0
SPEAKER_01
The following is a conversation with Walter Isaacson, one of the greatest biography writers ever, having written incredible books on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and now a new one on Elon Musk.
0
SPEAKER_01
We talked for hours on and off the mic.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m sure we ll talk many more times.
0
SPEAKER_01
Walter is a truly special writer, thinker, observer, and human being.
0
SPEAKER_01
I highly recommend people read his new book on Elon.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m sure there will be short-term controversy, but in the long-term, I think it will inspire millions of young people, especially with difficult childhoods, with hardship in their surroundings or in their own minds, to take on the hardest problems in the world and to build solutions to those problems, no matter how impossible the odds.
0
SPEAKER_01
In this conversation, Walter and I cover all of his books and use personal stories from them to speak to the bigger principles of striving for greatness in science, in tech, engineering, art, politics, and life.
0
SPEAKER_01
There are many things in the new Elon book that I felt are best saved for when I speak to Elon directly again on this podcast, which will be soon enough.
0
SPEAKER_01
Perhaps it s also good to mention here that my friendships, like with Elon, nor any other influence like money, access, fame, power, will ever result in me sacrificing my integrity.
0
SPEAKER_01
Ever.
0
SPEAKER_01
I do like to celebrate the good in people.
0
SPEAKER_01
to empathize and to understand.
0
SPEAKER_01
But I also like to call people out on their bullshit, with respect and with compassion.
0
SPEAKER_01
If I fail, I fail due to a lack of skill, not a lack of integrity.
0
SPEAKER_01
I ll work hard to improve.
0
SPEAKER_01
And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor.
0
SPEAKER_01
Check them out in the description.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s the best way to support this podcast.
0
SPEAKER_01
We got Masterclass for learning, NetSuite for business stuff, BetterHelp for mental health, ExpressVPN for security and privacy, and Shopify.
0
SPEAKER_01
for, well, buying and selling whatever on the internet.
0
SPEAKER_01
Choose wisely, my friends.
0
SPEAKER_01
Also, if you want to work with our team, our amazing team, we re always hiring, go to lexfriedman.com slash hiring.
0
SPEAKER_01
And now, onto the full ad reads.
0
SPEAKER_01
As always, no silly ads in the middle.
0
SPEAKER_01
I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors.
0
SPEAKER_01
I enjoy their stuff.
0
SPEAKER_01
Maybe you will, too.
0
SPEAKER_01
This show is brought to you by Masterclass.
0
SPEAKER_01
You can pay just a little bit of money and learn from the best people in the world at doing whatever it is they do.
0
SPEAKER_01
There s many ways to learn a thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
One is by doing.
0
SPEAKER_01
Another is by reading.
0
SPEAKER_01
or watching other people give tutorials on how to do the thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
And the other is to observe the people that do the thing at a world-class level, or who are the best in the world at doing that thing.
0
SPEAKER_01
And I think, oh, well, it s not the only thing you should be doing.
0
SPEAKER_01
That is as good as it gets.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s the advice I ve always been given, and I ve given.
0
SPEAKER_01
One of the best ways to excel in life, and not in some shallow way, but in a deep way, is to find the people in this world who you want to become, and do anything you can to work with them, to be around them, to learn from them.
0
SPEAKER_01
And not because they sit down and
0
SPEAKER_01
give their time to you to teach, but by just being in their presence and observing how they work, and then giving everything you can to contribute to that effort, to that mission, to sort of the passion that pulls them and that drives them.
0
SPEAKER_01
In some sense, watching a master class is a way of doing that.
0
SPEAKER_01
I m a big fan of watching not just teachers, but the doers in this world.
0
SPEAKER_01
I can go on, the list is incredible.
0
SPEAKER_01
From Chris Hadfield to Will Wright.
0
SPEAKER_01
Man, I should really talk to Will Wright.
0
SPEAKER_01
Carlos Santana, and I should talk to Carlos Santana.
0
SPEAKER_01
And not just talk.
0
SPEAKER_01
Talking s not enough, friends.
0
SPEAKER_01
Play guitar.
0
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, get unlimited access to every Masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com slash lexpod.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s masterclass.com slash lexpod.
0
SPEAKER_01
This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system.
0
SPEAKER_01
They are turning 25 years old this year.
0
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I remember when I was 25.
0
SPEAKER_01
Time flies, friends, when you re having fun.
0
SPEAKER_01
And NetSuite has been having a whole lot of fun helping people run their business as well.
0
SPEAKER_01
In fact, it s 36,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle.
0
SPEAKER_01
I love companies.
0
SPEAKER_01
Companies do stuff.
0
SPEAKER_01
They get together, a bunch of people get together.
0
SPEAKER_01
There s like a boss and there s employees and they have lunches and meetings.
0
SPEAKER_01
Some of them are horribly drowning in bureaucracy.
0
SPEAKER_01
Some of them resist and fight that bureaucracy and actually get something done.
0
SPEAKER_01
And that s that little struggle of humanity in these little pockets of dreams and sweat and labor and just reaching for the stars.
0
SPEAKER_01
with big goals and small goals.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s what this podcast is about.
0
SPEAKER_01
With Elon, with Steve Jobs, and all throughout history with DaVinci.
0
SPEAKER_01
Strive in all kinds of different ways.
0
SPEAKER_01
Well, you want to be using the best tools for the job of running a business, and NetSuite should be that tool, friends.
0
SPEAKER_01
Download NetSuite s popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com slash lex.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s netsuite.com slash lex for your own KPI checklist.
0
SPEAKER_01
This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, help.
0
SPEAKER_01
In this episode with Walter, we ll talk quite a bit about demons.
0
SPEAKER_01
Both demons in Diablo, I think we ll allude to that, and demons inside our own mind.
0
SPEAKER_01
And those demons are not all bad.
0
SPEAKER_01
They re, in some sense, reminders of how difficult life can be, how much struggle, big and small,
0
SPEAKER_01
all of us can experience, and that struggle can break us, or it can strengthen us.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s the choice all of us make through hardship, and some of the greatest men and women in the world, in the history of the world, have been defined in their early days by the struggle and the overcoming of that struggle.
0
SPEAKER_01
talking in general, but therapy, which is systematic, rigorous exploration of the human mind through the talking method, I think should be one of the tools for that, for turning the demons into productive demons versus destructive demons.
0
SPEAKER_01
BetterHelp is super accessible and easy, so definitely something you should try.
0
SPEAKER_01
You can check them out at betterhelp.com slash flex and save on your first month.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s betterhelp.com slash flex.
0
SPEAKER_01
This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN.
0
SPEAKER_01
I use them to protect my privacy on the internet.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s like a warm blanket for me of happiness that fights off the monsters that hide in the closet of our childhoods.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s very poetic.
0
SPEAKER_01
I never actually had monsters in the closet because grew up in a tiny place.
0
SPEAKER_01
There was no closets.
0
SPEAKER_01
Nowhere for the monsters to hide.
0
SPEAKER_01
That too is poetic, I m not sure where I m getting with that, but there is a sense of happiness that I associate with ExpressVPN because through some of the more difficult moments in my life, that was a piece of software that s running on my computer and it just works.
0
SPEAKER_01
It s silly how these little pieces of software can just bring a little bit of comfort to you.
0
SPEAKER_01
For a long time, Emacs as an IDE was that.
