Rivian Founder RJ Scaringe Is Building The Future: Leadership, Mindset, Innovation, & His Mission To Decarbonize Transportation | The Rich Roll Podcast

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The whole fabric of our society is gonna look very different in 30 or 40 years.

There is a desire to create a world in which the generations to come are inheriting something that's as magical as it was for us.

I think it's safe to say there are easier ways to make money than by starting a car company, but today's our guest, RJ Scringe, is really interested in what's easy.

He's interested in what's possible and more importantly, what's necessary.

RJ is the founder and CEO of Rivian Motors, and he's a guy who's very focused on a singular and pretty audacious mission, decarbonizing transportation.

It's a dream, he launched fresh out of MIT at a time when auto giants like GM and Chrysler were declaring bankruptcy.

and it's a vision that demanded billions of dollars invested before even a single vehicle could exist. It's also an ongoing journey in which he is constantly faced with seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

I think everybody deals with challenging situations differently.

There's no right or wrong answer.

We need to be able to work together, and it's easy to say let's work together and be collaborative when things are easy, and it's naturally hard to work together when things are difficult and when there's not an easy or obvious solution.

But RJ's most valuable contribution isn't just another electric vehicle on the market.

It's proving that patient multi -decade thinking can solve impossible problems. So while others are out there chasing quick gains, RJ is a guy who is quietly mastering the long game.

And so his is a story about the courage to dream big, but also the wisdom to waste.

Today we explore what it takes to devote your life to such an audacious mission, the hidden complexities of manifesting that mission at scale, and how to maintain resolve when the odds seem insurmountable.

When you look at the beginnings of the auto industry, it was born out of people that were tinkering or dreaming and challenging convention.

We need to have innovation that's not in any way constrained by dogmas of how a company used to do things, but rather a team of people that can come together to create something that doesn't exist. Thank you for doing this.

I know you're a very busy man and I've been trying to make this happen for a long time.

Yeah, I'm excited man.

I have so much admiration for this mission that you're on.

And I think what's really kind of most notable to me is that you're playing a very long game and you appreciate like the length of the game that you're playing.

And you're also playing it at a very high level.

So I think it would be helpful.

I mean, this is in the car podcast, people who are listening or watching, I'm sure know Rivian, but they may not know your story.

And so they may not know just how long this game is because it goes all the way back to you being a very young child.

Yeah, I mean, since I was 10 years old I've been a huge car enthusiast and thinking about doing something in transportation.

I grew up restoring and working on classic cars.

And along the way, realized these things I love so much, these things I was working on all the time.

We're contributing to some of the biggest challenges we have as society.

You know, everything from a lot of the geopolitical conflict that we have to the local air quality issues we have in essentially, every major city across the world, to most importantly, I think, the effect we're having on climate.

Well, you were deconstructing like auto parts and engines like in your bedroom before you had a driver's license, All the way before.

If you were going to my like 10 year old bedroom, you'd find like a literal engine, windshields, hoods.

I was acquiring parts for all kinds of projects I was dreaming up.

And what is your earliest memory of knowing that you wanted to found a car company?

I don't know, like 13 years old, something like that.

When I started to realize I wanted to do more than just work on cars, where I wanted to start something new and work towards solutions that would allow the idea, the dream of personal ability to continue in new forms. And so I had no idea what that meant in terms of like building a company, what does that mean, but I knew that I wanted to be in a place that 50 years later kids would be inspired in the same way that I was around the idea of something that can take you places, go long distances, be enjoyable to look at, enjoyable to drive, enjoy the details of how the many, many decisions were made

across a product like this.

That was one of the things that always intrigued me is a car is such a complex device, that it's a manifestation of a ton of teamwork.

And the better the car, the better the teams work together, the worse the car, the likely the worse the teams work together.

And so you can see how the chassis is executed, the body is executed, the way it looks, the way it that the power train all of those things have to come together.

And you literally have thousands of people working on a project to complete it in a couple of years.

It's one thing to be a car enthusiast as a young person and to have this engineering kind of approach to wanting to know how everything works.

And it's not unusual that that type of person would wanna be in the automotive industry.

It's a very different thing all together, especially at a very young age, You should say, I'm going to start my own like new car company.

Where does that, like confidence or kind of sense of self come from?

Like what is the origin around the origin of that?

I guess maybe not confidence, extreme optimism maybe.

When you look at the beginnings of the auto industry, it was born out of people that were tinkering or dreaming and challenging convention.

and that was what I love to do and that's what I love to to work on and to think about in terms of what's possible and so I've been in my own tinkering I thought boy I'd like to tinker on something bigger and at a larger scale and again I didn't fully appreciate even then I'd probably appreciate one percent of how complex a car company actually is.

You know it's one thing to build a car from parts in your garage when you're growing up it's a very different thing to build a company of this complexity.

But I knew that I did fully appreciate just how important innovation is going to be.

And that was the part that played from the very beginning when I first started thinking about this, to obviously today, which was we need to have innovation that's not in any way constrained by dogmas of how a company used to do things or how an organizational The traditional structure was set up, but rather a team of people that can come together to create something that doesn't exist. And in fact, when I first started the company, I was 26, and we were in this decrepit looking warehouse.

And I wrote on the wall, we had on the back wall, I said, we're building this company because it doesn't exist. And the point was is we need to be building technology, ideas, product concepts that are different than what is out there.

You go to Rensselaer, you graduate top of your class, you knew, you know, very young that engineering was gonna be your thing.

You end up at MIT after that, you get a master's and a PhD in the automotive lab.

And it was all about like preparing yourself so that you could go out into the world and like found this company.

Like that vision, you know, I don't know, like I'm sure that the specifics of it weren't in place, but you know, the imagination had been animated for a very long time.

It's sort of difficult to appreciate that not so long ago, I mean, with Tesla and what you're doing, and there are like, you know, a lot of sort of car startups.

But it wasn't very long ago.

Like before, we're like, remember back before Tesla, the idea of creating an independent car company was like an impossibility.

I mean, right when you graduated MIT, GM and Chrysler filed for bankruptcy, See nobody thought that that was a good idea or even like a viable concept to pursue at all.

So in the midst of all of that, thinking back like, yes, but I'm still gonna do this.

Yeah, in some ways the Christ for GM bankruptcy, which was happening as you said, right?

As I started Rivian was a indication that it's important that new ideas are born and the new companies are born.

But you're right. I mean, the challenges of starting a car company are unique because you need so much capital, you need thousands of engineers that are working on a solution.

Engineers and designers working on a product, you need hundreds of suppliers to make all the parts that go into.

You need technology that's robust, differentiated, and that all needs to be wrapped into something that customers ultimately want to buy.

So the product concept and the brand positioning are all really important.

And if you had all those things at day one, many billions of dollars of capital, a manufacturing 100s of suppliers, you know, several thousand percent engineering team, a brand, a product concept.

It would still take you a few years to get to your first product.

So in the beginning, you have none of those.

So it's the order of operation.

It's like shocking that you've gotten, you know, it's just amazing that you've been able to like manifest this.

Yes, you need billions of dollars even to get to the point where you can ship.

The first dollar of revenue takes many billions of dollars of investment.

So it's a really hard, the hardest thing for me that I didn't appreciate was the capital raising process.

