Joe Justice, Author of Scrum Master

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Len: Hi, I’m Len Epp for Leanpub, and in this episode of the Leanpub podcast, I’ll be interviewing Joe Justice. Based in Fukuoka, Joe is a former Tesla employee who lectures globally and certifies professionals in JoeDX, which represents the business practices, culture, and operating model used within Elon Musk’s companies. Joe has worked with Bill Gates, the leadership team at Amazon, and operated the Agile program at Tesla for Elon Musk. Joe founded Wikispeed, which became an example of automotive design and production speed in a fun, egalitarian culture, something we’ll be talking about later. Joe enjoys collaborating as a board member, writing, teaching, and helping companies to make a good future arrive faster. You can follow him on Twitter at Joe Justice and check out their website for the Agile Business Institute at en.ab-agile.com.

Joe is the author of the LeanPub book, Scrum Master: The Agile Training Seminar for Business Performance. In the book, Joe and his colleagues provide readers with the ultimate Agile training seminar in book form. Business leaders, professionals who are ready to learn, and instructors will find in the book a complete training regimen with rich content, a training-tested structure, and high-value insights that have already resulted in many thousands of Agile projects delivered at all types of top-tier organizations, from Fortune 100 companies to lean startup companies around the globe.

In this interview, we’re going to talk about Joe’s background and career, their book, and at the end, we’ll talk a little bit about their experience as a writer. So thank you very much, Joe, for being on the LeanPub podcast.

Joe: Absolutely, Len. Thanks for contacting me. I’m really impressed with what LeanPub brings to the world, and it’s my honor to be a part of it through this author community.

Len: Oh, thanks very much. We’re just so happy to have authors like you on the platform, too. I always like to start these interviews by asking people for their origin story. So I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about where you grew up and how you found your way into this interesting career you’ve had in tech and manufacturing and Agile and consulting.

Joe: Oh, hey, Len. That’s so kind of you to say. So I was born in a little farming town, South Bend, Indiana. The only things South Bend is known for is Notre Dame. That’s how we pronounce it there, not Notre Dame—we pronounce it Notre Dame. Notre Dame football, even more so than the university, and corn.

And it’s not too far from the Indianapolis 500. Hoosier tire is made there. Most people have no idea. Hoosier is what we from Indiana call ourselves. We call ourselves Hoosiers. And I don’t know why, even though I was born there. The Notre Dame piece—I didn’t go to Notre Dame—is maybe useful in how this all got connected.

Notre Dame was, and many people say still is, a place where they really challenge top-tier sports, but the athletes have to take a full credit load of standard classes. They don’t have easier classes for the athletes or a lighter credit load for the athletes. And I believe that’s still true. And that was pushed on me as a kid in kindergarten, first grade, second grade, and so on.

That “scholar-warrior” idea—a modern, less lethal version, let’s say scholar-athlete, of this Lao Tzu concept of a scholar-warrior—really was strong in this little town. And in a little town, you can have this amplification effect where all of your friends and all of your friends’ families, or almost all of them, have the same concept.

You get this resonating echo chamber that, especially when you’re a kid and you don’t know differently, is really strong. And I was baked in that, as a lot of other people were. This idea that you should be finding your limits—if you can take the AP physics class, of course, you should, period.

If you’re capable of surviving the AP physics class, no matter what your age, you should. The idea of always taking advanced classes if you can, and always taking advanced certifications, always doing the hardest part of the work if you can, was good.

Getting in arguments with my siblings to take the back seat—the most difficult seat—because you wanted to take the most difficult thing. This strange microcosm, maybe. Some other people out there from small towns, maybe you have versions of the same story. And in big cities too, there’s pocket neighborhoods, I think. I didn’t grow up in a big city, but I think so.

And then I moved around the U.S. a lot. My dad taught at Notre Dame. He taught nuclear physics. And he set up one of their nuclear reactors. He and his graduate research associate, the two of them, they commissioned it.

This huge thing—they cut the roof off the building. It was lowered in by cranes. And he and this one other person connected everything—all the pipes, all the cooling, all the wires, the dials. It was physical dials. And set up this nuclear reactor and particle accelerator and figured out how to bend the particles so they could hit the target precisely.

Basically, how to target radiation particles. And his research—he developed a way to target those particles at cancer cells. And he was offered a lot of money to enter the military to do nuclear weapons, radiation weapons. And he very proudly—he very publicly to his kids, at least—said, “I said no, even though it was a lot of money. And I said no again. They asked again, and I said no again. I want to use what I’m learning for medical reasons.”

Because that left a huge impact on me as this little kid, looking up to my dad. And he did. He developed a machine that became what most of us now call the radiation oncology department in hospitals around the world.

Because he had done the hardcore engineering—just hours and hours and hours of adjusting lead weights and magnetic fields to bend the particles to make them hit where you wanted them to be at the speed you wanted them to be, so they could hit cancer cells and not the healthy cells around them. Very precise targeting and kill cancer in a human, in a living human body, with minimal collateral damage.

