Elon Musk's 3 Rules To Learning Anything

foreign I do think there's a good a good framework for thinking is physics you know the sort of first principles reasoning um what I mean by that is boil things down to the the fundamental truths and reason up from there as opposed to reasoning by analogy um through most of our life we we get through life by reasoning by analogy which essentially means kind of coughing what other people do with slight variations and you have to do that otherwise it's it's mentally you wouldn't be able to get through the day um but when you when

you want to do something new you you have to you have to apply the the physics approach um give me an example that like what's one thing that you've done that on that you feels work for you sure so um somebody could say um in fact people do uh that battery packs are really expensive and that's just the way they'll always be because that's the way they've been in the past um you're like well no that's that's pretty dumb and you say no okay what what are the batteries made of so first principles would be

say okay what are the material constituents of the batteries what is the spot market value of the material constituents so you can say okay it's got Cobalt nickel aluminum carbon um and some pollinates for separation and a steel can so break that down in on a material basis and say okay what if we bought that in London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost like oh geez uh it's like 80 per kilowatt hour so clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of

a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much much cheaper than anyone realizes [Music] Rockets were super expensive and the cost cost per 100 kilogram to orbit had actually gone up over the years not down so um after my second or third trip back from Russia I was like whoa there's got to be a way to build Rockets um there's got to be a way to solve this rocket problem I started reading a lot of books and Rockets and a bit about sort of a first principles analysis of of a rocket just broke

down the materials that are in a rocket what would it cost to buy those materials what versus the price of the rocket and there's a gigantic difference between the raw material cost of the rocket and the Finish cost the rocket so there must be something wrong happening in in going from the constituent atoms to the final shape and I found that certainly to be true and then um you know just in general critical thinking is is good you know examining whether you have the correct axioms or the most applicable axioms uh does the logic necessarily

connect um and then what are the what are the range of probable outcomes outcomes are usually not deterministic they're they're they're a range and so you want to figure out what those probabilities are and make sure ideally that you're the house you know it's fine to take it's fine it's fine to gamble as long as you're the house [Music]