The First Principles Method Explained by Elon Musk

and then I think it's also important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy so the normal way that we conduct our lives is we we we reason by analogy it's we're doing this because it's like something else that was done or it's like what other people are doing me to type ideas yeah it's like yeah a slight iteration yeah on a theme and and and it's it because it's it's kind of mentally easier to reason by analogy rather than from first principles but but first principles is kind of a physics way of looking at the world and what that really means is you kind of boil things down to the most fundamental truths and and say okay what do we sure is true or sure as possible is true and then reason up from there that takes a lot more mental energy do you an example that like what's one thing that you've done that on that you feels work for you sure so somebody could say in fact people do 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 you're like well no that's that's pretty dumb you know because if if you apply that reasoning to anything new that then you wouldn't be able to ever get to that new thing right so you know it's like you can't say oh you know horses nobody wants a car because horses are great and we're used to them and they can eat grass there's lots of grass all over the place and you know there's not like there's no gasoline if you book and buy so people never going to it never get ever going to get parts right that people did say that and in for batteries they would say oh it's going to cost you know the historically its cost six six hundred dollars probe six hundred dollars per kilowatt hour and so it's not going to be much better than that in the future and say no okay well what what are the batteries made of so some 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 and some polymers for separation and a steel can so break that down on a material basis and say okay what if we bought that in london metal exchange what would each of those things costs like oh geez it's like $80 a 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

Channel: Innomind

Views: 1,530,238

Keywords: elon musk, quotes, The First Principles Method, Tesla Motors (Organization)

Id: NV3sBlRgzTI

Length: 2min 49sec (169 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 04 2013