The Cook and the Chef: Musk’s Secret Sauce

This is the last part of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an
explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start
with Part 1. 1 1 1 Blue numbered
notes like the 1 on
the left are for fun
facts, extra thoughts,
extraneous quotes
from my conversations
with Musk, and further
explanation. They’ll
Welcome to the last post in the series on the world of Elon Musk. appear in the margins.
Orange numbered
notes like the orange
It’s been a long one, I know. A long series with long posts and a long time 1 on the left are for
between posts. It turns out that when it comes to Musk and his shit, there sources and citations—
they’ll appear at the
was a lot to say. bottom of each page.

Anyone who’s read the first three posts in this series is aware that I’ve
not only been buried in the things Musk is doing, I’ve been drinking a tall
glass of the Elon Musk Kool-Aid throughout. I’m very, very into it.

I kind of feel like that’s fine, right? The dude is a steel-bending indus-
trial 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 dotcom party with $180 million, instead of sitting back
in his investor chair listening to pitches from groveling young entre-
preneurs, 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.

Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. But someone being exceptionally rad doesn’t in

itself nearly Kool-Aidy enough to warrant 90,000 words over a string of
months on a blog that’s supposed to be about a wide range of topics.

During the first post, I laid out the two objectives for the series:

1) To understand why Musk is doing what he’s doing.

2) To understand why Musk is able to do what he’s doing.

1 Small orange footnotes are boring and when you click on one of these, you’ll end up bored.
They’re for sources and citations.

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So far, we’ve spent most of the time exploring objective #1. But
what really intrigued me as I began thinking about this was objective #2.
I’m fascinated by those rare people in history who manage to dramati-
cally 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. Getting access to Elon Musk gave me what I decided was an
unusual chance to get my hands on one of those people and examine
them up close. If it were just Musk’s money or intelligence or ambition
or good intentions that made him so capable, there would be more Elon
Musks out there. No, it’s something else—what TED curator Chris Anderson
called Musk’s “secret sauce”—and for me, this series became a mission
to figure it out.

The good news is, after a lot of time thinking about this, reading about
this, and talking to him and his staff, I think I’ve got it. What for a while
was a large pile of facts, observations, and sound bites eventually began
to congeal into a common theme—a trait in Musk that I believe he shares
with many of the most dynamic icons in history and that separates him
from almost everybody else.

As I worked through the Tesla and SpaceX posts, this concept kept sur-
facing, 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 so unusu-
ally well. The thing that tantalized me is that this secret sauce is actually
accessible to everyone and right there in front of us—if we can just wrap
our heads around it. Mulling this all over has legitimately affected the
way I think my life, my future, and the choices I make—and I’m going to
try my best in this post to explain why.

Two Kinds of Geology

In 1681, English theologian Thomas Burnet published Sacred Theory of the

Earth, in which he explained how geology worked. What happened was,
around 6,000 years ago, the Earth was formed as a perfect sphere with a
surface of idyllic land and a watery interior. But then, when the surface
dried up a little later, cracks formed in its surface, releasing much of the
water from within. The result was the Biblical Deluge and Noah having to

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deal with a ton of shit all week. Once things settled down, the Earth was
no longer a perfect sphere—all the commotion had distorted the surface,
bringing about mountains and valleys and caves down below, and the
whole thing was littered with the fossils of the flood’s victims.

And bingo. Burnet had figured it out. The great puzzle of fundamental
theology had been to reconcile the large number of seemingly-very-old
Earth features with the much shorter timeline of the Earth detailed in
the Bible. For theologians of the time, it was their version of the general
relativity vs. quantum mechanics quandary, and Burnet had come up with
a viable string theory to unify it all under one roof.

It wasn’t just Burnet. There were enough theories kicking around recon-
ciling geology with the verses of the Bible to today warrant a 15,000-word
“Flood Geology” Wikipedia page.

Around the same time, another group of thinkers started working on the
geology puzzle: scientists.

For the theologian puzzlers, the starting rules of the game were, “Fact: the
Earth began 6,000 years ago and there was at one point an Earth-sweep-
ing flood,” and their puzzling took place strictly within that context. But
the scientists started the game with no rules at all. The puzzle was a
blank slate where any observations and measurements they found
were welcome.

Over the next 300 years, the scientists built theory upon theory, and
as new technologies brought in new types of measurements, old the-
ories were debunked and replaced with new updated versions. The
science community kept surprising themselves as the apparent age of
the Earth grew longer and longer. In 1907, there was a huge breakthrough
when American scientist Bertram Boltwood pioneered the technique of
deciphering the age of rocks through radiometric dating, which found
elements in a rock with a known rate of radioactive decay and measured
what portion of those elements remained intact and what portion had
already converted to decay substance.

Radiometric dating blew Earth’s history backwards into the billions of

years, which burst open new breakthroughs in science like the theory of
Continental Drift, which in turn led to the theory of Plate Tectonics. The
scientists were on a roll.

Meanwhile, the flood geologists would have none of it. To them, any con-
clusions from the science community were moot because they were
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breaking the rules of the game to begin with. The Earth was officially less
than 6,000 years old, so if radiometric dating showed otherwise, it was a
flawed technique, period.

But the scientific evidence grew increasingly compelling, and as time

wore on, more and more flood geologists threw in the towel and accepted
the scientist’s viewpoint—maybe they had had the rules of the game wrong.

Some, though, held strong. The rules were the rules, and it didn’t matter
how many people agreed that the Earth was billions of years old—it was
a grand conspiracy.

Today, there are still many flood geologists making their case. Just recently,
an author named Tom Vail wrote a book called Grand Canyon: A Different
View, in which he explains:

Contrary to what is widely believed, radioactive dating has not proven the
rocks of the Grand Canyon to be millions of years old. The vast majority of
the sedimentary layers in the Grand Canyon were deposited as the result
of a global flood that occurred after and as a result of the initial sin that
took place in the Garden of Eden.

If the website analytics stats on Chartbeat included a “Type of Geologist”

demographic metric, I imagine that for Wait But Why readers, the break-
down would look something like this:

It makes sense. Whether religious or not, most people who read this site

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are big on data, evidence, and accuracy. I’m reminded of this every time
I make an error in a post.

Whatever role faith plays in the spiritual realm, what most of us agree on
is that when seeking answers to our questions about the age of the Earth,
the history of our species, the causes of lightning, or any other physical
phenomenon in the universe, data and logic are far more effective tools
than faith and scripture.

And yet—after thinking about this for a while, I’ve come to an unpleas-
ant conclusion:

When it comes to most of the way we think, the way we make decisions,
and the way we live our lives, we’re much more like the flood geologists
than the science geologists.

And Elon’s secret? He’s a scientist through and through.

Hardware and Software

The first clue to the way Musk thinks is in the super odd way that he talks.
For example:

Human child: “I’m scared of the dark, because that’s when all the scary
shit is gonna get me and I won’t be able to see it coming.”

Elon: “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 vis-
ible 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
anymore after that.”2

Or:

Human father: “I’d like to start working less because my kids are starting
to grow up.”

2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suD1aBwwZfU

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Elon: “I’m trying to throttle back, because particularly the triplets are
starting to gain consciousness. They’re almost two.”3

Or:

Human single man: “I’d like to find a girlfriend. I don’t want to be so busy
with work that I have no time for dating.”

Elon: “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 10 — how much time does a woman want a
week? Maybe 10 hours? That’s kind of the minimum? I don’t know.”4

I call this MuskSpeak. MuskSpeak is a language that describes everyday

parts of life as exactly what they actually, literally are.

There are plenty of instances of technical situations when we all agree

that MuskSpeak makes much more sense than normal human parlance—

—but what makes Musk odd is that he thinks about most things in Musk-
Speak, including many areas where you don’t usually find it. Like when
I asked him if he was afraid of death, and he said having kids made him
3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJHTY0gWOGw
4 Ashlee Vance: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

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more comfortable with dying, because “kids sort of are a bit you. At least
they’re half you. They’re half you at the hardware level, and depending
on how much time you have with them, they’re that percentage of you
at the software level.”

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 what-
ever else they are.

And 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’s one of those areas of life where MuskSpeak
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 they were born with and all of its capabilities, which determines
their raw intelligence, their innate talents, and other natural 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 it’s the software that assesses and filters all that
input, processes and organizes it, and ultimately uses it to generate the
key output—a decision.

The hardware is a ball of clay that’s handed to us when we’re born. And
of course, not all clay is equal—each brain begins as a unique combi-
nation of strengths and weaknesses across a wide range of processes
and capabilities.

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But it’s the software that determines what kind of tool the clay gets
shaped into.

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, Genghis Khan, Marie Curie, John Lennon, Ayn Rand 2, 2 For anyone who
would like to lash
or Louis C.K.—the more I’m convinced that it’s their software, not their nat- out about Ayn Rand’s
ural-born intelligence or talents, that makes them so rare and so effective. inclusion in this list,
you can do so here.

So let’s talk about software—starting with Musk’s. As I wrote the other

three posts in this series, I looked at everything I was learning about
Musk—the things he says, the decisions he makes, the missions he takes
on and how he approaches them—as clues to how his underlying soft-
ware works.

Eventually, the clues piled up and the shape of the software began to
reveal itself. Here’s what I think it looks like:

Elon’s Software
The structure of Musk’s software starts like many of ours, with what we’ll
call the Want box:

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This box contains anything in life where you want Situation A to turn
into Situation B. Situation A is currently what’s happening and you want
something to change so that Situation B is what’s happening instead.
Some examples:

Next, the Want box has a partner in crime—what we’ll call the Reality box.
It contains all things that are possible:

3 Those goals ended

up looking a whole lot
Pretty straightforward. like the male symbol,
which is annoying of
them. The goals are
The overlap of the Want and Reality boxes is the Goal Pool, where your circles and I put the
goal options live:3 arrow on each of them
because each goal
points your powers in
a certain direction—i.e.
choosing a goal is
choosing which direction
to point your powers.

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So you pick a goal from the pool—the thing you’re going to try to move
from Point A to Point B.

And how do you cause something to change? You direct your power
towards it. A person’s power can come in various forms: your time, your
energy (mental and physical), your resources, your persuasive ability, your
connection to others, etc.

The concept of employment is just Person A using their resources power

(a paycheck) to direct Person B’s time and/or energy power toward Person
A’s goal. When Oprah publicly recommends a book, that’s combining her
abundant power of connection (she has a huge reach) and her abundant
power of persuasion (people trust her) and directing them towards the
goal of getting the book into the hands of thousands of people who would
have otherwise never known about it.

Once a goal has been selected, you know the direction in which to point
your power. Now it’s time to figure out the most effective way to use
that power to generate the outcome you want—that’s your strategy:

Simple right? And probably not that different from how you think.

But what makes Musk’s software so effective isn’t its structure, it’s that
he uses it like a scientist. Carl Sagan said, “Science is a way of thinking
much more than it is a body of knowledge,” and you can see Musk apply
that way of thinking in two key ways:

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1) He builds each software component himself, from the ground up.

