The Foundational Frontier

How SpaceX Thinking Could Revolutionize Mental Wellness

I’m currently trying to do two things. That’s a lie, I’m doing like 500 things. But two big ones: help my partner scale her maternal mental health practice, and build therapy-adjacent tools. What I’ve been annoyed by recently and for my entire life is that mental health has poor infrastructure. The overlap between these things is broader mental wellness, not just mental health. Mental health is about the presence or absence of psychiatric conditions. Wellness is about coherence: your biology supporting your psychology, your relationships reflecting your values, your meaning-making helping regulate your nervous system. When that coherence breaks down, we suffer.

If the current approach actually worked, we wouldn’t see developed nations with worse mental health outcomes despite all their resources. The fact that things ‘sort of work’ is the problem; we need systems that actually work.

Stay with me here. I’m going to connect three things that don’t seem related: why SpaceX matters, why ancient philosophy still works, and what’s broken about mental health care. By the end, you’ll see why they’re the same problem, and why solving it matters more than putting people on Mars.

The Launchpad for Mental Health: The Inner Frontier

People don’t realize what SpaceX has meant to human civilization. It’s not merely a rocket company. It’s not about putting people on Mars. What SpaceX did was revolutionize an almost non-existent industry by building infrastructure.

What Elon does really well is recognize, starting from atoms, how they can be aligned through the supply chain to manufacturing to figure out what products can be made in an affordable way. SpaceX has made it more affordable than ever and more accessible than ever to do space stuff. That literally opens up the final frontier.

So if space is the final frontier, what do we call our minds? And who is working on the SpaceX equivalent for mental health?

Ancient Philosophy Still Wins, And That Should Embarrass Us

Here’s what bothers me: Stoicism, which is a philosophy, not even a formal therapy, is probably one of the most effective and pragmatic operating systems for being a person. The fact that it’s 2,000 years old and our world has changed immensely, and yet it’s still one of our best tools for mental wellness.

Think about what we’ve done in those 2,000 years. We’ve advanced and optimized so much around our health, our lifespan, money, products, space exploration, physics, so many domains. And yet the whole field of psychology has made marginal gains at helping most people develop baseline mental health. Some degree of mental stability.

When you look at super developed nations, the ones with all the tools, money, leverage, capabilities and technologies, you don’t see what you’d expect. You actually see people with less mental health on average, less well-being.

What are we doing here?

Two Metrics That Should Guide the Field

If I try to put on my Elon hat and reason from first principles, there are two core metrics that matter. I’m calling them Time to Service (TTS) and Time to Regulation (TTR).

Time to Service (TTS): How quickly can someone who is in distress get help? Right now, people wait weeks or months to see a provider. Any system that can reduce TTS is better than one that can’t.

Time to Regulation (TTR): How fast can you get from mental distress to functional stability?

SpaceX revolutionized rockets by obsessing over one metric: cost per kilogram to orbit. They figured out how to reduce it, and that changed everything. Mental health needs the same approach, ruthlessly optimize for reducing the time and cost from distress to regulation.

But here’s the problem: mental health has no infrastructure to optimize. Not at any scope or scale that’s useful and practical. There’s no supply chain, no manufacturing process, no systematic deployment. We’re still operating like it’s a craft industry where every intervention is artisanal and one-off.

If you’re working in mental wellness space: building mental health products, running a practice, designing interventions, coaching, doing policy work, these two metrics should be your North Star. Not patient satisfaction scores. Not theoretical elegance. Not what’s billable or reimbursable. Time to Service and Time to Regulation. How fast can you get someone from distress to help? How fast can you get them from help to baseline? Everything else is downstream from these two numbers.

The Starting Position Problem

Some people inherit baseline mental wellness from their environment. If you were born to a loving, stable two-parent household, if you grew up in a great environment, even if you’re just an average person who sort of pays attention, you’re going to end up with pretty okay mental health. Your baseline is higher.

Everyone has their gifts; everyone is unique. But it’s going to seem a lot more special if you start life already in scoring position versus those who aren’t even born near the stadium. Some people are born in the next county over. They have a long way to go just to reach baseline.

The fact that we can’t make everyone grow up in ideal circumstances is understandable. It’s nearly impossible. But the fact that we can’t easily arm people with the ability to overcome their starting position or get back to some baseline level of mental wellness? That’s insane to me.

Those people, the ones who didn’t inherit stability, need quality care and tools more than anyone. And right now, we have no systematic way to give it to them.

The Mission Is Advancing the Foundational Frontier

I don’t care about putting people on Mars. (Well, not entirely true. I actually believe it’s awesome, and I love space!) But that’s not my mission.

I care about 10x-ing mental health. I hate being the type of person who says ‘10x-ing mental health,’ but for lack of a better exponential, here we are. Humans deserve some sort of baseline mental wellness, the equivalent of what you’d have if you were born into a stable loving environment. Not because anybody deserves anything inherently, but because this far in our evolution and our advancement as a species, it should be something we are capable of. We can’t give everyone that childhood retroactively. But we should be able to build the infrastructure, the feedback loops, the tools that help people catch up.

So that’s what I’m after. The tools, the systems, the infrastructure that makes mental wellness accessible the way SpaceX made space accessible. Starting from first principles. Optimizing for TTS and TTR. Building what was never built. Advancing the Foundational Frontier, that recursive infinite inner expanse. The place we all have where there’s always more depth, nuance, and subtlety within our experiences.

That’s the mission.