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

**David Senra** (0:00)
So, this week is going to be a little different too. If you've heard this podcast before, you know that every week I read a biography of a founder or entrepreneur, and then I share with you the highlights that made me think, or I thought were interesting, or something I learned by reading the book. And I'm going to do the same this week, but instead of a book, it's a book-length blog post. Tim Urban, the founder of Wait But Why, has been publishing a four-part series on Elon Musk and his companies.
And the posts are so long, he published them in Kindle format, and in total, it's like a seven-hour read. And today, I want to talk about the fourth part of that series, called The Cook and the Chef, Elon Musk's Secret Sauce. So let me just jump right into this distinction that I think is really interesting, what Tim is talking about as far as what makes Elon so special, and he uses the metaphor of the cook versus the chef. The difference between the way Elon thinks and the way most people think is kind of like the difference between a cook and a chef. The words cook and chef seem kind of like synonyms, and in the real world, they are often used interchangeably. But in this post, when I say chef, I don't mean any ordinary chef. I mean the trailblazing chef, the kind of chef who invents recipes. And for our purposes, everyone else who enters a kitchen, all those who follow a recipe, is a cook.
Everything you eat, every part of every cuisine we know so well, was at some point in the past created for the first time. Wheat, tomatoes, salt, and milk go back a long time. But at some point, someone said, what if I take those ingredients and do this, and this, and this, and ended up with the world's first pizza? That's the work of a chef. Since then, God knows how many people have made a pizza. That's the work of a cook. The chef reasons from first principles, and for the chef, the first principles are raw, edible ingredients. Those are her puzzle pieces, her building blocks, and she works her way upwards from there, using her experience, her instincts, and her taste buds. The cook works off of some version of what's already out there, a recipe of some kind, a meal she tried and liked, a dish she watched someone else make. On a typical day, a cook and a chef don't operate that differently. Even the chef becomes quickly exhausted by the mental energy required for first principles reasoning, and usually doing so isn't worth his time. Both types of people spend an average day with their brain software running on autopilot, and their conscious decision making center is dormant. But then comes a day when something new needs to be figured out. Whatever this new situation is, autopilot won't suffice.
This is something new, and neither the Chef nor the Cook software has done this before, which leaves only two options, create or copy. Let's say the Cook is thinking of starting a business and wants to know what the possibilities are. Conventional wisdom has him covered. He types the command into the interface, waits a few minutes, and then the system pumps out its answer. So what he's talking about there is before the section, he was talking about the parallels between computers and then our own brain, and then using the metaphor between hardware, which is our biology, and software, which is what we do with our time, how we optimize our learning, and so forth. So he's using that as the Cook is sitting there saying, hey, I have a question I don't know the answer to. Instead of trying to come up and use independent thinking or reasoning from first principles, I'm just going to go and reference conventional wisdom. And in this case, he's using the metaphor that conventional wisdom is a computer he types into, and that's where we're at. He types the command into the interface, waits a few minutes, and then the system pumps out its answer. Rules for starting a business. 1 If something has been done, it's possible.
2 If something has not been done, it's impossible.
3 If something is both a good idea and possible, it's already been done.
With the decision made, not to start a business, he switches his software back into autopilot mode, done and done.
Elon Musk calls the cook's way of thinking reasoning by analogy, as opposed to reasoning by first principles.
If you start looking for it, you'll see the chef cook thing happening everywhere. There are chefs and cooks in the worlds of music, art, technology, architecture, writing, business, comedy, marketing, app development, coaching, teaching, and military strategy. And in each case, though both parties are usually just on autopilot, mindlessly playing the latest album again and again at concerts, it's in those key moments when it's time to write a new album, those moments of truth in front of a clean canvas, a blank word doc, an empty playbook, a new sheet of blueprint paper, a fresh whiteboard, that the chef and the cook reveal their true colors. The chef creates, while the cook copies. Being a chef isn't being like Elon Musk. It's like being yourself.