Kimbal Musk
Appearances
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
One way to say it, it is abuse, but it's more just verbal diarrhea for hours and constantly saying, do you understand? He wants to make sure that I'm paying attention. So I trained myself to look like I'm paying attention, but I'm not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Disappear to some place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, and I do that less and less of the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, I think we are a good complement. I'll talk for myself first. My strength is definitely on the social side. I love the gathering place, and I love putting people together in person, and I love to have vibrant debates and conversations. I've been doing that constantly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
forever and including three fun parties and stuff where where I bring people together and I really kind of want people to have fun and be but be vulnerable in a in a not just like silly partying just but actually like let's all connect definition for me of a good party is people laugh and cry Like I want to have people have an emotional connection.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I go to Burning Man every year and that is, there's no question, you will cry at some point during Burning Man. No small talk. No small talk. Yeah, exactly. No small talk. You're totally right on. Like most parties, not parties, but most events you go to are like clubs, these sort of nightclubs. And I never go to those.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And my joke is, why would I want to go to a place where I pay to shout small talk in the dark? Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I have, so my compliment for my brother was just bringing joy and social connection. And he's truly, he's an engineering genius. I've worked with him forever and we do compliment each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I started cooking when I was 11 years old. My mom is just... She's wonderful, but she's self-admittedly a bad cook. But at the time, it was... I think anyone with kids goes through this. Your kids just want something like spaghetti bolognese or a burger or something. And my mom would do... Brown bread, plain yogurt, and boiled squash.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You know, like the absolute most disgusting things that a child could imagine eating. And so I said, can I cook? And she said, yeah, if you want to cook, no problem. So I went to the grocery store and I, back in those days, a butcher, separate to the grocery store. And I went to the butcher and I said, you know, what can I cook?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And he pulled out a chicken and he said, this is the easiest recipe for you. Just put it on a pan in an oven, a hot oven, because back then the ovens weren't necessarily like 400 degrees or 450 or whatever. And put it in a hot oven for one hour and enjoy. That was it. And so I went home and actually I also brought some French fries. I'll tell you that as well. I'm a kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Of course I want French fries. So the roast chicken was French fries. And the chicken came out and it was just fantastic. It was. Absolutely fantastic. That's incredible, by the way. You didn't screw it up the first time. First of all, I think that also kicks off the magic. If you screw it up and you're like, oh, maybe this is not for me. So for me, it really did kick it off.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You started out on a high note. Yeah, right, exactly. But I'll tell the French fry part, which was a disaster. So I cooked the French fries, but I didn't heat the oil first. So I just put the potatoes in the oil and I waited for it to heat up. And I just was throwing up later that night. Your body can't ingest that much because it sucks the oil then. Oh, wow. And so that was a disaster.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But at the time, it tasted good. The real magic, which I also found was wonderful, was when I cooked, my brother, my sister, my mom, all very, very busy, very intense people would sit down. And we would have a meal together. And I was like, wow, this is a powerful, it's a very powerful thing that I've now got where in no other way could I have that connection with my family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I mean, obviously we stay connected, we're very close, et cetera, but in no other way can we sit down and just talk about things. or talk about whatever's on our mind, or just to just, not even talk, just to be at the table together. And I've done that now through my whole life, my kids, still for my family, and we will do gratitudes at the beginning of our meal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it's just, I think what kept me cooking, what made my love of cooking so great, was actually the fact that we would sit down and be present with each other. And I'm also just also hard with that too. So I also get to be present.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
paying attention right like what is that what what is why is it food like what else does that sometimes maybe alcohol can do that which is a kind of food i guess yeah but i think alcohol is different because you usually standing when you're doing alcohol so you're you're like you're socializing but it's kind of you're just going to stay in more in the small talk zone yeah right whereas if you sit down and i i see this in my restaurant in the kitchen in boulder
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
where we have every viewpoint. Or we go to Denver, every viewpoint. We went to Chicago, every viewpoint. And the physical presence of someone being right there is, people are just, they're just very different, absolutely different to what they are online. I think we all know the difference between, you know, you send an email to someone and they misunderstand the email, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Oh, if I just had talked to the person, it would have been fine. Well, this is now happening at scale, you know, with all of these, what do you call it, trolling or whatever. And I have sat at the bar and I've had – hardcore Trump supporter, and I'm just curious. I'm not a Trump supporter, but tell me more. And it actually draws the conversation out because you're there for an hour or longer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
There's no rush to get the answer. And I think that's a big difference. I've had one time where just a couple months ago, I had someone, I was sitting at the community table. We have a community table in the restaurant. And I didn't know him too well, but he asked me, did I know that 9-11 was a conspiracy and it didn't really happen? It didn't happen, yeah. And I was like, huh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So actually, I was at 9-11. I mean, I watched it until I was four. I was there, physically there. Allegedly. There's no doubt in my mind. Okay. But I didn't want to interrupt what he had to say. So I let him talk for five minutes, six minutes, seven minutes. And again, you're there for a while, so you're not in a rush to jump in and argue. And then I shared that I was there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I think because I had been willing to listen to him, he was willing to listen to me. And I don't know if he changed his mind. He certainly didn't change my mind, but it was actually a pretty cool conversation to kind of get into each other's mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, exactly. I like the term play with them because what you're not trying to do is shut the conversation down. You're also not trying to... Talk down on me. Yeah, exactly. Like, let me just be nice while I totally disagree with this person. You can do that for a few minutes. You can't do that for two hours.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Absolutely. In fact... One of my favorite things to do is you do like a Jeffersonian-style dinner. Let's say five or six people. Sometimes people will break off into individual conversations. That's actually when things break down. So that's when you kind of go back to small talk. Like, oh, I'm stuck next to this guy. I'm just going to do a little small talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What you need to do to really create a great conversation is one conversation at the table. And that's where, you know, there'll be some simple questions that I'll say. I'll say, you know, what's your middle name? And you'll be amazed at the stories you get from that. But it's about creating vulnerability. So they're like, oh, no one's ever asked me that before. So then they become vulnerable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And then something as simple as what's the most fun thing you've done recently and what is the most fun thing you're looking forward to? Mm-hmm. And I have gotten into, with those prompts, I've gotten into hours-long discussions on God. I've gotten into hours-long discussions on love. I've gotten into hours-long discussions on anger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's actually amazing when people are just asked a question like, what's the most fun thing you've done lately? Well, why would anger come up? Well, actually... they're in a vulnerable place, so it'll just kind of come out of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, and we're going to open in Austin. In Austin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Are communists the likes of drugs? That's a good question to ask. I think I know some of those. Okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I love it. I think that I've talked to a lot of Austinites who've been here forever. And I'm like, man, you got to hold us accountable. We got to keep this place weird.