Founders - #11 The Cook & The Chef: Elon Musk's Secret Sauce

Episode Date: August 13, 2017

What I learned from reading The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why by Tim UrbanRead The Cook & The Chef: Elon Musk's Secret Sauce on WaitButWhy. Quotes from this episode: Which leaves only two options: create or copy Conventional wisdom: If something is both a good idea and possible, it's already been done.I'm fascinated by those rare people in history who managed to dramatically change the world during their short time here, and I've always liked to study those people and read their biographies. Those people know something the rest of us don't and we can learn something valuable from them. Musk calls this reasoning from first principles. One of the most important parts of this podcast. Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. Your entire life runs on the software in your head. Why wouldn't you obsess over optimizing it?We mistake the chef's originality for brilliant ingenuity. The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that they are aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. Conventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for a good reason. And history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, every time some chef comes around and changes things.  ----Founders Notes gives you the ability to tap into the collective knowledge of history's greatest entrepreneurs on demand. Use it to supplement the decisions you make in your work.  Get access to Founders Notes here. ----“I have listened to every episode released and look forward to every episode that comes out. The only criticism I would have is that after each podcast I usually want to buy the book because I am interested so my poor wallet suffers. ” — GarethBe like Gareth. Buy a book: All the books featured on Founders Podcast

So, this week's going to be a little different too. If you've heard this podcast before, you know that every week I read a biography of a founder or entrepreneur, and then I share with you the highlights that made me think or I thought were interesting or something I learned by reading the book. And I'm going to do the same this week, but instead of a book, it's a book-length blog post. Tim Urban, the founder of Wait But Why, has been publishing a four-part series on Elon Musk and his companies.

And the posts are so long he published them in Kindle format and in total it's like a seven-hour read. And today I want to talk about the fourth part of that series called The Cook and the Chef, Elon Musk's Secret Sauce. So let me just jump right into this distinction that I think is really interesting, what Tim is talking about as far as what makes Elon so special. And he uses the metaphor of the cook versus the chef. The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. The words cook and chef seem kind of like synonyms. And in the real world, they're often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, I don't mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef, the kind of chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who

enters a kitchen, all those who follow a recipe, is a cook. Everything you eat, every part of every cuisine we know so well, was at some point in the past created for the first time. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, and milk go back a long time. But at some point, someone said, what if I take those ingredients and do this, and this, and this, and ended up with the world's first pizza? That's the work of a chef. Since then, God knows how many people have made a pizza. That's the work of a cook. The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw, edible ingredients. Those are

her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds. The cook works off of some version of what's already out there, a recipe of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone else make. On a typical day, a cook and a chef don't operate that differently. Even the chef becomes quickly exhausted by the mental energy required for first principles reasoning, and usually doing so isn't worth his time. Both types of people spend an average day with their brain software running on autopilot,

and their conscious decision-making center is dormant. But then comes a day when something new needs to be figured out. Whatever this new situation is, autopilot won't suffice. This is something new and neither the chef nor the cook software has done this before, which leaves only two options, create or copy. Let's say the cook is thinking of starting a business and wants to know what the possibilities are conventional wisdom has him covered he types the command into the interface waits a few minutes and then the system pumps out its answer so what he's talking about there's before the section he was talking about the parallels between computers and then our own brain and then using the metaphor between hardware which is our biology and software

which is what we do with our time how we optimize optimize our learning and so forth. So he's using that as the cookie sitting there saying, hey, I have a question I don't answer to instead of trying to come up and use independent thinking or reasoning from first principles. I'm just going to go and reference conventional wisdom. And in this case, he's using the metaphor that conventional wisdom is a computer he types into. And that's where we're at. He types the command into the interface, waits a few minutes minutes and then the system pumps out its answer rules for starting a business number one if something has been done it's possible number two if something has not been done it's impossible number three if something is both a good idea and possible it's already been done with the decision made not to start a business,

he switches his software back into autopilot mode, done and done. Elon Musk calls the Cook's way of thinking reasoning by analogy as opposed to reasoning by first principles. If you start looking for it, you'll see the chef-cook thing happening everywhere. There are chefs and cooks in the worlds of music, art, technology, architecture, writing, business, comedy, marketing, app development, coaching, teaching, and military strategy. And in each case, though both parties are usually just on autopilot, mindlessly playing the latest album again and again at concerts, it's in those key moments when it's time to write a new album, those moments of truth in front of a clean canvas,