So then we traveled around as he would set up what became the radiation oncology department with the machine he developed and what had evolved from it at hospitals around the U.S.

So I grew up like a military family, moving from town to town to town, but with this work ethic: “Do the hard thing.” My dad would always say, “Work hard and have fun.”

Then my mother was, I believe, the first woman to be trained by IBM in computer programming. So you could think she was this pioneer, this feminist. I don’t think so. My impression of my mother is she just really wanted to learn programming.

It’s not like she was trying to make a statement for all women—I don’t think. Maybe. Like, I never saw her burn bras in the streets or anything like that. I didn’t see her join protests. Maybe that just wasn’t her style.

But she wanted to have as much access to the sciences, especially, as anyone. And I don’t think it was a gender issue—I think it was just blanket equality, you know, as anyone. And she did. She taught at St. Mary’s, the sister school to Notre Dame.

And then you might say, “Well, Joe, why didn’t you want to go to Notre Dame? You have this family lineage.” I did want to. Super early on, my dad told me, “Notre Dame’s expensive. You only go if you get a full-ride scholarship.” And I did not get a full-ride scholarship.

I think I’m pretty smart, but I didn’t rock the tests that hard. I did get a scholarship at the University of Wyoming. So after having lived in Colorado, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and—I’m sure I’m skipping some spots—maybe a short time in Michigan, I ended up in Wyoming at another really tiny town.

Wyoming is the least densely populated state of all of the 50 United States. So I spent a lot of time camping and learning about rock climbing and hiking. And I did.

I did a double major in Bachelor of Fine Arts and Computer Science, which at that time was an engineering discipline. So I took the oath of the engineer—the products we build, like think an engineer like a bridge, if they’re improperly engineered, people could die.

So I swear that these products will be more than adequate, that they will be robust, they will be excellent. Even though I was studying software development and some computer chip design, I took that oath.

And I had material sciences classes, that type of experience. And then I got to work for Bill Gates. And it was luck.

I was not identified as an early leader. I did not have some fantastic test score on some standardized test. I was not part of the accelerated celebrity program—nothing like that. It was lucky.

I had been involved in some Agile project management projects, some really early ones, when it was a new idea—some before it had a formal name. And Bill was looking for that. He was looking for some people with Agile experience, and that was really rare then.

And .NET had just been given a name, a Microsoft technology stack. And I had worked with the predecessor of that in college and in internships and when I just graduated. So I flew out to Seattle, and I worked for Bill.

I was in meetings with Bill. I got to experience Bill directly. And he had a profound impact on me. How can I say it? I think Bill was trying to teach everyone the same thing.

I also don’t want to sound so special. He didn’t single me out and say, “Joe, I’m going to teach you how to run a company.” But I paid attention and paid attention to the people around Bill, too, and I was lucky enough to be one of them sometimes.

Bill, I think, split everything into as many parallel pieces as possible and executed them all at once with different teams, as if they were different businesses—even if everyone was paid from the same tax structure or whatever, that was irrelevant.

He would try to not have them wait on each other for anything. If there was like a central finance function, he would try to split it up so every team had their own finance function, at least up to a point, so they could execute autonomously.

And that fit what I thought. And that’s what I knew about programming for multiple processors that run at the same time—multi-threading—which had been part of the computer science study I did anyway.

And that was enough to get me to consult at Amazon under Jeff Bezos. And I didn’t work directly with Jeff Bezos. I saw Jeff Bezos; he was over there.

But I was working with the leadership team that was in rings around Bezos. And Bezos looked like he did the same thing. His leadership style at Amazon looked identical.

There was minimal hierarchy at that time. There were program managers, project managers, program managers, product managers, project managers. That was about it in a huge company. And there was even fluidity between those.

The teams were really autonomous. They did some of their own budgeting in some cases—definitely a lot of their own architecture. And Bezos added to the formula.

He insisted the teams were super small—three, four, five people. So you had these teams of three, four, five people owning their own little business, like a startup. And that became Amazon Web Services—one little team per service.

And if any of you studied the finances of Amazon, you’ve seen that was a really successful financial move—from delivering books online to attempting to deliver anything online to delivering digital services online.

A service is about the thing that three, four, five humans—skillful humans that work cross-functionally—own. You don’t just design. You design and try to help test. You try to do three things.

The small groups of people could own it end-to-end and could see the finances of it. Those are pieces that make money. So it’s really a business, not some internal company function. It’s end-user profit-generating.

They could design, build, test, and deploy it with three, four, five humans. And that was a really successful move.

Then I founded Wikispeed. Actually, I founded Wikispeed while working for Bill Gates—a car company. I got totally into cars in college. My dad warned all of us kids not to. He called getting into cars “a disease.”

He said people would spend all their money on making some car cool and neglect other community or family obligations. And he was really worried about it.

He rode a bike a lot. He drove an old economy car, and he rode a bike a lot. And he would say, “Grease”—like an engine’s grease—“doesn’t build muscle.”

What he implied by that was, ride a bike because then at least you’re getting fit while you’re going there. He was an interesting guy. My mom, too.