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, it's actually, I think it's one of my most powerful life lessons is we have to eat. So it's not like you have a choice, you have to eat. And so what I choose to do is I choose to make it a gift to myself for each meal. And most of the time, the best gift is with friends, with family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So we'll have to cook some scrambled eggs in the morning with my daughter or we'll have dinner with our family. To me, it's a gift we give ourselves three times a day, you know, at least. But for the most part, three times a day. Let's make it a good one. What makes it a good one to you? What aspect of it makes it a good one? Well, first, definitely eating with people. So that makes it a good one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So eating in a restaurant, it doesn't have to be my restaurant, where you have the energy of people around you, energy of the town, people you don't know, creates a little bit of a vibe. You mentioned the watering hole analogy, the animals sipping at the water. Yeah. But there's an energy to that because they're also like looking around going, am I just about to be eaten?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So they're all in it together, but we need to have water. But there's also a little bit of tension as well in the background. And I think that's what restaurants do is a very, very subtle version of that. You're in a room with strangers. Yeah. And you're, yeah, you're a little cluster. Okay, fine. You guys are connected in it. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But you're in a room of strangers and it's just something that adds that energy to the meal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Like, are we too loud? Or just, you also just, people are random. So something random could happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Totally right. I mean, you know, look at the cowboy hat. I mean, actually, I'll take my hat off when I want to have a quiet meal and I can leave my hat on when I'm... So you're aware of the lot. I'm aware of the effect it has. Yeah, absolutely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So this is, you talk to the, the, the craziness of being, of being in the restaurant world where, you know, you're sitting at a table and anything can happen in the restaurant. So there's one time, I was like 15 years ago, the, um, This guy comes up to us and says he'd like to propose to his wife, his girlfriend. And so we said, okay, cool. We've done this before. We'll make sure it's all set up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
6 p.m. kind of reservation. So she shows up, and we give her a glass of champagne. We obviously didn't want to spoil the surprise, so we're just doing it the weekend. But then he doesn't arrive. And then we're like, oh, man. Yeah. Now we're like, don't leave. Can we get you another glass of champagne? We're doing everything we can.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Because the guy was obviously earnest earlier just because he's stuck in traffic or whatever. And coming through the back door of the restaurant, which is you're not allowed to come through the back door of the restaurant, a marching band from the school, the university, like comes through the restaurant, you know, full-on brass band and the whole thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And, you know, he gets down and he proposes. And it's beautiful, sure, but it's also like, man, this is chaos. This is insane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You do it and apologize. But that talks to that kind of what's the crazy thing that could happen. It's subtle, but it's still there. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I think the thing that I absolutely love about running the restaurant, not eating it, but running the restaurant, is the tangible reaction from people. And you also kind of know when you screwed it up. Mm-hmm. And you also know when you got it right. So even, it's kind of a weird way to say this, but even if the customer's unhappy, you know whether you got it right or wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's not just about the food you're making, but it's about the person's psychological state. And you'll even, you'll do something that you're like, you know that that was not well. And their psychological state is, they're just in a very happy place and they love it. And you're like, huh. You know, like that's not how I would have reacted to that dish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And then the other way around, you'd like, no, I got that right. And that person's just like really unhappy today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, you can tell. And you mentioned being at the bar. One of the most gifted bartenders really understand that. You know, it goes beyond, but what's also great about a restaurant, it goes beyond the one-time experience that you walk in and have that experience, is the good bartenders, they remember you. Oh, you were in a few months ago, and this is kind of your thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You might need a little time. Mm-hmm. And other people will come in, they want a conversation. Yeah. Or other people come in and they're going through a divorce and they just want to be sad for a moment, have a scotch. Yeah. And it's like, it's amazing what you learn in the restaurant world to just be... connected to humanity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
The table is when you connect with people, learn about each other. Bars, you can sometimes do that. You can talk left and right, but you have the freedom to always break free. You can say, okay, great, I'm going to go back to my meal. It's kind of like a friend you can turn on and off at any time because the bartender knows that. They're trained. If you want attention, I'm going to give it to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
If you don't, I'm going to stay away. If you want to be chatty, I'm going to be chatty. If you want to be completely in your head, I'll leave you in your head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And you can reach out. You can add some conversation or you can choose not to. And you can exit quickly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's a really good exit. So bars are wonderful. And I love going to a bar by myself after work. I might have a scotch, might not even have alcohol, just have something. And I'll just maybe have a snack or something before dinner because I'm going to go home and have dinner with the family. And that 20 minutes is just an amazing state change from daytime to nighttime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
If I went straight home, I'm like still in my head and I'm just trying to get grounded and I'm not as pleasant of a person. So that's another powerful use of a bar. It's just like a transition time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yes, you feel heard. Like I said earlier, the people going through a divorce, They don't know where else to go. These are mostly men. Sometimes women will do it, but mostly men will do this and women have other ways of processing it. But they just, they want a place to be sad. They want a place where they could feel comfortable talking about it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
They're certainly not going to go into too much detail, but they just want to say something. And the bartender is there for them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You don't know where to go.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What is that? I'll be honest, I still do it myself where if I'm at home and I don't have a work thing that I got to deal with and I don't have kids and I don't have my wife or family around, I don't often cook for myself. I actually love going to a bar by myself. I have a glass of red wine, and I usually don't have a starter, appetizer, just like a main meal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I just take in the energy of the space. If it's my restaurant or someone else's restaurant, I just take in the energy. And it's so much better than being home and turn the TV on. No, no, no. I want to be out in the restaurant. I want to feel the energy of the town. The other thing that restaurants teach me is they're the front lines of... The economy or what's the better word for it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Just like the front lines of the energy of how things are going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, exactly. So you can go into a restaurant and I'll use a simple example. And why is the restaurant empty? Mm-hmm. ah, there's a football game going on and there's such a large number of people who want to watch that game that the restaurant is quiet or it might be like another World Series or something. And you're like, wow, that's so interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You can actually watch in America, of course, American humanity, you can watch them move in their patterns just by being in the restaurant. And then another time you might be in a restaurant and it's just jamming. It's a Monday night and you're like, what is the energy that created this on a Monday night and maybe even on a cold February Monday night? What is it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And sometimes you can't find out, but you can feel it. And it's my front lines of humanity that I also just really love about the restaurants.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I actually prefer empty bars than full ones.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
like spiritual about it but it seems like it's in the walls or something like there's the history is felt and some of these bars are actually very old and it's wonderful like you know they're made in europe like this but there's a couple in new york city a few hundred years old and you you and they're still operating non-stop for that long and man you feel it yeah let me ask you some questions about ingredients what's your favorite ingredient to cook with
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
For me, cooking is an art, right? So it'd be like asking me what's my favorite paint color to use. It's not that it isn't like there isn't one. It's more like when there is one, it really is one. You know, like there's peaches on the cover of this cookbook. Those peaches, those were in August, Colorado peaches. It just doesn't get any better than that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That was the best. But that only lasts for a week. And then they don't taste so great. Yeah. But damn, are they so good in that moment. And you just can't stop wanting to use that ingredient.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