So, imagine, I come in to you to pitch you, you're an investor, and I'm pitching the idea of a car company.

And I say, I want to start a car company.

So, okay, great, tell me about your technology.

Well, we haven't developed that yet.

Okay, well, they'll show me what it looks like.

Well, we don't have that yet either.

Well, you must have a group of suppliers and partners lined up to work with you.

No, we still haven't done that yet.

Okay, well, you must have an amazing team of people.

Yeah, it's those three guys over there.

And you sort of go through it and you can imagine, And it was, it was not surprising that there were a lot of no's and a lot of closed doors in the beginning for obvious reasons.

Were you having those conversations on San Hill Road with like the tech venture capital funds at that time?

At some point, but even before that, if you get a meeting with a venture capital firm on San Hill Road, you have to have some level of credibility.

And so just the very nature of startup car company, no capital, no technology, no team, you know, no partners, no plant, it's either not, you're probably not even gonna get the meeting, you have to like build into that and build some credibility.

And that was one of the big reasons I decided to do PhD is I thought to myself, I'm gonna have to raise a lot of capital, I have to bring a lot of people together on this and then want to do it while I'm young and I don't want to go work at another car company first and I don't have any capital.

So the only way to sort of accelerate past that to have some earned credibility was to have a doctorate from a top tier school.

So that was very calculated.

I know that you told Guy Roz and how I built this that when you are getting your PhD, you didn't tell anyone that this was your idea and your intention.

And that's very curious.

Like, why not? You were having this experience in the automotive lab.

Why not like share that idea and see if you could get buy -in, what was the reason that you kept it quiet?

Probably two reasons.

One is I was intellectually aware that the odds were so low that with a bunch of other highly intelligent people that understand the industry well, if I said to them, I'm gonna go start a car company or they would just, They would talk you out of it.

They would tell me that it's a really bad idea and not be wrong.

They would be right.

They would be indisputably right that this is a hard thing to do and that this is low probability of success.

And then the second reason was I didn't want that be distraction from all the doors that were open to me as a PhD student.

So one of the great aspects of my time at MIT was that if I wanted to go visit a plant in Europe for pick a brand, it's just about any brand, any company, they would open the doors and say, hey, come in.

We'd love to give you a tour.

Let you understand how we do engineering.

So there's a great platform for me to be doing research and into how the existing incumbent that manufactures operate what their innovation strategies are, how ideas go from the idea stage to the production stage.

And so I was pretty guarded with putting this idea out there because I didn't want the idea to be like, just crushed by the perspectives of those that knew how hard it was.

And I think entrepreneurs, a lot of entrepreneurs go through this, I've now spent time with lots of founders of different types of companies.

And in the beginning the idea is so precious and so fragile that you're really careful with your own emotional state knowing that you sort of almost have to manage your mental state around something that's so unlikely.

Yeah. To nurture and kind of foster that dream in that fragile state when you just got a couple of guys and a couple of second mortgages to like, keep you going.

Yeah, yeah. And in the beginning, that's a big part of, like my job was to have extreme optimism but balanced with, call it like robust realism.

Like understanding that this isn't like you can hope your way to starting a car company, you do have to spend billions of dollars a capital.

You do have to bring on hundreds of suppliers.

You do have to build a manufacturing plant.

Now we're sitting in one of our retail space that you do have to build a whole network of sales locations and service locations.

So those aren't things that you can just will away.

They have to be there, but you have to build up to them.

You have to build a basis of some of the foundation before you can get to those pieces.

But it's a long chess game.

It's much easier if you start with a lot of money, like I used to always joke, it could be a lot easier to start a car company if at least you could start with a few billion dollars.

But starting with zero, it's a really hard, it's a really hard starting place.

I mean, it's a bit of a, I mean you say 3D chess, is sort of like you have to go into those rooms with confidence and be, I would imagine, a little bit ahead of yourself in order to engender the confidence level that you need for them to invest in you, right?

And I know some of those original investments, they came in stages, like let's get you through this stage.

Let's get you through that stage.

So it was always just sort of like gracefully, gradually, like walking you forward. But in this process, I mean, you're an engineer, You have this dream, you're taking one step at a time and you're trying to protect this, you know, amazing vision that you have. I suspect that requires a level of obsession, right.

This isn't gonna happen as a part -time hobby.

This has to be, you know, full buy -in.

Do you think that you have to be obsessed to do the kind of thing that you're doing and what is your own like relationship with obsession?

You need to be in a place in life where you can, obsessed has a negative connotation to it, I'd say, where you have the ability to be maniacally focused on a singular thing.

And to the extent that, it's hard to imagine those early years if I were to have had kids or if I had other things that would require me to, that would absorb any level of attention.

And now the same time I looked back and the way I went about things I think I could probably do more efficiently now, but it's also beneficial to have that early on just infinite energy to keep trying things and be wrong because it's not just the task wasn't just hard it was also that it was my first time running a company.

So it's not as if I was coming into this with like, this is my third startup this is my first time starting a company this is my first time making an investor deck my first time building a financial model, I went school for engineering, but I had to learn how to be pretty strong in finance because we couldn't afford to have a finance person, so that was me.

So a lot of the elements of the business, I had to learn real time, and I actually described it to friends now as actually a blessing that we didn't have a lot of capital in the beginning because it afforded me the chance to learn and grow.

You had to give every aspect of it.

Well, it gave me the chance to make mistakes.

you don't throw into the job.

It's like the mistakes were relatively low impact.

Like I could completely shift the strategy and I had to manage three people and essentially no shareholders.

Whereas it like today I couldn't walk into the office and be like, okay, we're going to do a completely different thing today.

The whole company you know, 17 ,000 people, we want everybody to make 180 degree shift. Whereas in the beginning, you could do those types of massive changes to everything.

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I'm interested in the lessons that you've learned and the kind of growth curve of going from that startup mentality and being nimble and having the ability to pivot and you having your fingerprints on every single aspect of the job, like understanding deeply every aspect of what needs to get done and how to do it, to today.

I mean, you go from that role and now you've raised billions of dollars to publicly traded company.

There's gotta be just tremendous pressure on you.

You have to kind of deal with the volatility of the stock market and your investors, et cetera.

And along the way, you go from a guy with a vision and a couple of other people that you got buy -in from to having to let go, delegate, team build and lead these teams and step, step back.

And it's not like you went to management school or were formerly trained in like how to be a leader or lead teams of people and empower them.

What was it like to learn that on the job?

The strength of mine is I've always been good at reading people and interacting with people and understanding how to motivate teams, motivate groups of people.

And so that's been a skill that I've had to sharpen over time.

and a lot of the mechanics of how you communicate or how you pull groups of team or teams of people together change, but the fundamentals are the same.

So they change in that, you know, in 2010, we could have a full company meeting at a room much smaller than this.

You know, today we have many, many locations.

We have 16, 17 ,000 employees between, you know, our plant, our multiple service locations, multiple retail, multiple development locations.

So it's like, you can't have a team meeting in a room.

So you can't even have a team meeting where everyone intends at the same time because of the time zones.

So just like the way you cascade information, the way you cascade decisions is totally different, but it's not like we went from one to the other.

So there was, I think of it as my skillset in terms of leading a team had to be reinvented and relearned, like every year.

So what I did with the five person team was different than when it was 100, which was different than it was 500, which was different as a private company versus a public company.