a blank word doc, an empty playbook, a new sheet of blueprint paper, a fresh whiteboard that the chef and the cook reveal their true colors. The chef creates while the cook copies. Being a chef isn't being like Elon Musk. It's like being yourself. That's the central metaphor to the entire post. And we're going to, and he builds, it's found about three quarters of the way through from from here on out everything i'm going to share is actually going to go back starting at the beginning and go in chronological order i just shared the the metaphor the chef and the cook to i think introducing at the beginning um gives you a good idea of of tim's opinion about after spending hundreds of hours researching elon and his companies what makes Elon so special and why he's so revered because he's a chef in the world of cooks. Anyone who's read the first three posts in this series is aware that I've not only been buried in

in the things Musk is doing I've been drinking a tall glass of Elon Musk Kool-Aid throughout. I'm very very into it. The dude is a steel-bending industrial giant in America in a time when there aren't supposed to be steel-bending industrial giants in America, igniting revolutions in huge old industries that aren't supposed to be revolutionable. After emerging from the 1990s dot-com party with $180 million, instead of sitting back in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entrepreneurs, he decided to start a brawl with a group of 900 pound sumo wrestlers, the auto industry, the oil industry, the aerospace industry,

the military industrial complex, the energy utilities, and he might actually be winning. And all of this, it really seems, for the purpose of giving our species a better future. So I just want to stop there. I just actually want to interject into that. If you know the story of Elon Musk, which was covered in Ashley Vance's book, it's been covered online.

We'll talk a little bit about it in this post. You realize that by 31, he was fabulously wealthy. And how many of us, he'd sold Zip2, which I'll talk about a little bit here, and then he'd sold X.com, or he merged X.com with PayPal, then eBay with PayPal. After that, he comes out of that with $180 million. He was the largest shareholder in that transaction. And how many people are going to make $180 million? And then if you know the story of Elon Musk, risk almost his last dollar and then sign up to work 100-hour weeks on projects

that everybody thought would or sure to fail there's never been a private space company the last uh successful american car company was founded what 75 years ago i forgot the exact but a very long time ago and then on top of that you're gonna um make it electric uh then you're gonna start with his cousins he funded solar city which now tesla has just obviously purchased if you've been following uh that recent event um so the reason I'm sharing this post and the reason I'm kind of rambling here and I don't mean to is just because I just think what he's doing is rare, and I don't even care if he doesn't succeed. I just think it's very important that somebody tries. Given that situation, I think 99..99 of the people would just sit back

restaurant laurels maybe they become a venture capitalist maybe they invest a little bit of money in other projects maybe they become a philanthropist not many would do what he's doing and i think that's what why he so why books about himself why podcasts about him are listened to why videos online about him are watched why people pay attention to them on twitter and why if you think about it look at the case of tesla they their marketing budget is zero yet every time the the model 3 event at the time of this recording was just a few weeks ago it was covered by every single news organization in the world there's there's what he's doing there is something very very unique very interesting and i think tim urban Urban's post on that piggybacks on that and helping us understand why he's doing the things he's doing and then how he does it.

So let's go back into the post after that long interjection. All right. So Tim's speaking here. During the first post, I laid out the two objectives for the series. Number one, to understand why Musk is doing what he's doing. And number two, to understand why Musk is able to do what he's doing. So far, we've spent most of the time exploring objective number one. But what really intrigued me as I began thinking about this was objective number two.

So the first three posts, I would say, fall into objective number one. And then this post is falling into objective number two. And again, I would go back and read them now. But I will cover the first three posts on this podcast at some point. And then this is Tim continues his thought. And I also highlighted this. This is also one of my favorite quotes of the post. I'm fascinated by those rare people in history who managed to dramatically

change the world during their short time here. And I've always liked to study those people and read their biographies. Tim needs to find out about this podcast. Those people know something the rest of us don't, and we can learn something valuable from them. As I worked through the Tesla and SpaceX posts, this concept kept surfacing and it became clear to me that this series couldn't end without a deep dive into exactly what it is that Musk and a few others do unusually well. The thing that tantalized me is that this secret sauce is actually accessible to everyone and it's right there in front of us. If we can just wrap our heads around it, mulling this over has legitimately affected the way I think about my life, my future, and the choices I make.