They're so good. What's your favorite fruit?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I love a smoothie bowl, so I do sort of berries, raspberries. But I use fruit more in the form of a smoothie bowl than I eat fruit that often. I like an apple or a banana, but for the most part, I prefer the blended. Not me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Oh, yeah, those are great. But try it sometime, come to Colorado in August, and when you try those peaches, it is like heaven has arrived in your mouth. It is so ridiculously good. But just for a week in August.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I've trained in New York as a French chef, but it wasn't very much ingredients focused. It wasn't very much sourcing focused. He came from the River Cafe in London, which was one of the OGs for the Farm to Table and still going strong today. And he taught me the value of getting to know farmers and getting to know vegetables from that farm versus vegetables from that farm.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And they're actually different. Soil's a little different. The way they grow it, a little different. It's the opposite of the industrial machine where everything needs to look exactly the same. And sometimes you'll get carrots that are kind of ugly and deformed, but there's much sweeter than the carrots you'd get for other purposes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So you'd make a carrot puree out of that, and then you'd take carrots that are more... typical in shape and size. You might roast them for dinner. So it's the appreciation for vegetables in general. I probably would say carrots is my favorite just because that was an example of one where I've really had to learn how to use the different types of carrots that come from all of our farms.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it's fun. It's a fun ingredient. If you just went to Whole Foods or just went to a grocery store and you just got exactly the same carrot every time, less fun. But go to a farmer's market and see what you get. And you'll see they're quite different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, I'm just not anti-carbs. You know, I think the... Anti-carb, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I think they play a role. You know, like I have a great friend who's an amazing doctor, and he did some tests for me and everything, and it turns out I have a gluten allergy. And I was like, okay. So what that means is I shouldn't eat gluten. He's like, yeah. I was like, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I also have hay fever, and that means I should not go out into nature. So I was like... nah, I think I'm going to go out into nature. And maybe what I'll do on bread and pastas, or like the true carbs, I'll just have it when it's really good. Because when it's really good, it's really good. And you don't want to miss that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Most of the time, okay, find some crummy bread, whatever, I can skip that part. But I find all of these diets are like, no, none of this, or super this, super that. I wonder if they're just like, people are just looking for something to hang on to. But these diets have been around forever, and if they worked, then we would know that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Let go. This is your cheat day or whatever. Yeah, yeah. And I've heard that. And actually, I have friends who do that, their cheat day. And I say to them, I'm only going to hang out with you on your cheat day because that's when you're actually fun.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, but you must be eating a lot of food in that one meal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I mean, I have kids in the morning. So if you have kids, it's for sure a morning experience. But if you don't, then you're right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, if you're eating one meal a day, you can eat whatever you like.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yes, we learned during COVID, if you wrap yourself in cotton wool in your basement, you're not going to die from COVID.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, he wrote a book called Kitchen Confidential in the 90s. I was in cooking school at the time. He romanticized the cooking in the restaurant so well. His writing is great. He kind of got me into like, oh, that's cool. I want to do that. It was cool. So I got into cooking school, got more engaged in it, and I had this FOMO feeling of I wanted to experience what it's like to be in the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
When you're cooking school, you are in the back. They had a restaurant we would serve people, but it's not the same thing as actually being in a real restaurant. It's like you're in a submarine with your teammates, and you've got to win tonight. It's a real energy experience. And so that was a big inspiration. I followed him over. He was so sad that he chose to end his life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I also had met with him a few times, not like one-on-one over dinner or anything, but just met with him. And I just felt his love for food and truly his love for food.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. I've used that phrase, especially the cook with love one. I mean, you know, one of the things about which we talked about this earlier where you get quick, tangible feedback from a customer when you're in the restaurant. I know when I didn't put love into that dish. I know when one of my line cooks did not put love into that part of the dish.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I know when that expert person did not put love into double-checking the dish before putting it on the table. You just know. And cook with love is when you do it for your family. Oh, actually, especially when you do it for your family, the food doesn't have to be perfect. But you're cooking with love.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I would call it, it's not a rough experience in that. In a beautiful way. Yeah, exactly. It's not like I'm a victim of it. It's rough in that they intentionally make it rough. So the school costs the same price as Harvard to go to. You show up. It's an 18-month program. You are allowed to drop out at any time. You don't get your money back. 25 people started, six people graduated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And the people who graduated, I graduated, but man, there were times where I'm like, I can't handle this. I mean, I would literally say to my friends, oh, I gotta go to cooking school, I'm gonna go get screamed at for the next six or seven hours. And I had this little French chef who was my nemesis. Does he still live in your head somewhere?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
in my head exactly he's only nuts he's like five foot two or something and uh and i remember him screaming so much at me that this he's like the short guy i'm six five the spittle would land on my face nice and i would just have to sit there or stand there and take it It was a very humbling experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I did learn, though, that it's intentionally rough, so I took a little bit of the edge off it one day when that same chef had come over to me and said, move over a little bit. And I moved over, and he took my carrots, whatever, and started just chopping everything perfectly. And then he said, okay, you can come back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And then he went over to someone else and started screaming at them, saying that, look, even Kimball can do this. And you can't do this. And I was like, this whole thing's like a psycho game. Yeah. So it did take the edge off when I realized there was... The guy was intentionally trying to break you down. And they do this apparently in the army.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I've not been to the army, but they need to break you down. Everything you know is worthless so that then we can teach you and you can come out of it with what actually we want you to know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
All of those things. I think that the, one of the most beautiful lessons was actually scrambled eggs. So there's different layers of chefs. So they're all master chefs, they're all very well-known people and everything, but Alain Soltner was one of the chief, like, main, main guys. And he just passed away. Master chef. And everything kind of stopped when he would show up in the kitchen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And he would teach very few things. And all of the other chefs, the same ones that were screaming at us, it was like the Red Sea parting. They have total respect for this human, and he can do whatever he wants. And one of the things he wanted to teach was how do you make an omelette, a French omelette. And it's really fundamentally the same thing. It's the soft scrambled eggs that you fold.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And the love that he put into the time with us, and of course he's a legend. There were moments like that where I'm like, wow, okay. He also, just like the other chefs, didn't have any concern berating anyone. So he berated our master chefs. Saying, I don't trust these people to teach you how to make scrambled eggs. So I'm gonna do it instead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, first of all, for me, it's a learning journey forever. So I make scrambled eggs, I mean, I've made it 10,000 times or more or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Pretty much. Okay. So I will wake up... and be held accountable by my kids to make scrambled eggs. So this happens every morning. And I know all the steps. muscle memory level kind of steps. I don't know how much while I know it. And then I'll cook it and it's very meditative for me because you have to focus.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So most scrambled eggs, soft scrambled egg recipes are 10, 15 minutes to get them to that perfect softness. And the recipe that I got from Chef Alan was something that you do in 90 seconds. But it requires total focus. If you look up for a second, you're going to miss the perfect moment where you have to stop and get those eggs out of the pan. Because the eggs will keep cooking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And so it's this meditation. And sometimes you hit it perfectly. But most times... Could have been a little softer, could have been a little firmer, could have been a little bit more salt, could have been a little bit more pepper. And so what's really fun about the morning is my kids are kind of into it. So they're sort of like we critique the eggs every morning. Do they have a rating system?