A brain software pro in a world where people don’t realize brain software is a thing.Which is why the real story here isn’t Musk. 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. In 2015, I got a call from Elon Musk. For cooks, even the more innovative 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. All good in GTA.Unlike GTA, in real life, the law is a thing and jail is a thing. 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. 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.
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. He keeps the decision-making center on standby for the next few weeks as he makes a bunch of early adjustments to the flawed hypothesis—a little more salt, a little less sugar, one prime ingredient that needs to be swapped out for another. Now fucking put your boots on because I said so and let’s go.”Imagine how this would play out in the science world.In fairness, parents’ lives suck. You’re in your thirties now and it’s too late to do something big in a whole different field. 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. 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. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. 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. Only bother with these if you want to see the source of a quote or fact or read more about the topic. He’s tantalizingly close to carving out his own chef path in the world, and he knows that if he just 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 ourselves how the chefs operate.Free of Self-Loathing Cook’s trepidation, the world’s chefs are liberated to put on their lab coats and start sciencing. 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. Sure, he knows there are no clothes on that emperor’s sweaty lower back fat roll—but actually 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.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. Without exception, they were really nice-seeming, friendly people, who all came off as ridiculously smart but in a non-pretentious way. Christianity is a tribe. Any reasoning 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 victims of their own certainty. For now, here’s the short story:In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future.