And being willing to like accept that, hey, like the way I did this before has to change.

So like the classic expression, the one constant is everything's gonna continue to change.

Yeah. And so that's certainly the truth.

And you can't be the bottleneck in any of these decisions.

But do you have that temptation to like roll up your sleeves and get into the granular engineering stuff that you've sort of had to like let go of?

Well, one of the things that's been really big learning for me is being super intentional with how I spend my time.

So in the beginning, like on day one when it was just me, I would do everything and often I would be doing things that weren't necessarily the highest impact.

They may feel the most urgent but they weren't actually the most important things to the business.

And now I'm very intentional in making sure the things I'm spending time on are not only high impact but they're things that I'm uniquely positioned to do well, meaning on product or technology topics, I still think I'm uniquely positioned because of the breadth of experiences and because of my visibility to the whole technology stack, I can add a lot of value.

But on our tax strategy or accounting strategy, those are not areas, there are people who are much more skilled than I am that I shouldn't spend a lot of time on those topics.

And so I've designed the team and the company in a way that allow me to be more product and technology focused.

I'm still our head of product.

and the product functions are a poor up to me.

But then in other aspects of the business and some of the more G &A, the general administrative functions, I of course stay linked into and tied into those, but I'm not as in the weeds.

So like earlier today, I was reviewing electrical board designs and power electronics in the detail level, not the board level, which is like, I'm not doing the parallel.

I'm not doing the parallel of that in let's say, you know, in some of our GNA functions.

The automotive industry is such an intractable, I mean, you gave these reasons why it's so complicated, so complex and why it's so capital intensive.

I heard you say that the development of a car requires something like 20 to 30 million different decisions.

It's hard to estimate it, but it's like, I mean that's - Many millions of decisions.

Insane, right? So what is the average person who's listening to this not kind of fully appreciate or understand when it comes to, you know, having this idea like we're going to make this electric vehicle and turn it into reality.

We think it's missed in why it's so hard. I think there's two things at the highest level, you said it already is that the number of decisions is really large.

And so the best products and this is true not just for cars, but for you know, just essentially every type of product.

because a product that has a really clear vision for what it wants to be.

And in the case of a car, that's harder than let's say, like a coffee cup, because the scale of the decisions and the breadth of the decisions is so broad.

So it's not possible for, like me to have a really crisp vision.

And for me to meet purely to go execute it, that vision has to be communicated effectively across many groups.

So there's a teams of people doing power electronics, battery design, motor design, chassis design, interior design, exterior design, and materials design, and each of those teams need to be looking at it with the same mindset around how we make trade offs between cost and features between mass and cost. Like there's all these trade offs that you have to make decisions where you can't get everything on everything.

You can't make it the lightest weight, the lowest cost, the highest performances of trades.

And so, across the many millions of decisions being made by thousands of engineers and designers across many functions.

It's really an exercise in coordination and communicating and disseminating a vision that's easily understood and easily actionable.

And not every single decision is gonna align with every single customer need.

And I look at... I don't know what you know.

And the customer's like, you know, why did you do this?

And they're like, well, it wasn't, it accidentally happened.

How much time do you have to explain?

But there's no accidents.

I'll give an example in the interior of our vehicle in the R1, we decided not to have buttons, so that the entire interface is through a touchscreen.

And if you want buttons, you're not going to like that decision.

And it doesn't matter what I say, but we optimized for the ability to have a completely updatable user interaction, user interface, that with software we can change anything.

And so that meant we drove everything to a touchscreen, a multi -touch screen.

And that singular decision means that it has like long -term repercussions.

It also means that the vehicles can get better over time.

But there's so many decisions like that, that we had to make trade -offs and we try to make them in a way that both feels consistent to the vision, but also, we think encapsulates something that's going to be highly compelling.

But by nature of the cars being compelling and unique and pointed, you're not going to Or have everyone like everything.

Right. And so that's okay.

I say that all the time.

If someone disagrees, I say, that's okay.

Like that's why like, hopefully there's lots of great choices that you can choose from.

This is one company's perspective on how to make, you know, this call it set of 30 million decisions.

There's other companies that have different ways of making those decisions.

Yeah. You're always quick to say, like we're at the very beginning of this huge mission.

And I wanna hear you articulate what that mission is specifically, But as of now, what is it like?

These are 10 % of the consumer transportation markets, something like that.

And we think like, oh, well there's Tesla and there's you, it's late, it's not, it's very early.

There's so much growth and so you're always kind of like celebrating any kind of innovation in this space and not looking at it through a sort of competitive lens because when these other companies win, you win as well because there's lots of room here.

But back to the mission, like if you have to say what is the mission statement of Rivian or what is your mission statement with this company?

Yeah. We actually look through that lens through the lens of what are we trying to accomplish as our objective or as our mission in driving a vast majority of the decisions we take as a company.

And for us, it's really helping to advance our whole society towards a climate -neutral transportation ecosystem energy ecosystem.

And so that means moving towards sustainable energy.

That means moving off of combustion and fossil fuels And you're right, I do talk about this being the beginning all the time.

And it's the beginning in so many ways.

It's where 8 % new vehicle sales are electric in the US.

There's 1 .5 billion combustion powered vehicles on the planet.

All of those need to be converted.

There's thousands of coal power plants, thousands of natural gas power plants.

So our grid is still, in the United States, about 60 % fossil fueled.

All of that has to be shut down and replaced.

But amazingly that's gonna happen in our lifetime.

So there's the world we live in today.

The optimism is still there.

It's just so, but it's just so amazing.

Like, I imagined everything we know of in the world, like the room we're sitting in, the lights that are in the microphones I'm speaking to, this technology was developed within the last few generations, meaning our parents, parents, parents, that string of four generations has built the world we know today.

And the world we know today is so different than what it's looked like for the vast majority of human history.

But of course, that was built with fossil fuels.

And we uniquely, in this moment in time, are responsible for replacing that entire energy infrastructure and industrial ecology with something that's going to be sustainable for many, many generations to come.

And we're running this whole world that we built off of a very finite fuel supply.

So we could either say we're going to run another two, maybe three new generation's worth and then we'll be out, you know, no more fossil fuel and recarbonize the atmosphere to such a degree that life as we know it is at high risk or we can make the transition much sooner.

And obviously I think we should make the transition much sooner and I think a lot of companies like Rivian need to emerge to recreate the, the, the, Yeah, you're not.

The industrial footprint that we live - No one of these companies is gonna do it alone.

It's just too big. In order to solve it, there's a vertical integration of systems in order to achieve that, right?

right, so let's just start with the climate impact of the sort of consumer transportation industry on the environment, like how damaging or deleterious is that and what is your sense of if you could, you know, flick a switch and everybody's driving an EV, we'll set aside like the power grid for a moment, like what degree of improvement do we accomplish in doing that?

And transportation is one of the single largest contributors to climate change.

Between carbon emissions and then unburned hydrocarbons, things like methane, it's one of the most damaging.

It also has the unique role that it plays in the air quality in our cities.

So if you hear what we're sitting here in LA, we saw a sneak preview at the start of COVID of what air quality will look like if we drive less combustion powered vehicles.

was one of the first times in a long time where you could see across the city without smog.

And so one of the benefits of moving to electric vehicles isn't just the reduction in carbon emissions, but we actually improve air quality across all our cities.