Musk calls this “reasoning from first principles.” I’ll let him explain:

I think generally people’s thinking process is too bound by convention or

analogy to prior experiences. It’s rare that people try to think of some-
thing on a first principles basis. They’ll say, “We’ll do that because it’s
always been done that way.” Or they’ll not do it because “Well, nobody’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” 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.5

In science, this means starting with what evidence shows us to be true.

A scientist doesn’t say, “Well we know the Earth is flat because that’s
the way it looks, that’s what’s intuitive, and that’s what everyone agrees
is true,” a scientist says, “The part of the Earth that I can see at any
given time appears to be flat, which would be the case when looking
at a small piece of many differently shaped objects up close, so I don’t
have enough information to know what the shape of the Earth is. One
reasonable hypothesis is that the Earth is flat, but until we have tools
and techniques that can be used to prove or disprove that hypothesis, it
is an open question.”

A scientist gathers together only what he or she knows to be true—the

first principles—and uses those as the puzzle pieces with which to con-
struct a conclusion.

Reasoning from first principles is a hard thing to do in life, and Musk is

a master at it. Brain software has four major decision-making centers:

1) Filling in the Want box

2) Filling in the Reality box

3) Goal selection from the Goal Pool

4) Strategy formation

5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJHTY0gWOGw

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Musk works through each of these boxes by reasoning from first prin-
ciples. Filling in the Want box from first principles requires a deep,
honest, and independent understanding of yourself. Filling in the Real-
ity box requires the clearest possible picture of the actual facts of both
the world and your own abilities. The Goal Pool should double as a Goal
Selection Laboratory that contains tools for intelligently measuring and
weighing options. And strategies should be formed based on what you
know, not on what is typically done.

2) He continually adjusts each component’s conclusions as new infor-

mation comes in.

You might remember doing proofs in geometry class, one of the most
mundane parts of everyone’s childhood. These ones:

Given: A = B

Given: B = C + D

Therefore: A = C + D

Math is satisfyingly exact. Its givens are exact and its conclusions
are airtight.

In math, we call givens “axioms,” and axioms are 100% true. So when we
build conclusions out of axioms, we call them “proofs,” which are also
100% true.

Science doesn’t have axioms or proofs, for good reason.

We could have called Newton’s law of universal gravitation a proof—and

for a long time, it certainly seemed like one—but then what happens when
Einstein comes around and shows that Newton was actually “zoomed
in,” like someone calling the Earth flat, and when you zoom way out, you
discover that the real law is general relativity and Newton’s law actually
stops working under extreme conditions, while general relativity works no
matter what. So then, you’d call general relativity a proof instead. Except
then what happens when quantum mechanics comes around and shows
that general relativity fails to apply on a tiny scale and that a new set of
laws is needed to account for those cases.

There are no axioms or proofs in science because nothing is for sure and

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everything we feel sure about might be disproven. Richard Feynman has
said, “Scientific knowledge is a body of statements of varying degrees
of certainty—some most unsure, some nearly sure, none absolutely cer-
tain.” Instead of proofs, science has theories. Theories are based on hard
evidence and treated as truths, but at all times they’re susceptible to
being adjusted or disproven as new data emerges.

So in science, it’s more like:

Given (for now): A = B

Given (for now): B = C + D

Therefore (for now): A = C + D

In our lives, the only true axiom is “I exist.” Beyond that, nothing is for
sure. And for most things in life, we can’t even build a real scientific theory
because life doesn’t tend to have exact measurements.

Usually, the best we can do is a strong hunch based on what data we

have. And in science, a hunch is called a hypothesis. Which works like this:

Given (it seems, based on what I know): A = B

Given (it seems, based on what I know): B = C + D

Therefore (it seems, based on what I know): A = C + D

Hypotheses are built to be tested. Testing a hypothesis can disprove it or

strengthen it, and if it passes enough tests, it can be upgraded to a theory.

So after Musk builds his conclusions from first principles, what does he
do? He tests the shit out of them, continually, and adjusts them regularly
based on what he learns. Let’s go through the whole process to show how:

You begin by reasoning from first principles to A) fill in the Want box,
B) fill in the Reality box, C) select a goal from the pool, and D) build a
strategy—and then you get to work. You’ve used first principles thinking
to decide where to point your power and the most effective way to use it.

But the goal-achievement strategy you came up with was just your first
crack. It was a hypothesis, ripe for testing. You test a strategy hypothesis

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one way: action. You pour your power into the strategy and see what
happens. As you do this, data starts flowing in—results, feedback, and
new information from the outside world. Certain parts of your strategy
hypothesis might be strengthened by this new data, others might be
weakened, and new ideas may have sprung to life in your head through
the experience—but either way, some adjustment is usually called for:

As this strategy loop spins and your power becomes more and more effec-
tive at accomplishing your goal, other things are happening down below.

For someone reasoning from first principles, the Want box at any given
time is a snapshot of their innermost desires the last time they thought
hard about it. But the contents of the Want box are also a hypothesis,
and experience can show you that you were wrong about something you
thought you wanted or that you want something you didn’t realize you
did. At the same time, the inner you isn’t a statue—it’s a shifting, morph-
ing sculpture whose innermost values change as time passes. So even
if something in the Want box was correct at one point, as you change, it
may lose its place in the box. The Want box should serve the current inner
you as best possible, which requires you to update it, something you do
through reflection:

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A rotating Want loop is called evolution.

On the other side of the aisle, the Reality box is also going through a
process. “Things that are possible” is a hypothesis, maybe more so than
anything else. It takes into account both the state of the world and your
own abilities. And as your own abilities change and grow, the world
changes even faster. What was possible in the world in 2005 is very dif-
ferent from what’s possible today, and it’s a huge (and rare) advantage
to be working with an up-to-date Reality box.

Filling in your Reality box from first principles is a great challenge, and keep-
ing the box current so that it matches actual reality takes continual work.

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For each of these areas, the box represents the current hypothesis and the
circle represents the source of new information that can be used to adjust
the hypothesis. It’s our duty to remember that the circles are the boss, not
the boxes—the boxes are only trying their best to do the circles proud. And
if we fall out of touch with what’s happening in the circles, the info in the
boxes becomes obsolete and a less effective source for our decision-making.

Thinking about the software as a whole, let’s take a step back. What we see
is a goal formation mechanism below and a goal attainment mechanism
above. One thing goal attainment often requires is laser focus. To get
the results we want, we zoom in on the micro picture, sinking our teeth
into our goal and honing in on it with our strategy loop.

But as time passes, the Want box and Reality box adjust contents and morph
shape, and eventually, something else can happen—the Goal Pool changes.

The Goal Pool is just the overlap of the Want and Reality boxes, so its own
shape and contents are totally dependent on the state of those boxes.
And as you live your life inside the goal attainment mechanism above, it’s
important to make sure that what you’re working so hard on remains in
line with the Goal Pool below—so let’s add in two big red arrows for that:

Checking in with the large circle down below requires us to lift our heads

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up from the micro mission and do some macro reflection. And when
enough changes happen in the Want and Reality boxes that the goal you’re
pursuing is no longer in the goal pool, it calls for a macro life change—a
breakup, a job switch, a relocation, a priority swap, an attitude shift.

All together, the software I’ve described is a living, breathing system,

constructed on a rock solid foundation of first principles, and built to
be nimble, to keep itself honest, and to change shape as needed to best
serve its owner.

And if you read about Elon Musk’s life, you can watch this software
in action.

How Musk’s software wrote his life story

Getting started

Step 1 for Elon was filling in the contents of the Want box. Doing this from
first principles is a huge challenge—you have to dig deep into concepts
like right and wrong, good and bad, important and valuable, frivolous
and trivial. You have to figure out what you respect, what you disdain,
what fascinates you, what bores you, and what excites you deep in your
inner child. Of course, there’s no way for anyone of any age to have a
clear cut answer to these questions, but Elon did the best thing he could
by ignoring others and independently pondering.

I talked with him about his early thought process in figuring out what to
do with his career. He has said many times that he cares deeply about the
future well-being of the human species—something that is clearly in the
center of his Want box. I asked how he came to that, and he explained:

The thing that I care about is—when I look into the future, I see the future
as a series of branching probability streams. So you have to ask, what are
we doing to move down the good stream—the one that’s likely to make
for a good future? Because otherwise, you look ahead, and it’s like “Oh
it’s dark.” If you’re projecting to the future, and you’re saying “Wow, we’re
gonna end up in some terrible situation,” that’s depressing.

Fair. Honing in on his specific path, I brought up the great modern phys-
icists like Einstein and Hawking and Feynman, and I asked him whether
he considered going into scientific discovery instead of engineering.
His response:

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I certainly admire the discoveries of the great scientists. They’re discover-
ing 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 there 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 there is a garden. So I’m trying to make
sure there is a garden, such that in the future, many Feynmans may bloom.

In other words, both A and B are good, but without A there is no B. So I

choose A.

He went on:

I was at one point thinking about doing physics as a career—I did under-
grad in physics—but in order to really advance physics these days, you
need the data. Physics is fundamentally governed by the progress of
engineering. This 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 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.

A and B are both good, but B can only advance if A advances. So I choose A.

In thinking about where exactly to point himself to best help humanity,

Musk says that in college, he thought hard about the first principles ques-
tion, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” and put together a
list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in
particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intel-
ligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”6

Hearing him talk about what matters to him, you can see up and down the
whole stack of Want box reasoning that led him to his current endeavors.

6 http://www.startalkradio.net/show/the-future-of-humanity-with-elon-musk/

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He has other reasons too. Next to wanting to help humanity in the Want
box is this quote:

I’m interested in things that change the world or affect future in won-
drous new technology where you see it and you’re like, “How did that even
happen? How is that possible?”7

This follows a theme of Musk being passionate about super-advanced

technology and the excitement it brings to him and other people. So
an ideal endeavor for Musk would be something to do with engineering,
something in an area that will be important for the future, and something
to do with cutting-edge technology. Those broad, basic Want box items
alone narrow down the goal pool considerably.

Meanwhile, he was a teenager with no money, reputation, or connections,

and limited knowledge and skills. In other words, his Reality box wasn’t that
big. So he did what many young people do—he focused his early goals not
around achieving his Wants, but expanding the Reality box and its list of
“things that are possible.” He wanted to be able to legally stay in the US after
college, and he also wanted to gain more knowledge about engineering, so
he killed two birds with one stone and applied to a PhD program at Stanford
to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up
with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy.

U-turn to the internet

Musk had gone into the Goal Pool and picked the Stanford program, and
he moved to California to get started. But there was one thing—it was
1995. The internet was in the early stages of taking off and moving much
faster than people had anticipated. It was also a world he could dive
into without money or a reputation. So Musk added a bunch of inter-
net-related possibilities into his Reality box. The early internet was also
more exciting than he had anticipated—so getting involved in it quickly
found its way into his Want box.

These rapid adjustments caused big changes in his Goal Pool, to the point
where the Stanford PhD was no longer what his software’s goal formation
center was outputting.

Most people would have stuck with the Stanford program—because they
had already told everyone about it and it would be weird to quit, because
7 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-and-spacex-elon-musks-industrial-empire/

20
it was Stanford, because it was a more normal path, because it was safer,
because the internet might be a fad, because what if he were 35 one
day and was a failure with no money because he couldn’t get a good job
without the right degree.

Musk quit the program after two days. The big macro arrow of his software
came down on the right, saw that what he was embarking on wasn’t in the
Goal Pool anymore, and he trusted his software—so he made a macro change.

He started Zip2 with his brother, an early cross between the concepts of
the Yellow Pages and Google Maps. Four years later, they sold the company
and Elon walked away with $22 million.

As a dotcom 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.

But Musk’s goal formation center had other ideas. His Want box was
bursting with ambitious startup ideas that he thought could have major
impact on the world, and his Reality box, which now included $22 million,
told him that he had a high chance of succeeding. Being leisurely on the
sidelines was nowhere in his Want box and totally unnecessary according
to his Reality box.

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 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 realized—and that was all he
needed to know to move forward. In the top part of his software, as his
strategy-action-results-adjustments loop spun, X.com’s 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.

Following his software to space

Now 31 years old and fabulously wealthy, Musk had to figure out what to
do next with his life. On top of the “whatever you do, definitely don’t risk

21
losing that money you have” conventional wisdom, there was also the
common logic that said, “You’re awesome at building internet companies,
but that’s all you know since you’ve never done anything else. You’re in
your thirties now and it’s too late to do something big in a whole different
field. This is the path you chose—you’re an internet guy.”

But Musk went back to first principles. He looked inwards to his Want
box, and 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.

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.

Conventional wisdom said no entrepreneur had ever succeeded at an

endeavor like this before, and that he shouldn’t risk his money on some-
thing so likely to fail. But Musk’s stated philosophy is, “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 the
Earth was flat, Musk started crunching numbers to do the math himself.
Here’s how he recounts his thoughts:

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 can break it down and say, what is the raw material cost of all these
components? And if you have them stacked on the floor and could wave
a magic wand so that 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

22
the atoms are arranged—so you’ve got to figure out how can we get the
atoms in the right shape much more efficiently. And 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.8

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. He started SpaceX, again with his own money,
and dove in head first. The mission: dramatically lower the cost of space
travel to make it possible for humanity to become multi-planetary.

Tesla and beyond

Two years later, while running a growing SpaceX, a friend brought Elon
to a company called AC Propulsion, which had created a prototype for a
super-fast, long-range electric car. It blew him away. The Reality box of
Musk’s software had told him that such a thing wasn’t yet possible, but
it turns out that Musk wasn’t aware of how far lithium-ion batteries had
advanced, and what he saw at AC Propulsion was new information about
the world that put “starting a top-notch electric car company” into the
Reality box in his head.

He ran into the same conventional wisdom about battery costs as he had
about rocket costs. Batteries had never been made cheaply enough to
allow for a mass-market, long-range electric car because battery prices
were simply too high and always would be. He used the same first prin-
ciples logic and a calculator to determine that most of the problem was
middlemen, not raw materials, and decided that actually, conventional
wisdom was wrong and batteries could be much cheaper in the future. So
he co-founded Tesla with the mission of accelerating the advent of a
mostly-electric-vehicle world—first by pouring in resources power and
funding the company, and later by contributing his time and energy
resources as well and becoming CEO.

Two years after that, he co-founded SolarCity with his cousins, a com-
pany whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a
large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions
of people’s homes. Musk knew that his time/energy power, the one kind
of power that has hard limits, no matter who you are, was mostly used
8 http://www.startalkradio.net/show/the-future-of-humanity-with-elon-musk/

23
up, but he still had plenty of resources power—so he put it to work on
another goal in his Goal Pool.

Most recently, Musk has jumpstarted change in another area that’s

important to him—the way people transport themselves from city to city.
His idea is that there should be an entirely new mode of transport that
will whiz people hundreds of miles by zinging them through a tube. He
calls it the Hyperloop. For this project, he’s not using his time, energy, or
resources. Instead, by laying out his initial thoughts in a white paper and
hosting a competition for engineers to test out their innovations, he’s
leveraging his powers of connection and persuasion to create change.

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 tests it 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 Musk does isn’t rocket science—it’s common sense. Your
entire life runs on the software in your head—why wouldn’t you obsess
over optimizing it?

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. Let’s try to figure out why.

Most People’s Software

You always hear facts about human development and how so much of who
you become is determined by your experiences during your formative years.
A newborn’s brain is a malleable ball of hardware clay, and its job upon
being born is to quickly learn about whatever environment it’s been born
into and start shaping itself into the optimal tool for survival in those cir-
cumstances. That’s why it’s so easy for young children to learn new skills.

24
As people age, the clay begins to harden and it becomes more difficult to
change the way the brain operates. My grandmother has been using a
computer as long as I have, but I use mine comfortably and easily because
my malleable childhood brain easily wrapped itself around basic com-
puter skills, while she has the same face on when she uses her computer
that my tortoise does when I put him on top of a glass table and he
thinks he’s inexplicably hovering two feet above the ground. She’ll use a
computer when she needs to, but it’s not her friend.

So when it comes to our brain software—our values, perceptions, belief

systems, reasoning techniques—what are we learning during those key
early years?

Everyone’s raised differently, but for most people I know, it went some-
thing like this:

We were taught all kinds of things by our parents and teachers—what’s

right and wrong, what’s safe and dangerous, the kind of person you should
and shouldn’t be. But the idea was: I’m an adult so I know much more about
this than you, it’s not up for debate, don’t argue, just obey. That’s when the
cliché “Why?” game comes in (what MuskSpeak calls “the chained why”).

A child’s instinct isn’t just to know what to do and not to do, she wants
to understand the rules of her environment. And to understand something,
you have to have a sense of how that thing was built. When parents and
teachers tell a kid to do XYZ and to simply obey, it’s like installing a piece
of already-designed software in the kid’s head. When kids ask Why? and
then Why? and then Why?, they’re trying to deconstruct that software
to see how it was built—to get down to the first principles underneath
so they can weigh how much they should actually care about what the
adults seem so insistent upon.

The first few times a kid plays the Why game, parents think it’s cute. But many
parents, and most teachers, soon come up with a way to cut the game off:

Because I said so.

“Because I said so” inserts a concrete floor into the child’s deconstruction
effort below which no further Why’s may pass. It says, “You want first prin-
ciples? There. There’s your floor. No more Why’s necessary. Now fucking
put your boots on because I said so and let’s go.”

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Imagine how this would play out in the science world.

26
27
28
In fairness, parents’ lives suck. They have to do all the shit they used
to have to do, except now on top of that there are these self-obsessed,
drippy little creatures they have to upkeep, who think parents exist to
serve them. On a busy day, in a bad mood, with 80 things to do, the Why
game is a nightmare.

29
But it might be a nightmare worth enduring. A command or a lesson or a
word of wisdom that comes without any insight into the steps of logic it
was built upon is feeding a kid a fish instead of teaching them to reason.
And when that’s the way we’re brought up, we end up with a bucket of
fish and no rod—a piece of installed software that we’ve learned how to
use, but no ability to code anything ourselves.

School makes things worse. One of my favorite thinkers, writer Seth Godin
(whose blog is bursting with first principles reasoning wisdom), explains
in a TED Talk about school that the current education system is a product
of the Industrial Age, a time that catapulted productivity and the standard
of living. But along with many more factories came the need for many
more factory workers, so our education system was redesigned around
that goal. He explains:

The deal was: universal public education whose sole intent was not to
train the scholars of tomorrow—we had plenty of scholars. It was to train
people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave,
to comply, to fit in. “We process you for a whole year. If you are defective,
we hold you back and process you again. We sit you in straight rows, just
like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about inter-
changeable people because factories are based on interchangeable parts.”

Couple that concept with what another favorite writer of mine, James
Clear, explained recently on his blog:

In the 1960s, a creative performance researcher named George Land con-

ducted a study of 1,600 five-year-olds and 98 percent of the children scored
in the “highly creative” range. Dr. Land re-tested each subject during five
year increments. When the same children were 10-years-old, only 30 per-
cent scored in the highly creative range. This number dropped to 12 percent
by age 15 and just 2 percent by age 25. As the children grew into adults
they effectively had the creativity trained out of them. In the words of Dr.
Land, “non-creative behavior is learned.”

It makes sense, right? Creative thinking is a close cousin of first principles

reasoning. In both cases, the thinker needs to invent his own thought
pathways. People think of creativity as a natural born talent, but it’s
actually much more of a way of thinking—it’s the thinking version of
painting onto a blank canvas. But to do that requires brain software that’s
skilled and practiced at coming up with new things, and school trains us
on the exact opposite thing—to follow the leader, single-file, and to get

30
really good at taking tests. Instead of a blank canvas, school hands kids
a coloring book and tells them to stay within the lines.4 4 Musk recently
started a new
school that his kids
What this all amounts to is that during our brain’s most malleable years, go to—one without
rigid grade levels and
parents, teachers, and society end up putting our clay in a mold and where students learn
squeezing it tightly into a preset shape. through application,
not memorization.

And when we grow up, without having learned how to build our own
style of reasoning and having gone through the early soul-searching that
independent thinking requires, we end up needing to rely on whatever
software was installed in us for everything—software that, coming from
parents and teachers, was probably itself designed 30 years ago.

30 years, if we’re lucky. Let’s think about this for a second.

Just say you have an overbearing mother who insists you grow up with her
values, her worldview, her fears, and her ambitions—because she knows
best, because it’s a scary world out there, because XYZ is respectable,
because she said so.

Your head might end up running your whole life on “because mom says
so” software. If you play the Why? game with something like the reason
you’re in your current job, it may take a few Why’s to get there, but you’ll
most likely end up hitting a concrete floor that says some version of
“because mom says so.”

But why does mom say so?

Mom says so because her mom said so—after growing up in Poland in 1932,
where she was from a home where her dad said so because his dad—a
minister from a small town outside Krakow—said so after his grandfather,
who saw some terrible shit go down during the Siberian Uprising of 1866,
ingrained in his children’s heads the critical life lesson to never associate
with blacksmiths.

Through a long game of telephone, your mother now looks down upon
office jobs and you find yourself feeling strongly about the only truly
respectable career being in publishing. And you can list off a bunch of
reasons why you feel that way—but if someone really grilled you on your
reasons and on the reasoning beneath them, you end up in a confusing
place. It gets confusing way down there because the first principles foun-
dation at the bottom is a mishmash of the values and beliefs of a bunch

31
of people from different generations and countries—a bunch of people
who aren’t you.

A common example of this in today’s world is that many people I know

were raised by people who were raised by people who went through the Great
Depression. If you solicit career advice from someone born in the US in the
1920s, there’s a good chance you’ll get an answer pumped out by this software:

The person has lived a long life and has made it all the way to 2015, but
their software was coded during the Great Depression, and if they’re not
the type to regularly self-reflect and evolve, they still do their thinking
with software from 1930. And if they installed that same software in their
children’s heads and their children then passed it on to their own chil-
dren, a member of Generation Y today might feel too scared to pursue an
entrepreneurial or artistic endeavor and be totally unaware that they’re
actually being haunted by the ghost of the Great Depression.

When old software is installed on new computers, people end up with

32
a set of values not necessarily based on their own deep thinking, a set
of beliefs about the world not necessarily based on the reality of the
world they live in, and a bunch of opinions they might have a hard time
defending with an honest heart.

In other words, a whole lot of convictions not really based on actual data.
We have a word for that.

Dogma

I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understand-
ing, they learn by some other way—by rote or something. Their knowledge
is so fragile!
—Richard Feynman

Dogma is everywhere and comes in a thousand different varieties—but

the format is generally the same:

X is true because [authority] says so. The authority can be many things.

33
34
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 rulebook. 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 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. 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 with
you finding another dogma lifeboat to jump onto—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.

People don’t do any of this intentionally—usually if we reject a type of

dogma, our intention is to break free of a life of dogmatic thinking all
together and brave the cold winds of independent reasoning. But dog-
matic thinking is a hard habit to break, especially when it’s all you know. I
have a friend who just had a baby, and she told me that she was so much
more open-minded than her parents, because they wanted her to have
a prestigious career, but she’d be open to her daughter doing anything.
After a minute, she thought about it, and said, “Well actually, no, what
I mean by that is if she wanted to go do something like spend her life

35
on a farm in Montana, I’d be fine with that and my parents never would
have been—but if she said she wanted to go work at a hedge fund, I’d kill
her.” She realized mid-sentence that she wasn’t free of the rigid dogmatic
thinking of her parents, she had just changed dogma brands.

This is the dogma trap, and it’s hard to escape from. Especially since
dogma has a powerful ally—the group.

Tribes

Some things I think are very conservative, or very liberal. I think when
someone falls into one category for everything, I’m very suspicious. It
doesn’t make sense to me that you’d have the same solution to every issue.
—Louis C.K.

What most dogmatic thinking tends to boil down to is another good Seth
Godin phrase:

People like us do stuff like this.

It’s the rallying cry of tribalism.

There’s an important distinction to make here. Tribalism tends to have a

negative connotation, but the concept of a tribe itself isn’t bad. All a
tribe is is a group of people linked together by something they have in
common—a religion, an ethnicity, a nationality, family, a philosophy, a
cause. Christianity is a tribe. The Democratic Party is a tribe. Australians
are a tribe. Radiohead fans are a tribe. Arsenal fans are a tribe. The
musical theater scene in New York is a tribe. Temple University is a tribe.
And within large, loose tribes, there are smaller, tighter, sub-tribes. Your
extended family is a tribe, of which your immediate family is a sub-tribe.
Americans are a tribe, of which Texans are a sub-tribe, of which Evangel-
ical Christians in Amarillo, Texas is a sub-sub-tribe.

What makes tribalism a good or bad thing depends on the tribe member
and their relationship with the tribe. In particular, one simple distinction:

Tribalism is good when the tribe and the tribe member both have an inde-
pendent identity and they happen to be the same. The tribe member has
chosen to be a part of the tribe because it happens to match who he really

36
is. If either the identity of the tribe or the member evolves to the point
where the two no longer match, the person will leave the tribe. Let’s call
this conscious tribalism.

Tribalism is bad when the tribe and tribe member’s identity are one and
the same. The tribe member’s identity is determined by whatever the
tribe’s dogma happens to say. If the identity of the tribe changes, the
identity of the tribe member changes with it in lockstep. The tribe mem-
ber’s identity can’t change independent of the tribal identity because
the member has no independent identity. Let’s call this blind tribalism.

With conscious tribalism, the tribe member and his identity comes first.
The tribe member’s identity is the alpha dog, and who he is determines
the tribes he’s in. With blind tribalism, the tribe comes first. The tribe is
the alpha dog and it’s the tribe that determines who he is.

This isn’t black and white—it’s a spectrum—but when someone is raised

without strong reasoning skills, they may also lack a strong independent
identity and end up vulnerable to the blind tribalism side of things—espe-
cially with the various tribes they were born into. That’s what Einstein
was getting at when he said, “Few people are capable of expressing with
equanimity opinions which differ from the prejudices of their social envi-
ronment. Most people are even incapable of forming such opinions.”

A large tribe like a religion or a political party or a nation will contain

members who fall across the whole range of the blind-to-conscious spec-
trum. But some tribes themselves will be the type to attract a certain
type of follower. It makes logical sense that the more rigid and certain
and dogmatic the tribe, the more likely it’ll be to attract blind tribe mem-
bers. ISIS is going to have a far higher percentage of blind tribe members
than the London Philosophy Club.

The allure of dogmatic tribes makes sense—they appeal to very core parts
of human nature.

Humans crave connection and camaraderie, and a guiding dogma is a

common glue to bond together a group of unique individuals as one.

Humans want internal security, and for someone who grows up feeling
shaky about their own distinctive character, a tribe and its guiding dogma
is a critical lifeline—a one-stop shop for a full suite of human opinions
and values.

37
Humans also long for the comfort and safety of certainty, and nowhere is
conviction more present than in the groupthink of blind tribalism. While
a scientist’s data-based opinions are only as strong as the evidence she
has and inherently subject to change, tribal dogmatism is an exercise in
faith, and with no data to be beholden to, blind tribe members believe
what they believe with certainty.

We discussed why math has proofs, science has theories, and in life, we
should probably limit ourselves to hypotheses—but blind tribalism pro-
ceeds with the confidence of the mathematician:

Given (because the tribe says so): A = B

Given (because the tribe says so): B = C + D

Therefore (because the tribe says so): A = C + D

And since so many others in the tribe feel certain about things, your own
certainty is reassured and reinforced.

But there’s a heavy cost to these comforts. Insecurity can be solved the
hard way or the easy way—and by giving people the easy option, dogmatic
tribes remove the pressure to do the hard work of evolving into a more
independent person with a more internally-defined identity. In that way,
dogmatic tribes are an enabler of the blind tribe member’s deficiencies.

The sneaky thing about both rigid tribal dogma and blind membership
is that they like to masquerade as open-minded thought with conscious
membership. I think many of us may be closer to the blind membership
side of things with certain tribes we’re a part of than we recognize—and
those tribes we’re a part of may not be as open-minded as we tend
to think.

A good test for this is the intensity of the us factor. That key word in
“People like us do stuff like this” can get you into trouble pretty quickly.

Us feels great. A major part of the appeal of being in a tribe is that you get
to be part of an Us, something humans are wired to seek out. And loose
Us is nice—like the Us among conscious, independent tribe members.

But the Us in blind tribalism is creepy. In blind tribalism, the tribe’s guid-
ing dogma doubles as the identity of the tribe members, and the Us factor

38
enforces that concept. Conscious tribe members reach conclusions—blind
tribe members are conclusions. With a blind Us, if the way you are as
an individual happens to contain opinions, traits, or principles that fall
outside the outer edges of the dogma walls, they will need to be shed—or
things will get ugly. By challenging the dogma of your tribe, you’re chal-
lenging both the sense of certainty the tribe members gain their strength
from and the clear lines of identity they rely on.

The best friend of a blind Us is a nemesis Us—Them. Nothing unites Us

like a collectively hated anti-Us, and the blind tribe is usually defined
almost as much by hating the dogma of Them as it is by abiding by the
dogma of Us.

Whatever element of rigid, identity-encompassing blindness is present in

your own tribal life will reveal itself when you dare to validate any part
of the rival Them dogma.

Give it a try. The next time you’re with a member of a tribe you’re a part
of, express a change of heart that aligns you on a certain topic with who-
ever your tribe considers to be Them. If you’re a religious Christian, tell
people at church you’re not sure anymore that there’s a God. If you’re an
artist in Boulder, explain at the next dinner party that you think global
warming might actually be a liberal hoax. If you’re an Iraqi, tell your family
that you’re feeling pro-Israel lately. If you and your husband are staunch
Republicans, tell him you’re coming around on Obamacare. If you’re from
Boston, tell your friends you’re pulling for the Yankees this year because
you like their current group of players.

If you’re in a tribe with a blind mentality of total certainty, you’ll probably

see a look of horror. It won’t just seem wrong, it’ll seem like heresy. They
might get angry, they might passionately try to convince you otherwise,
they might cut off the conversation—but there will be no open-minded
conversation. And because identity is so intertwined with beliefs in blind
tribalism, the person actually might feel less close to you afterwards.
Because for rigidly tribal people, a shared dogma plays a more important
role in their close relationships than they might recognize.

Most of the major divides in our world emerge from blind tribalism, and on
the extreme end of the spectrum—where people are complete sheep—blind
tribalism can lead to terrifying things. Like those times in history when
a few charismatic bad guys can build a large army of loyal foot soldiers,

39
just by displaying strength and passion. Because blind tribalism the true
villain behind our grandest-scale atrocities—

Most of us probably wouldn’t have joined the Nazi party, because most
of us aren’t on the extreme end of the blind-to-conscious spectrum. But I 5 There’s something I
need to tell you. I typed
don’t think many of us are on the other end either. Instead, we’re usually the Dogma and Tribes
somewhere in the hazy middle—in the land of cooks.5 sections on a six-hour
cross-country flight.
Normally when I write
posts, I’m on the internet

The Cook and the Chef and WordPress saves

the post periodically as
I go. Just to be safe, I
also copy and paste it
The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people into a Word doc every
think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. couple paragraphs. In
this case, there was
no internet because
The words “cook” and “chef” seem kind of like synonyms. And in the real I was on a flight and
go-go charges $3,250 to
world, they’re often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, connect to the internet,
I don’t mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef—the kind of and I happened to go
the whole flight without
chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who enters backing up to a Word
a kitchen—all those who follow recipes—is a cook. doc. At the end of the
flight, I closed the laptop,
and when I opened it
Everything you eat—every part of every cuisine we know so well—was at to keep working later
that day, somehow
some point in the past created for the first time. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, WordPress had reverted
and milk go back a long time, but at some point, someone said, “What if to the version it had last
time it saved and I lost
I take those ingredients and do this…and this.....and this......” and ended everything I had done
up with the world’s first pizza. That’s the work of a chef. on the plane. Now, with
this Nazi reference, I’m
finally back to where
Since then, god knows how many people have made a pizza. That’s the I was. The only bright
side is that I might like
work of a cook. the way it came out the
second time better. But
I’m not sure. There’s
The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are no particular point in
raw edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces and she works her way telling you all of this
other than that it was a
upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds. soul-crushing moment
in my life and I want
you to know that.
The cook works off of some version of what’s already out there—a recipe

40
of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone
else make.

Cooks span a wide range. On one end, you have cooks who only cook by
following a recipe to the T—carefully measuring every ingredient exactly
the way the recipe dictates. The result is a delicious meal that tastes
exactly the way the recipe has it designed. Down the range a bit, you have
more of a confident cook—someone with experience who gets the general
gist of the recipe and then uses her skills and instincts to do it her own
way. The result is something a little more unique to her style that tastes
like the recipe but not quite. At the far end of the cook range, you have an
innovator who makes her own concoctions. A lamb burger with a vegetable
bun, a peanut butter and jelly pizza, a cinnamon pumpkin seed cake.6 6 I’m neither a chef,
nor a cook, as evidenced
by how horrible those
But what all of these cooks have in common is their starting point is some- three concoctions sound.

thing that already exists. Even the innovative cook is still making a version
of a burger, a pizza, and a cake.

At the very end of the spectrum, you have the chef. A chef might make
good food or terrible food, but whatever she makes, it’s a result of her own
reasoning process, from the selection of raw ingredients at the bottom
to the finished dish at the top.

In the culinary world, there’s nothing wrong with being a cook. Most
people are cooks because for most people, inventing recipes isn’t a goal
of theirs.

But in life—when it comes to the reasoning “recipes” we use to churn

out a decision—we may want to think twice about where we are on the
cook-chef spectrum.

On a typical day, a “reasoning cook” and a “reasoning chef” don’t operate

41
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 auto-pilot and their conscious decision-making
centers dormant.

But then comes a day when something new needs to be figured out. Maybe
the cook and the chef are each given the new task at work to create a
better marketing strategy. Or maybe they’re unhappy with that job and
want to think of what business to start. Maybe they have a crush on
someone they never expected to have feelings for and they need to figure
out what to do about it.

Whatever this new situation is, auto-pilot won’t suffice—this is something

new and neither the chef’s nor the cook’s software has done this before.
Which leaves only two options:

Create. Or copy.

The chef says, “Ugh okay, here we go,” rolls up his sleeves, and does
what he always does in these situations—he switches on the active deci-
sion-making part of his software and starts to go to work. He looks at
what data he has and seeks out what more he needs. He thinks about the
current state of the world and reflects on where his values and priorities
are. He gathers together those relevant first principles ingredients and
starts puzzling together a reasoning pathway. It takes some hard work, but
eventually, the pathway brings him to a hypothesis. He knows it’s probably
wrong-ish, and as new data emerges, he’ll “taste-test” the hypothesis and
adjust it. He keeps the decision-making center on standby for the next few
weeks as he makes a bunch of early adjustments to the flawed hypothe-
sis—a little more salt, a little less sugar, one prime ingredient that needs
to be swapped out for another. Eventually, he’s satisfied enough with how
things are going to move back into auto-pilot mode. This new decision is
now part of the automated routine—a new recipe is in the cookbook—and
he’ll check in on it to make adjustments every once in a while or as new
pertinent data comes in, the way he does for all parts of his software.

The cook has no idea what’s going on in the last paragraph. The reason-
ing cook’s software is called “Because the recipe said so,” and it’s more
of a computerized catalog of recipes than a computer program. When
the cook needs to make a life decision, he goes through his collection of
authority-written recipes, finds the one he trusts in that particular walk

42
of life, and reads through the steps to see what to do—kind of like WWJD,
except the J is replaced by whatever authority is most trusted in that area.
For most questions, the authority is the tribe, since the cook’s tribal dogma
covers most standard decisions. But in this particular case, the cook leafed
through the tribe’s cookbook and couldn’t find any section about this type
of decision. So he needs to get a hold of a recipe from another authority
he trusts with this type of thing. Once the cook finds the right recipe, he
can put it in his catalog and use it for all future decisions on this matter.

First, the cook tries a few friends. His catalog doesn’t have the needed
info, but maybe one of theirs does. He asks them for their advice—not
so he can use it as additional thinking to supplement his own, but so it
can become his own thinking.

If that doesn’t yield any strongly-opinionated results, he’ll go to the trusty

eternal backstop—conventional wisdom.

Society as a whole is its own loose tribe, often spanning your whole
nation or even your whole part of the world, and what we call “conven-
tional wisdom” is its guiding dogma cookbook—online and available to
the public. Typically, the larger the tribe, the more general and more
outdated the dogma—and the conventional wisdom database runs like
a DMV website last updated in 1992. But when the cook has nowhere else
to turn, it’s like a trusty old friend.

And in this case—let’s say the cook is thinking of starting a busi-

ness 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:

43
The cook, thoroughly discouraged, thanks the machine and updates his
Reality box accordingly.

With the decision made (not to start a business), he switches his software
back into auto-pilot mode. Done and done.

Musk calls the cook’s way of thinking “reasoning by analogy” (as opposed
to reasoning by first principles), which is a nice euphemism. The next time
a kid gets caught copying answers from another student’s exam during
the test, he should just explain that he was reasoning by analogy.

If you start looking for it, you’ll see the chef/cook thing happening every-
where. There are chefs and cooks in the worlds of music, art, technology,
architecture,7 writing, business, comedy, marketing, app development, 7 The book The
Fountainhead is entirely
football coaching, teaching, and military strategy. And in each case, though about the concept of the
both parties are usually just on autopilot, mindlessly playing the latest chef (played by Howard
Roark) and the cook
album again and again at concerts, it’s in those key moments when it’s time (played by Peter Keating).
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, in some form or another, copies.

44
And the difference in outcome is enormous. For cooks, even the more inno-
vative kind, there’s almost always a ceiling on the size of the splash they
can make in the world, unless there’s some serious luck involved. Chefs
aren’t guaranteed to do anything good, but when there’s a little talent and
a lot of persistence, they’re almost certain to make a splash. Sometimes
the chef is the one brave enough to go for something big—but other times,
someone doesn’t feel the desire to make a splash and the chef is the one
with the strength of character to step out of the game and in favor of
keeping it small. Being a chef isn’t being like Elon Musk—it’s being yourself.

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. The question is, how did that set of songs come to be?
How were 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 drumbeat
and chords of an existing song and write your own melody on top of it?
Do you just play covers?

I know what you want the answers to these questions to be. This is a
straightforward one—it’s clearly better to be a chef. But unlike the case
with most major distinctions in life—hard-working vs. lazy, ethical vs.

45
dishonest, considerate vs. selfish—when the chef/cook distinction passes
right in front of us, we often don’t even notice it’s there.

Missing the Distinction

Like the culinary world’s cook-to-chef range, the real world’s cook-to-chef
range isn’t binary—it lies on a spectrum:

But I’m pretty sure that when most of us look at that spectrum,
we think we’re farther to the right than we actually are. We’re usually more
cook-like than we realize—we just can’t see it from where we’re standing.

For example—

Cooks are followers—by definition. They’re a cook because in whatever

they’re doing, they’re following some kind of recipe. But most of us don’t
think of ourselves as followers.

A follower, we think, is a weakling with no mind of their own. We think about

leadership positions we’ve held and initiatives we’ve taken at work and
the way we never let friends boss us around, and we take these as evidence
that we’re no follower. Which in turn means that we’re not just a cook.

But the problem is—the only thing all of that proves is that you’re no
follower within your tribe. As Einstein meanly put it:

In order to form an immaculate member of a flock of sheep one must,

above all, be a sheep.

In other words, you might be a star and a leader in your world or in the

46
eyes of your part of society, but if the core reason you picked that goal
in the first place was because your tribe’s cookbook says that it’s an
impressive thing and it makes the other tribe members gawk, you’re not
being a leader—you’re being a super-successful follower. And, as Einstein
says, no less of a cook than all those whom you’ve impressed.

To see the truth, you need to zoom way out until you can see the real
leader of the cooks—the cookbook.

But we don’t tend to zoom out, and when we look around at our life,
zoomed in, what appears to be a highly unique and independent self may
be an optical illusion.8 What often feels like independent reasoning when 8 I wrote this post
about the concept of
zoomed out is actually playing connect-the-dots on a pre-printed set being zoomed in—I
of steps laid out by someone else. What feel like personal principles called it being on Step
1, deluded by fog.
might just be the general tenets of your tribe. What feel like original
opinions may have actually been spoon-fed to us by the media or our
parents or friends or our religion or a celebrity. What feels like Roark
might actually be Keating. What feels like our chosen life path could just
be one of a handful of pre-set, tribe-approved yellow brick roads. What
feels like creativity might be filling in a coloring book—and making sure
to stay inside the lines.

Because of this optical illusion, we’re unable to see the flaws in our own
thinking or recognize an unusually great thinker when we see one. Instead,
when a superbly science-minded, independent-thinking chef like Elon
Musk or Steve Jobs or Albert Einstein comes around, what do we attribute
their success to?

Awesome fucking hardware.

When we look at Musk, we see someone with genius, with vision,

with superhuman balls. All things, we assume, he was more or less born
with. So to us, the spectrum looks more like this:

47
The way we see it, we’re all a bunch of independent-thinking chefs—and
it’s just that Musk is a really impressive chef.

Which is both A) overrating Musk and B) overrating ourselves. And com-

pletely missing the real story.

Musk is an impressive chef for sure, but what makes him such an extreme
standout isn’t that he’s impressive—it’s that most of us aren’t chefs at all.

It’s like a bunch of typewriters looking at a computer and saying, “Man,

that is one talented typewriter.”

The reason we have such a hard time seeing what’s really going on is that
we don’t get that brain software is even a thing. We don’t think of brains
as computers, so we don’t think about the distinction between hardware
and software at all. When we think about the brain, we think only about the
hardware—the thing we’re born with and are powerless to change or improve.
Much less tangible to us is the concept of how we reason. We see reasoning
as a thing that just kind of happens, like our bodies’ blood flow—it’s a process
that automatically happens, and there’s not much else to say or do about it.

And if we can’t even see the hardware/software distinction, we certainly

can’t see the more nuanced chef software vs. cook software distinction.

By not seeing our thinking software for what it is—a critical life skill,
something that can be learned, practiced, and improved, and the major
factor that separates the people who do great things from those who
don’t—we fail to realize where the game of life is really being played. We
don’t recognize reasoning as a thing that can be created or copied—and
in the same way that causes us to mistake our own cook-like behavior
for independent reasoning, we then mistake the actual independent rea-
soning of the chef for exceptional and magical abilities.

Three examples:

1) We mistake the chef’s clear view of the present for vision into the future.

Musk’s sister Tosca said “Elon has already gone to the future and come
back to tell us what he’s found.”9 This is how a lot of people feel about
Musk—that he’s a visionary, that he can somehow see things we cannot.
We see it like this:
9 http://www.cbsnews.com/news/tesla-and-spacex-elon-musks-industrial-empire/

48
But actually, it’s like this:

Conventional wisdom is slow to move, and there’s significant lag time

between when something becomes reality and when conventional wisdom
is revised to reflect that reality. And by the time it does, reality has moved
on to something else. But chefs don’t pay attention to that, reasoning
instead using their eyes and ears and experience. By ignoring conven-
tional wisdom in favor of simply looking at the present for what it really is
and staying up-to-date with the facts of the world as they change in real-
time—in spite of what conventional wisdom has to say—the chef can act
on information the rest of us haven’t been given permission to act on yet.

2) We mistake the chef’s accurate understanding of risk for courage.

Remember this MuskSpeak quote from earlier?

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 anymore
after that.10

10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suD1aBwwZfU

49
That’s just a kid chef assessing the actual facts of a situation and deciding
that his fear was misplaced.

As an adult, Musk said this:

Sometimes people fear starting a company too much. Really, what’s the
worst that could go wrong? You’re not gonna starve to death, you’re not
gonna die of exposure—what’s the worst that could go wrong?11

Same quote, right?

In both cases, Musk is essentially saying, “People consider X to be scary,

but their fear is not based on logic, so I’m not scared of X.” That’s not
courage—that’s logic.

Courage means doing something risky. Risk means exposing yourself to

danger. We intuitively understand this—that’s why most of us wouldn’t
call child Elon courageous for sleeping with the lights off. Courage would
be a weird word to use there because no actual danger was involved.

All Elon’s saying in the second quote is that being scared to start a
company is the adult version of being scared of the dark. It’s not actu-
ally dangerous.

So when Musk put his entire fortune down and on SpaceX and Tesla, he
wasn’t being bold as fuck, but courageous? Not the right word. It was a
case of a chef taking a bunch of information he had and puzzling together
a plan that seemed logical. It’s not that he was sure he’d succeed—in
fact, he thought SpaceX in particular had a reasonable probability of
failure—it’s just that nowhere in his assessments did he foresee danger.

3) 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.

When you’re in a foreign country and you decide to ditch the guidebook
and start wandering aimlessly and talking to people, unique things always
end up happening. When people hear about those things, they’ll think
11 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g9FD1UE6E1g

50
of you as a pro traveler and a bold adventurer—when all you really did
is ditch the guidebook.

Likewise, when an artist or scientist or businessperson chef reasons inde-

pendently instead of by analogy, and their puzzling happens to both A)
turn out well and B) end up outside the box, people call it innovation and
marvel at the chef’s ingenuity. When it turns out really well, all the cooks
do what they do best—copy—and now it’s called a revolution.

Simply by refraining from reasoning by analogy, the chef opens up the

possibility of making a huge splash with every project. When Steve Jobs9 9 People often
compare Musk to
and Apple turned their attention to phones, they didn’t start by saying, Steve Jobs. I actually
“Okay well people seem to like this kind of keyboard more than that kind, don’t think it’s a great
comparison—and
and everyone seems unhappy with the difficulty of hitting the numbers neither do the people
on their keyboards—so let’s get creative and make the best phone key- who work with Musk—
but being chefs is
board yet!” They simply asked, “What should a mobile device be?” and in definitely something
their from-scratch reasoning, a physical keyboard didn’t end up as part they have in common.

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.

Different version of the same story with the invention of the United
States. When the American forefathers found themselves with a new
country on their hands, they didn’t ask, “What should the rules be for
selecting our king, and what should the limitations of his power be?” A
king to them was what a physical keyboard was to Apple. Instead, they
asked, “What should a country be and what’s the best way to govern a
group of people?” and by the time they had finished their puzzling, a
king wasn’t part of the picture—their first principles reasoning led them
to believe that John Locke had a better plan and they worked their way
up from there.

History is full of the stories of chefs creating revolutions of apparent

ingenuity through simple first principles reasoning. Genghis Khan orga-
nizing a smattering of tribes that had been fragmented for centuries using
a powers of ten system in order to build one grand tribe that could sweep
the world. Henry Ford creating cars with the out-of-the-box manufactur-
ing technique of assembly-line production in order to bring cars to the
masses for the first time. Marie Curie using unconventional methods to
pioneer the theory of radioactivity and topple the “atoms are indivisi-
ble” assumption on its head (she won a Nobel Prize in both physics and
chemistry—two prizes reserved exclusively for chefs). Martin Luther King
taking a nonviolent Thoreau approach to a situation normally addressed

51
by riots. Larry Page and Sergey Brin ignoring the commonly-used meth-
ods of searching the internet in favor of what they saw as a more logical
system that based page importance on the number of important sites
that linked to it. The 1966 Beatles deciding to stop being the world’s best
cooks, ditching the typical songwriting styles of early-60s bands, includ-
ing their own, and become music chefs, creating a bunch of new types of
songs from scratch that no one had heard before.

Whatever the time, place, or industry, anytime something really big

happens, there’s almost always an experimenting chef at the center of
it—not being anything magical, just trusting their brain and working from
scratch. Our world, like our cuisines, 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 us all. What makes Musk so rad is that he’s a software out-
lier. 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.

We spent this whole time trying to figure out the mysterious workings of
the mind of a madman genius only to realize that Musk’s secret sauce is
that he’s the only one being normal. And in isolation, Musk would be a
pretty boring subject—it’s the backdrop of us that makes him interesting.
And it’s that backdrop that this series is really about.

So…what’s the deal with us? How did we end up so scared and cook-like?
And how do we learn to be more like the chefs of the world, who seem

52
to so effortlessly carve their own way through life? I think it comes down
to three things.

How to Be a Chef

Anytime there’s a curious phenomenon within humanity—some collective

insanity we’re all suffering from—it usually ends up being evolution’s fault.
This story is no different.

When it comes to reasoning, we’re biologically inclined to be cooks, not

chefs, which relates back to our tribal evolutionary past. First, it’s a better
tribal model for most people to be cooks. In 50,000 BC, tribes full of inde-
pendent thinkers probably suffered from having too many chefs in the
kitchen, which would lead to too many arguments and factions within the
tribe. A tribe with a strong leader at the top and the rest of the members
simply following the leader would fare better. So those types of tribes
passed on their genes more. And now we’re the collective descendants
of the more cook-like people.

Second, it’s about our own well-being. It’s not in our DNA to be chefs because
human self-preservation never depended upon independent thinking—it
rode on fitting in with the tribe, on staying in favor with the chief, on
following in the footsteps of the elders who knew more about staying
alive than we did. And on teaching our children to do the same—which
is why we now live in a cook society where cook parents raise their kids
by telling them to follow the recipe and stop asking questions about it.

Thinking like cooks is what we’re born to do because what we’re born to
do is survive.

But the weird thing is, we weren’t born into a normal human world. We’re living
in the anomaly, when for many of the world’s people, survival is easy. Today’s
privileged societies are full of anomaly humans whose primary purpose is
already taken care of, softening the deafening roar of unmet base needs
and allowing the nuanced and complex voice of our inner selves to awaken.

The problem is, most of our heads are still running on some version of
the 50,000-year-old survival software—which kind of wastes the good
luck we have to be born now.

53
It’s an unfortunate catch-22—we continue to think like cooks because we
can’t absorb the epiphany that we live in an anomaly world where there’s no
need to be cooks, and we can’t absorb that epiphany because we think like
cooks and cooks don’t know how to challenge and update their own software.

This is the vicious cycle of our time—and the secret of the chef is that
they somehow snapped out of it.

So how do we snap out of the trance?

I think there are three major epiphanies we need to absorb—three core

things the chef knows that the cook doesn’t:

Epiphany 1) You don’t know shit.

The flood geologists of the 17th and 18th centuries weren’t stupid. And
they weren’t anti-science. Many of them were just as accomplished in
their fields as their science geologist colleagues.

But they were victims—victims of a religious dogma they were told to

believe without question. The recipe they followed was scripture, a recipe
that turned out to be wrong. And as a result, they proceeded on their
path with a fatal flaw in their thinking—a software bug that told them
that one of the undeniable first principles when thinking about the Earth
was that it began 6,000 years ago and that there had been a flood of the
most epic proportions.

54
With that bug in place, all further computations were moot. Any reason-
ing tree that puzzled upwards with those assumptions at its root had no
chance of finding truth.

Even more than being victims of any dogma, the flood geologists were vic-
tims of their own certainty. Without certainty, dogma has no power. And
when data is required in order to believe something, false dogma has
no legs to stand on. It wasn’t the church dogma that hindered the flood
geologists, it was the church mentality of faith-based certainty.

That’s what Stephen Hawking meant when he said, “The greatest enemy
of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.” Neither
the science geologist nor the flood geologist started off with knowledge.
But what gave the science geologist the power to seek out the truth
was knowing that he had no knowledge. The science geologists sub-
scribed to the lab mentality, which starts by saying “I don’t know shit”
and works upwards from there.

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: To myself I am only a child playing on the beach,

while vast oceans of truth lie undiscovered before me.

And Richard Feynman: I was born not knowing and have had only a little
time to change that here and there.

And Niels Bohr: Every sentence I utter must be understood not as an

affirmation, but as a question.

Musk has said his own version: You should take the approach that you’re
wrong. Your goal is to be less wrong.12

The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what
they know is that as scientists, they’re aware that unjustified certainty
is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. They
firmly believe that reasoning of all kinds should take place in a lab, not
a church.

If we want to become more chef-like, we have to make sure we’re doing

12 https://youtu.be/Q8Y565OnarQ

55
our thinking in a lab. Which means identifying which parts of our thinking
are currently sitting in church.

But that’s a hard thing to do because most of us have the same relation-
ship with our own software that my grandmother has with her computer:10 10 I feel bad. My
grandmother reads
It’s this thing someone put there, we use it when we need to, it somehow this blog. And she’s
magically works, and we hope it doesn’t break. It’s the way we are with a being used here, for
the second time, as the
lot of the things we own, where we’re just the dumb user, not the pro. thing you don’t want
We know how to use our car, microwave, phone, our electric toothbrush, to be like. I feel bad
because I love her. But I
but if something breaks, we take it to the pro to fix it because we have also love apt metaphors,
no idea how it works. so sometimes
things happen.

But that’s not a great life model when it comes to brain software, and
it usually leads to us making the same mistakes and living with the
same results year after year after year, because our software remains
unchanged. Eventually, we might wake up one day feeling like Breaking
Bad’s Walter White, when he said, “Sometimes I feel like I never actually
make, any of my own… choices. I mean, my entire life it just seems I never…
had a real say about any of it.” If we want to understand our own thinking,
we have to stop being the dumb user of our own software and start being
the pro—the auto mechanic, the electrician, the computer geek.

If you were alone in a room with a car and wanted to figure out
how it worked, you’d probably start by taking it apart as much as you
could and examining the parts and how they all fit together. To do the
same with our thinking, we need to revert to our four-year-old selves and
start deconstructing our software by resuming the Why game our parents
and teachers shut down decades ago. It’s time to roll up our sleeves, pop
open the hood, and get our hands dirty with a bunch of not-that-fun
questions about what we truly want, what’s truly possible, and whether
the way we’re living our lives follows logically from those things.

With each of these questions, the challenge is to keep asking why until
you hit the floor—and the floor is what will tell you whether you’re in a
church or a lab for that particular part of your life. If a floor you hit is one
or more first principles that represent the truth of reality or your inner
self and the logic going upwards stays accurate to that foundation, you’re
in the lab. If a Why? pathway hits a floor called “Because [authority] said
so”—if you go down and down and realize at the bottom that the whole
thing is just because you’re taking your parent’s or friend’s or religion’s
or society’s word for it—then you’re in church there. And if the tenets of
that church don’t truly resonate with you or reflect the current reality

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of the world—if it turns out that you’ve been working off of the wrong
recipe—then whatever conclusions have been built on top of it will be just
as wrong. As demonstrated by the flood geologists, a reasoning chain is
only as strong as its weakest link.

Astronomers once hit a similar wall in their progress trying to calculate

the trajectories of the sun and planets in the Solar System. Then one day
they discovered that the sun was at the center of things, not the Earth,
and suddenly, all the perplexing calculations made sense, and progress
leapt forward. Had they played the Why game earlier, they’d have run into
a dogmatic floor right after the question “But why do we know that the
Earth is in the center of everything?”

People’s lives are no different, which is why it’s so important to find the
toxic lumps of false dogma tucked inside the layers of your reasoning
software. Identifying one and adjusting it can strengthen the whole chain
above and create a breakthrough in your life.

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The thing you really want to look closely for is unjustified certainty. Where
in life do you feel so right about something that it doesn’t qualify as a
hypothesis or even a theory, but it feels like a proof? When there’s proof-
level certainty, it means either there’s some serious concrete and verified
data underneath it—or it’s faith-based dogma. Maybe you feel certain that
quitting your job would be a disaster or certain that there’s no god or
certain that it’s important to go to college or certain that you’ve always
had a great time on rugged vacations or certain that everyone loves it
when you break out the guitar during a group hangout—but if it’s not well
backed-up by data from what you’ve learned and experienced, it’s at best
a hypothesis and at worst a completely false piece of dogma.

And if thinking about all of that ends with you drowning in some combi-
nation of self-doubt, self-loathing, and identity crisis, that’s perfect. This
first epiphany is about humility. Humility is by definition a starting point—
and it sends you off on a journey from there. The arrogance of certainty
is both a starting point and an ending point—no journeys needed. That’s

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why it’s so important that we begin with “I don’t know shit.” That’s when
we know we’re in the lab.

Epiphany 2) No one else knows shit either.

Let me illustrate a little story for you.

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Yes, it’s an old classic. The Emperor’s New Clothes. It was written in 1837
by Hans Christian Andersen11 to demonstrate a piece of trademark human 11 Fun fact: the story
was first published as a
insanity: the “This doesn’t seem right to me but everyone else says it’s duo alongside The Little
right so it must be right and I’ll just pretend I also think it’s right so no Mermaid, both part of
Andersen’s book Fairy
one realizes I’m stupid” phenomenon. Tales Told for Children.

My favorite all-time quote might be Steve Jobs saying this:

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.12 12 While we’re
here, this famous Apple
commercial is Steve
This is Jobs’ way of saying, “You might not know shit. But no one knows Jobs’ ode to chefs.

shit. If the emperor looks naked to you and everyone else is saying he has
clothes, trust your eyes since other people don’t know anything you don’t.”

It’s an easy message to understand, a harder one to believe, and an even

harder one to act on.

The purpose of the first epiphany is to shatter the belief that all that
dogma you’ve memorized constitutes personal opinions and wisdom
and all that certainty you feel constitutes knowledge and understanding.
That’s the easier one because the delusion that we know what we’re
talking about is pretty fragile, with the “Oh god I’m a fraud who doesn’t
know shit” monster never lurking too far under our consciousness.

But this epiphany—that the collective “other people” and their conven-
tional wisdom don’t know shit—is a much larger challenge. Our delusion
about the wisdom of those around us, our tribe, and society as a whole is
much thicker and runs much deeper than the delusion about ourselves. So
deep that we’ll see a naked emperor and ignore our own eyes if everyone
else says he has clothes on.

This is a battle of two kinds of confidence—confidence in others vs. con-

fidence in ourselves. For most cooks, confidence in others usually comes
out the winner.

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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 impres-
sive but are actually just a result of them having lost this respect. Being
a gamechanger is just having little enough respect for the game that
you realize there’s no good reason not to change the rules. Being a trail-
blazer 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 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.

And if you open your eyes, there are other clues all through your own
life that the society you live in is nothing to be intimidated by. All the
times you learn about what really goes on inside a company and find
out that it’s totally disorganized and badly run. All the people in high
places who can’t seem to get their personal lives together. All the well-
known sitcoms whose jokes you’re pretty sure you could have written
when you were 14. All the politicians who don’t seem to know more about
the world than you.

And yet, the delusion that society knows shit that you don’t runs deep, and
still, somewhere in the back of your head, you don’t think it’s realistic that
you could ever actually build that company, achieve that fabulous wealth
or celebrity-status, create that TV show, win that senate campaign—no
matter what it seems like.

Sometimes it takes an actual experience to fully expose society for the

shit it doesn’t know. One example from my life is how I slowly came
to understand that most Americans—the broader public, my tribe, and
people I know well—knew very little about what it’s actually like to visit
most countries. I grew up hearing about how dangerous it was to visit
really foreign places, especially alone. But when I started going places

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I wasn’t supposed to go, I kept finding that the conventional wisdom
had been plain wrong about it. As I had more experiences and gathered
more actual data, I grew increasingly trusting of my own reasoning over
whatever Americans were saying. And as my confidence grew, places like
Thailand and Spain turned into places like Oman and Uzbekistan which
turned into places like Nigeria and North Korea. When it comes to trav-
eling, I had the epiphany: other people’s strong opinions about this are
based on unbacked-up dogma and the fact that most people I talk to
feel the same way means nothing if my own research, experience, and
selective question-asking brings me to a different conclusion.13 When it 13 Relevant Galileo
quote: “In questions of
comes to picking travel destinations, I’ve become a chef. science, the authority of
a thousand is not worth
the humble reasoning
I try to leverage what I learned as a traveler to transfer the chefness of a single individual.”
elsewhere—when I find myself discouraged in another part of my life by
the warnings and head-shaking of conventional wisdom, I try to remind
myself: “These are the same people that were sure that North Korea was
dangerous.” It’s hard—you have to take the leap to chefdom separately in
each part of your life—but it seems like with each successive cook → chef
breakthrough, future breakthroughs become easier to come by. Eventually,
you must hit a tipping point and trusting your own software becomes your
way of life—and as Jobs says, you’ll never be the same again.

The first epiphany was about shattering a protective shell of arrogance to

lay bare a starting point of humility. This second epiphany is about con-
fidence—the confidence to emerge from that humility through a pathway
built on first principles instead of by analogy. It’s a confidence that says,
“I may not know much, but no one else does either, so I might as well be
the most knowledgeable person on Earth.”

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Epiphany 3) You’re playing Grand Theft Life

The first two epiphanies allow us to break open our software, identify
which parts of it were put there by someone else, and with confidence
begin to fill in the Want and Reality boxes with our own handwriting and
choose a goal and a strategy that’s right for us.

But then we hit a snag. We’re finally in the lab with all our tools and
equipment, but something holds us back. To figure out why, let’s bring
back our emperor story.

When the emperor struts out with his shoulder hair and his gut and his
little white junk, the story only identifies two kinds of people: the mass
of subjects, who all pretend they can see the clothes, and the kid, who
just says that the dude is obviously naked.

But I think there’s more going on. In an emperor’s new clothes situation,
there are four kinds of people:

1) Proud Cook. Proud Cook is the person drinking the full dogma Kool-
Aid. Whatever independent-thinking voice is inside of Proud Cook was
silenced long ago, and there’s no distinction between his thoughts and
the dogma he follows. As far as he’s concerned, the dogma is truth—but
since he doesn’t even register that there’s any dogma happening, Proud
Cook simply thinks he’s a very wise person who has it all figured out.

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He feels the certainty of the dogma running through his veins. When
the emperor walks out and proclaims that he is wearing beautiful new
clothes, Proud Cook actually sees clothes, because his consciousness
isn’t even turned on.

2) Insecure Cook. Insecure Cook is what Proud Cook turns into after
undergoing Epiphany #1. Insecure Cook has had a splash of self-aware-
ness—enough to become conscious of the fact that he doesn’t actually
know why he’s so certain about the things he’s certain about. Whatever
the reasons are, he’s sure they’re right, but he can’t seem to come up
with them himself. Without the blissful arrogance of Proud Cook, Insecure
Cook is lost in the world, wondering why he’s too dumb to get what every-
one else gets and trying to watch others to figure out what he’s supposed
to do—all while hoping nobody finds out that he doesn’t get it. When Inse-
cure Cook sees the emperor, his heart sinks—he doesn’t see the clothes,
only the straggly gray hairs of the emperor’s upper thighs. Ashamed, he
reads the crowd and mimics their enthusiasm for the clothes.

3) Self-Loathing Cook. Self-Loathing Cook is what Insecure Cook becomes

after being hit by Epiphany #2. Epiphany #2 is the forbidden fruit, and
Self-Loathing Cook has bitten it. He now knows exactly why he didn’t feel
certain about everything—because it was all bullshit. He sees the tenets
of conventional wisdom for what they really are—faith-based dogma. He
knows that neither he nor anyone else knows shit and that he’ll get much
farther riding his own reasoning than jumping on the bandwagon with
the masses. When the emperor emerges, Self-Loathing Cook thinks, “Oh
Jesus…this fucktard is actually outside with no clothes on. Oh—oh and
my god these idiots are all pretending to see clothes. How is this my life?
I need to move.”

But then, right when he’s about to call everyone out on their pretending
and the emperor out on his bizarre life decision, there’s a lump in his
throat. Sure, he knows there are no clothes on that emperor’s sweaty
lower back fat roll—but actually saying that? Out loud? I mean, he’s sure
and all—but let’s not go crazy here. Better not to call too much attention
to himself. And of course, there’s a chance he’s missing something. Right?

Self-Loathing Cook ends up staying quiet and nodding at the other

cooks when they ask him if those clothes aren’t just the most marvelous
he’s ever seen.

4) The chef. The kid in the story. The chef is Self-Loathing Cook—except

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without the irrational fear. The chef goes through the same inner thought
process as Self-Loathing Cook, but when it’s time to walk the walk, the
chef stands up and yells out the truth.

A visual recap:

We’re all human and we’re all complex, which means that in various parts
of each of our lives, we play each of these four characters.

But to me, Self-Loathing Cook is the most curious one of the four.
Self-Loathing Cook gets it. He knows what the chefs know. He’s tantaliz-
ingly close to carving out his own chef path in the world, and he knows
that if he just goes for it, good things would happen. But he can’t pull the
trigger. He built himself a pair of wings he feels confident work just fine,
but he can’t bring himself to jump off the cliff.

And as he stands there next to the cliff with the other cooks, he has to
endure the torture of watching the chefs of the world leap off the edge
with the same exact wings and flying skills he has, but with the courage
he can’t seem to find.

To figure out what’s going on with Self-Loathing Cook, let’s remind our-
selves how the chefs operate.

Free of Self-Loathing Cook’s trepidation, the world’s chefs are liber-

ated to put on their lab coats and start sciencing. To a chef, the world
is one giant laboratory, and their life is one long lab session full of a
million experiments. They spend their days puzzling, and society is their
game board.

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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 feed-
back, 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.”

To a chef in the lab, negative feedback is a free boost forward in progress,

courtesy of someone else. Pure upside.

As for the F word…the word that makes our amygdalae quiver in the
moonlight, the great chefs have something to say about that too:

Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.
—Henry Ford

Success is going from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm.

—Winston Churchill13

I have not failed 700 times. I’ve succeeded in proving 700 ways how not
to build a lightbulb.
—Thomas Edison

There’s no more reliable corollary than super-successful people thinking

failure is fucking awesome.

But there’s something to that. The science approach is all about learning
through testing hypotheses, and hypotheses are built to be disproven,
which means that scientists learn through failure. Failure is a critical part
of their process.

It makes sense. If there were two scientists trying to come up with a

breakthrough in cancer treatment, and the first one is trying every bold
thing he can imagine, failing left and right and learning something each
time, while the second one is determined not to have any failures so is

13 1987 July 22, New Castle News, Turning failure into success can make life bearable again by William
D. Brown, Quote Page 12, Column 4, New Castle, Pennsylvania. (NewspaperArchive)

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making sure his experiments are similar to others that have already been
proven to work—which scientist would you bet on?

It’s not surprising that so many of the most wildly impactful people seem
to treat the world like a lab and their life like an experiment session—
that’s the best way to succeed at something.

But for most of us, we just can’t do it. Even poor Self-Loathing Cook, who
is so damn close to being a chef—but somehow so far away.

So what’s stopping him? I think two major misconceptions:

Misconception 1: Misplaced Fear

We talked about the chef’s courage actually just being an accurate assess-
ment of risk—and that’s one of the major things Self-Loathing Cook is
missing. He thinks he has become wise to the farce of letting dogma
dictate your life, but he’s actually in the grasp of dogma’s slickest trick.

Humans are programmed to take potential fear very seriously, and evolu-
tion didn’t find it efficient to have us assess and re-assess every fear inside
of us. It went instead with the “better safe than sorry” philosophy—i.e. if
there’s a chance that a certain fear might be based on real danger, file it
away as a real fear, just in case, and even if you confirm later that a fear
of yours has no basis, keep it with you, just in case. Better safe than sorry.

And the fear file cabinet is somewhere way down in our psyches—some-
where far below our centers of rationality, out of reach.

The purpose of all of that fear is to make us protect ourselves from danger.
The problem for us is that as far as evolution is concerned, danger = some-
thing that hurts the chance that your genes will move on—i.e., danger =
not mating or dying or your kids dying, and that’s about it.

So in the same way our cook-like qualities were custom-built for survival in
tribal times, our obsession with fears of all shapes and sizes may have served
us well in Ethiopia 50,000 years ago—but it mostly ruins our lives today.

Because not only does it amp up our fear in general to “shit we botched
the hunt now the babies are all going to starve to death this winter” levels
even though we live in an “oh no I got laid off now I have to sleep at my par-
ents’ house for two months with a feather pillow in ideal 68º temperature”

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world—but it also programs us to be terrified of all the wrong things. We’re
more afraid of public speaking than texting on the highway, more afraid of
approaching an attractive stranger in a bar than marrying the wrong person,
more afraid of not being able to afford the same lifestyle as our friends
than spending 50 years in meaningless career—all because embarrassment,
rejection, and not fitting in really sucked for hunters and gatherers.

This leaves most of us with a skewed danger scale:

Chefs hate real risk just as much as cooks—a chef that ends up in the
Actually Dangerous territory and ends up in jail or in a gutter or in dire
financial straits isn’t a chef—he’s a cook living under “I’m invincible”
dogma. When we see chefs displaying what looks like incredible courage,
they’re usually just in the Chef Lab. The Chef Lab is where all the action
is and where the path to many people’s dreams lies—dreams about their
career, about love, about adventure. But even though its doors are always
open, most people never set foot in it for the same reason so many Amer-
icans never visit some of the world’s most interesting countries—because
of an incorrect assumption that it’s a dangerous place. By reasoning by
analogy when it comes to what constitutes danger and ending up with a
misconception, Self-Loathing Cook is missing out on all the fun.

Misconception 2: Misplaced Identity

The second major problem for Self-Loathing Cook is that, like all cooks, he
can’t wrap his head around the fact that he’s the scientist in the lab—not
the experiment.

As we established earlier, conscious tribe members reach conclusions,

while blind tribe members are conclusions. And what you believe, what

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you stand for, and what you choose to do each day are conclusions that
you’ve drawn. In some cases, very, very publicly.

As far as society is concerned, when you give something a try—on the

values front, the fashion front, the religious front, the career front—you’ve
branded yourself. And since people like to simplify people in order to
make sense of things in their own head, the tribe around you reinforces
your brand by putting you in a clearly-labeled, oversimplified box.

What this all amounts to is that it becomes very painful to change. Chang-
ing is icky for someone whose identity will have to change along with
it. And others don’t make things any easier. Blind tribe members don’t
like when other tribe members change—it confuses them, it forces them
to readjust the info in their heads, and it threatens the simplicity of their
tribal certainty. So attempts to evolve are often met with mockery or
anger or opposition.

And when you have a hard time changing, you become attached to who
you currently are and what you’re currently doing—so attached that it
blurs the distinction between the scientist and the experiment and you
forget that they’re two different things.

We talked about why scientists welcome negative feedback about their

experiments. But when you are the experiment, negative feedback isn’t a
piece of new, helpful information—it’s an insult. And it hurts. And it makes
you mad. And because changing feels impossible, there’s not much good
that feedback can do anyway—it’s like giving parents negative feedback
on the name of their one-month-old child.

We discussed why scientists expect plenty of their experiments to fail. But

when you and the experiment are one and the same, not only is taking
on a new goal a change of identity, it’s putting your identity on the line.
If the experiment fails, you fail. You are a failure. Devastating. Forever.

I talked to Musk about the United States and the way the forefathers rea-
soned 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
“trapped in their own history.”

I’ve heard Musk use this same phrase to describe the big auto and

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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 in their industries, he sees an inability to drive
their strategies from a clean slate mentality. Referring to the aerospace
industry, Musk said, “There’s a tremendous bias against taking risks. Every-
one is 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. And you end up being the cancer researcher we mentioned
who only tries likely-to-succeed experimentation within the comfort zone
he knows best.

It’s for this reason that Steve Jobs looks back on his firing from Apple in
1986 as a blessing in disguise. He said:14 “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 of my life.” Being
fired “freed” Jobs from the shackles of his own history.

So what Self-Loathing Cook has to ask himself is: “Am I trapped in my

own history?” As he stands on the cliff with his wings ready for action and
finds himself paralyzed—from evolving as a person, from making changes
in his life, from trying to do something bold or unusual—is the baggage
of his own identity part of what’s holding him back?

Self-Loathing Cook’s beliefs about what’s scary aren’t any more real
than Insecure Cook’s assumption that conventional wisdom has all the
answers—but unlike the “Other people don’t know shit” epiphany, which
you can observe evidence of all over the place, the epiphany that nei-
ther failing nor changing is actually a big deal can only be observed by
experiencing it for yourself. Which you can only do after you overcome
those fears…which only happens if you experience changing and failing
and realize that nothing bad happens. Another catch-22.

These are the reasons I believe so many of the world’s most able people
are stuck in life as Self-Loathing Cook, one epiphany short of the prom-
ised land.

The challenge with this last epiphany is to somehow figure out a way to
lose respect for your own fear. That respect is in our wiring, and the only
14 http://news.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

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way to weaken it is by defying it and seeing, when nothing bad ends up
happening, that most of the fear you’ve been feeling has just been a
smoke and mirrors act. Doing something out of your comfort zone and
having it turn out okay is an incredibly powerful experience, one that
changes you—and each time you have that kind of experience, it chips
away at your respect for your brain’s ingrained, irrational fears.

Because the most important thing the chef knows that the cooks don’t is
that real life and Grand Theft Auto aren’t actually that different. Grand
Theft Auto is a fun video game because it’s a fake world where you can do
things with no fear. Drive 200mph on the highway. Break into a building.
Run over a prostitute with your car. All good in GTA.

Unlike GTA, in real life, the law is a thing and jail is a thing. But that’s about
where the differences end. If someone gave you a perfect simulation
of today’s world to play in and told you that it’s all fake with no actual
consequences—with the only rules being that you can’t break the law or
harm anyone, and you still have to make sure to support your and your
family’s basic needs—what would you do? My guess is that most people
would do all kinds of things they’d love to do in their real life but wouldn’t
dare to try, and that by behaving that way, they’d end up quickly getting
a life going in the simulation that’s both far more successful and much
truer to themselves than the real life they’re currently living. Removing the
fear and the concern with identity or the opinions of others would thrust
the person into the not-actually-risky Chef Lab and have them bouncing
around all the exhilarating places outside their comfort zone—and their
lives would take off. That’s the life irrational fears block us from.

When I look at the amazing chefs of our time, what’s clear is that they’re
more or less treating real life as if it’s Grand Theft Life. And doing so gives
them superpowers. That’s what I think Steve Jobs meant all the times he
said, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

And that’s what this third epiphany is about: fearlessness.

So if we want to think like a scientist more often in life, those are the 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.

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It’s a good plan—but also, ugh. Right? That’s a lot of stuff to try to do.

Usually at the end of a post like this, the major point seems manageable
and concrete, and I finish writing it all excited to go be good at shit. But
this post was like, “Here’s everything important and go do it.” So how do
we work with that?

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 of
our evolution, and our mood that day.

If we want to improve ourselves and move our way closer to the chef side
of the spectrum, we have to remember to remember. We have to remem-
ber that we have software, not just hardware. We have to remember that
reasoning is a skill and like any 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.

It’s fitting that this blog is called Wait But Why because the whole thing
is a little like the adult version of the Why? game. After emerging from
the blur of the arrogance of my early twenties, I began to realize that my
software was full of a lot of unfounded certainty and blind assumptions
and that I needed to spend some serious time deconstructing—which is
the reason that every Wait But Why post, no matter what the topic, tends
to start off with the question, “What’s really going on here?”

For me, that question is the springboard into all of this remembering to
remember—it’s a hammer that shatters a brittle, protective feeling of cer-
tainty and forces me to do the hard work of building a more authentic,
more useful set of thoughts about something. Or at least a better-em-
braced bewilderment.

And when I started learning about Musk in preparation to write these

posts, it hit me that he wasn’t just doing awesome things in the world—he
was a master at looking at the world, asking “What’s really going on here?”
and seeing the real answer. That’s why his story resonated so hard with
me and why I dedicated so much Wait But Why time to this series.

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But also, Mars. Let’s all go, okay?

If you’re into Wait But Why, sign up for the Wait But Why email list and
we’ll send you the new posts right when they come out. Better than having
to check the site!

If you’re interested in supporting Wait But Why, here’s our Patreon.

The other posts in this series:

Part 1: Elon Musk: The World’s Raddest Man

Part 2: How Tesla Will Change the World
Part 3: How (and Why) SpaceX Will Colonize Mars

Extra Post #1: The Deal With Solar City

Extra Post #2: The Deal With the Hyperloop

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