And I'm going to try my best in this post to explain why. This is why I think reading books and listening to a podcast that you can learn from are so important. Because he's saying, mulling this over has legitimately affected the way I think about my life, my future, and the choices I make. So he's saying studying Elon Musk has affected the way he's going to make decisions in his own life. Just like I shared a little earlier, the fact that I just happened to be randomly watching this podcast on YouTube one day and hearing Elon Musk say the importance of reading biographies has now led me to creating something that didn't exist before, which is a podcast just about biographies of founders. I think that's the greatest illustration of this self-reinforcing loop of the things we read,

the things that we expose ourselves to, whether through reading or podcasts, or if you like watching TV or whatever other forms of media you like to consume, are inevitably going to penetrate and affect your day-to-day life. So we should choose those carefully. So let's jump into the section he calls hardware and software. This is really funny. The first clue to the way Musk thinks is the super odd way that he talks. For example, here's how a human, and he's giving examples of the difference between a human and Elon.

So human child. I'm scared of the dark because that's when all the scary shit is going to get me, and I won't be able to see it coming. Elon's version of that. When I was a little kid, I was really scared of the dark. But then I came to understand dark just means the absence of photons in the visible wavelength, 400 to 700 nanometers. Then I thought, well, it's really silly to be afraid of a lack of photons. Then I wasn't afraid of the dark after that.

Here's another example. Human father, quote, I like to start thinking, I like to start working less because my kids are starting to grow up. Quote from Elon, I'm trying to throttle back because particularly the triplets are starting to gain consciousness. They're almost two.

Another example, human single man. I'd like to find a girlfriend. I don't wanna be so busy with work that I have no time for dating. Elon's version of this. I would like to allocate more time to dating, though I need to find a girlfriend. That's why I need to carve out just a little more time. I think maybe even another five to ten. How much time does a woman want a week? Maybe ten hours? That's kind of the minimum. I don't know. I call this must speak. Musk speak is a language that describes everyday parts of life as exactly what they actually literally are. When you or I look at kids, we see small, dumb,

cute people. When Musk looks at his five kids, he sees five of his favorite computers. When he looks at you, he sees a computer. And when he looks in the mirror, he sees a computer, his computer. It's not that Musk suggests that people are just computers. It's that he sees people as computers on top of whatever else they are. At the most literal level, Elon's right about people being computers. At its simplest definition, a computer is an object that can store and process data, which the brain certainly is. And while this isn't the most poetic way to think about our minds, I'm starting to believe that it is one of those areas of life where must-speak can serve us well,

because thinking of a brain as a computer forces us to consider the distinction between our hardware and our software, a distinction we often fail to recognize. For a computer, hardware is defined as the machines, wiring, and other physical components of a computer. So for a human, that's the physical brain that we were born with and all of its capabilities, which determines their raw intelligence, their innate talents, and other strengths and shortcomings. A computer's software is defined as the programs and other operating information used by a computer.

For a human, that's what they know and how they think, their belief systems, thought patterns, and reasoning methods. Life is a flood of incoming data of all kinds that enter the brain through our senses, and reasoning methods. Life is a flood of incoming data of all kinds that enter the brain through our senses, and it's the software that assesses and filters all that input, process, and organizes it, and ultimately uses it to generate the key output, a decision. When people think, and here's the summary, when people think about what makes someone like Elon Musk so effective, they often focus on the hardware. And Musk's hardware has some pretty impressive specs. But the more I learn about Musk and other people who seem to have superhuman powers, whether it be Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, Henry Ford, the more I'm convinced that it's their

software, not their natural-born intelligence or talents, that makes them so rare and so effective. Okay, so in that example, he's saying that software is what is processing all this information and ultimately uses it to generate the key output, a decision. So now this is his opinion on Elon software and how he makes decisions. How do you cause something to change? You direct your powers towards it. A person's power can come in various forms. Your time, your energy, your resources, your persuasive ability, your connection to others. So how does Elon do it? Number one,