And that's super exciting.

But this flick the switch point that you bring up, I wish that was possible, but it's really going to take a couple of decades.

And that's maybe a slightly optimistic view to replace the one and a half billion vehicles on the planet.

but it's... We can say whether it's two decades or three or four decades, but I characterize it as my lifetime.

But the time scales to do that are very similar to the time scales to completely clean up our grid.

And that's turning off thousands of power plants that are running today.

That's building many, many sites that are doing renewable energy, both solar and wind.

It's going to evolve continued development in nuclear power.

So we're gonna see a whole new grid emerge over that 40 to 50 year timeframe as well.

When you think about charging infrastructure and the power grid, like most power grids are powered by natural gas, oil, coal.

And I think there is this sense with the consumer that is this really any better?

I'm plugging into the grid.

It's coal. Like it's kind of the same thing.

it's actually not because of the law of thermodynamics, and there's a reason why it's still better, and I'm sure you could articulate much better than me.

So you're still doing a good thing by doing this, but yes, of course, the problem doesn't get solved until the power grid is powered by renewable energy.

We should talk about that just for a second.

I'm glad you bring it up.

So, if you think about what a power plant is, let's say a natural gas power plant, And you were to compare that to an engine in a car.

They're very similar thermodynamically, except the power plant can run at very high levels of optimal efficiency.

So it can run at let's say an average efficiency of 40 plus percent in terms of converting the energy and the fuel and natural gas to actual mechanical power, which is like it can be converted to electricity in a vehicle, because the engine's much smaller, because it has to be throttled to run at lower speeds.

it's running at maybe on average 15 % efficiency.

Right, something like 20 % of the energy from the gas has lost to heat.

A huge amount of the energy has lost to heat.

So you have, call it 15, maybe 20 % efficiency.

So you have at least a two to three X improvement just by using these larger centralized power plants.

And of course the energy to go from electricity to mechanical power and electric motor is very efficient.

And it's close to 97, 98%, depending on the design.

So you just have a very big difference in terms of energy efficiency between an engine and a vehicle versus what you're using at the grid level.

Now, above and beyond that, the grid is not a 100 % fossil fuel.

We've already made some progress in the United States.

40 % of our grid is carbon -free.

You know, of that 40%, roughly half or 20 % of the grid is renewable.

And the other roughly half, roughly 20 % is nuclear power, which is carbon free.

And so we're already on a journey.

And the neat thing about an electric vehicle is every year, every month, every month or every year that goes by, the grid is getting cleaner and cleaner and cleaner.

And they're 10 evolving.

And there's the air quality aspect of it as well, just with the emissions aspect.

You can do a lot more to control the emissions of the plant because it's large, it's centralized.

You can use things like scrubbers.

There's a lot of technologies to clean up the output from a plant.

But the other point which I'd say is more philosophical is if we all waited until everything was perfect.

If we said, we're not gonna, I'm not gonna switch out of my combustion powered vehicle until the grids 100 % green and like held off on that or until, you know, battery supply chains are perfectly optimized, we'll end up waiting for forever.

So we have to start making this transition.

As we make the transition, the technologies will become better, the efficiencies will become better.

I say this all the time, like that's our role.

Our moment in time is that we're at the start of this transition.

And so it'd be wrong to judge the end state by what it looks like in the beginning.

Sure, it's gonna be messy for awhile.

I mean, that applies to battery manufacturing.

It applies to almost anything.

And lithium, you know, mining and all these other kind of like, you know, considerations that come into play.

Like if the mission is decarbonizing transportation, like there are other problems that have to be solved.

It applies to so many, I mean, if you were sitting, So let's say 1980 and imagining a world in which you have a computer in your pocket, you'd say, well, I don't want to start with that cause I have these giant computers or the pain.

So I'm not gonna use a computer.

Tell me when it's ready to go in my pocket.

It took us going through many iterations before we could get to what we now think of as like an iPhone or a Pixel or a small amazingly powerful device that goes into our pocket.

But if we'd gone back and just said we're gonna wait until it's there, we would have never gotten there.

Mm -hmm. How do you think about your customers?

Like what is the Rivian customer?

How do you cater to that person?

How do you think about that, and how you message around, you know, this mission and the products that you create.

So, linked to this, just the overall mission around driving towards sustainable energy, sustainable transportation.

One of the words we've talked about a lot in building the brand is the word inviting.

And we want to create a brand that's highly inviting and it doesn't tie to any specific demographic or age group, but rather it's inviting across a broad spectrum of people, personalities, backgrounds, what have you.

Part of that is we wanted to look at it beyond just the effects that our products are going to have in a positive way on the climate.

And so we really started to design the brand.

And this was maybe six, seven years ago, we started design the brand around enabling people to do the kinds of things that would connect them back to the world, to connect them back to the natural environment.

And so we started to build this idea of a brand built around adventure.

And when we talk about a brand built around the idea of adventure, and it really was going after this idea of there's an adventure in all of us.

And your version of adventure may be different than my version.

And I may want to take a telescope out to an open field and look at stars at night, yours may be running a 100 mile race, riding a bike 50 miles, it could be going to the beach with kids.

Everybody has a different form of adventure.

But we wanna make those types of experiences both highly accessible, but also, and I'd say, perhaps even more importantly, we wanna help inspire those things.

So, I wanna inspire people in addition to enabling them to do the kinds of things you wanna take photographs of.

When I think back, what was I doing 10 years ago?

What was I doing 20 years ago?

We rarely think about the things we bought.

We rarely think about the clothes we were wearing.

We look back and remember the emotions we had, the experiences we had.

We look at the pictures of those things.

And you know, that as a brand is what we're trying to embody.

The ethos, you know, kind of behind this from my perspective is, you're somebody who wants the products to speak for themselves, which is very different from Tesla.

There's definitely a cult of personality around Elon and that has its pros and cons, I suppose.

I mean, his sort of like, ascendency into kind of everyone's consciousness, I'm sure has a positive impact on Tesla sales, but the downside of that is because he's very opinionated and has aligned himself politically in a certain way that ultimately could become an Achilles heel.

And you're somebody who I see is very neutral.

You're trying to create this welcome mat for everybody.

Maybe it's a slower kind of like growth curve, but at the same time, like you're sort of more in the background and letting the work kind of like talk for you.

Is that fair? It's funny.

When you think about building a brand or a company in the process.

You do all this work envisioning the future.

So you're like what do we want to have happen?

What are the types of outcomes we'd like to accomplish?

And one of the things we spent a lot of time talking about was envisioning a world where our products would inspire people to go do things that they love, to do the kinds of things they want to photograph.

But importantly, bring groups of people together to go create these experiences together.

I would say the sharpest, maybe perhaps most unlikely thing we envisioned was the idea of user groups forming that would help create opportunities for people who experience the world in different ways or in new ways, and those user groups to be really diverse.

Our team would put together these slides like groups of people going out and like checking out a trail or going on a hike together, but getting there in the Rivian's and imagining that group of someone who's never been on a, you know, like an outdoor hike before and the first time doing it.

And what's amazing is that's actually happened and we have one of the most active customer bases that I'm so happy is so diverse.

And in the world right now we're unfortunately sustainability and electrification become politicized in ways that I really could have never imagined.

