you know my ex-husband or as i sometimes like to think of him my baby daddy is the visionary elon musk of uh tesla and spacex i met him when i was 18. he was 19. we were at college he would call me up he always had classical music playing in the background and he would ask me out and i would say no and he would call me up again and he would ask me out and i would say no and it went on like this until we ended up living together in an apartment in the
bay area which we shared with uh three roommates and a miniature dachshund who was not house trained and by the time we divorced we were living in a house in bel air with no roommates and a miniature dachshund who still was not house trained so it's a really funny simpsons episode elon has this uh meaningful relationship with homer it's very romantic and at one point the smithers character says to another character that somebody like elon must have a darkness in his soul and as a dark fantasy writer who's had novels published by major publishers and
stories and anthologies and has a blog this line leaped out at me because i actually think a lot about creativity and darkness and the larger-than-life nature of these people that we call visionaries and geniuses or as my son likes to say genai and darkness does not have to mean evil you know it can refer to anything that has not yet been brought out into the light that lives in the space beyond boundaries beyond our comfort zone where a lot of us do not want to go the writer lucy h pierce has a quote that i
like a lot she says as creatives our job is to uncover what lies in the darkness and give it new life new identity and i realize that artists and entrepreneurs are a lot alike and that they are both obsessed with creating something out of nothing with pulling value from the dark so when i was preparing this talk i uh said to elon you know so do you have any advice that i could maybe give to bright young things in the audience who might want to like grow up to be you one day and he did
say something which i'll get to at the end but he also said you know i don't know if they would still want that if they really knew what it's like to be me and it made me think that before we call these people visionaries before they have that kind of success we have other words for them we call them you know geek or outsider socially awkward weird a little different odd one out i've been friends with one person for 10 years before he told me that when he was a kid he hated going to school
because the other kids liked to follow him home and they would throw soda cans at his head so he sought refuge in computer games which got him into coding which led to the creation of his first company which he sold by the time he was in his mid-20s so you know nobody is throwing cans at him now during my years with elon i became familiar with a distinct and deeply tribal mentality known as engineers and once when my dad came to visit i was taking him to see elon at elon's first company at zip2 and
we were crossing through the office park and we saw these lanky dudes and jeans and t-shirts and they were racing these remote controlled contraptions around the parking lot and banging them into cars and my dad said to me oh are these the children of the engineers and i said no dad these are the engineers [Music] and when eli and i would travel and we had to fill out those um forums and customs that wanted to know your occupation you know elon never wrote down ceo or king of the world or studly international playboy he wrote
engineer [Music] and he wore jeans and t-shirts to work and whenever we went shopping for clothes or later consulted with the stylist whose name was martin he would say no no you don't understand i can't look cool or hip because i have to look like an engineer and one of the things that he told me although i don't know if it's as true now as it was back then was that engineers could not quite figure out why it was that the suits made the big money when it was the engineers who actually built the stuff
that they were selling and meanwhile the suits would listen to the engineers talk and they would have no idea what they were saying [Music] and that's when i realized that elon was somebody who had learned to speak both languages and he could move between the tribes because he was an engineer in a suit and he brought together worlds and this is what an engineer does i mean this is what a visionary does it not only creates something new but they become the living embodiment of it they don't just tell us a new story they are
that story and soon they don't even have to open up their mouths they just walk into the room i recently read a profile on elon and he's quoted as saying something to a friend and this happened during the time we were still married together and he said something to this friend that he never said to me and he was saying that he was prepared to sacrifice everything his entire fortune to get a rocket into orbit and he said i don't care if justine and the kids and i end up living in justine's parents basement i'm
going to make this happen and so i read this and i kind of wanted to go back in time and go up to him and take him by the shoulders and look him very seriously in the eyes and say have you seen my parents basement so i'd like to wrap up by getting to elon's advice which is to always go beyond memorizing formulas passing tests to always go deep into the underlying principles of a subject to track any problem down to the root cause buried in the dirt in the dark and i would add to
that and say be brave enough be bold enough and be insane enough to see things more completely and more vividly more fully than everybody else around you and refuse to look away from what you see and what you know even if people want to burn you at the stake because visionaries they take all that passion and their badass personalities and their mad skills and the mastery of their chosen subject matter and they use it to put themselves on the line unlike anybody else you'll ever meet and it's this that allows them to open up windows
into another deeper reality in which transformation is possible and things of awe happen on a regular basis because in the beginning we don't trust them because we think they're crazy but by the end we trust them because we know they're crazy they're crazy enough to accomplish anything and risk it all in order to bring us something new to believe in they might make lousy husbands and terrible wives they might be the friend who never sends you a birthday present and forgets to show up for coffee but they bring light to the dark and they show
us the universe keep the channel open thank you