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's more like... And again, it also comes back to how people feel, right? So my kids can be in a bad mood and they can be grumpy. Or it's like a Michelin star system, like what? No, no, it's more like, oh yeah, I like my eggs a little more gooier or yesterday it was this way, but a little bit more salt, a little less salt. Salt is usually the one That is because not all salts are equal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So if you are used to working with a certain kind of salt and then you just are forced, for some reason, ran out of salt to use some other salt, you actually don't know how to use it. You really want to have the same salt all the time. They have a page on salt in the book, which is fascinating. Salt is... You got to get to know your salt. You got to love your salt.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And you got to use it over and over and over again. And it will teach you how to use that salt. Your own palate will tell you how salty you like things. But if you change it up and you mix up a whole bunch of salt, you've now multiplied your learning path So for me, my favorite salt is kosher salt. And I like to use that all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And if I ever change it, I might sprinkle a little bit of Molden salt, which is a crunchy, sort of a flaky salt. But it's more for that when you're actually eating. For the texture. It gives you texture as well as salt, exactly. You wouldn't use it on scrambled eggs. But if you switch out your salts... It's a different weapon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And also not even all kosher salts are the same. It's the particular salt that you like, get to know it. Get in a relationship with it. It's like great. You will learn so much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So it's by feel, and that's where you get the relationship. So in fact, in the cookbook, I have QR codes that people can scan because what I struggle with recipes is they don't teach technique, right? They can describe the technique, but they don't teach the technique because it's a technique. It's not a recipe. And so one of the lessons is how do you salt vegetables?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
a steak and the answer is not here's a teaspoon and you do it this way the answer is use kosher salt so you can see with your eyes because they're little flakes how much salt is on your steak and then taste it cook it and then taste it you know do you think you didn't need more or you needed less okay now next time put a little more on because you can see it
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it's about learning the fact that you want to be able to see how much salt is on the steak so that you can then train yourself for the future of how much salt you want on your steak. Yeah, but then the steak and the salt kind of dance together. It depends on where the steak came from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's true. All the thickness of the steak, that'll make a difference. But for the most part, if you... If you're able to see it, versus table salt, for example, this just disappears. You just can't see what you're putting on your steak. You can't really learn as a result.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. Like a good New York strip from a good rancher that, you know, there's a lot of... discussion, controversy on how cattle should be raised. And we have a very different approach, which is we know how our cattle are raised. We go to the farm. We get to know the rancher.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And sometimes you do want to have them be finished on, like they'll be grass-fed for the most part, but then there's some sort of cool recipe of food you're giving them that will then make them taste better. And sometimes it is actually pretty good to have 100% grass-fed. I've had some amazing ranchers that show me that the flavor is all there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
For the average person that might go to Whole Foods or a grocery store, I think the simplicity of a good steak, it is important to get good sourcing, but also it's just good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, New York strip. Yeah. I like the fact that it's lean, but if you want the fat, you can dive into that little strip of fat or you can leave it alone because you don't want it that night. And it's also a great steak for adding something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Like if you want to, you could either do a pepper sauce or you could do a lot of ground pepper, which gives it a peppery, it's not sauce, but it's a peppery steak. It's a really good, a canvas for other things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, pretty much. Actually, I will say there's another one, garlic. This is my favorite recipe for steak is you season it, both sides, salt and pepper, You saute it in a little olive oil, barely anything. And you're getting a nice crisp, like a golden, dark golden brown on both sides. The other trick with cooking a steak is don't touch it. You just put one side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
When you're ready to turn it, turn it around. Don't touch it any other time. But at the end, you take a dab of butter and you crush a clove of garlic. Mm-hmm. You don't even chop it. You just crush the glove and you put the two of them in the pan and you just roll the steak around in the garlic butter. I think that's the one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, I would say there's an Austin way, which is, and actually even Austin would say there's a suburb of Austin way. I think that actually the adventure of food is wonderful. I would absolutely say that Austin is one of the great food cities of America, and barbecue is one of its gifts that it gives the city. But you'll go to one and the other and you'll have a different approach.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And that's the part I love is where there's a real celebration of the artisan. So you might go to one and they have a style that they love and they've been doing it for years. And then you'll go to another and they have a style that they love and they've been doing it for years. And it's not, they're still barbecue, but they're actually different. And it's really beautiful to see that. And that's
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I think that's what food culture is. Like it just builds up over time by people who love this style of cooking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, they also have like paper towels. Get as messy as you like. And it's a whole roll of paper towels. They don't even give you a napkin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
One of the other things that will happen in a town like Austin is there'll be a barbecue joint that is just legendary, right? And then out of that will come someone who wants to do their own barbecue joint, and they'll take the learning from that barbecue joint. They'll open up a new one, but it won't be the same as the other barbecue joint. Part of it is like, dude, don't just do the same thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Do something different. What do you have to say? But also part of it is if you're in the world of food as an art form and you want to go open up another barbecue joint, you kind of want to prove yourself. Like I deserve to have a barbecue joint in this town. I know this is one of the holy grails of barbecue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And people will follow you like they're following a musician or they're following an artist. And they are excited to... To see what your version is and how well you can pull it off. It's like, it's actually, that's what I love. That's what I mean by like a city with a food culture. Austin has that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Our restaurant in Boulder, the kitchen, is 20 years old. We're very well known, very well respected, and we do have to live up to the name. I think that our restaurant lives up to its name in not just the food. It's like you walk in and you feel the restaurant, and that is also something we've just done naturally. The space is a 120-year-old building. It used to be a brothel, and it was a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
bookstore, like storied history. This was a mining town, right? So back in the 1800s, this was built late 1800s. That sort of Brussels, that was a thing. And so there's an actual tunnel in the basement that goes to the local hotel that would be used for going back and forth between the hotel and the brothel without people knowing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And the tunnel is now concreted up, but you can go about 20, 30 feet into the tunnel. But you go into the space and it's actually an old space, so you feel like it's been there forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. So 2010, I was 37. I had opened the restaurant in 2004, and I had loved the restaurant world, loved it. But I didn't really want to grow a restaurant company. That wasn't my goal. And so I went back into technology, and I had gone from something that I love to something that I like. For me, it was like chewing sawdust every day.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I just couldn't believe that I had gone from, that had changed my life, I had gone back into technology. And now I do do work in technology and I do love it, but I found a better relationship with it. But I was really, really unhappy. From the outside, I was a sort of CEO of a startup, but from the inside, I was just very unhappy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I was in Jackson Hole, and I was doing these very aggressive snowboard runs, and I'm, at the time, a pretty good aggressive snowboarder. And I remember saying to myself, look, I've got kids. I need to chill on this. The next day was Valentine's Day. Tomorrow's Valentine's Day. I'm just going to have a nice day with the family and my wife at the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And we went to a children's run to do the inner tube run. And the tubes are small, but everyone uses the same tube. So I'm 6'5", and my kids are 4 years old, and everyone uses the same size tube. It should have been a message to me not to get on this thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