But I got into cars anyway in college. And I started a car company to try to make very efficient cars. We competed in the XPRIZE, which was a $10 million U.S. prize to see: Can you make a 100-mile-per-gallon U.S. EPA cycle city-highway combined car that was road-legal and met all the safety specifications and could be sold?

In 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, that was nowhere near possible. Now, of course, it is. None of the hybrids are there yet, but the electric cars are way over 100 miles per gallon equivalent, so it’s clearly physically possible.

But in 2006, 7, 8, 9, 10, nothing was even close. Most people said it was impossible.

After work and on weekends—so I was working with Bill during the day—and then after working on weekends, I started a car startup, an automotive car startup.

We made 14 cars ultimately, and we set four world records with them. One of those was really important for the books that I’ve then written.

I used Agile methods because I was using Agile methods in Seattle and Agile methods all throughout. And that was unusual in hardware.

The idea of an Agile method in my life is instead of having a year or longer budget with phases or milestones or gates for each piece of the budget, you have a budget, and you measure it like a startup would.

You say, “How much money do we have left? What’s the best decision we can make today?”

So you don’t plan your future decisions at all. I mean, you take guesses, but you’re not committed to any future decision. There’s zero penalty to change in Agile. And that’s very important for responding to change.

I ran this small car operation that way, and that allowed us to design, build, test, deploy, and get road legal approval for a new car design in one week. That is still a world record—from starting a car design to having built it, crash-tested it, gotten certification, and sold that version of the car in seven days. That still stands. No one has been that fast ever.

We did it 14 times to prove it could work. We sold most of those cars. Some were commuter cars; many of them were used as race cars. They were really simple cars, but they were road-legal. They met safety specifications—four-seat cars.

That experience then got me to consult for Tesla. I raced against Tesla in the XPRIZE, and we outlasted Tesla. We didn’t win either. We finished 10th place out of 144 cars, I think. So we did well—we didn’t win, but we did well.

We went further than Tesla, than the Musk companies. But I’d met the Tesla team, and I was really impressed at how fast they were at developing, at engineering, and the quality of the engineering.

I consulted with them on what became the Model S—the White Star—looking at the chassis and body in white with them. I recommended more modularity, more pieces that could be unplugged so teams could work independently, which they did.

The future versions of the Model S have many more modules, and all Tesla products are just more and more and more modular.

Then I became a Tesla employee in 2020. Just before joining Tesla, I wrote my first large LeanPub book, Scrum Master. It was everything I learned about Agile up until becoming a Tesla employee.

I think that date was really important to me. I knew Tesla was doing something really next-gen, really special—something that was new to this current phase in the world.

I do believe nothing’s really new. If we look 100, 200, or 1,000 years back, very similar things have happened.

But nowhere else in this generation had I seen anything like what Elon Musk was repeatedly doing in Tesla and SpaceX. So I wanted to get out cleanly what I thought I knew first.

I wrote a 20-chapter book, and thanks to LeanPub, it did very well. Because of LeanPub, I met a lot of interested, collaborative editors who improved each and every chapter. They’re credited in the first two pages of the book—thank you so much!

They translated it into, what, 13 languages now? Again, because of the online community, the global community.

Then I went to work at Tesla and used everything I knew to make the biggest difference I could. I was already considered the world’s expert at short hardware development cycles—at Agile hardware.

One week—design, build, test, road-legal certification of life-critical systems. I was often cited as, “Talk to Joe Justice. He’s the world’s expert.”

Tesla was doing all of it already. I had recommended splitting the cars into parallel pieces that could be designed, engineered, certified, manufactured independently, and then integration-tested by robots.

Well, of course, Tesla was doing that already. I’d seen that in the Model S as it developed. Then I’d recommended small teams—three, four, or five people. All of the modules had been split small enough for three, four, or five passionate engineers.

I’d recommended eliminating meetings and using automated information sharing instead—like monitors to say the important thing that would have been shared in the meeting. Tesla was doing all of that.

I didn’t see a single PowerPoint the entire time I was a Tesla employee.

I’d recommended not having budgets in advance, instead measuring how much money is left. Tesla was doing that.

There were monitors above everyone’s head showing how much money is in the Tesla bank account. Then we were told by signs in the bathrooms and in the places you could eat, “What do you want to spend money on today? Spend money as fast as is responsible,” which I’d never seen in any other company.

I was only able to add one thing that improved the performance of Tesla, and that was some of what I learned about definition of ready and definition of done.

Len: Oh, yeah.

Joe: Len, if you or if anyone out there is curious about that, it’s in the book. Dive in—please enjoy it on LeanPub.

That helped, but I was really humbled and blown away.

So, I rewrote the book, and I added Chapter 21, “Agile at Tesla.” Then I visited SpaceX with my Tesla badge to say, “Is it similar?” I updated Chapter 21 again.

That has started a speaking tour all around the world.

Now, thank you, LeanPub. As a LeanPub author, I spend the month of June in Europe going to different cities—a different city every other day. Many times, sold-out lectures.