We see people that are on the right, on the left, guys, girls you know, It's different, every orientation of everything you can imagine, that our lining are on this, and I think that's really good.

And so we don't want to lose that.

We want to maintain that.

And we want to, as you said, be as welcoming as we can across such a broad spectrum.

I think along with that, the products need to speak for themselves.

So a big area of debate I had when I first started the company was whether the product wants to be like purely optimized for the most diehard climate focused customer or something that would be broadly appealing.

And I did, the summer before I started the company, as I was still thinking about what it wanted to be, I did an experiment where I tried to live carbon neutral.

When I did that, I went full in so no dishwasher, no clothes washing, no lights, no AC, raw foods.

It was, Robert, I'm vegetarian, so it was like...

everything was raw, it was very, very low carbon.

And I got through it then, I'm like...

Well, I don't think that many people are going to sign up to do that.

And if we want to sell highly efficient vehicles, we need to create products that are compelling, that meet people where they are.

So like a teeny little car is probably not going to sell that many, it may be really efficient, but it's not gonna sell it many.

You got like Ed Begley Jr. and people like that, who are all in, who will be your customers.

But you're not going to have impact.

So we decided to make the most incredible SUV and the most incredible truck that regardless whether it's electric or not, it's just amazing.

So it's quicker than a supercar or at a 60, it's more capable off road than anything you can buy.

It's comfortable and premium in a way that you wouldn't imagine an off road capable vehicle can do.

So we did all this work to create a flagship product that would, regardless of your orientation towards climate is just interesting, and it's been really successful.

So we have people that are buying it just because they love the product and then they tell their friends and say, look, I wasn't really super excited about electrification, but I drove this thing and it's freaking nuts.

It's so cool. The experience of driving them is just ...

I mean, it's just a better experience across the board. And so the more people that get exposed to that, it just self -perpetuates.

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When you reflect back to the early 2010s and you think about EVs, this is sort of the purview of the NPR tote bag where you know, coastal elites, that's very much changed to me.

It's only a matter of time because the product is so much better, But I'm curious around like your sense of the consumer marketplace and like, like where is this going?

Like there is some sort of market stagnation.

The growth is, you know, slower than I'm sure you would like at the moment.

And I think the marketplace is dominated by players who are, you know, creating products that are essentially like luxury products, right?

Yeah. Inaccessible to a lot of people.

and I know you're moving in the direction of affordability and scale allows you to do that, but from your perspective, like how do you win the hearts and minds of all of these people who are either skeptical or thinking like, this is like not for me, like why is this a little bit stagnant right now?

Set aside regulation and political climate and all that.

Yeah, I think the biggest driver of this is there's a lack of choice.

So, today, if you want to get a highly compelling, well -engineered software -first product that's sub-$50 ,000, or very, very few choices.

I'd say less than the number of fingers of my hand, it's obviously a Tesla Model Y, a Tesla Model 3, great products.

But if you're in the market for something that costs less than $50 ,000, you have to You can make big compromises today around form factor, up around brand and brand presentation and what the brand stands for.

And you also have to accept that there's a single player Tesla that has so much market share that's you're gonna end up with...

It's a great product but a lot of people have the same thing.

So it's a very, it's becoming more and more ubiquitous.

And I think in order to see large scale adoption of the magnitude that is the global automotive market.

So call it 80 to 90 million electric vehicles per year, it's gonna need more than two or three choices.

And you could argue that it's more economically optimized for everybody to buy the same thing.

But that, without exaggeration, that has not happened in any part of human society.

Meaning it'd be way cheaper if everyone wore the exact same pair of clothes and we had six factories across the planet that made all the world's clothes.

But, you know, there's probably a hundred people on our campus right here, I bet you no one's wearing the same shirt.

And so like we have a desire as a human species for personal expression.

We have a desire for differentiation, and I think the same is true in vehicles.

So we need lots of great choices.

We haven't had those.

It's one of the reasons we're so excited about our, as you've called it out, our more affordable products, our R2 and our R3.

And it's one of the reasons why I'm constantly reminding people that like, it's not going to be just R2 and R3 and model three and model Y.

We need a lot more great choices.

Yeah, I've heard you talk about how you wish these other companies weren't just trying to copy Tesla.

We need creative differentiation in here as well.

Yeah, yeah. Than that.

Yeah, so our take our R1S, as you said, it's an expensive product, but it's been very successful.

And in terms of vehicles priced over $70 ,000, it's the most popular SUV in California.

And not most popular electric SUV, just most popular SUV, over $70 ,000 in California.

So it outsells any of the incumbent, traditional internal combustion vehicles at the premium, within the premium segment.

And so our hope is we can translate that success that we've had in a premium segment to something that's in the more, call it middle of the market, around the price of an out, what an average transaction is in the United States, which is under $50 ,000.

It wasn't that long ago, three, four years ago.

You're in this very challenging position.

You've raised billions of dollars.

You buy this former Mitsubishi plant in normal Illinois and you invest like $1 .5 billion in equipment to install and retrofit this plant to produce Rivian vehicles.

Pandemic happens, COVID, supply chain disruption.

You've got hundreds and hundreds of suppliers.

And you're also like new.

and you had to like convince these suppliers to work with you in the beginning, you know, like just leading up to that is, you know, case studies and overcoming obstacles.

But now you're faced with having to like deal with, you know, problems you couldn't have even foreseen, you know, it's sort of amazing that you navigated that and have come out the other side.

So I say all that just because I'm curious around like how you think about and manage like obstacles.

Like I'm sure a day doesn't go by where you're not presented with some insane challenge that you couldn't have imagined two weeks earlier that you have to figure out a solution to.

So, how do you problem solve in those situations?

How do you like maintain your equanimity and stay focused on kind of moving forward on your mission?

I mean, we were talking about before I started the company, how I didn't talk about what we were doing to very many folks and at that point, the risk was enormously high.

And I contrast that with today, where everyone we're public companies.

So like every quarter we put our financials out and you called out just some of the challenges that happened that were linked to COVID supply chain crisis multiple vehicles being launched at the same time as all those challenges.

And, you know, as I look at our situation today, people say, are you stressed?

And I say, of course I'm stressed.

I'm like incredibly focused on what's in front of us but the risk profile today is so different than what it was before.

In fact, I said to my dad that I've never been more confident in Rivian than I am right now.

Yeah. You know, and if I would just contrast today with 15 years ago, we have built a world -class brand.

The last two years in a row, we've come out in a bunch of independent brand studies as the number one rated brand, the highest rate of repurchase, the highest level of customer satisfaction.

We launched a flagship product that's the dominant market share player depending on how you categorize it, a number of ways.

and we are about to launch our mass market product, which means we're spending a tremendous amount of capital to develop that, make sure that from a technology point of view and a product point of view, it's among the best in the world.

But before we launched that, we have all the costs associated with building that business we're forward investing in service, forward investing in our retail and service sales infrastructure, but that's all really visible to us.

And so we have real clear line of sight to what's to come, and so we're really excited about that.

But the differences of public company is it's very easy to look at this from that side and say, boy, you're losing money today still, looks like you're having to invest in technology and spend a lot of money on your R &D.

I look at it and say, of course this isn't easy, but we're so focused as a team, so focused as a company around what we have to do.

And I said this to a group of our leaders every day, We need to be successful, we must be successful.