South Africa was... So I grew up in apartheid South Africa, but more specifically, the fall of apartheid. So it was the 80s. I was a teenager in the 80s. And our community would... Part of our social life, frankly, was the anti-apartheid protests and to go be with white people, black people, kind of mixing it all together.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I went and got on it, and on the first run, and I went down, and you're going super fast, 35 miles an hour, and a tube hit the braking mats, and it stopped. The tube just stopped where it was. It just threw me. My head was facing downhill, so that's created the wrong center of gravity. So instead of braking, it just threw me. I landed on my head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
My head went into my chest, like compression into my chest. Down like that. I ruptured my spine at C6 and C7. And in like the blink of a second, I was paralyzed. I was like, like, like what? You know, just like impossible to... Impossible to comprehend. And they take me, they put this big thing on my, like, halo on my head, and they take me to the hospital, which was more of a medical clinic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I'm just like, what is going on here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I remember being... So this is one of the things that actually the doctor said caused the most damage was... I was thrown from the tube, and I heard this big crunch sound in my body. And I knew that I was hurt. But I didn't feel any pain. That's also, why wouldn't you feel pain? Because you don't feel pain. And I'm face down on the snow, and the snow is burning my face, because you can't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You need something. And I... found a way to turn myself around so that my face wouldn't be on the ground, but I knew I couldn't move. And that, they said, actually caused more damage than, well, obviously the accident created the opening, but once you move your body, the blood goes into the spinal column at a faster rate, and that is what caused my paralysis. But I remember that, and I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I remember getting into the ambulance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It was a different feeling of death. It was more... It was more of a, what is going on here? It was more like I can't make sense of what's going on. It was... There was a moment where I got to the hospital and they did this MRI and the doctor comes up to me and says, look, we've done this MRI and so now I'm in the hospital and I'm like, I can't move. But I also don't feel any pain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I'm like, it's very confusing. Your body looks like you can move it. Like, look, see how I'm moving my hand. Like, it looks like you can do that. And then it just doesn't move. There's no feedback loop that it's not moving. Your brain even thinks it's moving, but it's not moving. It's like the worst, like most terrifying thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So the doctor says, look, the way you broke your neck was really at a zero degree angle. That is so rare. But as a result, there is no twisting of the spine. We think that we can get the blood out of your spinal column and you should get some or maybe all of your movement back. And I was like, oh, okay, I think I'm going to be fine. I guess I'm going to be fine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And then I realized I had tears just streaming down the side of my face. And I was like, whoa, man, I have no idea what's going on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
The most formative experience is, frankly, how much I appreciate a place like America where we have value for human life. So there was a country where human life was not valued. It was a It's a weird thing to come from that to here where we take it so seriously if someone dies in a war or something like that. And we just didn't take it seriously in South Africa. People died.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, it was for sure all of the defenses were up. I don't know how else to describe it, but there was denial. Yeah. There was this curiosity of like, why is there no pain? Like that's when they did actually repair me and fix me. It was three days later. The pain was... indescribable how much pain I was in. But it was no pain for three days.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, so they did the surgery, but I had this very clear voice in my head that kind of determined that it's God. I'm not religious, but I don't know how else to describe the voice. And this voice was very clear. You're going to work with kids and food. Okay, well, where did that come from? I'm like tech CEO. I have a restaurant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And we were working with some kids in schools with like some, you know, helping a local nonprofit. And he's like, no. You're just going to work on kids and food. And my good friend Antonio and my brother were in the hospital, and I was like, I'm going to work on kids and food. Because they were like, he's crazy. He lost his mind. Not that they weren't already. No one was arguing with me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I was like, I'm just going to do that. I need to say it out loud. And I remember resigning from my job as the CEO from the hospital. And that was it. It was just clear. It was a clear voice. It wasn't for a moment. It wasn't like a flash of light or anything. It was probably two weeks of clear voice. Of clarity. Clarity. Exactly. Clarity. No monkey brain. Nothing. No monkey brain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Just clarity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Well, I've done ayahuasca, and I've spoken to what they call Mother Aya, which is another version of God. It's a divine presence. Maybe I think it's a better way to say it. I've also had this debate in my head. Maybe it's just me. I'm talking to me. And it's my peaceful, more kinder, less caught up in the emotion of the day version of me. Maybe it's me. Okay, maybe it is, but it's there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, all of the, which is really true. Evolution literally is true. That we all are, the photons from the sun came in. You're part fish. We all came from that. I think there's one, you know, so one of the things I do is meditate. And this was, I've been meditating for many, many years. And the way I meditate is I sit and I listen to my thoughts. And I simply just do that for 15 to 20 minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it just calms the nervous system. And I might breathe and just be calm. breathe through because it's been a stressful day. And it's just a beautiful way to kind of do it around. I remember I said I used to do a scotch at the bar after work. Now I go meditate, for instance. A little bit better for my health.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But meditation, I was taught, Sam Harris actually taught me this, was not so much just about watching your thoughts, but realizing that you're a watcher. You're actually a watcher. You're not just, like, who is the person watching you? That's you, actually. Your thoughts are floating through your mind, but you are the watcher. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Okay, so I'm going to learn that. I'm going to be the watcher. And what I learned was I'm watching these thoughts go by, and there's a consistent other presence there. And I'm like, what is that consistent other presence? It's not a thought. It's not something I can kind of let it float away, and it doesn't even want to float away. It's just a consistent other presence that I can watch and feel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yes, yeah, that's how I feel. And it's a beautiful presence. It's not a presence that is trying to intervene. It's not a presence that is trying to tell you what to do. It's just a beautiful presence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
where people were killed. I saw someone killed in front of me. I was getting off a train, and it's a very violent train, known for violence. We were stupid kids. We didn't really listen to our parents. We went on this train, and the doors opened, and I had people trying to get off the train.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I learned about Mother Aya where you have this experience of talking to, actually, I would say the closest thing to breaking my neck, that feeling was ayahuasca.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, sure. So first of all, I think there are many different ways to do it, right? And I've done many, many different ways. There's a very Western medicine approach where you have doctors that look after you during the day, put an eye mask on, you're on a futon, and you really are in a Western medicine setting. And it's, frankly, for me, has been the most powerful experience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I feel the most comfortable because I'm part of Western medicine in my upbringing. the other extreme, but they're kind of in between would be very, probably a Peruvian ceremonies where you're probably going to go very much, um, uh, about, uh, You do it in a community, you do it with others, and you feel people go through their pain and their processing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I know the whole gamut, but the thing that I found most powerful about it, and profoundly powerful, I would say, first of all, it's non-recreational, so no one should do this for a good time. This is not a good time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I was actually going to say that word, but it's not traumatic. It's profound. So it's more like you don't have, you really leave who you were before behind. and then you become the person you will be afterwards. And that's never an easy thing. Yes, exactly. And sometimes what I recall was arguing with Brother Aya and saying, No, I'm fine. What are you talking about? Leave me alone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
