Good Motor
Being smart doesn’t seem to be very important. But then, what is?
Billionaires often say or do stupid things. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
Recently, Steve Ballmer, the current owner of the LA Clippers, former CEO of Microsoft, and one of the ten richest people in the world, seems to have arranged to pay Kawhi Leonard $28 million for a no-show job through a sham company as a way of circumventing the NBA’s salary cap restrictions. Ballmer denies this, but the evidence fits, and no remotely plausible alternative explanation has emerged.
Closer to home for this newsletter, Elon Musk did one of his stupidest tweets ever on the subject of chess, and yes that’s saying something.
Let’s break this down.
The initial tweet is from Demis Hassabis, the founder of the AI lab DeepMind. He was congratulating Gukesh Dommaraju for becoming world chess champion by defeating Ding Liren at age 18. This was regarded by everyone as a splendid accomplishment.
Well, almost everyone. Because here comes Elon from the top rope.
“This is cool, but I am quite certain that Chess can be fully solved, like Checkers”
This is not wrong, but it’s astonishingly stupid. In theory, it is possible to solve any deterministic two-player game (of which chess is one) by the same methods used to solve checkers. Claude Shannon described the procedure in 1950:
“With chess it is possible, in principle, to play a perfect game or construct a machine to do so as follows: One considers in a given position all possible moves, then all moves for the opponent, etc., to the end of the game (in each variation)... Each of these variations ends in win, loss or draw. By working backward from the end one can determine whether there is a forced win, the position is a draw or is lost.”
In principle. However, the possibility space of chess is far larger than checkers. It’s much too big to calculate with current computers, and it’s unclear if computers capable of doing the job are even possible in the universe as it exists. This is all well known amongst people who are interested in these sorts of things.
Speaking of people who are interested in these sorts of things, Demis Hassabis is a former chess prodigy. DeepMind, the company he founded, went on to create AlphaZero, a revolutionary chess AI that learned chess strategy purely by experimentation with no human input. He won the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for using AI to predict protein structures. Hassabis may be, quite literally, the most knowledgeable person in the world when it comes to the intersection of chess and AI. He’s well aware of the pablum that Elon is flinging at him.
Nonetheless, he finds the patience to respond gracefully. A real pro.
So to recap, Elon’s tweet was…
irrelevant
trivial
emotionally tone-deaf
What’s going on here? How can these guys get so rich while being so dumb?
When it comes to Elon, there are various theories. Some people think he was never smart in the first place. Codswallop, in my opinion. Elon has been at the helm of at least six revolutionary companies: PayPal, Tesla, OpenAI, SpaceX, Neuralink, and now Twitter (X). That’s a hell of a coincidence.
Some people think social media melted his brain. I mean, that definitely happened, but I don’t think it’s the whole story.
Nate Silver wrote a post about Elon’s “spiky intelligence.” In other words, strengths and weaknesses. He breaks down intelligence along a lot of dimensions, but the one that stands out to me is “good motor.” This is a term used in sports for someone who has a lot of energy, who never seems to get tired. It’s the defensive lineman who flushes the quarterback out of pocket, then catches him from behind 15 yards downfield.
As (the other) Nate said, “...Elon isn’t just sitting in an empty room tweeting all the time; he’s tweeting while jaunting around the world looking after his various enterprises and interests, hosting dinner parties, fathering children, and so on. And now he’s sort of co-president of the United States, too.”
This, I believe, is the real secret of Elon’s success. A lot of what he says and does is dumb, but he just does so much of it. He gives himself a lot of shots on goal.
My kids have great motors. I never did, until now.
As I wrote about last week, I was diagnosed with GPA, a rare autoimmune disease. The treatment involves a very large dose of steroids. The purpose of this is to reduce inflammation, but it also makes me really amped up. Suddenly, I’m the motor guy. In the past two weeks, I’ve…
Learned a new opening repertoire
Completely redesigned my coaching offerings
Built a new website from scratch
Ground it up to Mythic (the highest level) in Magic Arena
Written an article on what I learned about the Arena metagame
Written four newsletter posts
Started working on a party game called Conspiracy Theory (more on this soon)
I didn’t do shit in 2025 before this.
One of my heroes is the Spanish chef and philanthropist José Andrés. His book Vegetables Unleashed has some asides that describe his day-to-day life. From the back of an Uber, he directs his kitchen R&D team. Then he checks in on World Central Kitchen operations, currently addressing a food crisis in Puerto Rico. Next he plans a 60 Minutes appearance. Then calls the Washington Post to pitch an op ed on Catalan independence.
When I first read this a few months ago, I thought, “This sounds like a nightmare.” When I read it just now on 60mg/day of prednisone, I thought, “This sounds kind of like me.”
Some people are born with good motors. They just don’t get tired. According to Dolce Magazine, the designer Tom Ford “sleeps three hours a night and keeps post-it notes by his bed, just in case he wakes up with an idea.”
For others, the work is so important that they power through. Toni Morrison famously woke up at 4 a.m. to write her novels while raising two children as a single mom. After not publishing a post in over a month, I wrote two in one night. Nobel Prize, here I come.
Martha Stewart (who co-hosts the cooking show Yes, Chef! with Andrés) slept three to four hours a night when starting her catering business. She insisted on being first to the New York City markets to get the best ingredients.
“If you’d go early enough, you got the really good stuff, and she would always only get the best,” said her first employee. “I’d be in the backseat semi-conscious, and she was somebody who could function on three hours of sleep.”
It’s not the mind, it’s the motor.
A British grandmaster once said, “In chess, thinking doesn’t seem to be very helpful.” I remember this quite clearly, but have never been able to track down the source. Maybe I made it up. In any case, I’ve come to believe in it, in life as well as chess.
The doctors can’t tell me exactly how long it will take to ramp down the prednisone. The most likely timeline seems to be a few months. I can foresee a sort of Flowers for Algernon scenario, not for intelligence, but for energy. I’ll have tasted a good motor and lost it. For that reason, I feel a lot of pressure to accomplish as much as possible in these few months, to change my life for the better.
Or I guess, once the prednisone runs out, I could switch to ketamine. It seems to be working for Elon.
Not so sure anything is working for Elon lately, but i guess it did in the past
No, ketamine won't juice you up like prednisone... believe me, I give it out a lot for procedural sedation.