Chris Williamson

how comprehensive and correct can I be about their whole history?

Not what's the most useful thing that you would pull out of the biography.

Like that, I think that's why like David Senra's episodes are amazing.

Cause he takes the biography and distills it and kind of boils it down.

And that is like my approach is like take a million words and turn it into 50,000 of the most useful ones.

And to pull out the things that he would teach you if you were sitting across from him is like actually a really interesting kind of test for material to go through and how timeless can it be and how universally can it be applied?

Like I think anybody on earth can take something useful out of this and I over and over again kind of sift it through that filter.

If they were trying to be as helpful as possible, like their best selves, right?

So that's the other difference is like, I'm not trying to build a comprehensive view of the person.

I'm not trying to put them in historical context.

I'm trying to be as useful as possible.

And I don't dwell on any of the personal stuff, any of the political stuff.

We don't talk about his family.

It's just like, what would he teach if he set out to teach all of the ideas that he had the most conviction in?

They're using Elon as a foil to be like, I think it's great that we're going to Mars and doing these things, or I think it's terrible that he made this decision about, you know, the USAID.

And...

That's fine.

You can agree or disagree with anything that this person does, but you're using that to project your values.

You're not asking, what can I learn from this person?

To pick somebody as an exemplar is not to say that everything they do is correct.