And society needs multiple versions, multiple companies like us, in transportation, in energy, in consumer goods, in agriculture, to be disruptive agitators that are changing the way these industries work.

And they need to be not monopolies, they need to have multiple different companies that are driving through competition better products for customers.

You have this vision, you know the trajectory you're on, you can see the path to profitability, you understand that it's long and labor intensive and capital intensive and all of that, I get that you have the patience and I'm sure your teams do as well, but that kind of version of playing the long game isn't always simpatico with like, being a publicly trading company and the pressures that come with that world, right?

like it's quarterly earnings.

And it's like where are we right now?

There's, there is, it's the antithesis of patience, right?

So do you feel that pressure?

I mean, it's not, it's pretty common, not necessarily in the automotive industry, but it's pretty common for founders who are visionaries who figure out a way to create something real and solve a problem and create a huge business around it, go public, grow and then get to that place where the board feels like maybe it's time for a change.

Like, let's bring in the real operator.

You can be the visionary guy in the face of this, but I'm like, we need, we're at a place right now that's, you know, outside of your depth, right?

So how does that work with your board, and how do you kind of maintain, you know, amity amongst the board members so that you kind of avoid that situation, that follows a lot of people?

That's quite common. and we talked about it before.

The skills that I need to have to run Rivian have evolved a lot since I started the company and there's certain moments where there was like step changes in how I need to look at the business and how I would look at what I even do.

And one of those was the launch of our products.

We went from a company developing products to a company suddenly selling products and actually having customers.

was another was the buildout of a large service, you know, service infrastructure and go -to -market infrastructure.

But one of the biggest was us going from private company to a public company and for me, it was a lot of, there was a lot of learning in the first year of being public of there's gonna be lots, especially a company that's public, that's not like we're doing enterprise offer or something that's obscure, that's not people aren't paying attention to.

This is we sell products that you can see on the road And it's very relatable and you've recalled that already, there's natural comparisons that one will wanna draw between our products and Tesla products or our products and incumbent vehicle manufacturers.

It's unavoidable that it's gonna be a complex environment to manage externally.

And really core to that is that it's important that in my role as CEO, that I have a really close relationship with our board, that we have active discussions around the challenges we're up against, that we're consistent and aligned on how we approach these challenges in terms of balancing the short term focus and the long term focus.

And then that we as a leadership team can manage the choppiness of a share price that is highly volatile.

And so it's taken some practice, it's taken some learning.

And I think I've certainly feel like I'm much stronger at managing both the emotional ups and downs, but also the types of relationships necessary across investors and analysts and actually stakeholders like suppliers as a public company that I was just a couple of years ago.

But the beauty of the high functioning board is that it's not just a fiduciary function, it's also an advisory function.

So it's an opportunity for me to get great counsel and advice from the board that we've put together.

so I'm really pleased with that.

You know, it's lots of learnings, like a weekly board memo goes a long way to keeping everybody aligned.

Be proactive. I really enjoy a weekly board memo.

Okay. I like to write it, or board enjoys it, so there's like these little tactical things.

Yeah, just in case they're listening, like let's make sure they know that, okay?

But this idea of like taking counsel, like a big part of the really an ethos is collaboration, like you have all these partnerships.

Yeah. And you've got this incredible partnership with Amazon and you're creating this fleet of commercial Amazon delivery vehicles and now your own kind of commercial vehicle for multipurpose, right?

And this new deal with Volkswagen that was recently enriched even further $5 .8 billion, that's gonna allow kind of your technology to find its way into the Volkswagen suite of vehicles, which include Porsche, and that's very exciting.

It gives you kind of like - Yeah, it's some nice capital.

And you could see the benefit like you're a technology company that manifests its technology in automobiles.

These other companies, legacy automotive companies, they're automotive companies that have figured out how to like incorporate technology.

It's they're upside down of each other.

So there's clearly like a synergy there, but on this piece around collaboration, I'm interested in what you've learned as a leader from these relationships.

Like what was that first meeting like with Jeff Bezos?

And what did you learn from him?

And what is the counsel like that he's providing you?

I mean Jeff, having among the friends and advisors that we've accumulated as a company that I've built over the last 15 years, Jeff's been really interesting Because he's been through, he built one of the most valuable companies in the world.

It was not a straight -line journey, and he famously wrote an annual shareholder letter around the importance of focusing on the long -term versus the short -term.

And that opening passage of that shareholder letter is something I've probably read 150 times.

And so he's been a great advisor and someone that, particularly when there's hard decisions around trade -offs between short and long -term, hard decisions around technology and how we invest in technology in our current state as we're scaling, it's been really valuable.

And so that's true in the case of Jeff.

That's true in the case of a number of other leaders across other businesses that we've partnered with or worked with.

And I think one of the really key parts that I deeply believe is important for our success and for that matter, success of our society, is that we need to be able to work together.

And it's easy to say, let's work together and be collaborative when things are easy.

It's actually really hard to work together, and it's naturally hard to work together when things are difficult.

And when there's not an easy or obvious solution.

And so, that's true within our product teams, that's true within our business, that's also true with our corporate partners and relationships.

And so one of the things that has me very excited with Volkswagen is we didn't just sign this deal after like all over the scene I had like a fun weekend meeting and said hey let's do a five point eight billion dollar deal next week it was there was a year of rigorous work that our teams got to know their teams we worked through challenges for us to deploy our electronic stack and our software across their whole portfolio vehicles it's it's not like you know inserting and uploading a new software packages, a deep set of changes that have to happen to their vehicles to do that, and so the work

of seeing our teams come together, collaborate, disagree, challenge each other, ultimately arrive at solutions where both sides are equally excited to move forward in the deal is really I think speaks volumes to the kind of culture that we've worked so hard to build within Rivian, and the same is true in our relationship with Amazon, the same is true in our relationship across our own business within between let's say our manufacturing teams and our engineering teams or our go to market sales teams and our product teams. But it's not a skill that's, it's not like a naturally equilibrium point.

It's something that takes constant focus, constant attention, and that means you need to have the right leaders in place, if you have the wrong leaders in place, it's incumbent upon myself and other leaders to make changes.

The right types of behaviors need to be identified and rewarded, and the wrong types of behaviors There's also need to be identified and actioned on.

And so, it is a constant active gardening of the culture active work of how it looks and how it shapes up.

When I asked you about navigating COVID in the supply chain issues at that time, you said something along the lines of like, well, that was like the least sort of risky time, like amongst all the obstacles that you faced and overcome, Like you feel like, the company isn't under threat through these like it has been in the past and you kind of get over these sorts of things.

The byproduct of which of course it's like, you're building this resilience to meet these challenges.

But was there ever kind of an existential threat to the company where the obstacle was so dire that you thought like this is it.

Like, I can't do it.

How are we gonna wake up in the morning kind of thing.

Like what was the most intense crisis that you faced?

I mean, there's been so many, the obvious one is, along the way, there's many times we're almost ran out of money.

And so. How close? Oh, look way closer than I would have ever wanted the teams to know.

Days, weeks. Yeah, like a week or two before it could be payroll.

It was early, early on.

Early on, yeah. And that was like just, that became just the norm that we were essentially hand -to -mouth for so many years.

but I'd say in more recent times that you talked about COVID.

We were planning to launch our first product in 2021.

