook.org (book)

Eric Jorgenson, author of the Naval Almanac and the Book of Elon, and CEO of Scribe Media joins me to discuss what makes Elon Musk the most consequential entrepreneur alive.

We dig into Elon's purpose-driven risk-taking, his philosophy of attacking bottlenecks, and why the people who make the biggest dents often pay the steepest personal price. Eric also reflects on his own journey from curating Naval's wisdom at 24 to defining an entirely new genre of book and what it means to do one thing so well the world notices.

Timestamps

03:53 – "A Million Musks" — what Eric actually means by it
04:42 – Can you be a world-changer and still be a good family man?
07:22 – The canonical 2008 Elon risk-taking story
12:47 – Rolling the winnings: Zip2 → PayPal → Tesla/SpaceX
Elon's pattern of compounding risk.
16:19 – Elon's talent attraction formula
18:20 – Has Elon's politics hurt his ability to hire?
19:44 – Elon's first principles communication style
21:23 – How much does Elon recognise his own luck?
26:09 – Vertical integration and the supply chain philosophy
32:36 – How Elon has influenced a new generation of hardware entrepreneurs
36:37 – ASML / Martin van der Brink — the supply chain counterpoint
38:25 – Could Elon disrupt chip manufacturing?
39:50 – Mark Andreessen on founder-led management
41:15 – How Eric got Elon's blessing to publish
42:32 – The almanac format and defining a genre
44:03 – Scribe Media: the business model and Eric's role as CEO
48:30 – What did Vance and Isaacson miss that makes room for the Book of Elon?
52:11 – Naval's foreword: the reaction and what it meant
53:13 – How the Naval Almanac changed Eric's life
56:03 – Eric's worldview in the Book of Elon
1:00:04 – What would Eric still ask Elon?
1:01:08 – "Don't aspire to glory, aspire to work" — what does Eric aspire to now?
1:03:21 – The serendipity question

Podcast Starter Packs

• Investigative Journalists
• Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering
• Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development
• Explorers & Adventurers

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Will Marshall is the CEO and Co-Founder of Planet.

Planet own and operate a fleet of (200+) satellites which image daily, the entire world.

Planet’s ultimate ambition is to achieve a queryable earth.

The way you might ask Google what the population of Australia is, you’d be able to ask Planet any conceivable question you might have about the surface of the world. The way Google would refer to the Australian Bureau of Statistics for an answer to the countries population, Planet will refer your query to their data, millions and millions of indexed images of the planet’s surface to present you an answer.

The applications of this are huge.

Take economic intelligence as an example… all types of queries that could summon early indicators of movements that aren’t already priced in.

• For instance, as an early prediction of retail sales you could ask; How many cars are in Walmart parking lots across America right now? Or even, over the past 3 months, what’s the daily average number been?
• Which Chinese ports are seeing more or less traffic than they usually might since the 2026 Iran war began?

And then there’s uses for climate and the environment.

• I could ask, at what rate is a specific glacier retreating? Measure this season’s melt against each other year to date.
• Monitoring and acting upon overfishing in protected zones.
• Or as I ask Will in the interview, could Planet’s data be more accurate at early predictions regarding where an Australian bushfire season might be worst hit

You can imagine the applications for agriculture but as well, naturally, Planet’s data is also crucial for defence.

• Will comment’s on Planet’s data indicating very early the Russian buildup of activity closing in on a Ukraine border.
• And I caught Will just day’s after the 2026 war with Iran, a conflict where Planet’s data is also in use.

Will Marshall an incredible entrepreneur, but as you’ll see in the interview, he also has extensive interests beyond just those of his business.

Marshall’s PHD advisor was Sir Roger Penrose. He worked at NASA. He was on the team that discovered large quantities of water ice on the moon. He co-invented a space debris collision avoidance method using ground-based lasers. Will has lived in communal housing for 20 years. He’s a Brit abroad in America and is now the CEO of a company not only ambitioning for all the queryable stuff mentioned above, but as well is now partnered with both Google and Nvidia to explore the potential for data centres in space.

It’s a enormous pleasure to welcome to Will Marshall to the podcast.

Podcast Starter Packs

• Investigative Journalists
• Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering
• Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development
• Explorers & Adventurers

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• Rampart
• The Chairman's Lounge
• Curious Worldview Substack

*Leave a review on Apple or Spotify* (nothing does more to help grow the show)

Podcast Starter Packs

• Investigative Journalists
• Offshore Finance/Kleptocracy & Money Laundering
• Geopolitics/Economics/Economic Development
• Explorers & Adventurers

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Who is Joe Aston?

For my Australian audience, you'll likely know him from his debut book The Chairman's Lounge, a forensic and damning account of Qantas. But for anyone international, put simply, Joe is among Australia's most consequential journalists.

He took over the Australian Financial Review's Rear Window column at just 28, and across a twelve-year tenure transformed it into the most anticipated daily column in Australian business and politics.

His former editor called it journalism "like never before seen in Australia and arguably the world."

Joe's reporting contributed to the downfall of the CPA Australia CEO and board, the resignation of Rio Tinto's chairman, Alan Joyce's early exit from Qantas, and a long list of uncomfortable reckoning in between.

In and amongst the many themes that this podcast covers, the most consistent among them has been journalism and good journalists.

And I say that because I think I caught Joe at an interesting juncture in his life. In the last twelve months Joe’s gone independent. Leaving the security of the AFR to launch his own media company, Rampart.

The work is the same. Breaking the stories from business and politics that his readers have come to expect, but the model is new, and it puts Joe in unfamiliar territory as an entrepreneur which I think is another example of how media business models are being re-cast, and indicative of the direction the best talent is heading towards.

We recorded this about ten months into the Rampart journey. We cover his influences, his early years in PR, his personal battles, Rampart and throughout it all, what Joe judges to be, good journalism.

Timestamps with Joe Aston

00:00 Introduction To Joe
02:06 Joe’s Influences
08:01 Alcoholism
14:54 From The Rear Window To Rampart
33:59 Journalistic Courage and Ethical Boundaries
44:04 Lessons from PR and Corporate Life
54:49 Goals for Rampart and Future Media Innovation
01:08:06 Serendipity