Transcription
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 copying 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 feel's worked 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.
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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 finished cost of 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.
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