And so to do that, there's obviously the product engineering, but there's a buildup of hundreds of suppliers that can make all the components and tool all those components.

So, you know, like a facial or a headlight the supplier has to build it, but they also have to build the tooling for it.

And so that was our first time turning on our supply chain.

And, in each case, we had to go through the really painful process in 2018 -2019 of negotiating deals with these suppliers.

From a position of weakness, the brand wasn't known.

We didn't have a balance sheet that looked particularly robust. It wasn't clear whether customers wanted to buy electric trucks and SUVs. And we were unproven as a company.

And so we had to pay, and by the way, the auto industry was at its peak.

So it was like, hmm, high times.

It wasn't like the the automotive supply base was desperate by any means.

So essentially we had to pay a pretty significant premium just to get all these suppliers to work with us and it wasn't as if we had a choice because there was just such a lack of leverage that we had.

But the assumption that I made was that after launching we would be able to negotiate meaningful cost reductions, off the success the product, and with continued volume growth.

and what we didn't predict was first that COVA would happen, and that would make setting up a plant, not just our plant, but all these suppliers getting toolings set up and coordinated and tested and quality loops worked through.

Really difficult from 2020 to 2021 when we were supposed to launch, but then subsequent to that, setting up the plant, and installing equipment that the supply chain would have such a hysteresis of capacity like just constrained for so long.

And so rather than us being able to negotiate cost savings, those same suppliers came and said, if you still wanna keep getting parts, you have to keep paying us.

And so there was this, I won't call it extortion, but it was almost like we had no choice but to pay whatever, you know, whatever additional fees were on top.

So it was just - This is why you're still having to subsidize like every sale.

And so that, we had to really work through that and it was, we launched another thing.

We decided to launch three products at the same time.

launch a truck and SUV in a commercial van all at once.

And so if things were going well, that would have been a really positive thing in that environment, it made it immensely complex. And just to illustrate how hard this is.

I feel like a two things that the install of the equipment of the plant, we had hundreds of truckloads of equipment that was sitting outside our plant in 2020 with no ability to install it, because we couldn't give contractors to work on site to like do the electrical drops and all of the above.

To actually install this equipment?

So we had to like - So they paid a billion and a half dollars to have deliver - So we had to like come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to get the equipment installed.

We had, you know, multiple different colors of shirts for different teams so that they wouldn't walk by each other and exchange, you know, COVID.

It was very complex. Once we got through that, when our supply chain was ramping, any single supplier can stop the plant.

And I think the focus is always on the single supplier that stops the plant.

What's not appreciated, is the other suppliers keep sending stuff.

So we would have insane stockpiles of the stuff we did have enough of, and it overflowed all of our warehouses.

We had to rent additional warehouses.

There were times we would have 100 semis lined up at one of our warehouses because there's nowhere to put the parts, because a single part was stopping production, so we couldn't build vehicles to consume the other parts.

And so the pain and the complexity of learning for the first time, how to run a complex supply chain across not just one vehicle, but three and to do that in that environment was, we like had to go zero to highly capable really quickly.

And so we're just now coming out of that.

So we renegotiated and resourced about half of our vehicle on our one.

But as I said, like the linkage to how that started still remains.

Hangover was long. R2, it's a totally different supply chain.

So the cost structure on R2 is, it's like, I'm so excited about it.

It's so much cheaper than what we did on R1.

And it's just starting from such a different position.

The supply chain stuff is so interesting because it's not like you're waiting on a part, you're waiting on in many cases, components.

And so when there's a piece that's required for your supplier to create that component that's missing, they have their supply chain.

So, it's sort of like it's a domino effect all the way down the line.

It takes a very long time for that to repair itself and get back on track.

Meanwhile, you've got 100 ,000 pre -orders and you've got all these customers waiting.

Like when did we do that panel in Denver?

Do you remember with Alex?

Oh man. Before we had a pandemic, it must've been 2018.

Yeah, it was before we put cars in.

2018 or 19. Something like that.

And it was a big dog and pony show, you had the vehicles there and it was like, we're on the precipice.

Everybody's gonna be getting this soon.

Yeah and then boom, yeah.

You know, it would be like three years later, right?

Yeah. I mean, you know, and you're trying to manage like, you know, making sure there's no customer revolt amidst all of this.

Like, I can't even imagine.

So, when you look back on all of those experiences, you know, what do you tell your younger self?

Like had you known all of this going in?

I mean, you strike me as somebody who would be like, yeah, I'm still doing it like Simonian.

Oh yeah, wouldn't have changed.

I probably would have spaced out the three vehicle launches.

Like I wouldn't have compressed so much complexity.

So probably would have launched R1S first, then the truck, then the van instead of all within the same six month window.

But in some ways the pain, the world has not yet seen it and it hasn't been realized yet but R2 is going to be so much better from a cost point of view and a supply chain robustness point of view because of the beating that we took on R1.

And I actually think the pain that we went through on R1 is leading to R2 being a better product.

And so the R2 is like the aggregate result of all of our experiences as a company.

And so those experiences are viable.

They helped inform how we operate.

They informed our culture.

to ensure they informed how we negotiate with suppliers.

And time, you know, it's like, I certainly wish some of those things were less painful, but it's gonna make us stronger in the end.

You seem like a very grounded, calm, equanimous person by nature.

And I'm just trying to imagine you in the center of the firestorm and how you kind of maintain that level of calm so that you can, you know, make good decisions.

What are the lifestyle habits that you, you know, kind of deploy to, you know, kind of maintain your sanity in a very insane life?

Hmm. I think everybody deals with challenging situations differently and there's no right or wrong answer.

For me, what I find is that as the situation becomes more complex and more pressurized, I'm at my best if I'm consciously staying calm.

So if you were to look at my notebook, at the hardest moments in Rivian's history, you'll find written -on pages, stay calm, or I often write, the calm person wins, and it's a reminder to myself that you just said it, but we make better decisions, we can process things more thoughtfully, or at least I should say, I can make better decisions and I process things more thoughtfully when I consciously stay calm.

And that's easy to say sometimes hard to do, but it's the reason I write it down sometimes to remind myself.

Do you have a practice though to do that other than just a reminder?

Like, are there things that you do or is there a way that you set up your life that makes it more conducive to remaining calm?

There's three things I think that are help.

So I eat very healthy, I'm vegetarian for a long, long time, plant -based for also a long time.

I like to exercise.

And even if it's, when I say exercise, I think we ought like our minds often go to like being in a gym, but exercise is walking, hiking, biking.

Rivian -style exercise...

Yeah, it can be lots of things, but it's being active, it's getting your body moving in a way that you may not solve something on a walk or on a hike, but your brain, at least I find my brain can reset and look at the same exact set of constraints and problem in a different way.

And then the third, which I don't do a great job of, is getting enough sleep.

I think if you do those three things well, you're in your best position to make great decisions.

That's some of the advice I've had from other founders or along those lines, which are, particularly as a company, scales.

In the beginning, your job in running a company is to do everything.

But as it scales, a big part of my job is to make as strong and robust of decisions as possible.

I'm no longer the person that's gonna design every part or, but I need to be making like the hard big decisions, and to even know what the most important decisions are to make so that your attention and your focus is being placed in the right.

And, often the big decisions that are easier the ones where the answer is obvious, the big decisions that are hard are the ones that are unpopular.