How did that work out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, so in 94 we actually did a road trip around the U.S. to brainstorm about what we wanted to do after college. What was the road trip like? It was awesome. So we went from Silicon Valley to Philadelphia. Nice. My brother's old, like really cool, you know, it's one of those very old BMWs, not ones from the 60s or 70s. But the car didn't work. It would break down all the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But we had a blast. You know, we just, I remember going through needles. On the border of California and Arizona, it's a town called Neils. It's the hottest place in America. And the engine was not cooling, so we had to put the heat on. So we've got the heat blasting to keep the engine cool and keep the windows down because you can't stand the heat in the car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And in front of me, two black people, one black guy just stabbed this knife in the side of this other black guy's head. You're like, what the fuck? And you just, I've got to get off the train. How old were you at this time? Probably 16 or 17. And I got to get off the train. And everyone is trying to get me to get off because they're all behind me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But actually the outside heat is hotter than the inside heat. So you're just in a furnace.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I can't imagine doing that in the day. Yeah, it was wonderful. It took us a few weeks, I think three weeks maybe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
First, like a road trip like that. Yeah, for sure. But it was really not a road trip for tourist sites. We went to the weirdest places. And actually, I would say we didn't go to them. We broke down in the weirdest places. Because that's when we stopped.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Did you meet any interesting people? I remember we broke down in the badlands of South Dakota about an hour from Rapid City. And that road is empty. And so we actually slept in the car because there was just no one around. There were no cell phones in those days. And eventually a trucker picked us up. I was just like, man, you guys are the dumbest kids on the planet. I was like 21.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
He was maybe 22. Yeah. But he was so nice to us and so kind to us and found us a mechanic in Rapid City and then found us a tow truck. You find the most wonderful people. When you're in a place of distress, people do want to take care of other people. They help you. Yeah, they want to help.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, exactly. This was not tourist related. We did, of course, one, we stopped at Mount Rushmore at night, which you can see nothing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah. So, I had an experience in college running a house painting business that, for me, was my first experience with success. It was very, very hard. It was a franchise where they teach students how to paint houses. Yeah. But I was good at it. I built a team of 30 people after about two years. And so I was like, I had a taste of, hey, I'm not unable to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
In fact, my most vulnerable place I remember as an entrepreneur was I just loved the idea of Wall Street and finance. I was kind of allured by it. This was in late 80s. I'm in high school and there was a lot of these books, Liar's Poker and others that came out. I was like, oh man, this is awesome. These people must be amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I went to business school and I busted my ass to get like a kick-ass summer job. And I got a job in one of the main banks and it was in Toronto, but it was like the original Wall Street. And I was so disappointed. with the people that I was around. I was just like, whoa. I totally misunderstood what the banking world is. It was a very large bank.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I'm sure if I'd gone to a more aggressive one, maybe I would have had a better experience. When I say aggressive, meaning... someone was paying attention. Like this was just a, just people kind of showing up and not doing much, you know. And actually, this is funny. So this is great. So 1991, 92, so one of those summers, the summer job was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I step off and I step into the pool of blood, one foot, and then I just walk for about 100 paces while the stickiness of the blood just kind of, for my sneakers, just on one foot, just like leaves a footprint behind me. And you just walk on. You just walk on. Did the others walk on as well? Everyone walked on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Literally, they print out the sales for all brokerage houses for the whole company, like a pile of papers that's maybe four or five feet tall. And you have a pencil and you add things up using your pencil and a calculator. And I had known about Lotus 1, 2, 3 forever. Excel was coming out, and I was like, hey, guys, you know that there's a different way to do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And they're like, don't talk to us. Just do your job. Yeah, just use the pencil. So I went to the head of the database. I just asked. Those days you had the manila envelope where you just write the name of the person that you want this to go to, and it'll go to them. It's like email, I guess, but there's no filter. There's no spam filter. There's no spam filter. So I sent a note.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I wrote a nice letter to the database administrator who I didn't really know. And I said, would you be open to me saying hi and maybe I can get access to the file rather than print the damn thing out and use a pencil. And she responded right away. And we hit it off. I mean, she was great. And so she's like, of course you can. I can't believe these guys are… doing what they're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So for the first couple of weeks of the summer, I wrote code in Lotus 1-2-3 that would, it's going to sound crazy, but you type in the date range. You type in the geography, and you type in which part of the bank you care about, and it will literally just create a new spreadsheet, and the macro would print it out. It was like a magic trick for these guys. Incredible. No, no. It's astounding.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
For me, I was like, guys, this is… So obvious. And so I got all that done. And this job was supposed to take three or four months because it's really, you're doing this with a pencil.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And now I'd created this macro that you could not just do it, you could tweak it and say, oh, I want this area of the world or this area of, or this month or that month compared to that month, all the normal things you could do with a spreadsheet. And the software was on a floppy disk. And I was like, here's the software and just put it into your computer. All right, now open one, two, three.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it just pops up with a little box that type in your dates and the whole little thing like that. And what I was astounded by was Not so much that it was a magic trick. It was the lack of appreciation for innovation. They just looked at it. They were like, oh, that's nice.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I was like, we're going to have someone spend hundreds of hours doing something, and now it's something you can do in a minute.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, if that doesn't move your needle, what the heck? And so I was really disappointed with the banking world. But anyway, that was also fun. Such a good example, though.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But then I got back to business school, and I – I canceled all of my business classes I possibly could. I was actually in business school, so I couldn't cancel them all. All finance courses, I'm done with that industry. I'm not going back. So the vulnerable part for me was my whole family is full of entrepreneurs. And there was this franchise to do house painting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I genuinely was afraid that I wouldn't be good at it. And I was like, wow, I really am afraid of failure. It's very easy to avoid entrepreneurship. But if your whole family is entrepreneurs and you go in and you aren't good, I was really afraid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yes. And it's – our family are wonderful and everything, but they – But pretty much everyone's an entrepreneur. And, and of course not everyone is perfect and everyone's doing it successfully all the time. But when you're, when you're young and you want to prove yourself, it really was putting my heart on my sleeve. I started the, the, the business in this part of Toronto and,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
For the first, you paint the houses in the summer, but you do all your sales before the summer. And all the way until April, I was just not succeeding. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm just going to fail. And I remember that. My whole nervous system was like, I'm a failure. I'm a failure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
and I remember I had this general manager who, who, you know, he was like, you seem like you'd know what you're doing. Why are you not making any sales? And so, so he actually went with me on a few sales calls and I was like, and he's like, Oh, you're, he was great. You're doing this wrong. You're doing that wrong. You're doing this wrong and change those three things. And it was like a, uh,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