Then I visited private companies that want to implement the book as they understood it and the Musk model and JoeDX. My understanding of the Musk model is what I call JoeDX.

Now I work with Toyota in Japan and their supply chain—Denso, etc.—and Honda and Nissan, but even more with Toyota.

And aerospace—Airbus, Lockheed Martin. Len, you and I were just talking about ABB, a very large European electrical company that at least used to make many of the big industrial cabinets and electronics used in Tesla superchargers, among many other parts—not just Tesla. That’s the connection there.

I have a tip for anyone interested in LeanPub that I’d like to say as soon as possible.

That’s to contact photographers and artists that you like and ask them if they’re interested in being featured in what you wrote.

I did that with someone on social media—I just liked their watercolors. I said, “Your watercolors are beautiful. I wrote a Christmas book to explain what I hope gift-giving really means—what I hope Santa Claus really means to my kids. I think your watercolors would be beautiful. Are you interested?”

And she did.

Here, my son Bruce is here. Would you hand me the book Everyone is Santa?

So she made watercolors. Sorry about the blur.

Len: Oh yeah, you can send me a cover image afterward, and we’ll put it up with the materials and stuff like that, yeah.

Joe: She mixed real gold flake in the watercolor to get the right effects. This book—it’s not hand-painted on LeanPub; it’s pictures of her hand-painting on LeanPub. But here’s her. You can follow her on social media. She’s phenomenal—Chikako-san.

I recommend, if you are an artist, contact people on LeanPub who like to write. If you’re an author, contact people anywhere who like to create diagrams, illustrations, and embrace their style.

Please don’t micromanage their style, right? They’re doing this for fun, too. If you’re one of the rare people who can do both, you win, right? But the partnerships and friendships I’ve made through LeanPub have been life-enhancing, life-enriching.

Right now, the AI Prompt Generating book by George Tome is in a combo pack on LeanPub at a reduced price with my book, Scrum Master, because George found my work and said, “You’re explaining the way companies should run so that the people in those small teams of three, four, five can use AI well.”

George said, “My book, AI Prompt Engineering, is how to use AI well.” I looked through his materials and said, “He’s exactly right.”

We were able to make this business collaboration that is currently selling well—it’s the holiday season right now, and it’s selling well.

Len: My wish for LeanPub authors is connect and collaborate.

Joe: Yes, Len, please go ahead.

Len: Thanks very much for sharing all of that. That was so great—so well told and so coherently told.

Yes, definitely. I mean, 100% reach out to people—reach out to people to be beta readers of your book. Reach out to people to collaborate with you on illustrations and things like that.

People don’t mind hearing that you admire their work. They don’t mind hearing that you admire their judgment. They don’t mind being asked to collaborate on projects as long as you do it professionally, with respect for their time and the value of their work and things like that.

Our platform is definitely set up to help encourage people to talk to each other, to get things out early, modify them as you go along with feedback and stuff.

But before we go on to talk maybe a little bit more about the book specifically, there’s a lot. You told us a lot about your life, all the interesting things you’ve done, but I know there’s more to it.

Put on the hat if you want. We’re shooting at Christmas.

Now that it’s been revealed, I was going to say you knitted us a fantastic sweater there just for the holidays.

There’s a couple of threads I want to add and maybe pull on—just a couple of personal ones first before we go on to talk about basically what’s happened in manufacturing that you’ve been a part of and you’ve seen.

The first is, did you study Chinese martial arts when you were younger?

Joe: I did.

Len: Thanks to LinkedIn for this—I didn’t go snooping.

What style did you study?

Joe: For 15 years, I did a style they called Shaolin Kung Fu. In martial arts circles, a lot of people want to claim any famous name, and you don’t know.

You know someone is teaching you martial arts, and where they actually learned it, and where the person who taught them actually learned it, is highly contested. And I also don’t know.

But they called it Shaolin Kung Fu, and I did study three hours a day most days, some weekends, 12-hour days for 15 years.

I’d put a test for me—like, because I didn’t know if the lineage is real or whatever—I was like, “What do I want to get out of this?”

And I said, “I want to break concrete with my hands.”

And I got to a level where I could.

And I said, “I want to break concrete with one finger.”

The training regimen brought me towards that. We were doing fingertip push-ups every day, and then you’d take fingers away over the years until you were doing one-finger push-ups.

Actually, I would do them on my middle fingers, braced like that. Then breaking exercises until I could break concrete with one finger.

I did get there on both hands, 15 years later, which was my definition of success.

Man, the discipline that taught me has been useful in other things.

Len: That’s the word I was just going to use—discipline.

Not for 15 years, but for three years, I studied Flying Crane in Montreal.

That lineage is actually quite well…

Joe: Yeah, that one is. I had thought of going there to study as well.

Len: Laurent Bernard.

Laurent Bernard was the name of the guy—the teacher that I had.

It’s the discipline you learn and just sticking around to…

A lot of people might not believe the three hours a day, kind of everyday, kind of sessions.

But traditional Chinese martial arts teachers are actually very generous with their time, which is probably the thing that would be most surprising to hear about that.