he builds each software component himself from the ground up. Musk calls this reasoning from first principles. I'll let him explain. This is a direct quote from Musk and one of the most important parts of this entire podcast. I think generally people's thinking process is too bound by convention or analogy to prior experiences. It is rare that people try to think of something

on a first principles basis. They'll say, well, we do that that way because it's always been done that way. Or they'll not do it because, well, no one's ever done that, so it must not be good. But that's just a ridiculous way to think. You have to build up the reasoning from the ground up, from the first principles. From the first principles is the phrase that's used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that. from the first principles. From the first principles is the phrase that's used in physics. You look at the fundamentals and construct your reasoning from that, and then you see if you have a conclusion that works or doesn't work, and it may or may not be different from what people have

done in the past, end quote. Number two, he continually adjusts each component's conclusions as new information comes in. Honing in on his specific path, I brought up the great modern physicists like Einstein and Hawking and Feynman and asked him whether he considered going into scientific discovery instead of engineering. His response, I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. They're discovering what already exists. It's a deeper understanding of how the universe already works. That's cool, but the universe already sort of knows that.

What matters is knowledge in a human context. What I'm trying to ensure is that knowledge in a human context is still possible in the future. So it's sort of like I'm more like the gardener, and then they are the flowers. If there's no garden, there's no flowers. I could try to be a flower in the garden or I could try to make sure that there is a garden. So I'm trying to make sure there's a garden such that in the future, many fine mints may bloom. In other words, that's the end of his quote. In other words, both A and B are good, but without A, there is no B. So I chose A. He continues on. I was at one point thinking about doing physics as a career. I did undergrad in physics.

But in order to really advance physics these days, you need the data. Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of engineering. The debate, which is better, engineers or scientists, aren't scientists better? Wasn't Einstein the smartest person? Personally, I think that engineering is better because in the absence of the engineering, you do not have the data. You just hit a limit. And yeah, you can be real smart within the context of the limit of the data you have,

but unless you have a way to get more data, you can't make more progress. Like look at Galileo. He engineered the telescope. That's what allowed him to see that Jupiter had moons. The limiting factor, if you will, is the engineering. And if you want to advance civilization, you must address the limiting factor. Therefore, you must address the engineering. He had other reasons too. And here's another quote. I'm interested in things that change the world or affect future and wondrous new technology where you see it and you're like how did that even happen how is that possible so going back to to elon software and the principle number two that

he continually adjusts each each component's conclusion as new information comes in he makes a u-turn to the internet so now we're going back into the biography of Elon Musk. And at this point, he just started a PhD program at Stanford and it said, Musk quit the program after two days. The big macro arrow of his software came down to the right, saw that what he was embarking on wasn't in his goals anymore and he trusted his software so he made a macro change he dropped out he started zip2 with his brother an early

cross between the concepts of yellow pages and google maps and four years later they sold the company and elon walked away with 22 million he's in his 20s at this time as a dot-com millionaire the conventional wisdom was to settle down as a lifelong rich guy and either invest in other companies or start something new with other people's money. That's what I was referencing earlier, why I have so much respect that he took a different path. But Mutt's goal formation center had other ideas. Being leisurely on the sidelines was nowhere in his want box and totally unnecessary according to his reality

box the want box and the reality box uh you'd have to go back and read the post because these are drawings that tim does so if you're familiar with the way but why blog you know that uh part of what people like about us he's like little sketches that he does they're they're kind of like crude but really informative and kind of funny um and so the one box is just uh if you're looking at think of like a diagram where these are all the things that you want in life and you compare it there's an overlap like a venn diagram to the reality box things are actually possible and um a central thesis of this post is that people's reality boxes are distorted they they think what is possible is only that what already exists or what conventional wisdom

tells them is possible so back to uh this part in elon's life so he used his newfound wealth to start x.com in 1999 with the vision to build a full-service online financial institution the internet was still young and the concept of storing your money in an online bank was totally inconceivable to most people and musk was advised by many that it was a crazy plan but again Musk trusted his software what he knew about the internet told him that told him that this was inside the reality box because his reasoning told him that when it came to the internet the reality box had grown much bigger than people anticipated and that was all he needed to know to move forward.