like a watershed moment. All of a sudden, and I just followed the instructions of what this guy had told me. All of a sudden, every single sale I would make, I was like, I can't believe that I... It was really my lack of humility to learn from someone else. I was like, no, I'm going to prove that I can do this without your teachings. And I... I was going to fail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I would say if we have an openness to learning, which does require humility, you course correct, you help get other people to help you course correct. But it does start with humility because if you try and pretend you have all the answers, you don't.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, so mapping had been on the internet, but vector-based mapping had not. So that's the ability to zoom in or zoom out, and it's really data versus an image that comes across. And we went to this company called Navtech, my brother and I, and we just asked for the data. And this is Silicon Valley. They wrote us a one-page letter that we had to sign and said, here's all of our data. We own it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
You don't own it. But you can use it on the internet, and if you ever make any money on it, you have to call us. That was it? Yeah. All right, okay. That sounds great. So we put it up on the internet and back in those days it might take 60 to 120 seconds to actually give you an answer back. But... It was amazing. The door-to-door directions, the ability to take a map and zoom in and zoom out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
We use these things 10 times a day now. It was amazing. We were the first two humans to see it on the internet. This stuff didn't even exist to the world. The Navtech was building it for Hertz Neverloss, which would come out a few years later. This was not something that people knew existed. This was something we discovered that it existed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And we're like, well, let's put it on the internet and share it with the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It was amazing. It was like, what?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I don't think people understand that. Before this moment, you could not be told your directions. You just could not. Like today, we live in this world where we're told our directions all the time. Before this moment, you could not be told your directions. And all of a sudden, you could. It wasn't like a little thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Holy shit, this is going to be used by everyone all the time forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I would say it was a success, but it was also a very hard company to build. And I mean it because the internet in those days was a boom time. We were being funded, but you couldn't make any money. And so it was actually really hard. The constant outside criticism that we aren't for real, this is not going to survive, this is not going to, and it started to feel that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
We're like, wow, man, this is, we are doing something that is great that people are using, and we were top 100 website users. Most of our work was through folks like the New York Times, so we were even much busier than that. But there was just no money in it. Even today, go to Google Maps, there's no money in it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's just local search that is needed for everyone, and it became an add-on to search. But even remember in those days, you couldn't make money at search either. No one had figured out AdWords or anything. They didn't realize how big of a business this was. But we all knew this was a thing. And everyone was using it. But didn't quite know how to make money on it. Couldn't make money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I've heard this before, which I think I agree with, is when someone is killed, someone is taken from our lives, the vacuum that it creates, the social vacuum, is extraordinarily painful. And it truly is true. I mean, if someone in my community passes away, it's very, very sad for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
When we got acquired, it was a bittersweet moment because Compaq that owned AltaVista wanted to merge. So that's sort of regular search with the best search engine at the time, pre-Google, with Zip2, which would be the best local search, and it would be a Yahoo killer. And the Compaq just wanted to make money by taking the company public. but they wouldn't give us any stock.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
They paid us cash return, which turned out actually very well for us, but because the whole internet bubble burst, we didn't know that at the time. And so it was bittersweet because they essentially wanted our company, and we were welcome to stay, but you don't have to. And that was a pretty rough feeling. But in retrospect, it opened the door to... It set us up for an incredible...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
platform to go do beautiful things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, I still sell on the board of Tesla. Tesla is 20 years now. Isn't that amazing? 20 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So I didn't join as a founder. I joined as a founding board member. And so I actually, I didn't write the business plan. I got to read it. And I still have that. I still have it as a part of history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
No. No, I certainly didn't. What I saw in it was- For me personally, I was really upset that General Motors had killed their EV car. There's even a movie called Who Killed the Electric Car? And I knew that the physics of electric is perfectly fine. I mean, there's no reason why you couldn't use an electric car to drive around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What resonated with me with the business plan was take an electric motor, which is really a high-performance motor, and put it in a sports car and sell it at a high price as a way to enter into the market. Whereas what others had been doing, what General Motors had done is you put it into a really crummy car and you sell it as a commuter vehicle that doesn't really work that well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it looks ugly as well. They really did everything they could to make that thing as ugly as it's in. And then I was like, okay, I get it. We're going to take an appropriate technology and put it in an appropriate car so that when you have, because electric motors, they have constant torque, incredible power, put it in a car that looks like a sports car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So the idea was to put it in the Lotus Elise, redesign it a bit. And even at that point, I was like, this is theoretically good, so I'm going to join and help build it. But I was not convinced that it would work because General Motors had done such a terrible job of making everyone think that these things are terrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And when you go to a place where, you know, grow up in a place where that human life is not valued, there's something about the, there's a little bit less of the social vacuum created because everyone is kind of expecting everyone to potentially be taken out at any moment. Yeah. But then there's also a beauty to it because there's a much more of a celebratory element.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But I was curious, and the time that I fell in love with the company and its mission was I was driving in what's called a mule, where we take a car and we take the engine out and we put in an electric drivetrain. And I drove it. You know, even the dashboards, there's no dashboards. It's just like you got a steering wheel and it's just like wires and everything around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I remember there's a street we were running in the Bay Area called Bing Street. And I was just like, no traffic. So I'm just going to drive this on the floor and see what happens. And it was a feeling I'd never experienced before. Gasoline cars have an inertia to them. So you go. Yeah. This is just, it was like being shot out of a cannon. Okay, this is going to be real.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's a very spaceship-like feeling. Yeah. It's like, whoa. It's like the G-Force pulls you back. So I was like, okay, this is going to be great. This is going to be an interesting, we're going to create something interesting here. I think the real transformative thing for Tesla was the Model 3 when we were able to get the price down for the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And you were done. We were borderline bankrupt like two or three times that year. And everyone was hating on us about whether we'd get that done. The Model 3 today is an incredibly affordable car, like a $300 a month kind of lease and $3,000 down. That's where you get the scale. That's where you get people who... And by the way, it's a great car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It's even a better Model 3 now than it was five years ago. We don't function the way... Car companies function, right? We function more like how an iPhone company, how Apple works. So our Model 3 today is, this year is better than last year. It's like way better. And we just keep getting better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Exactly. And we can upload over the air.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Exactly. It's an iPhone with wheels. But actually, talking about autopilot, like right after this interview, I'm going to go test out the latest Model 3. You're going to get driven around by a robot. I'm going to get driven around by the car. I'm going to say, I want to go to this barbecue joint. Take me there and park me there. And I'm going to see how it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And this is the latest Model 3 that we have out into production. Anyone can buy it. And it's super affordable. And it's like, okay. Full stop driving is a journey. It's not like there's a destination. It's a journey forever. So let's see where we are on the journey today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I think that's a really good insight. I actually live with this concept of a growth mindset versus a fixed mindset. And it's a philosophical term where fixed mindset is about the destination. And growth mindset is about learning on the journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I think that I'm a happier person because I take that learning on the journey approach, which is really frustrating if you're always, it has to be about the destination every time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I would say that I still do that, but I call those forcing functions instead of destinations. Sure. Because you're just forcing people to crank on some code or cookbook or whatever because you have a date. And sometimes there's a reason. I mean, it's the 20th anniversary. You want to get the cookbook out. We have a reason. We didn't make this up out of thin air. And so, yeah, that does push you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