Three-hour sessions with just one group of students, things like that.

The other thing—you mentioned this in your book—that I believe… and I just want to talk about challenges and overcoming them.

You were born legally blind.

Joe: Yeah, that’s right.

Len: And you had multiple surgeries as a kid, and you had to learn how to read, I think, holding the book right up to your face and things like that.

You talked about the environment you’re baked into, and it sounds like Notre Dame had various virtues and principles.

But specifically for you, it sounds like there was a personal engagement with that—doing something the hard way.

Joe: My family had six kids, which at the time I grew up in South Bend, Indiana, was not that uncommon.

That was still a lot. But, I mean, people had a lot more kids then, and especially in that town’s culture at that time.

I’m the youngest, so my mom is actually very old now because I’m the youngest of six. My dad has passed away.

They didn’t notice I was legally blind.

Think about it—when you have two kids or three or, you know, when kids come over for a playdate, you’re like, “Are they all here?”

Really, they just thought I was clumsy.

I got all the way to seven years old and riding a bike, and no one knew I was legally blind.

“Why didn’t Joe stop for the stop sign?” They’re like, “Oh, he probably just doesn’t care.”

I didn’t see it.

I didn’t see the stop sign. That’s how poor my eyesight was.

Then standardized testing at school—the staff sent a report to my parents. Actually, I think they talked to my parents directly—it’s a small enough town—saying, “Joe can’t see. You know how he’s daydreaming in class and having trouble with writing his letters correctly? He actually cannot see.”

I remember crying a lot when they told me I needed to wear glasses because I didn’t want anything more to be different than the kids I was trying to play with.

But there was an enormous advantage. I’d been drawing every day.

I think the reason why most people didn’t know I couldn’t see is because I drew actually quite well.

I would draw with my nose actually touching the paper as a five-, six-, seven-year-old kid so I could see clearly.

And I could see super clearly—I mean, that close, I could see each little break off of the pencil lead or, you know, as the ink would go into the different grooves of the paper.

So there was this hyper-focus. I didn’t have the whole context, but I had this hyper-focus.

So I would look at another picture—because I couldn’t see the real thing—and I thought it was fun for hours to copy or interpret, whatever.

I did some pretty realistic drawings as a six-year-old, and they were like, “Well, clearly he can see fine, because look at that.”

But that difference in perspective has maybe been useful—looking absurdly close and then, now that I can, far away and seeing holistically.

But not just far away and holistically at a glance like most of us would in normal life, but also being comfortable touching my nose to something.

As an analogy to that, each time I’ve been lucky enough to go in a company, I’ve asked, “Can I participate in making the thing?”

In most companies, they have this separate executive layer with their own bathrooms, their own coffee machine, often their own building.

You don’t go into production unless it’s on a tour.

I’m usually brought in by the owners, by the board, or the executive team hired by the board to solve some problem or grow to some goal, to achieve some ambition.

And quite unusually, for most of these cultures, I ask, “Can I join the work?”

And need full work suit, safety gear, go through the safety training.

So when I worked in Toyota, I actually helped build a Camry on the line.

When I worked in… Oh, what’s another good example?

But everywhere, I’ve participated in making the components.

I think it’s part of the work ethic you alluded to, maybe part of the discipline.

But I actually think maybe because of the difference in perspective I had as a tiny kid, because I couldn’t see.

Len: You’ve reminded me there—there are two things I’d like to get to, that I’d really like to get to while I still have you.

One is you—I mentioned it earlier in the introduction—you do talk in your talks and your writing about management hierarchy and how it’s basically bad to have a distinction between “boss” and “worker.”

That flat hierarchies are actually, we’ve discovered, the most productive in a lot of ways.

It reminded me of something—I’m just a layperson who’s been watching Elon Musk and his companies from a distance.

But one thing that particularly becomes clear is that because of the industries he chose to—the two main industries he chose to get involved in were the two most full-of-shit industries that there were: space and cars.

Incredibly hierarchical, particularly with the automotive industry—full of boasting.

My personal insight or hypothesis was always, one of the main things that Elon Musk saw was no one is actually trying to make the best thing the best way.

Literally no one in cars or in space was trying to do the best thing the best way.

A lot of it had to do with East Coast hierarchy and nepotism, power play: “I’m the suit; I’m in the executive bathroom, so therefore I want zero domain expertise. I’m a manager. I’m an executive. If I actually put on the hard hat and even knew how the machines worked, that would be a detriment to my power.”

I think that’s what Musk saw—there are just layers and layers of theater and ego and BS.

Actually, no one’s just trying to solve it: “How do we make a car that can break the machine that tests how strong cars are?”

No one was even trying to do anything like that. They were all fighting to get their grill on the front of the car that they preferred, and they’d trade that for the steering wheel that some other guy got to choose.

It was mostly all guys, too.

Do you think there’s some truth to that, as someone who’s worked seeing all these changes and things like that?

Joe: Len, you’re a master. You politely even framed it as a question. It is so enjoyable to talk to somebody with your level of tact. So you phrase it as a question—you’re hilarious.

