Jeffrey Escobar Is Building for a Decade That Arrives in Three Years

The pace, and what it does to the timeline

Ian Sierra: Start with what you’re seeing. Why does this idea exist at all?

Every single day I see more and more people lock in, get more dedicated, work more. That’s where the culture is right now. Young people, old people, everyone is understanding that time is finite. And now you have AI and the ability to get things done rapidly. We’re moving into a process where it’s like living in New York City, but everywhere in the world, digitally.

You mean the pace.

Every day there’s a new video, a new trend. Every second, every millisecond, something is published on the internet. That’s going to escalate and grow exponentially, so change happens fast. Progress goes even faster. We hit new targets at quicker rates than we thought we would.

What does that do to the timeline?

I think we’re in a huge global economic growth spurge and it’s not stopping. We’re on the J curve, literally 90 degrees upwards. What we think can happen in 10 to 15 years is going to happen in 2 to 3. Every single day gets quicker and quicker.

What the core actually is

So the core is your answer to that.

The core is one location, wherever you want in the world, based on your preferences. That location is where you do most of your thinking, your work, your exercise, everything, so you never have to leave. It’s quite simple. Make it a house, make it an office, whatever. But in that place you have your gym, your shower, your bed, and your computer.

And everything else?

Food comes to you. You don’t go out to get food. Clothes come to you. You don’t go shopping. If you want a sauna, a cold plunge, whatever health thing, it comes to you. If you have to wash clothes, have someone do it. The whole idea is to cut the meandering and the unnecessary things so your entire essence is building, growing, creating, working.

The money objection

The obvious pushback is cost. He answers it before I can finish asking.

People are going to say this requires money.

You don’t need that many funds. You can use Uber Eats. You can do meal prep and food planning. The infrastructure is already built. That’s my point. We already have all of this.

Describe your version. The one you’d actually build.

Something beautiful. A house in Hawaii near the beach, so I have everything there. My gym. A cook who cooks food for me. Housekeepers who take care of my clothes after I use them. A bedroom that’s completely dark, so no sunlight gets in. A red room, not UV, so I can get red light therapy. A cold plunge would be awesome.

If I want to swim one day, I swim. If I want a tennis court, I have a tennis court. Whatever the sport is. I have to allocate time for health, so I allocate everything there and I don’t leave at all. I’m just there, working and thinking. My books are there. If I need a manicure, a haircut, they come to me.

That reads as isolating to a lot of people.

Sure, it can seem miserable to some people because you want to go out into the world. But at this point everything is on your computer. You can literally do anything. You can build trillion-dollar companies straight from your desk. I’m a very firm believer in this.

The arithmetic underneath

He isn’t describing monasticism, and that’s the part people miss when they react to the surface of it. His objection to going out isn’t moral. It’s arithmetic. Every errand is a withdrawal from a balance that never refills, and he is one of the few people I’ve talked to who runs the math out loud.

Where does that arithmetic come from?

So the best executors have a limited time. With that limited time, every minute counts. Every second counts.

And if you’re young?

If you start young, that’s perfect. Your 20s are the best time to go out and get this done.

Labor changed

Why do you keep coming back to the Panama Canal?

People took action when they built the Panama Canal. People took action when they built the railroad system in the United States. People took action when they built New York City, the Golden Gate Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, the Brooklyn Bridge. That’s a lot of action and a lot of labor. But labor has changed. Labor is no longer physically enduring hard work. It’s action. Deciding what goes where and when.

Which is a job you can do from one room.

That’s the whole thing. We don’t need the extra step of learning a specific skill to execute something anymore. We just have to execute. We need people who can take action.

Part two covers what Escobar says most people building this way get wrong, and why he thinks a bad diet ends a career faster than a bad idea.