X.com service changed, the team changed, the mission changed, even the name changed. By the time eBay bought it in 2002, the company was called PayPal and it was a money transfer service. Musk made $180 million. So now we're going to just skip ahead to the section about following his software to space. Having reflected on things, doing another internet thing wasn't really in the box anymore. What was in there was his still burning desire to help the future of humanity. In particular, he felt that to have a long future, the species would

have to become much better at space travel. Musk went back to first principles. So he started exploring the limits of the reality box when it came to getting involved in the aerospace industry. Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. It said he had no formal education in the field and didn't know the first thing about being a rocket scientist. But his software told him that formal education was just another way to download information into your brain and a painfully slow download at that. So he started reading, meeting people and asking questions. I love that part about thinking about formal education as a just another way to download information into your brain. And then the part where it says a painfully slow download is a direct quote from Elon. So going back to this, conventional wisdom said no entrepreneur

had ever succeeded at an endeavor like this before, and that he shouldn't risk his money on something so likely to fail. But Musk's stated philosophy is, quote, when something is important enough, you do it even if the odds are not in your favor. Conventional wisdom said that he couldn't afford to build rockets because they were too expensive and pointed to the fact that no one had ever made a rocket that cheaply before. But like the scientists who ignored those who said the Earth was 6,000 years old and those who insisted that the Earth was flat, Musk started crunching numbers to do the math himself.

Here's how he recounts his thoughts. This is a direct quote from Elon. Historically, all rockets have been expensive. So therefore, in the future, all rockets will be expensive. But actually, that's not true. If you say, what is a rocket made of? It's made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And you break it down and say, what is a rocket made of? It's made of aluminum, titanium, copper, carbon fiber. And you break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of these components? And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave a magic wand so the cost of rearranging the atoms was zero, then what would the cost of the rocket be? And I was like, wow, okay, it's really small. It's like 2% of what a rocket costs. So clearly it would be in how the atoms

are arranged. So you've got to figure out how you can get the atoms in the right shape much more efficiently. So I had a series of meetings on Saturdays with people, some of whom were still working at the big aerospace companies, just to try to figure out if there's some catch here that I'm not appreciating. And I couldn't figure it out. There doesn't seem to be any catch. So I started SpaceX, end quote. History, conventional wisdom, and his friends all said one thing, but his own software, reasoning upwards from first principles, said another, and he trusted his software. So again, think about, go back and think about the title of the post and the difference between the cook and the chef Which we talked about at the beginning of this podcast

The cook would have looked at that and said Oh, rockets are expensive, they'll always be expensive The chef, like, well, maybe there's something here Is there a way that I can buck conventional wisdom And actually come up and figure out what the actual, what he called What's the word he used? Let's see But if you say, what is a rocket actually made of? And you break it down and see the raw material cost of all these components.

And he figured out, okay, there's this. And then he, so he figures that out first. Then he talks to people in the industry. He's like, I can't figure out. There doesn't seem to be a catch. So if I can't discover that, maybe conventional wisdom is wrong. And I'm going to go ahead. And now this is, he started this back in what, 99?

Let's say 2000. So now we're 15, 17 years later. And now this is, he started this back in what, 99? Let's say 2000. So now we're 15, 17 years later and we're seeing the results. He's shooting rockets in space and landing and like they're coming back and landing on themselves on barges out in the ocean. It's just crazy. It's a crazy thing to watch.

Skipping ahead. So this is a section talking about optimizing his software. And again, just a reminder, this is not meant to be a summary of the entire post. I'm just pulling up parts that were particularly interesting to me. And if you find them interesting, then it's a good indicator that it's well worth your time going back and reading it. All right, so optimizing his software. There are all kinds of tech companies that build software. They think hard for years about the best, most efficient way to make their

product. Musk sees people as computers, and he sees his brain software as the most important product he owns. And since there aren't companies out there designing brain software, he designed his own, beta tested every day, and makes constant updates. That's why he's so outrageously effective, why he can disrupt multiple huge industries at once, why he can learn so quickly, strategize so cleverly, and visualize the future so clearly. This part of what Elon Musk does isn't rocket science. It's common sense. And this is a quote I want to read. I want to constantly keep in my life and read over and over again. Your entire life runs on

the software in your head. Why wouldn't you obsess over optimizing it? I love that quote. And yet, not only do most of us not obsess over our own software, most of us don't even understand our own software, how it works or why it works that way. So this is the part on dogma. So he listed dogma and then the note I wrote next to it was or why you must learn how to think for yourself. Good way to think about dogma and then the note i wrote next to it was or why you must learn how to think for yourself

good way to think about dogmas dogma is basically the antithesis of reasoning from first principles and he talks about that here dogma unlike first principles reasoning isn't customized to the believer or her environment and isn't meant to be critiqued and adjusted as things change it's not software to be coded it's a printed rule book. Its rules may be originally based on reasoning by a certain kind of thinker in a certain set of circumstances at a time far in the past or a place far away, or it may be based on no reasoning at all. But that doesn't matter because you're not supposed to dig too deep under the surface anyway. You're just supposed to accept it, embrace it, and live by it.

No evidence needed. You may not like living by someone else's dogma, but you're left without much of a choice. When your childhood attempts at understanding are met with, because I said so, and you absorb the implicit message, your own reasoning capability is shit. Don't even try. Just follow these rules so you

don't fuck your life up. You grow up with little confidence in your own reasoning process. When you're never forced to build your own reasoning pathways, you're able to skip the hard process of digging deep to discover your own values and the sometimes painful experience of testing those values in the real world and learning you want to adjust them. And so you grow up a total reasoning amateur. Only strong reasoning skills can carve a unique life path. And without them, dogma will quickly have you living someone else's life. That's so important.

Dogma doesn't know you or care about you and is often completely wrong for you. It'll have a would-be happy painter spending their life as a lawyer and a would-be happy lawyer spending their life as a painter. But when you don't know how to reason, you don't know how to evolve or adapt. If the dogma you grew up with isn't working for you. You can reject it. But as a reasoning amateur, going it alone usually ends up with you finding another dogma lifeboat to jump into, another rulebook to follow, and another authority to obey. You don't know how to code your own software, so you install someone else's. So I want to skip ahead and talk about the reasoning industry which is I never something

I never thought about and Tim just makes some really good points in this section no one talks about the reasoning industry but we're all part of it and when it comes to chefs and cooks it's no different than any other industry we're working in the reasoning industry every time we make a decision. Your current life, with all its facets and complexity, is like a reasoning industry album. This is a metaphor he's going to use here. The question is, so think of your life as an album. The question is, how did that set of songs come to be? How are the songs composed and by whom? And in those critical do or die moments, when it's time to write a new song, how do you do your creating? Do you dig deep into yourself? Do you start with

the drum beat and the chords of an existing song and write your own melody on top of it? Or do you just play covers? I know what you want the answers to these questions to be. This is a straightforward one. It is clearly better to be a chef. But unlike the case with most major distinctions in life, hardworking versus lazy, ethical versus dishonest, considerate versus selfish, when the chef-cook distinction passes right in front of us, we often don't even notice it's there. We mistake the chef's originality for brilliant ingenuity. People believe thinking outside the box takes intelligence and creativity, but it's mostly about independence. When you simply ignore the box and build your reasoning from scratch, whether you're brilliant or not, you end up with a unique conclusion, one that may or may not fall

within the box. By simply refraining from reasoning by analogy, the chef opens the possibility of making a huge splash with every project. When Steve Jobs and Apple, this is a really interesting anecdote, when Steve Jobs and Apple turned their attention to phones, they didn't start by saying, okay, well, people seem to like, kind of like this keyboard more than that kind. And everyone seems unhappy with the difficulty of hitting the numbers on their keyboards. So let's get creative and make the best phone keyboard yet. They simply asked, what should a mobile device be? And in their from scratch reasoning, a physical keyboard didn't end up as part of the plan at all. It didn't take genius to come up with the design of the iPhone. It's actually pretty logical. It just took the ability to not copy.

History is full of stories of chefs creating revolutions of apparent ingenuity through simple first principle reasoning. Our world was created by these people. The rest of us are just along for the ride. Yeah, Musk is smart as fuck and insanely ambitious, but that's not why he's beating everyone. What makes Musk so rad is that he's a software outlier, a chef in a world of cooks, a science geologist in a world of flood geologists, a brain software pro in a world where people don't realize brain software is a thing. That's Elon Musk's secret sauce. Which is why the real story here isn't Musk, it's us. The real puzzle in this series isn't why Elon

Musk is trying to end the era of gas cars, or why he's trying to land a rocket, or why he cares so much about colonizing Mars. It's why Elon Musk is so rare. The curious thing about the car industry isn't why Tesla is focusing so hard on electric cars. And the curious thing about the aerospace industry isn't why SpaceX is trying so hard to make rockets reusable. The fascinating question is why they're the only companies doing so. Okay, so I want to skip to the section where he talks about how to be a chef. He shares three epiphanies on how to be a chef. I'm going to share the first two and parts of the first two.

The third one, I think if you remove from context without reading the entire post, isn't going to make as much sense. So I'm just going to pull these parts out. So epiphany number one, you don't know shit. This is kind of funny

because for listeners of the podcast before, we always have this section these parts out so epiphany number one you don't know shit this is kind of funny because it yeah if for pat for listeners of the podcast before we always have this this section um in these biographies of founders and entrepreneurs always seem to pop up and it's i call it critics don't know shit but it's usually people criticizing their idea heavily and trying to discourage them from doing that so one of the most famous um examples is Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, winds up becoming the most successful retailer in the world. Yet the boss at his first job working in retail told him he's just not cut out for retail. If you would have listened to him, maybe his path would have been different. He obviously reasons for his principles like,

no, I think I can figure this out and winds up being the most successful retailer in history. All right. So epiphany number one, you don't know shit. That's what Stephen Hawking meant when he said, quote, the greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance. It's the illusion of knowledge, end quote. If you want to see the lab mentality, so I got to explain what Tim's talking about here. The lab mentality starts by saying,

I don't know shit and working up from there. So that's when he's going to reference lab mentality. It's just saying the mindset of saying, hey, I don't know what I don't know. So let me assume I don't know it. And then let me like lay a foundation to my knowledge and build upon that. So if you want to see the lab mentality at work, just search for famous quotes of any prominent scientist. And you'll see each one of them expressing the fact that they don't know shit. Here's Isaac Newton, quote, to myself, I am only a child playing on a beach while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me, end quote. That's beautiful. That's amazing language. And Richard Feynman, quote, I was born not knowing and had only a little time to change that here and

there, end quote. And Niels Bohr, quote, every sentence I utter must be understood not as an affirmation, but as a question, end quote. Musk has said his own version, quote, you should take the approach that you're wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong. The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that they're aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. Epiphany number two, you don't know shit. Number two, realizing that no one else knows shit either. So he's going to talk about The Emperor's New Clothes. So The Emperor's New Clothes is a story written in 1837 by Hans Christensen.

And it demonstrates a piece of trademark human insanity. And that is, this doesn't seem right to me, but everyone else says it's right. So it must be right. And I'll just pretend I also think it's right. So no one realizes I'm stupid. So something I've referenced on this podcast all the time is that history doesn't repeat, but human nature does. And again, this story written in 1937, you constantly see this even to this day. This is not going to change. This is programmed into the human species. And you'll see it constantly once you realize it. And let me just read it again. This doesn't seem right to me, but everyone else says it's right. So it must be right. And I'll just pretend I also think that it's right. So no one realizes i'm stupid

So, um, i'd recommend going back He does a nice summary in the post about the emperor's new clothes You've probably heard the story. You can also read the original version, but it's basically the emperor is naked and One person says the emperor comes up He's like, oh look at my my beautiful new clothes because he thinks he has invisible magic clothes on So the the person's like wow oh, look at my beautiful new clothes because he thinks he has invisible magic clothes on. So the person is like, wow, even though he doesn't see it. So let's say this group of, you know, eight, ten people there.

He doesn't see it, but he believes what the emperor is saying. So he's like, oh, your clothes are great. Then the person next to him is like, oh, shit. I don't see it. But I don't want people to think I'm stupid. And so he just goes up and imitates what person one said. It's like, oh, yeah, your clothes are great. Your clothes are great. Until somebody that's removed from the group walks by and goes, why is that guy naked?

So it's a really interesting story and a good metaphor for a certain part of human behavior. Going back to Tim's post. My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this. And this is a good summary of no one knows shit either. And this is now Steve Jobs talking. When you grow up, you tend to get told the world is the way it is, and your life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life.

Have fun. Save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact, and that is everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it. You can influence it. You can build your own things that other people can use. Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again. This is Job's way of saying, you might not know shit, but no one knows shit. If the emperor looks naked to you and

everyone else is saying that he has clothes, trust your eyes since other people don't know anything you don't. And this is a really important part. It's an easy message to understand, a harder one to believe, and an even harder one to act on. To swing the balance, we need to figure out how to lose respect for the general public, your tribe's dogma, and society's conventional wisdom. We have a bunch of romantic words for the world's chefs that sound impressive, but are actually just a result of having lost this respect. I never thought about this section, but I definitely learned something from it.

And so he continues here. Being a game changer is just having little enough respect for the game that you realize there's no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trailblazer is just not respecting the beaten path and so deciding to blaze yourself a new one. Being a groundbreaker is just knowing that the ground wasn't laid by anyone that impressive and so feeling no need to keep it intact. Not respecting society is totally counterintuitive to what we're taught when we grow up,

but it makes perfect sense if you just look at what your eyes and experience tell you. There are clues all around showing us that conventional wisdom doesn't know shit. Conventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for good reason. And history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again every time some chef comes around and changes things. Okay, so that was the end of any of the long sections that I pulled out. From here on in, these are just maybe a paragraph or two, each under a different heading that I think are important that you can easily digest.

This one's on negative feedback and on Elon Musk's musk's um thoughts on that so going back to the post the chef treats his goals and undertakings as experiments whose purpose is as much to learn new information as it is to be ends in themselves that's why when i asked musk what his thoughts were on negative feedback he answered with this i'm a huge believer in taking feedback i'm trying to create a mental model that's accurate. And if I have a wrong view on something, or if there's a nuanced improvement that can be made, I'll say, I used to think this one thing that turned out to be wrong. Now, thank goodness I don't have that wrong belief.

That's the end of his quote. To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress, courtesy of someone else, pure upside. Skipping ahead, this is Elon's thoughts on not being trapped in your own history, which I think is really important. I talked to Musk about the United States and the way the forefathers reasoned by first principles when they started the country. He said he thought the reason they could do so is that they had a fresh slate to work with. The European countries of that era would have had a much harder time trying to do something like that because, as he told me, they were, quote, trapped in their own history.

I've heard Musk use this same phrase to describe the big auto and aerospace companies of today. He sees Tesla and SpaceX like the late 18th century USA, fresh new labs ready for experiments. But when he looks at other companies and their industries, he sees an inability to drive their strategies from a clean slate mentality. Referring to the aerospace industry, Musk said, quote, there's a tremendous bias against taking risks. Everyone's trying to optimize their ass covering. Being trapped in your history means you don't know how to change. You've forgotten how to innovate and you're stuck in the

identity box the world has put you in. It is for this reason that Steve Jobs looks back on his firing from Apple in 1986 as a blessing in disguise. He said, quote, getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life, end quote. Being fired freed Jobs from the shackles of his own history. And this is the last part I want to read from the post. And it's about three key objectives. I think the key is to not try to be a perfect chef or expect that of yourself whatsoever. Because no one's a perfect chef, not even Elon. And no one's a pure cook either.

Nothing's black and white when you're talking about an animal species whose brains contain 86 billion neurons. The reality is that we're all a little of both, and where we are on that spectrum varies in 100 ways, depending on the part of life in question, the stage we're in our evolution, and our mood that day. If we want to improve ourselves and move our way closer to the chef's side of the spectrum, we have to remember to remember. We have to remember that we have software, not just hardware. We have to remember that reasoning is a skill, and like any other skill, you get better at it if you work on it.

And we have to remember the cook-chef distinction, so we can notice when we're being like one or the other. We have to remember three key objectives. To be humbler about what we know, more confident about what's possible, and less afraid of things that don't matter. So if you want the full story, make sure you read the full post. It's available on WaitButWhy. I left a link in the show notes and the podcast description on your podcast player. I also left a link to the Kindle edition of the full four-part series on Elon Musk.

Links to that and every other book I've talked about on past podcasts are available at founderspodcast.com. If you are new to this podcast, make sure you subscribe. I read a new biography of a founder and entrepreneur every week. And subscribing is the best way to make sure you won't miss any episodes. Thank you very much for helping me keep this podcast ad-free and independent, and I'll talk to you next week.