Yes, I will agree. Absolutely. But your knowledge is deep and useful and broad too. I really appreciate it, and I can respect it.

Len: Well, I got to validate it because I’ve secretly believed this all this time.

Joe: The reason it seems to have been so intractable is because of paid press. The ability to buy press articles as if they’re advertisements and the… the blurriness—very intentional blurriness—between paid advertising and journalism because the journalism also became paid.

So I got to experience that firsthand. I’ll try to say the short version. Someday, people on LeanPub, ask if you’d like the longer version of the story.

The 2011 Detroit Auto Show—that was during the bankruptcy filings for all of the Detroit Big Three, two of whom did file bankruptcy, one didn’t.

They essentially bought the future Biden presidency in exchange.

That’s a contentious statement. I’m happy to stand behind that statement, but I’m aware that most people don’t agree with that statement I just made. But that is what happened.

The idea of Biden saying, “Mary, you led in electric car development,” when it was clearly Tesla at the time, is one of the evidence points.

Anyway, that’s when that was happening. The “buying the future presidency” was being negotiated.

There was a period of months where all the people—all the journalists—that were being paid by the Detroit Big Three to talk about how great the next car is, when it’s the same, or in some cases worse than the previous car—and had been for several iterations, and trucks, and SUVs—were writing glowing press. Glowing journalism.

They were paid so much that independent journalists didn’t have enough money to survive and had almost entirely left for other jobs.

So there was almost only now paid journalism by the Big Three for automotive journalism.

Suddenly, there was a period of months during the bankruptcy filing where they weren’t getting paid by the Detroit Big Three.

It was over the holidays, too, so these journalists were really upset.

And what are these journalists good at doing? Writing media and producing media.

So suddenly, there was a lot—several articles a day—about… they were various levels of angry with the Detroit Three.

Starting to talk about problems with the vehicles in the most extreme cases, but more often saying, “We reviewed this car, and it was okay.”

Suddenly, I was this new car company owner—Wikispeed.

We had a car at the Detroit Auto Show. We were put on the main floor.

We were given the spot for free.

We were put right next to Ford.

And on the other side…

And we got all the positive press.

We had several positive articles a day, from major publications. The Discovery Channel interviewed us several times. Road & Track.

“Where are you coming from?”

“We’re a startup. Our product does work, but barely. We’re basically selling a beta. It’s safe, but that’s it.”

We had so much glowing press.

And I knew something very strange was happening because we hadn’t earned it.

None of them asked for validation. None of them asked to see our fuel economy tests, which we were advertising—though we had them.

But none of them asked to see it.

None of them asked to see our safety tests.

I realized it was 100% paid advertising.

We were getting the benefit of their anger saying, “See? This is what you’ll do if you don’t pay us.”

So that defended the nepotism you spoke about, the hierarchy you spoke about, and the boasting—the large egos you spoke about.

It’s this completely paid media engine.

The more indirect version of saying the same thing—a more indirect way that influence takes place—I have this joke that the only industry writing worse than car industry writing is book publishing industry writing.

And if you want to know why certain authors never get negative reviews in certain papers, you can just check the ads in the Sunday book section and who’s paying for those to find out why.

So even if it’s not like a direct payment to the journalist to write it, if half the ads in the newspaper are car industry ads for fuel cars specifically, guess what?

Guess what you’re going to hear about the future of the EV industry, right?

And it’s not necessarily because—and I’m not saying you’re wrong—but it’s absolutely the same function takes place whether anyone’s getting directly paid by the car company or the book publisher or not.

That influence is 100% there, including to editorial page level, for sure.

Len: I wish we had more time, but there’s another big, big issue that I wanted to talk about. So thank you for that.

When you said that your mother was either the first or one of the first women to be trained as a programmer by IBM, a former podcast guest that we had was a guy named Jerry Weinberg. I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of him.

Joe: Okay.

Len: He passed away a few years ago, sadly, but he had a very long and very rich life. He was the first programmer he ever met.

He was old enough to have been hired as a—or sorry, no, not programmer, computer.

His first—one of his first jobs was as a computer because that used to be a thing people did.

And he had a story about being in a room—I hope I’m getting this right, there’s a full transcript on the interview—in a room at IBM with IBM executives with, like, a computer.

When they learned that programming was going to be not just a one-and-done activity, but a continuous ongoing thing, he said their faces just sank, and they were heartbroken because they didn’t…

They wanted to be in the engineering, as in the nuts and bolts and screws.

And like this idea of—you brought up the idea of that engineering used to be kind of in the kind of bridge and tunnel engineering kind of part of engineering.

That they, those executives, didn’t want programming or software to have anything really to do at all with what they were producing, or how they were producing it, let alone how they were producing it.

And I just want to bring up that historical moment of…

And then that wonderful talk you gave at ABB, which I’ll link to, or to ABB, about what Tesla has been doing with their Justice Board and modularity and all sorts of other things.

You do talk about the bathrooms, which is very funny, and the cafeterias in that talk.

Could you just, for five minutes, maybe talk a little bit about what the Justice Board at Tesla is and what modularity is and how it works?

Because it’s just—especially if you know some of the history of manufacturing and things like this—it’s just mind-blowing.

Joe: On the simple level, the Justice Board is like a chart. It looks like a spreadsheet.

There’s a number you want to get better. It’s like a score in a video game.

For example, how many grams the seats that go in the cars weigh.

And there’s other numbers, and some of them correct each other.

Like another number is how comfortable they are, and that’s measured in points of pressure across the seat.

So it’s actually a measurement. It’s not subjective.

And then there’s how many seconds it takes the seat to be installed.

So there’s groups of these numbers.

Those all connect up to the parent goal of the company, which in Tesla’s case is transitioning civilization away from fossil fuels because fossil fuels are not available on the Moon or on Mars.

They only work on Earth.

If we’re going to be a multi-planetary species, we need a civilization we like that scales out that’s not fossil fuel dependent—sustainable energy.

So that’s the number. That’s the goal—transition civilization to renewable tech.

Then part of it is, well, if our cars cost less and they’re electric, maybe more people will get them.

So part of the car is down to the seat—how many grams the seat is.

So you have these scores like a video game. That is your management.

No one needs to take you into a meeting and say, “Can we figure out how to make the seats lighter?”

Your score is right there.

It’s like when you play a video game—you don’t have a management meeting before you start playing the game to say, “Can you gather more coins and stomp on more turtles?”

You just get points when these things happen.

So you’re like, “I get it. The game thinks that’s good.”

Elon’s very forward about the gamification of all of life and, of course, runs the companies that way.

So you have this number, and then three, four, or five humans with a lot of AI assistance.

The AIs are really useful to check your engineering, suggest engineering ideas, help you program the robots, or help you complete supply chain contract edits.

You can complete the core work much faster and with much higher quality and way lower effort because of these tools.

These tools let three, four, or five humans do the entire stack of seat design, supplier negotiation, robot programming, assembly, and testing.

It requires a lot of skills, but the AI helps you with those skills.

So, three, four, or five people, assisted by AI, it’s your job to try within 12 hours to improve that number.

From 5 a.m. to 5 p.m., you try to make that number go up in production.

There’s not some separate design building—you are in production, where seats are being put in cars, and you’re trying to adjust the robots making the seats and putting them in cars to do it a second faster without reducing quality.

You have quality checks—you have to have a lot of quality checks to move this quickly.

By 5 p.m., hopefully, one of those numbers, or sometimes more than one, is better.

Well, that’s the seat, right? So that’s a module that’s about the size three, four, or five humans with AI assistance can sometimes improve within 12 hours.

Then there’s the heat pump. Then there’s the battery pack. And the battery pack is split into sub-modules and the cells under that.

There are teams working on cell making.

There are 12 big chunks for each Tesla car—or there were last time I was in the company, it was 12.

Some of them have sub-modules.

That makes the Justice Board the Justice Board.

It looks like a grid with scores to improve, and the goal is to try to split those scores until three, four, or five people, assisted by AI, without any other team’s help, independently can make one of those scores get better.

Len: That’s such a great answer. It replaces management.

Joe: Yeah.

Len: That’s something I had missed sort of asking you to elaborate on, is the way the sort of conventional management layer is taken out of it.

Management is a key performance indicator that they’ve decided now.

But there’s this board with all these rows with these modules.

The thing about the modules that’s so interesting is that this is not unique to Tesla automotive manufacturing with respect to everything, but like it’s the same seat in the semi as it is in the SUV, as it is in the sedan.

It’s not that, again, that sort of thing happens all over the place, but the fact that it’s baked into the way things are fundamentally done—not just convenient or something like that—there’s a theory and a philosophy behind doing that is one of the things that makes it so fascinating.

One of the reasons they’re so—they can do things so quickly.

This is an industry where people boasted about their worst feature, which was how many parts went into their cars.

I remember—it was so funny to watch—it was so backwards the way people would defend the incumbent car industry by saying, “Tesla will never be able to compete. Those Silicon Valley guys have no idea how many parts go into a car.”

And it’s like, they’re trying to reduce the number of parts in the car. They’re telling you that you’ve got it exactly backwards, and they couldn’t be saying it more straightforwardly.

That’s one of the many things that’s just so fascinating.

I’ll point people to the amazing talk you gave to ABB, that they very graciously let you publish, where you go into this, not only in detail yourself, but with an excellent audience of engineers who know exactly what they’re doing and what to talk about.

There’s HR people there, there’s people who bring up something you talk about, which is customers and things like that.

But just before I let you go, we’ve got a couple more minutes.

At the end of the interview, we’d like to talk about the person’s experience as a writer and an author.

You talked about that a little bit, but do you have a special approach to writing books?

Did you book it? Do you do it in an Agile way? Do you book a time, like an hour every Saturday morning, “I’m going to write”?

Joe: The most important step to making the best writing that I’m capable of doing is to avoid writing until I’ve experienced something unusual.

I would often tell myself I have a choice between sitting down and writing today or doing something worth writing about.

Always choose the second one.

I could have gone directly into writing the second book, Product Owner, which is not done, or joined Tesla as an employee in 2020.

And I said, my life will be a much more interesting book, if my life were a book, if I don’t write that book yet.

I think the goal is not to publish as much as possible.

For me, it’s to try to make it strikingly interesting and useful.

That is a much more fun process because you get to do a lot more.

If we live our life as if it’s the book, and then only when we cannot do— We’re in the hospital, the pandemic just breaks out and you’re basically under house arrest— Whatever that is, only when you cannot do, that’s when you have the experience in your notes, in your diary, or in your brain, depending on how your memory works, to then write.

When that happens, for me, my approach is to set a rhythm.

Time box every day, seven days a week. Interrupting it, even for the weekend, breaks it for me.

A cycle that I’m happy to keep every day.

I think it was 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. every day, seven days a week, I think is what it was for Scrum Master.

The process I use there is definitely not unique to me. I think a lot of authors will say, “Yeah, I tried that, and then it did or didn’t work for me.”

It was: Start with the 10 things I would tell my kids honestly and straightforwardly on my deathbed.

On this topic, like, “Kids, I’m about to pass away. This is no regrets, exactly what I wish you knew about this topic.”

If people asked you about this topic, “This is really what I wish you knew. No nonsense.”

And those are the chapters.

Len: That’s a really amazing answer—both parts of it.

The specific sort of process you had at the end, but it works for some people and doesn’t for others.

Also, choosing what to write about in that very specific way.

The last question I always like to ask, if the guest has been using LeanPub as an author on the podcast, is:

If there was one magical feature we could build for you, or if there was something that, whenever you’re using LeanPub, has you shaking your fist going, “Damn you, LeanPub! Why does this suck so bad? Please fix this for me.”

If there was one thing you could ask us to do, what would you ask?

Joe: Marketing.

Len: Marketing? Okay.

Joe: Yeah.

Len: I get it. You don’t need to say a lot more. Anybody who’s ever published a book or self-published a book will know what Joe’s getting at.

It’s the hardest part. Apart from writing the book, getting the book in front of people, getting people to buy it, getting people—and then getting the people to read it—that is the hardest thing.

We do things like this podcast to try and help.

We have various—actually, email newsletters are one of the most popular ways for people to market books now, and we have a couple of those that are growing.

But yeah, that’s the hardest part, and we’re trying to get better at it, kind of quite actively now.

If anyone has any ideas or thoughts— But that also, that being said, the best marketer of a book is the author.

Even conventionally, the big publishers, like Penguin Random House, will tell you now they’ll ask the author, “What are you going to do with your platform?”

So, one word encapsulates the biggest problem that the book world actually has, and you did it very well.

Joe: I mean, like big kids’ marketing.

Like tobacco companies paying to have people smoking movies.

I mean, like— I can’t—I don’t play video games anymore, but I can’t think of the last time I played a video game, and you find a book on the bookshelf, and it’s a LeanPub title, and it says “LeanPub.”

Or I can’t think of the last time— I don’t watch Netflix, but I walk past someone watching Netflix, and there’s a character in the Netflix drama ordering a book on LeanPub.

I mean, those are paid placements.

That’s how those shows make their money, and I’ve not seen any for LeanPub.

I’ve not seen a politician with their pack backed by LeanPub, and they talk about the authorship initiative to get more LeanPub authors in schools, and suddenly that’s on every news network.

Like big kids’ marketing.

I’ve not seen that used enough except by evil players.

I think it’s time for songs to rap about not just Gucci, Fendi, Prada.

How do I know those names? Because they’re in every song when I’m in the gym.

Well, those songs need to say “LeanPub” and then the 10 most common LeanPub titles.

Because that artist gets a hundred dollars or whatever for every time they say a top 10 LeanPub book promo and the name “LeanPub.”

That’s how the system—the bad part of the system—works.

That needs to be flexed a lot more than email lists and podcasts, which are an essential deeper dive for once people hear them or hear a drop on by their politician, etc.

Len: Thanks very much for encouraging us to up our game in that very—you just said it very well—about this reality that’s all around us.

If we can find a way for good reasons and with a good mission to insert ourselves in the daily public conversation, that’s definitely something we’d love.

Well, Joe, thank you very much for taking some time out of your day to talk to me and to talk to all of us.

Thank you for using LeanPub as a platform for your books.

Joe: Len, it’s my honor and privilege.

Everybody, happy holidays.

Read Everyone is Santa and see if it matches what you want to share with your loved ones.

Some of you, it might.

If it does, I think we’ll be good friends.

So then connect with me on social media because I think we’re a rare group that thinks about Santa Claus that way.

If you’re passionate about business performance, you’ll love all the business performance books on LeanPub.

Consider mine, too: Scrum Master.

Len, you’re amazing. I hope to talk to you again one day.

I’d love to have a coffee or beer with you in real life someday.

Len: Definitely. Thanks very much.