When my cousin Russ and I, again, we were stupid kids, we shouldn't be doing this, but we'd go into the townships where a lot of the violence would be happening. We really didn't see most of the violence there. It was in these more protests and so forth. But there's a joy that also comes from lower value of human life. There's a real joy. Everyone is like, well, I mean, it's beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But just because we have the cookbook doesn't mean it's a destination. It means it was a forcing function to get it out there. Now we're on the journey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Seriously, to talk about a journey, that is incredible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
One of the hardest times in SpaceX was... We were in the mid-Pacific in Kwajalein, and my brother had sold PayPal. He'd done well financially, but in the rocket world, that money goes away really quickly. And we were in this military base in Kwajalein, and I think it was the second rocket that blew up. I'm not sure, but we didn't have infinite resources. I certainly didn't have the resources.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I mean, I'm there to support, brotherly support. But the... So every rocket launch was do or die. And the first one had blown up. And so the second one, I think it was the second one, blew up. And it was so depressing. It was just like, oh, there's nowhere to go. You're in the... There's no distraction. You're just... You're on this military base. You don't re-socialize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
So it's just we're all together. And I had gotten to know, you know, for me, I'm not part of the team. I'm just there for emotional support or whatever because it's cool. And so I got to know a couple of people locally and got to know this one guy who had a mobile home. Best view in the world, but it's just a mobile home with a patch of grass next to it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I was just desperate to find food that wasn't from the cafeteria because this is the worst food you can imagine. And so I met him and he showed me this little tiny little grocery store which had a few things like canned tomatoes. And this is, again, you're in the middle of nowhere, so it's nothing fresh.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And I made this dish that was kind of a version of a, like an Italian version of chili, you know, just baked beans and sweating onions and then tomatoes. And it was a big pot of food, because it's a group of people. We didn't even have a table. And we just put the big pot in the middle and we had our little paper plates and took a scoop as we needed it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And it was really the gathering place of like food brings people together. in the most difficult times. And it was one of my favorite memories because I was able to bring my gift to this group of incredible people that their hearts were broken, you know, and to sit there and share a meal and feel the life kind of come back into us. And by the end of the night, we're actually having a good time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
A communal, vulnerable connection. Like we mentioned vulnerability earlier, the most vulnerable place, actually that's when you have some of your most beautiful meals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
If you look at how things have changed over the past, say, 50 years, you can clearly say, oh, wow, poverty rates have gone down. Infant mortality has gone down dramatically. All these things have gone down a lot. So if you look at it on a daily basis, you can tell that life is very dramatic, whether it's something's blowing up on X or from the newspapers or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
We'd have dinner with black friends, friends with their family. We were still pretty young. And there was just a real joy to it. When you accept mortality, you can really enjoy life. You can really enjoy life. I mean, I think there's actually quite a nice insight. I've never really put it that way, but I think that's right, actually. I think you just chill out a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
and you can really get caught up into it. But if you look back over the past few decades, things are getting better. And I mean at the fundamental level, like are less people hungry? Are more people, are there, I mean there is war going on, of course, but are there less wars? Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And so I think that, I think if we all just step back a little bit, it's less about hope, it's more perspective and reflection. And if I do see a problem, like in case of the obesity epidemic, I work really hard to help with that. Our nonprofit's called Big Green, and we work with 150 nonprofits around the country to help Americans grow food again, get connected to their food.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Because I really believe growing food changes your life. And so, okay, let's go do that. So I'll help out where I think we really can make a difference. But if you step back a little, things are actually getting better. It's just a bumpy ride.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Actually, that's a really nice point. I have learned that you really want to celebrate your successes because even in the greater scheme of things, I've learned this in the startup world where you're constantly facing death. Why should you even exist? Do your customers want your product or whatever? And then something will happen where you're like, wow, we really nailed that. That's really great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
We got a product released or got some good kudos from something. All right, everyone, we're going to go celebrate. And actually everyone's still like, no, no, we've got all these other problems. Nope, we're going to go celebrate and then we'll go back to the problems. But if you don't do that, then it starts building on this kind of, you never really get to celebrate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Thank you for having me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
It takes things a little less seriously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I do love that we all live longer and so forth, but we should live longer with the goal of joy and the goal of happiness and peace, not some form of misery that you choose to attach yourself to. Maximize joy. Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I mean, it was horrible. I think, you know, coming back to the point of low value of human life, they tried to kill him. It wasn't... There was no holding back, so I just watched someone. It wasn't just one, but there was a main person, and then there was a few others that piled in. They just tried to kill him in front of me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
We were eating sandwiches on a staircase at the school, an outdoor staircase. They were not coming after me, and I just had to watch, and I couldn't help. It was one of the saddest, most difficult experiences. It just was, it's just awful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Yeah, I think, so I've had a near-death experience where I almost died. I was in 2010, and I think that, and I broke my neck, and I can go into that story in a moment, but this was different. This was, this comes back to the low value of human life part where if someone had killed my brother, if that person had beat him to death, which he was trying to do, Life would have gone on.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
That's like an insane thought in an American, maybe in some tough neighborhoods, but for the most part, it's another thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Exactly.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
I always say to people who have an opinion about America that, you know, this is a really bad country or whatever, and I say, look, please go try another country before you say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
Not to say that America can't get better, but please go try another country because not having that perspective or having a perspective that, I don't know, that could chip on their shoulder about the country that they're in Okay, go try another country. And then come back and tell me. Pick any country. It doesn't have to be some very violent country. Go pick any country.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
And you just realize that actually the world doesn't think the same way that America thinks. And you're going to just learn a perspective that I think gives you a better way to critique where we live in America.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
What I thought you were going to say, what I thought you were going to end the sentence with, live up to my father's expectations. Mm-hmm. That's what most people say. But then you said the second part, which is make up for his mistakes. Mm-hmm. And I think that's actually, that one rings true for me. He was really, he's still alive, but I'm not connected to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
But he's very, he taught me, the phrase I used to have was he taught me what not to do. So I still actually learned a lot. What kind of human not to be, what kind of actions not to take. And so that kind of closer to living up to his mistakes, but my father was such a train wreck that it's not really mistakes. It's like intentional actions of what not to do. Okay, don't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#417 – Kimbal Musk: The Art of Cooking, Tesla, SpaceX, Zip2, and Family
The good and the bad. There's a critique that my friends give me, which is when they're talking to me, I kind of just drift away. I'm still looking at them. I'm still nodding. I might even respond to them in their conversation, but I'm actually not there. And I've realized that actually that grew up because my father would just verbal abuse.