0
SPEAKER_01
I would open up the Emacs editor with a bunch of windows open, black background, white text, and I would see all that code laid out before me.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it was an escape from the hardness of life.
0
SPEAKER_01
In a simpler way, ExpressVPN is kind of like that.
0
SPEAKER_01
Across different operating systems, Linux included, it works everywhere.
0
SPEAKER_01
And you can go check it out yourself at expressvpn.com slash logspot for an extra three months free.
0
SPEAKER_01
This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and gives you tools to manage day-to-day operations.
0
SPEAKER_01
And boy, do I know.
0
SPEAKER_01
how easy they make that.
0
SPEAKER_01
Now that, friends, let me plug myself and say that there s now a official podcast Shopify store.
0
SPEAKER_01
You can go there by clicking on, I think, lexfriedman.com slash store, and they ll take you there.
0
SPEAKER_01
And it was so incredibly easy to set up.
0
SPEAKER_01
It just works.
0
SPEAKER_01
In this case, I m just selling t-shirts, but it was so easy to go from zero to hero, although I never quite got to hero, but get the store set up, super easy, I love it.
0
SPEAKER_01
So if you wanna get the merch for this podcast, you can go there and get merch for all kinds of podcasts and all kinds of things by going to all the amazing stores that Shopify supports.
0
SPEAKER_01
I mean, it just really makes it easier to sell stuff.
0
SPEAKER_01
So if you have stuff to sell, I highly recommend Shopify is obviously the thing you should be using to sell that stuff.
0
SPEAKER_01
Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash lex, all lowercase.
0
SPEAKER_01
Go to shopify.com slash lex to take your business to the next level today.
0
SPEAKER_01
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast.
0
SPEAKER_01
To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description.
0
SPEAKER_01
And now, dear friends, here s Walter Isaacson.
0
SPEAKER_01
What is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great men and women, great minds?
0
SPEAKER_01
Is that a requirement, is it a catalyst, or is it just a simple coincidence of fate?
0
SPEAKER_00
Well, it s not a requirement.
0
SPEAKER_00
Some people with happy childhoods do quite well.
0
SPEAKER_00
But it certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they re harnessing the demons of their childhood.
0
SPEAKER_00
Even Barack Obama s sentence in his memoirs, which is, I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father.
0
SPEAKER_00
And for Elon, it s especially true, because he had both a violent and difficult childhood and a very psychologically problematic father.
0
SPEAKER_00
He s got those demons dancing around in his head, and by harnessing them,
0
SPEAKER_00
It s part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.
0
SPEAKER_01
You ve written that Elon talked about his father and that at times it felt like mental torture, the interaction with him during his childhood.
0
SPEAKER_01
Can you describe some of the things you ve learned?
0
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, well, Elon and Kimball would tell me that, for example, when Elon got bullied on the playground, and one day was pushed down some concrete steps and had his face pummeled so badly that Kimball said, I couldn t really recognize him, and he was in the hospital for almost a week, but when he came home,
0
SPEAKER_00
Elon had to stand in front of his father, and his father berated him for more than an hour, and said he was stupid, and took the side of the person who had beaten him.
0
SPEAKER_01
That s probably one of the more traumatic events of Elon s life.
0
SPEAKER_00
Yes, and there s also Veld School, which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to.
0
SPEAKER_00
And at one point, you know, he was scrawny, he has very,
0
SPEAKER_00
bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues.
0
SPEAKER_00
He talks about being Asperger s.
0
SPEAKER_00
And so he gets traumatized at a camp like that.
0
SPEAKER_00
But the second time he went, he d gotten bigger.
0
SPEAKER_00
He had shot up to almost six feet and he learned a little bit of judo.
0
SPEAKER_00
And he realized that if he was getting beaten up, it might hurt him, but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible.
0
SPEAKER_00
So that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon.
0
SPEAKER_00
I spend a lot of time talking to Errol Musk, his father.
0
SPEAKER_00
Elon doesn t talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimball.
0
SPEAKER_00
It s been years.
0
SPEAKER_00
And Errol doesn t even have Elon s email.
0
SPEAKER_00
So a lot of times, Errol will be sending me emails.
0
SPEAKER_00
And Errol had one of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities.
0
SPEAKER_00
you know, a great mind of engineering, and especially material science.
0
SPEAKER_00
Knew how to build a wilderness camp in South Africa using mica and how it would not conduct the heat.
0
SPEAKER_00
But he also would go into these dark periods in which he would just be psychologically abusive.
0
SPEAKER_00
And of course, Maymusk says to me, his mother, who divorced Errol early on,
0
SPEAKER_00
said the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.
0
SPEAKER_00
And every now and then, you ve been with him so much, Lex, and you know him well.
0
SPEAKER_00
He ll even talk to you about the demons, about Diablo dancing in his head.
0
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he gets it, he s self-aware.
0
SPEAKER_00
But you ve probably seen him at times where those demons take over and he goes really dark and really quiet.
0
SPEAKER_00
And Grimes,
0
SPEAKER_00
says, you know, I can tell a minute or two in advance when demon mode s about to happen.
0
SPEAKER_00
And he ll go a bit dark.
0
SPEAKER_00
I was, you know, here at Austin, wanted dinner with a group.
0
SPEAKER_00
And you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was gonna go dark.
0
SPEAKER_00
I ve watched it in meetings where somebody will say, we can t make that part for less than $200, or no, that s wrong, and he ll berate them.
0
SPEAKER_00
And then he snaps out of it, as you know that too, the huge snap out where suddenly he s showing you a Monty Python skit on his phone and he s joking about things.
0
SPEAKER_00
So I think coming out of the childhood, there were just many facets, maybe even many personalities, the engineering mode, the silly mode, the charismatic mode, the visionary mode, but also the demon and dark mode.
0
SPEAKER_01
A quote you cited about Elon really stood out to me.
0
SPEAKER_01
I forget who it was from, but inside the man, he s still there as a child, the child standing in front of his dad.
0
SPEAKER_00
That was Tallulah, his second wife.
0
SPEAKER_00
And she s great.
0
SPEAKER_00
She s an English actress.
0
SPEAKER_00
They ve been married twice, actually.
0
SPEAKER_00
And Tallulah said that s just him from his childhood.
0
SPEAKER_00
He s a drama addict.
0
SPEAKER_00
Kimball says that as well.
0
SPEAKER_00
And I asked why, and he said, and Tallulah said,
0
SPEAKER_00
You know, for him, love and family are kind of associated with those psychological torments, and in many ways, he ll channel.
0
SPEAKER_00
I mean, Tallulah would be with him in 2008 when the company was going bankrupt, whatever it may have been or later, and he would be so stressed he would vomit.
0
SPEAKER_00
And then he would channel things that his father had said, use phrases his father had said to him.
0
SPEAKER_00
And so she told me, deep inside the man is this man child still standing in front of his father.
0
SPEAKER_01
To what degree is that true for many of us, do you think?
0
SPEAKER_00
I think it s true, but in many different ways.
0
SPEAKER_00
I ll say something personal, which is I was blessed, and perhaps it s a bit of a downside too, with the fact that I had the greatest father you could ever imagine, and mother.
0
SPEAKER_00
They were the kindest people you d ever want to meet.
0
SPEAKER_00
I grew up in a magical place in New Orleans,
0
SPEAKER_00
My dad was an engineer, an electrical engineer, and he was always kind.
0
SPEAKER_00
Perhaps I m not quite as driven or as crazed.
0
SPEAKER_00
I don t have to prove things.
0
SPEAKER_00
So I get to write about Elon Musk.
0
SPEAKER_00
I get to write about Einstein or Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci, who, as you know, was totally torn by demons and had
1
SPEAKER_01
different, difficult childhood situations, not even legitimized by his father.
1
SPEAKER_01
So sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle, sweet childhood, we grow up with fewer demons, but we grow up with fewer drives, and we end up maybe
1
SPEAKER_01
being Boswell and not being Dr. Johnson.
1
SPEAKER_01
We end up being the observer, not being the doer.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I always respect those who are in the arena.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t, you know.
1
SPEAKER_01
You don t see yourself as a man in the arena.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve had a gentle, sweet career.
1
SPEAKER_01
and I ve got to cover really interesting people.
1
SPEAKER_01
But I ve never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve never moved us into the air of electric vehicles.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ve never stayed up all night on the factory floor.
1
SPEAKER_01
I don t have quite those, either the drives or the addiction to risk.
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Elon s addicted to risk.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s addicted to adventure.
1
SPEAKER_01
Me, if I see something that s risky, I spend some time calculating, okay, upside, downside here.
1
SPEAKER_01
But that s another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done, and people like me write about the Elon Musks.
1
SPEAKER_00
One other aspect of this, given a difficult childhood, whether it s Elon or Da Vinci,
1
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if there s some wisdom, some advice almost that you can draw, that you can give to people with difficult childhoods.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents.
1
SPEAKER_01
And we all have demons.
1
SPEAKER_01
And rule one in life is harness your demons.
1
SPEAKER_01
know that you re ambitious or not ambitious or you re lazy or whatever, Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator.
1
SPEAKER_01
I think it s usual to know what s eating at you, know how to harness it, also know what you re good at.
1
SPEAKER_01
I ll take Musk as another example.
1
SPEAKER_01
I m a little bit more like Kimball Musk than Elon.
1
SPEAKER_01
I maybe got over-endowed with the empathy gene.
1
SPEAKER_01
And what does that mean?
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine.
1
SPEAKER_01
It was a group of about 150 people on the editorial floors, and I knew them all, and we had a jolly time.
1
SPEAKER_01
When I went to CNN, I was not very good at being a manager or an executive of an organization.
1
SPEAKER_01
I cared a little bit too much that people didn t get annoyed at me or mad at me.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Elon said that about John McNeil, for example, who was president of Tesla.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s in the book, I talked to John McNeil a long time, and he says, you know, Elon just would fire people, be really rough on people.
1
SPEAKER_01
He didn t have the empathy for the people in front of him.
1
SPEAKER_01
And Elon says, yeah, that s right.
1
SPEAKER_01
And John McNeil couldn t fire people.
1
SPEAKER_01
He cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the entire enterprise or getting things done.
1
SPEAKER_01
Being over-endowed with a desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that doesn t mean there aren t great people who are over-endowed.
1
SPEAKER_01
Ben Franklin?
1
SPEAKER_01
over-endowed with the desire to please people.
1
SPEAKER_01
The worst criticism of him from John Adams and others was that he was insinuating, which kind of meant he was always trying to get people to like him.
1
SPEAKER_01
But that turned out to be a good thing.
1
SPEAKER_01
When they can t figure out the big state, little state issue at the Constitutional Convention, when they can t figure out the Treaty of Paris, whatever it is, he brings people together, and that is his superpower.
1
SPEAKER_01
So to get back to the lessons you asked, and the first was harness your demons, the second is to know your strengths and your superpower.
1
SPEAKER_01
My superpower is definitely not being a tough manager.
1
SPEAKER_01
After running CNN for a while, I said, okay, I think I ve proven I don t really enjoy this or know how to do this well.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, do I have other talents?
1
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think I have the talent to observe people really closely.
1
SPEAKER_01
to write about it in a straight, but I hope interesting narrative style.
1
SPEAKER_01
That s a power.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s totally different from running an organization.
1
SPEAKER_01
It took me until three years of running CNN that I realized I m not cut to be an executive in a really high-intense organization.
1
SPEAKER_01
situations.
1
SPEAKER_01
Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situations, so much so that when things get less intense, when they actually are making enough cars and rockets are going up and landing, he thinks of something else so he can surge and have more intensity.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s addicted to intensity.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.
1
SPEAKER_00
But I think also, to build on that, it s not just addiction to risk and drama.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s always a big mission above it.
1
SPEAKER_00
So I would say it s an empathy towards people in the big picture.
1
SPEAKER_01
It s an empathy towards humanity more than the empathy towards the three or four humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And that s a big deal.
1
SPEAKER_01
You see that in a lot of people.
1
SPEAKER_01
You see it, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Elon Musk, they always have,
1
SPEAKER_01
empathy for these great goals of humanity, and at times they can be clueless about the emotions of the people in front of them, or callous sometimes.
1
SPEAKER_01
Musk, as you said, is driven by mission more than any person I ve ever seen.
1
SPEAKER_01
And it s not only mission, it s like cosmic missions.
1
SPEAKER_01
meaning he s got three really big missions.
1
SPEAKER_01
One is to make humans a space-faring civilization, make us multi-planetary, or get us to Mars.
1
SPEAKER_01
Number two is to bring us into the era of sustainable energy, to bring us into the era of electric vehicles and solar roofs and battery packs.
1
SPEAKER_01
And third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values.
1
SPEAKER_01
And every now and then I d talk to him and we d be talking about Starlink satellites or whatever, or he would be pushing the people in front of him at SpaceX and saying, if you do this, we ll never get to Mars in our lifetime.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then he would give the lecture, how important it was.
1
SPEAKER_01
for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime.
1
SPEAKER_01
And I m thinking, okay, this is the pep talk of somebody trying to inspire a team, or maybe it s a type of pontification you do on a podcast.
1
SPEAKER_01
But on like the 20th time I watched him, I realized, okay, I believe it.
1
SPEAKER_01
He actually is driven by this.
1
SPEAKER_00
He is frustrated and angry that because of this particular minor engineering decision,
1
SPEAKER_00
the big mission is not going to be accomplished.
1
SPEAKER_00
It s not a pep talk, it s a literal frustration.
1
SPEAKER_01
And impatience, a frustration, and it s also just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission.
1
SPEAKER_01
He joked at one point to me about how much he loved reading comics as a kid, and he said, all the people in the comic books
1
SPEAKER_01
They re trying to save the world, but they re wearing their underpants on the outside and they look ridiculous.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then he paused and said, but they are trying to save the world.
1
SPEAKER_01
And whether it s Starlink in Ukraine, or Starship going to Mars, or trying to get a global new Tesla, I think he s got this epic sense of the role he s gonna play in helping humanity on big things.
1
SPEAKER_01
and like the characters in the comic books, it s sometimes ridiculous, but it also is sometimes true.
1
SPEAKER_00
When I was reading this part of the book,
1
SPEAKER_00
I was thinking of all the young people who are struggling in this way, and I think a lot of people are, in different ways, whether they grow up without a father, whether they grow up with physical, emotional, mental abuse, or demons of any kind, as you talked about.
1
SPEAKER_00
And it s really painful to read, but also really damn inspiring, that if you sort of walk side by side with those demons,
1
SPEAKER_00
if you don t let that pain break you, or somehow channel it, if you can put it this way, that you can achieve, you can do great things in this world.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s an epic view of why we write biography, which is more epic than I d even thought of.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I say thank you, because in some ways what you re trying to do is say, okay,
1
SPEAKER_01
I mean, Leonardo, you talk about being a misfit, he s born illegitimate in the village of Vinci, and he s gay, and he s left-handed, and he s distracted, and his father won t legitimize him.
1
SPEAKER_01
And then he wanders off to the town of Florence, and he becomes the greatest artist and engineer of that part of the Renaissance.
1
SPEAKER_01
I hope this book inspires.
1
SPEAKER_01
Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who discovers, helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Codebreaker, she grew up feeling like a misfit, you know, in Hawaii, in a Polynesian village, being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her.
1
SPEAKER_01
So if people can read the books,
1
SPEAKER_01
And I should ve said about Jennifer Doudna, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don t do science.
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, science is not for girls.
1
SPEAKER_01
You re not gonna do math or science.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so it pushes her to say, all right, I m gonna do math and science.
1
SPEAKER_00
Just to interrupt real quick, but Jennifer Doudna, you ve written an amazing book about her, Nobel Prize winner, CRISPR developer, she s incredible, one of the great scientists in the 21st century.
1
SPEAKER_01
Right, and I m talking about when Jennifer Doudna was young and she felt really, really out of place.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like you and me and a lot of people when they re feeling that way, they read books.
1
SPEAKER_01
They go into, they curl up with a book.
1
SPEAKER_01
So her father drops a book on her bed called The Double Helix, the book by James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA by him and Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick.
1
SPEAKER_01
And
1
SPEAKER_01
she realizes, oh my God, girls can become scientists.
1
SPEAKER_01
My school guides counselor s wrong.
1
SPEAKER_01
So I think books, like she read this book, and even if it s a comic book, like Elon Musk read, books can sometimes inspire you.
1
SPEAKER_01
And every one of my books is about people who were totally innovative, who weren t just smart, because none of us are gonna be able to match Einstein in mental processing power.
1
SPEAKER_01
But we can be as curious as he was, and creative, and think out of the box the way he did.
1
SPEAKER_01
Or Steve Jobs put it, think different.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so I hope with my books, I m saying,
1
SPEAKER_01
This isn t a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside, you can see.
1
SPEAKER_01
I signed growing up Jewish in Germany.
1
SPEAKER_01
You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Elon Musk, you know, in really violent South Africa, with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to anti-apartheid concert with his brother, and there s a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood, and it s sticky on their soles.
1
SPEAKER_01
This causes scars that last the rest of your life, and the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred, it s how do you deal with it?
1
SPEAKER_00
Einstein too, one of my, and it s hard to pick my favorite of your biographies, but Einstein, I mean, you really paint a picture of another
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t wanna call him a misfit.
1
SPEAKER_00
But a person who doesn t necessarily have a standard trajectory through life of success.
1
SPEAKER_00
And that s extremely inspiring.
1
SPEAKER_00
I don t know exactly what question to ask.
1
SPEAKER_00
There s a million.
1
SPEAKER_01
Well, I ll talk about the misfit for a second, because we talked about Leonardo being that way.
1
SPEAKER_01
Einstein s Jewish in Germany at a time when it starts getting difficult.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s slow in learning how to talk, and he s a visual thinker, so he s always daydreaming and imagining things.
1
SPEAKER_01
The first time he applies to the Zurich Polytech, because he runs away from the German education system because it s too much learning by route.
1
SPEAKER_01
He gets rejected by the Zurich Polytech.
1
SPEAKER_01
Now, it s the second best school in Zurich, and they re rejecting Einstein.
1
SPEAKER_01
I tried to find, but couldn t, the name of the admissions counselor at the Zurich Polytech.
1
SPEAKER_01
Like, you rejected Einstein?
1
SPEAKER_01
And then he doesn t finish in the top half of his class, and once he
1
SPEAKER_01
does, and he goes to graduate school, they don t accept his dissertation, so he can t get a job.
1
SPEAKER_01
He s not teaching it.
1
SPEAKER_01
He even tries about 14 different high schools, a gymnasium, to get a job and they won t take him.
1
SPEAKER_01
So he s a third class examiner in the Swiss Patent Office in 1905.
1
SPEAKER_01
Third class because they ve rejected his doctoral dissertation and so he can t be second class or first class because he doesn t have a doctoral degree.
1
SPEAKER_01
And yet he s sitting there on the stool in the Patent Office in 1905 and writes three papers that totally transform science.
1
SPEAKER_01
And if you re thinking about being
1
SPEAKER_01
misunderstood or unappreciated.
1
SPEAKER_01
In 1906, he s still a third-class patent.
1
SPEAKER_01
In 1907, he still is.
1
SPEAKER_01
It takes until 1909 before people realize that this notion of the theory of relativity might be correct and it might upend all of Newtonian physics.
1
SPEAKER_00
How is it possible?
1
SPEAKER_00
for three of the greatest papers in the history of science to be written in one year by this one person.
1
SPEAKER_00
Is there some insights, wisdoms you draw?
1
SPEAKER_00
Plus he had a day job as a patent examiner.
1
SPEAKER_01
And there s really three papers, but there s also an addendum, because once you figure out quantum theory, and then you figure out relativity, and you re understanding Maxwell s equations and the speed of light,
1
SPEAKER_01
He does a little addendum that s the most famous equation in all of physics, which is E equals MC squared.
1
SPEAKER_01
So it s a pretty good year.
1
SPEAKER_01
It partly starts because he s a visual thinker, and I think it was helpful that he was at the patent office rather than being the acolyte of some professor at the academy where he was supposed to follow the rules.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so at the patent office, they re doing devices to synchronize clocks, because the Swiss have just gone on standard time zones, and Swiss people, as you know, tend to be rather
1
SPEAKER_01
You know, Swiss, they care if it strikes the hour in Basel, it should do the same in Bern at the exact instant.
1
SPEAKER_01
So you have to send a light signal between two distant clocks.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he s visualizing what s it look like to ride alongside a light beam.
1
SPEAKER_01
He says, well, if you catch up with it, if you go almost as fast, it ll look stationary.
1
SPEAKER_01
But Maxwell s equations don t allow for that.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he said, it was making my palms sweat that I was so worried.
1
SPEAKER_01
And so he finally figures out, because he s looking at these devices, the synchronized clocks, that if you re traveling really, really fast, what looks synchronous to you, or synchronized to you, is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction.
1
SPEAKER_01
And he makes the mental leap that time,
1
SPEAKER_01
that the speed of light
2
SPEAKER_01
That s always constant, but time is relative depending on your state of motion.
2
SPEAKER_01
So it was that type of out-of-the-box thinking, those leaps, that made 1905 his miracle year.
2
SPEAKER_01
Likewise with Musk.
2
SPEAKER_01
I mean, after General Motors and Ford, everybody gives up on electric vehicles?
2
SPEAKER_01
to just say, I know how we re going to have a path to change the entire trajectory of the world into the era of electric vehicles.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then when he comes back from Russia, where he tried to buy a little rocket ship so he could send a experimental greenhouse to Mars and they were
2
SPEAKER_01
poking fun of him and actually spit on him at one point in a drunken lunch.
2
SPEAKER_01
This is very fortuitous because on the ride back home on the Delta Airlines flight, he s like doing the calculations of how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel
2
SPEAKER_01
How much would it really cost?
2
SPEAKER_01
And so he s visualizing things that other people would just say is impossible.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s what Steve Jobs  friends called the reality distortion field, and it drove people crazy.
2
SPEAKER_01
It drove them mad, but it also drove them to do things they didn t think they would be able to do.
2
SPEAKER_00
You said visual thinking.
2
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if you ve seen parallels of the different styles and kinds of thinking that operate the minds of these people.
2
SPEAKER_00
Is there parallels you see between Elon, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci, specifically in how they think?
2
SPEAKER_01
I think they were all visual thinkers, perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children,
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, Leonardo was left-handed and a little bit dyslectic, I think.
2
SPEAKER_01
And certainly Einstein had echolia, he would repeat things, he was slow in learning to talk.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think visualizing helps a lot.
2
SPEAKER_01
And with Musk,
2
SPEAKER_01
I see it all the time when I m walking the factory lines with him or in product development, where he ll look at, say, the heat shield under the Raptor engine of a Starship booster.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he ll say, why does it have to be this way?
2
SPEAKER_01
Couldn t we trim it this way?
2
SPEAKER_01
Or even get rid of this part of it?
2
SPEAKER_01
And he can visualize the material science.
2
SPEAKER_01
There s small anecdotes in my book, but at one point he s on the Tesla line and they re trying to get 5,000 cars a week in 2018.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a life or death situation.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he s looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he insists that Drew Bagley, not Drew, that Lars Maravy, one of his great lieutenants come, and they have to summon him.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he says, why are there six boats here?
2
SPEAKER_01
And Lars and others explained, well, for the crash tests or anything else, the pressure would be in this way, so you have to.
2
SPEAKER_01
And they were blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
2
SPEAKER_01
And he said, no, if you visualize it, you ll see if there s a crash, the force would go this way and that way.
2
SPEAKER_01
And it could be done with four bolts.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, that sounds risky, and they go test it and they engineer it, but it turns out to be right.
2
SPEAKER_01
I know that seems minor, but I could give you 500 of those, where in any given day, he s visualizing the physics of an engineering or manufacturing problem.
2
SPEAKER_01
That sounds pretty mundane.
2
SPEAKER_01
But for me, if you say what makes him special, there s a mission-driven thing, I give you a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is he cares not just about the design of the product, but visualizing the manufacturing of the product, the machine that makes the machine.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years, we outsourced so much manufacturing.
2
SPEAKER_01
I don t think you can be a good innovator
2
SPEAKER_01
If you don t know how to make this stuff, you re designing.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s why Musk puts his designer s desk right next to the assembly lines in the factories, so that they have to visualize what they drew as it becomes the physical object.
2
SPEAKER_00
So understanding everything from the physics all the way up to the software, it s like end to end.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, having an end-to-end control is important, certainly with Steve Jobs.
2
SPEAKER_01
I m looking at my iPhone here.
2
SPEAKER_01
It s a big deal.
2
SPEAKER_01
That hardware only works with Apple software, and for a while, the iTunes Store.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he has an end-to-end that makes it like a Zen garden in Kyoto, very carefully curated, but a thing of beauty.
2
SPEAKER_01
For Musk, when he first was at Tesla, and before he was the CEO, when he was just the executive chairman and basically the finance person funding it, they were outsourcing everything.
2
SPEAKER_01
They were making the batteries in Japan, and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop in Thailand, and then sent to the Lotus factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise chassis.
2
SPEAKER_01
was a nightmare.
2
SPEAKER_01
You did not have end-to-end control of the manufacturing process.
2
SPEAKER_01
So he goes to the other extreme.
2
SPEAKER_01
He gets a factory in Fremont from Toyota, and he wants to do everything in-house.
2
SPEAKER_01
The software, in-house.
2
SPEAKER_01
The painting, in-house.
2
SPEAKER_01
The battery, he makes his own batteries.
2
SPEAKER_01
And I think that end-to-end control is part of his personality.
2
SPEAKER_01
but it also would allow Tesla to be innovative.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I got to see and understand in detail one example of that, which is the development of the brain of the car in autopilot, going from Mobileye to in-house building the autopilot system to basically getting rid of all sensors that are not
2
SPEAKER_00
rich in data to make it AI friendly, sort of saying that we can do it all with vision.
2
SPEAKER_00
And like you said, removing some of the bolts.
2
SPEAKER_00
So sometimes it s small things, but sometimes it s really big things like getting rid of radar.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, vision only, getting rid of radar is huge.
2
SPEAKER_01
And everybody s against it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Everybody, and they re still fighting it a bit.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re still trying to do a next generation, some form of radar.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it gets back to the first principles.
2
SPEAKER_01
We were talking about visualizing.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, he starts.
2
SPEAKER_01
with the first principles.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the first principles of physics involve things like, well, humans drive with only visual input.
2
SPEAKER_01
They don t have radar, they don t have LIDAR, they don t have sonar.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so there is no reason in the laws of physics that make it so that vision only won t be successful in creating self-driving.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, that becomes an article of faith to him, and he gets a lot of pushback.
2
SPEAKER_01
But now, and he s, by the way, not been that successful in meeting his deadlines of getting self-driving.
2
SPEAKER_01
He s way too optimistic.
2
SPEAKER_01
But it was that first principles of get rid of unnecessary things.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now, you would think LIDAR, why not use it?
2
SPEAKER_01
Like, why not use a crutch?
2
SPEAKER_01
It s like, yeah, we can do things vision only, but when I look at the stars at night, I use a telescope too.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, you could use LiDAR, but you can t do millions of cars that way at scale.
2
SPEAKER_01
At a certain point, you have to make it not only a good product, but a product that goes to scale.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you can t make it based on maps, like Google Maps, because it ll never be able to, you know, then drive from New Orleans to Slidell, where I want to go when it s too hot in New Orleans.
2
SPEAKER_01
Take, for example, full self-drive.
2
SPEAKER_01
he has been obsessed with what he calls the robo-taxi.
2
SPEAKER_01
We re gonna build the next generation car without a steering wheel, without pedals, because it s gonna be full self-drive, you just summon it, you won t need to drive it.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, over and over again, all these people I ve told you about, Lars Maravy and Drew Baglino and others, they re saying, okay, fine, that sounds really good, but,
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, it ain t happened yet.
2
SPEAKER_01
We need to build a $25,000 mass market global car that s just normal with a steering wheel.
2
SPEAKER_01
And yeah, he finally turned around a few months ago and said, let s do it.
2
SPEAKER_01
And then he starts focusing on how s the assembly line gonna work?
2
SPEAKER_01
How are we gonna do it?
2
SPEAKER_01
And make it the same platform for robo-taxi so you can have the same assembly line.
2
SPEAKER_01
Likewise, for full self-drive, they were doing it by coding.
2
SPEAKER_01
hundreds of thousands of lines of code that would say things like, if you see a red light, stop.
2
SPEAKER_01
If there s a blinking light, if there are two yellow lines, do this.
2
SPEAKER_01
If there s a bike lane, do this.
2
SPEAKER_01
If there s a crosswalk, do that.
2
SPEAKER_01
Well, that s really hard to do.
2
SPEAKER_01
Now he s doing it through artificial intelligence and machine learning only.
2
SPEAKER_01
FSD-12 will be based on the billion or so frames from Tesla each week of Tesla drivers and saying, what happened when a human was in this situation?
2
SPEAKER_01
What did the human do?
2
SPEAKER_01
And let s only pick the best humans, the five-star drivers, the Uber drivers, as Elon says.
2
SPEAKER_01
And so, that s him changing his mind and going to first principles, but saying, all right, I m even gonna change full self-driving so that it s not rules-based, it becomes AI-based.
2
SPEAKER_01
Just like Chachi P.T.
2
SPEAKER_01
doesn t try to answer your question, who are the five best popes or something, by, Chachi P.T.
2
SPEAKER_01
does it by having ingested billions of
2
SPEAKER_01
pieces of writing that people have done.
2
SPEAKER_01
This will be AI but real world done by ingesting video.
2
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes it feels like he and others, they re building things in this world successfully, are basically confidently exploring a dark room with a very confident, ambitious vision of what that room actually looks like.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like they re just walking straight into the darkness,
2
SPEAKER_00
There s no painful toys or Legos on the ground.
2
SPEAKER_00
I m just going to walk.
2
SPEAKER_00
I know exactly how far the wall is.
2
SPEAKER_00
And then very quickly willing to adjust as they run into, they step on the Lego and their body is filled with a lot of pain.
2
SPEAKER_00
What I mean by that is there s this kind of evolution that seems to happen where you discover really good ideas along the way that allow you to pivot.
2
SPEAKER_00
Like to me,
2
SPEAKER_00
since a few years ago when you could see with Andrej Karpathy, the software 2.0 evolution of autopilot, it became obvious to me that this is not about the car.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is about Optimus, the robot.
2
SPEAKER_00
This is like, if we look back 100 years from now,
2
SPEAKER_00
The car will be remembered as a cool car, nice transportation, but the autopilot won t be the thing that controls the car.
2
SPEAKER_00
It will be the thing that allows embodied AI systems to understand the world, so broadly.
2
SPEAKER_00
And so that kind of approach, and you kind of stumble into it.
2
SPEAKER_00
Will Tesla be a car company?
2
SPEAKER_00
Will it be an AI company?
2
SPEAKER_00
Will it be a robotics company?
2
SPEAKER_00
Will it be a home robotics company?
2
SPEAKER_00
Will it be an energy company?
2
SPEAKER_00
And then you kind of slowly discover this as you confidently...
2
SPEAKER_00
like push forward with a vision.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s interesting to watch that kind of evolution, as long as it s backed by this confidence.
2
SPEAKER_01
There are a couple of things that are required for that.
2
SPEAKER_01
One is being adventurous.
2
SPEAKER_01
One doesn t enter a dark room without a flashlight and a map, unless you re a risk taker, unless you re adventurous.
2
SPEAKER_01
The second is to have iterative brain cycles, where you can process information and do a feedback loop and make it work.
2
SPEAKER_01
The third, and this is what we failed to do a lot in the United States and perhaps around the world, is when you take risks, you have to realize you re gonna blow things up.
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, first three rockets, the Falcon rockets that Musk does,
2
SPEAKER_01
they blow up, even Starship, three and a half minutes, but then it blows up the first time.
2
SPEAKER_01
So I think Boeing and NASA and others have become unwilling to enter your dark room without knowing exactly where the exit is and the lighted path to the exit.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the people who created America, whenever they came over,
2
SPEAKER_01
You know, whether the Mayflower is refugees from the Nazis, they took a lot of risks to get here.
2
SPEAKER_01
And now I think we have more referees than we have risk takers, more lawyers and regulators and others saying you can t do that, that s too risky, than people willing to innovate.
2
SPEAKER_01
And you need both.
2
SPEAKER_01
I think you re also right on fifty hundred years from now.
2
SPEAKER_01
What musk will be most remembered for besides space travel is real world ai.
2
SPEAKER_01
Not just optimus robot but optimus robot and the self-driving car.
2
SPEAKER_01
they re pretty much the same.
2
SPEAKER_01
They re using GPU clusters or dojo chips or whatever it may be to process real world data.
2
SPEAKER_01
We all got, and you did on your podcast, quite excited about large language model generative predictive text AI.
2
SPEAKER_01
That s fine, especially if you want to chit chat with your chatbot.
2
SPEAKER_01
But the holy grail is artificial general intelligence.
2
SPEAKER_01
And the tough part of that is real-world AI.
2
SPEAKER_01
And that s where Optimus, the robot, or full self-drive are, I think, far ahead of anybody else.
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I like how you said chitchat.
2
SPEAKER_00
I would say, for one of the greatest writers ever, it s funny that you spoke about language and the mastery of languages as merely chitchat.
2
SPEAKER_00
You know, people have fallen in love over some words.
2
SPEAKER_00
People have gone to wars over some words.
2
SPEAKER_00
I think words have a lot of power.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s actually an interesting question.
2
SPEAKER_00
where the wisdom of the world, the wisdom of humanity is in the words or is it in visuals, is it in the physical?
2
SPEAKER_00
I don t really.
2
SPEAKER_00
It s in mathematics.
2
SPEAKER_00
Maybe it all boils down to math and in the end this kind of discussion about real world AI versus language is all the same, maybe.
2
SPEAKER_00
I ve gotten a chance to hang out quite a bit in the metaverse with Mr. Mark Zuckerberg recently and boy,
2
SPEAKER_00
is the realism in there.
2
SPEAKER_00
The thing that s coming up in the future is incredible.
2
SPEAKER_00
I got scanned in Pittsburgh for 10 hours into the metaverse, and there s like a virtual version of me, and I got to hang out with that virtual version.
2
SPEAKER_00
Do you like yourself?
2
SPEAKER_00
Well, I never like myself.
2
SPEAKER_00
But it was easier to like
2
SPEAKER_00
That other guy, that was interesting.
2
SPEAKER_00
I was like- Did he like you?
2
SPEAKER_00
He didn t seem to care much.
2
SPEAKER_00
Actually, lack of the empathy.
2
SPEAKER_00
But that was, you know, it made me start to question even more than before, like, well, how important is this physical reality?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because I got to see, you know, myself and other people in that metaverse, like, the details of the face,
2
SPEAKER_00
like all the all the things that you think maybe if you look yourself in the mirror are imperfections all this kind of stuff when i was looking at myself and at others all those things are beautiful and it was like
2
SPEAKER_00
It was real and it was intense and it was scary because you re like, well, are you allowed to murder people in the metaverse?
2
SPEAKER_00
What are you allowed to do?
2
SPEAKER_00
Because you can replicate a lot of those things and you start to question what are the fundamental things that make life worth living here as we know as humans.
2
SPEAKER_00
Have you talked to Elon about
3
SPEAKER_00
his views of we re living in a simulation, maybe, and how you would figure out if that s true.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes, there s a constant lighthearted, but also a serious sense that this is all a bit of a game.
3
SPEAKER_01
One of my theories on Elon, a minor theory, is that he read Hitchhiker s Guide to the Galaxy once too often.
3
SPEAKER_01
And as you know, there s a scene in there that says,
3
SPEAKER_01
that there s a theory about the universe that if anybody ever discovers the secrets of meanings of the universe, it will be replaced by an even more complex universe.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then the next line Douglas Adams writes is, there s another theory that this has already happened.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I m gonna try to get my head around that, but I know that Elon Musk tries to.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, there s a humor to that.
3
SPEAKER_01
There s an enormous humor to Hitchhiker s Guide, and I really think that helped Musk, out of the darkest of his periods, to have sort of the sense of fun of figuring out what life is all about.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wonder if this is a small aside we could say, just having gotten to know Elon very well, the silliness, the willingness to engage in the absurdity of it all and have fun.
3
SPEAKER_00
What is that?
3
SPEAKER_00
Is that just a quirk of personality, or is that a fundamental aspect of a human who s running six plus companies?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it s a relief valve, just like video games and Polytopia and Elden Ring are relief valves for him.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he does have an explosive sense of humor, as you know.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the weird thing is when he makes the abrupt transition from dark demon mode, and you re in a conference room, and he has really become upset about something.
3
SPEAKER_01
And not only are there dark vibes, but there s dark words emanating, and he s saying your resignation will be accepted if you die, et cetera.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then something pops and he pulls out his phone and pulls up a Bonnie Python skit, you know, like the School of Silly Walks or whichever John Cleese it was, and he starts laughing again and things break.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s almost as if he has different modes, the emulation of human mode, the engineering mode, the dark and demon mode, and certainly there is the silly and giddy mode.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, you ve actually opened the Elon book with quotes from Elon and from Steve Jobs.
3
SPEAKER_00
So Elon s quote is, to anyone I ve offended, I just want to say, this is on SNL, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship.
3
SPEAKER_00
Did you also think I was going to be a chill, normal dude?
3
SPEAKER_00
And then the quote from Steve Jobs, of course, is the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you think is the role of the old madness and genius?
3
SPEAKER_00
What do you think is the role of crazy in this?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, first of all, let s both stipulate that Musk is crazy at times.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then let s figure out, and I try to do it through storytelling, not through highfalutin preaching,
3
SPEAKER_01
where that craziness works.
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, give me a story, tell me an anecdote, tell me where he s crazy.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, the almost final example, AI, but him shooting off Starship for the first time, in between an aborted countdown and the shoot off, he goes to Miami to an ad sales conference and meets Linda Iaccarino for the first time, makes her the CEO.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s a very impulsiveness to him.
3
SPEAKER_01
Then he flies back, they launch Starship,
3
SPEAKER_01
And you realize that there s a drive and there are demons and there s also craziness.
3
SPEAKER_01
you sometimes wanna pull those out.
3
SPEAKER_01
You wanna take away his phone so he doesn t tweet at 3 a.m.
3
SPEAKER_01
You wanna, say, quit being so crazy.
3
SPEAKER_01
But then you realize there s a wonderful line of Shakespeare in Measure for Measure at the very end.
3
SPEAKER_01
He says, even the best are molded out of faults.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so you take the faults of Musk, for example, which includes a craziness that can be endearing, but also a craziness that s just,
3
SPEAKER_01
like effing crazy, as well as this drive in demon mode, I don t know that you can take that strand out of the fabric and the fabric remains whole.
3
SPEAKER_00
I wonder, sometimes it saddens me that we live in a society that doesn t celebrate even the darker aspects of crazy in acknowledging that it all comes in one package.
3
SPEAKER_00
It s the man in the arena versus the critic.
3
SPEAKER_01
And the man in the arena versus the regulator, to make it more prosaic.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, let me ask about not just the crazy, but the cruelty.
3
SPEAKER_00
So in, you ve written when reporting on Steve Jobs, Woz told you that the big question to ask was, did he have to be so mean, so rough and cruel, so drama addicted?
3
SPEAKER_00
What is this answer for Steve Jobs?
3
SPEAKER_00
Did he have to be so cruel?
3
SPEAKER_01
For Jobs, I asked Woz at the end of my reporting, because that s what he said at the beginning,
3
SPEAKER_01
We re doing the launch of, I think, the iPad 2, it may have been.
3
SPEAKER_01
Steve is emaciated because, you know, he s been sick.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I say to Waz, what s the answer to your question?
3
SPEAKER_01
And he said, well, if I had been running Apple, I would have been nicer to everybody.
3
SPEAKER_01
Everybody got stock options.
3
SPEAKER_01
We ve been like a family.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I, I don t know if you know Waz, but he s like a teddy bear.
3
SPEAKER_01
He paused, he smiled, and he said, but if I had been running Apple,
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think we would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone.
3
SPEAKER_01
So yeah, you have to sometimes be rough.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Jobs said the same thing that Musk said to me, which is he said, people like you love wearing velvet gloves.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, I don t know that I ve worn velvet gloves often, but you like people to like you, you like to sweet talk things, you sugarcoat things.
3
SPEAKER_01
He says, I m just a working class kid.
3
SPEAKER_01
And i don t have that luxury if something sucks i gotta tell people it sucks or i got a team of b players will musk is that way as well and it gets back to what i said earlier which is.
3
SPEAKER_01
I probably would wear velvet gloves if I could find them at my haberdasher.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I do try to sugarcoat things.
3
SPEAKER_01
But when I was running CNN, it needed to be reshaped.
3
SPEAKER_01
It needed to be broken.
3
SPEAKER_01
It needed to have certain things blown up.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, bad on me.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it made me realize, okay, I ll just write about the people who can do it.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, that thing of saying, I think probably both of them, but Elon certainly saying things like that is the stupidest thing I ve ever heard.
3
SPEAKER_01
By the way, I ve heard.
3
SPEAKER_01
Jeff Bezos say that, I ve heard Bill Gates say that, I ve heard Steve Jobs say it, I ve heard Steve Jobs say it about a smoothie, they were making it a whole food or something.
3
SPEAKER_01
People, they use the word stupid really often.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you know who else used it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Errol Musk.
3
SPEAKER_01
He kept making Elon stand in front of him and saying, that s the stupidest thing, you re the stupidest person, you ll never amount to anything.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know, you know, as John McNeil, the president of Tesla said, do you have to be that way?
3
SPEAKER_01
Probably not.
3
SPEAKER_01
There are a lot of successful people who are much kinder, but it s sometimes necessary to be much more brutal and honest, brutally honest, I would say, than people like
3
SPEAKER_01
who win boss of the year trophies.
3
SPEAKER_00
Well, as you said, this kind of idea did also send a signal.
3
SPEAKER_00
This idea of Steve Jobs of eight players, it did send a signal to everybody.
3
SPEAKER_00
It was a kind of encouragement to the people that are all in.
3
SPEAKER_01
Right, and that happened to Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_01
When we went to Twitter headquarters the day before the takeover, he was having Andrew and James, his two young cousins and other people from the autopilot team, going over lines of code.
3
SPEAKER_01
And Musk himself sat there with a laptop on the second floor of the building.
3
SPEAKER_01
Looking at the lines of code that had been written by twitter engineers and they decided they were gonna fire eighty five percent of them because they had to be all in and this notion of psychological safety and mental days off and.
3
SPEAKER_01
Working remotely he said either and then it came up actually one of his.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it was one of the cousins or maybe Ross Nordeen came up with the idea of let s not be so rough and just fire all these people.
3
SPEAKER_01
Let s ask them, do you really want to be all in?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because this is going to be hardcore.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to be intense.