So they're either high risk, or they're ones for which the whole leadership team is like, RJ, what are you thinking?

And it's like, oh, I'm really convicted on this.

So you're not gonna be a 100 % right as well.

So you have to recognize that you will get some things wrong.

But I think on the really big, you know, one way door decisions, I try really hard to make sure we're thinking about those in the right way.

And so what is your advice to the young founder or somebody out there who's tackling a big problem or has an audacious vision for how to change the world from your experiences and all the things that you've learned?

I think first and foremost, I say this all the time.

It does take a lot.

It takes a lot of time.

You have to maybe it's possible, I can't imagine a way to do without you put it as a being obsessive of things, you had like being really dedicated to the thing you're working towards.

And this whole concept of work -life balance, your whole life is integrated into your work.

If you're really doing something big and if you, I think following a model similar to what I followed. So it's just every thing you're thinking about in some way relates in.

And then as your life becomes, is in the case with me, as your life becomes, has more things added to it.

So in my case had kids like finding ways for your kids to be part of it is important.

But there's no way to avoid that this is gonna take a tremendous amount of focus and time.

And you have to love it, you have to deeply love it.

You have to be passionate about it.

You have to be in it for the right reasons.

It's a different relationship with balance.

Yeah. You can't get too unbalanced or you're not gonna be able to actually fulfill the mission.

Yeah. One of the things I learned a lot in doing this, and so I've gone through cycles where I've been not physically as healthy and I'd say not performing it as effectively as I could have to where I am today, which is I've been much more intentional on how I find ways to make everything all fit together.

And so I talked about being intentional at time.

I'm really intentional on energy now.

So I think about, in the course of a week, what are the things that we're doing?

Are there enough things that are creative, enough things that are like grinding out hard work, enough things that are collaborative in mapping out the timeline over the course of a week to say that look, make sure it's balanced and make sure the context switching is also thoughtful.

So going from an intense negotiation where it's, you know, like a serious hard negotiation to giving an inspiring all hands talk to terminating a leader at the company to your recruiting lunch. That's a bad flow of events to have happen in the morning, but you could arrange those same things differently across the course of a week and your energy levels can be much higher.

So, you know, I spent a lot of time looking at my layout of the week to think.

You know, like what I did immediately before this was important that it wasn't something that put me in a really bad mood for example, or not even bad mood, just like beat me up emotionally.

And similarly, I know that after this, I'm gonna be in a great mood.

So I should go do something creative and inspiring.

Our time is winding up.

I gotta let you go shortly.

But I can't let you leave without some thoughts on where this is all going.

Like if you cast your gaze and your vision and onto a future maybe 30, 40, 50 years on the horizon.

And assuming there are all these obstacles and it's not going to go as planned and there are setbacks and the timeline gets stretched, what does it look like?

Like what is the world that you want to see that would match up to this vision that you have?

This is where I think I've said it before.

I think we're at such a wonderful inflection point.

And we're at the early innings of this transition away from fossil fuels.

So 30, 40 years from now, we should be in the late innings of that.

And it should start to feel as if when we look back almost unimaginable the way the world operated for the last 120 years, we'll just look back and be like, boy, that was crazy how we used to do things.

Can you believe we used to have these little teeny engines that would be on the end of a stick that we'd used to whack weeds in our backyard?

like that actually happened, and we'll like, look at that in the way that my kids look at like a dial up phone and don't understand what it is.

It's just going to feel so foreign.

But I think one of the things we haven't talked about here, which is also interesting, I characterize the transition away from fossil fuels is more than once in a generation, so once in a planet change.

We as a planet we had the benefit of this accumulated stored mass of carbon in the form of liquid and solid fuels that allowed us to industrialize the way we did.

That's a one -time thing.

We're gonna reuse them to get to where we did from a technology point of view.

We're now gonna figure out how to get off of them, but that's it.

Like in the history of our planet, that will be one blip.

One really important but short blip.

And so to be alive in that transition's a big deal.

The other transition and change we're seeing is the birth of artificial intelligence.

And there's no reason that these two happened to be occurring at the same time, but they are.

And so the combination of those two is gonna create opportunities that are even beyond what we might think of as science fiction, so things like cars that drive themselves, packages that are delivered to your house without any human involvement, manufacturing plants that are operated almost entirely through robotics, the elimination of information asymmetry in making decisions around everything from traffic to what I want to eat for dinner.

And so, I mean we could spend hours just dreaming about what the future looks like.

But the point is is it's the whole fabric of our society is going to look very different in 30 or 40 years.

And as we go through these massive changes.

Anytime there's a set of changes that impact society at this level, whether it's whether you're looking at the transit transition away from carbon based fuels, you know, away from fossil fuels, or looking at trying to you know, of the birth of artificial intelligence, it's gonna cause tension in society.

You know, and it's gonna be, that tension's gonna manifest for lots of reasons.

It's gonna manifest because there's incumbent businesses or incumbent ideologies or incumbent habits that are being challenged by that.

So I think it's important that as society, as many leaders as possible work to find the common thread amongst us as a species.

And it was one of the reasons early on and our life as a company, we start talking about our Kids Kids Kids and it's one of the...

We actually have a short, it's a really cool short.

Kids Kids Kids, it's three different trees.

But it's... I think it's this singular aligning mechanism that I've found regardless of almost everything.

Religion, political orientation, country of origin, age, it's something that unifies us as a species and I've had a chance to fortunately just travel a lot in life and it's so consistent.

We want a better world for our kids and we can debate what that looks like and that often leads to some of these tensions.

But a unifying thing is that there's a desire to create a world in which the generations to come are inheriting something that's as magical as it was for us.

So that's I think very important and I hope.

So yes what I think about for 30 or 40 years now there's technology, there's changes that are Like your goose bump inducing beyond even our imagination, I think we'll start to see.

But my hope is that the threat of humanity that has informed our society today continues.

And in fact, we find ways to run towards that as opposed to away from that.

Yeah, I share that optimism.

It's an incredible inflection point, this decisive moment that we find ourselves in.

I know as a kid, you used to say like, I wish I was born in 1890, I used to do this all the time.

I think your great era of automotive innovation.

1890s got nothing on 1983 or whenever you were born.

It is really a remarkable time in which we're living and the rate of change is only gonna escalate.

We're at the very beginning of this and it's exciting to bear witness to that.

And I'm very glad that you're somebody who is helping to steward that.

So, I have to let you go.

I could talk to you for four more hours but I really appreciate you sharing with me today.

I think you're on a beautiful and laudatory mission and I'm a fan.

Adversa that RJ. Thanks.

Thank you very much. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Cheers.

That's it for today.

Thank you for listening.

I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation.

To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at RichRoll .com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Boicing Change, and The Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals .richroll .com.

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Peace. Plants. Namaste.

[RJ Scaringe: The Audacious Mission to Decarbonize Transportation]-[Rivian Founder RJ Scaringe Is Building The Future: Leadership, Mindset, Innovation, & His Mission To Decarbonize Transportation]

📋 Summary

The Long Game: Rivian’s Audacious Mission to Decarbonize Transportation

The Complexity of the Automotive Industry

Navigating Existential Challenges and Resilience

Innovation Through "Soft Wins" and Design

The Future: A Once-in-a-Planet Transition

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript