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

What I learned from reading The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why by Tim Urban

Read The Cook & The Chef: Elon Musk's Secret Sauce on WaitButWhy. 

Quotes from this episode: 

Which leaves only two options: create or copy 

Conventional wisdom: If something is both a good idea and possible, it's already been done.

I'm fascinated by those rare people in history who managed to dramatically change the world during their short time here, and I've always liked to study those people and read their biographies. Those people know something the rest of us don't and we can learn something valuable from them. 

Musk calls this reasoning from first principles. One of the most important parts of this podcast. 

Conventional wisdom screamed at the top of its lungs for him to stop. 

Your entire life runs on the software in your head. Why wouldn't you obsess over optimizing it?

We mistake the chef's originality for brilliant ingenuity. 

The reason these outrageously smart people are so humble about what they know is that they are aware that unjustified certainty is the bane of understanding and the death of effective reasoning. 

Conventional wisdom worships the status quo and always assumes that everything is the way it is for a good reason. And history is one long record of status quo dogma being proven wrong again and again, every time some chef comes around and changes things. 

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