Elon Musk & The Midwit Meme

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:00)
This is the beauty of the Midwit meme, is the genius and the idiot come to the same conclusion. So what is the idiot approach?
Like, that's actually how you can divine the genius approach, is you're like, what would an idiot do?

**Michael Seibel** (0:16)
Everyone can reach for the idiot approach. Everyone has the intellectual capacity to reach for the idiot approach.

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:21)
If I didn't know anything.

**Michael Seibel** (0:24)
This is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell. Today, we're gonna talk about how overthinking is sometimes a founder's biggest mistake. So Dalton, this video was triggered by this amazing meme that you made on fundraising advice.
But before we get to the meme, because I think it's like one of the best memes I've ever seen for fundraising advice. Let's start in general. Let's start in general.
How can overthinking be bad? And when can overthinking be bad?

**Dalton Caldwell** (0:55)
Yeah, I mean, I think that what people think being a founder is, is what they saw in like watching the Facebook movie or popular television, where you're like coding a lot, and you're making deals and screwing over your friends. Just kidding. But in reality, it's a lot of feeling lost and being not sure what to do, and feeling stressed out a lot. And you're worried all the time, and so you tend to overthink everything. And every decision, you kind of think in circles over and over and over again, because you don't have a boss, you don't have constraints when you're a startup founder, right? There's no one really telling you what to do, so you're on your own.
And so when you, the experience of being a startup founder, it's to always be overthinking everything.

**Michael Seibel** (1:45)
In this way, there's a bit of an advantage to being young, right?

**Dalton Caldwell** (1:49)
Yeah, like you and I experienced this ourselves as founders where we were young when we first started, and this is the beauty of not knowing anything.
The beauty of not knowing anything is that you think everything is easy, and none of the innumerable reasons why something might be hard or your startup might fail even occurs to you. You're like, oh yeah, I'm 22, like everything's easy. I can figure this out, right? And so again, this is like the Midwit meme, right? Where if you don't know anything, your approach looks a lot like the approach of people that are really good founders.
And the worst place to be is that you know just enough to know why the things you're trying are hard and the odds are stacked against you, and that freaks you out. And so you think about it a lot, right?

**Michael Seibel** (2:35)
So Dalton, one of the most perfect examples of this is actually Elon Musk. And why I think it's so perfect is that depending on how you tell the story, Elon looks like the dummy or the idiot, right? Like, I'm sorry, the dummy or the genius, right? Depending on how you tell the story. And it almost doesn't matter, right? Cause he's winning.
But to me, the first example that I always loved is that I read some book about the starting of SpaceX, and it started with Elon going to Russia trying to buy like rockets.
And like the Russian government being like, there's this American billionaire guy who wants to buy rockets and kind of not believing it, but Elon just looking really serious. So they like considered it. And like, they eventually said, no, but like he got to talk to people about buying rockets from them. He's just a dude with money.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:28)
He was like, go to Russia, buy rockets. Like that's the, those are the extremes. Is that genius or stupid? I can't tell.

**Michael Seibel** (3:35)
I can't tell.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:36)
And like with Tesla itself, like to me, the mid-wit is electric cars are good. That's the extreme. Electric cars are good. Or in the middle, it's like, no one has successfully done a startup car company since the 50s and every single, if you look at all prior attempts to build an electric car, like there's all these words.

**Michael Seibel** (3:53)
And the infrastructure you need.

**Dalton Caldwell** (3:53)
He was like, electric car is good.

**Michael Seibel** (3:55)
Yeah, yes.
And I think the one that we find most funny, which we'll see, this video we'll see if we can stand the test of time is the boring company, right? Drilling holes under the ground so that you can drive places faster is very clearly the idiot one, but it could be the genius one too, right?