3
SPEAKER_01
You get to choose.
3
SPEAKER_01
But by midnight tonight, we want you to check the box.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m hardcore, all in.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll be there in person.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll work, you know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or that s not for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve got a family.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ve got work balance.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you got different type of people that way, and different stages of their life.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was a little bit more hardcore and all in when I was in my 20s than when I was in my 50s.
3
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and you write about this really nice idea, actually, that there s two camps.
3
SPEAKER_00
And you find out, I wonder how true this is.
3
SPEAKER_00
It rings true.
3
SPEAKER_00
You can just ask people, which camp are you in?
3
SPEAKER_00
Are you the kind of person that prides themselves and enjoy staying up till 2 a.m.
3
SPEAKER_00
programming or whatever?
3
SPEAKER_00
Or do you see the value of quote unquote, you know, about life, work-life balance, all this kind of stuff.
3
SPEAKER_00
And it s interesting, I mean,
3
SPEAKER_00
Like, you could, people probably divide themselves in different stages in life, and you could just ask them, and it makes sense for certain companies at certain stages of their development to be like, we only want hardcore people.
3
SPEAKER_01
Or certain teams, it doesn t even have to be a whole company.
3
SPEAKER_01
And you re right, it goes back to what I was saying about rule, the first secret is sort of know thyself, obviously comes from Plato, and everything comes from Plato and Socrates, but, and,
3
SPEAKER_01
Decide on this stage of my life.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do I wanna be a hackathon all in all night and change the world or do I want to bring wisdom and stability but also have balance?
3
SPEAKER_01
I think it s good to have different companies with different styles.
3
SPEAKER_01
The problem was Twitter was at almost one extreme with yoga studios and mental health days off and enshrining psychological safety.
3
SPEAKER_01
as one of the mantras that people should never feel psychologically threatened.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he, I remember the bitter laugh he unleashed when he kept hearing that word.
3
SPEAKER_01
He said, no, I like the words hardcore.
3
SPEAKER_01
I like intensity.
3
SPEAKER_01
I like a intense sense of urgency as our operating principle.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, yeah, there are people that way as well.
3
SPEAKER_01
So know who you are and know what type of team you wanna build.
3
SPEAKER_00
versus psychological safety and too many birds everywhere.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, a lot of times, Musk did things, and I go, what the hell?
3
SPEAKER_01
And among them was changing the name, Twitter, and getting rid of the birds.
3
SPEAKER_01
I said, hey man, there s a lot invested in that brand.
3
SPEAKER_01
But when I watched him, he thought, okay, these sweet little chirpy birds tweeting away, and the name Twitter, it s,
3
SPEAKER_01
not hardcore, it s not intense.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so, for better and for worse, I think he s taking X into the hardcore realm with people who post hardcore things, with people with hardcore views.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s not a polite playpen for the blue-checked, anointed elite
3
SPEAKER_01
And I thought, okay, this is gonna be bad.
3
SPEAKER_01
The whole thing s gonna fall apart.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, it has had problems, but the hardcore intensity of it has also meant that there s new things happening there.
3
SPEAKER_01
So it s very Elon Musk to not like the sweetness of birds chirping and tweeting and saying, I want something more hardcore.
3
SPEAKER_00
As you ve written in referring to the previous Twitter CEO, Elon said, Twitter needs a fire-breathing dragon.
3
SPEAKER_00
I think this is a good opportunity to maybe go through some of the memorable moments of the Twitter saga, as you ve written about extensively in your book, from the early days of considering the acquisition to how it went through to the details of, like you mentioned, the engineering teams.
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, at the beginning of 2022, he was riding high.
3
SPEAKER_01
But as we say, he s a drama addict.
3
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t like to ghost.
3
SPEAKER_01
And, you know, Tesla sold a million vehicles.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think 33 boosters, you know, Falcon 9s have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he was the richest person on earth and times person of the year.
3
SPEAKER_01
And yet, he d said, you know, I still want to put all my chips back on the table.
3
SPEAKER_01
I want to keep taking risks.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t want to savor things.
3
SPEAKER_01
He had sold all of his houses.
3
SPEAKER_01
So, he started secretly buying shares of Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_01
January, February, March, becomes public at a certain point, he has to declare it, and we were here in Austin at Gigafactory on the mezzanine, and he was trying to figure out, well, where do I go from here?
3
SPEAKER_01
And at that time, it was early April, they were going to offer him a board seat.
3
SPEAKER_01
He was going to do a standstill agreement and stop at 10% or something.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now remember, you know, we were standing around.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was Luke Nozick, whom you know well, Ken Howery, some of his friends on that mezzanine here.
3
SPEAKER_01
And all afternoon and then late into the evening at dinner is like, should we do this?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I didn t say anything, I m just the observer.
3
SPEAKER_01
But everybody else is saying, excuse me, why do you want to own Twitter?
3
SPEAKER_01
And Griffin, his son, joined at dinner.
3
SPEAKER_01
And May, for some reason, was in town.
3
SPEAKER_01
And like everybody says, no, we don t use Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_01
Why would you do that?
3
SPEAKER_01
And May said, well, I use Twitter.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it s almost like, okay, the demographics are people my age or May s age.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it looked like he wasn t gonna pursue it.
3
SPEAKER_01
They offered him a board seat.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then he went off to Hawaii to Larry Ellison s house, which he sometimes uses.
3
SPEAKER_01
He was meeting a friend, Angela Bassett, an actress.
3
SPEAKER_01
And instead of enjoying three days of vacation, he just became supercharged and started firing off text messages, including the fire Breathing Dragon one, I think,
3
SPEAKER_01
You know, he used that phrase a few times, that Parag wasn t the person who was going to take Twitter to a new level.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then by the time he gets to Vancouver, where Grimes meets him, they stay up all night playing Elden Ring.
3
SPEAKER_01
He was doing a TED Talk.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then at 5.30, he finishes playing the Elden Ring and sends out that, I ve made an offer.
3
SPEAKER_01
Even when he comes back, people are trying to intervene and say, excuse me, why are you doing it?
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it was a rocky period between late April and October when the deal closed.
3
SPEAKER_01
And people ask me all the time, well, did he want to get out of the deal?
3
SPEAKER_01
I said, what, Jelan, are you talking about at what time of day?
3
SPEAKER_01
Because there ll be times in the morning when he d say, oh, the Delaware court s going to force me to do it.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s horrible.
3
SPEAKER_01
Talk to his lawyers.
3
SPEAKER_01
You can win this case.
3
SPEAKER_01
Get me out of it.
3
SPEAKER_01
He met here in Austin with three or four investment bankers, Blair Efron at Centerview, Bob Steele at Perella Weinberg, and they offered him options.
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you want to get out?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you want to stay in?
3
SPEAKER_01
Do you want to reduce the price?
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think he was mercurial.
3
SPEAKER_01
There were times he would text me or say to me, this is going to be great.
3
SPEAKER_01
It s going to be the accelerant to do x.com the way we thought about 20 years ago.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so it s not until they finally tell him at the beginning of October, right when Optimus the robot is being unveiled in California actually.
4
SPEAKER_01
that the lawyers say, you re not gonna probably win this case, better go through with the deal.
4
SPEAKER_01
And by then, he s not only made his peace with it, he s kinda happy with it at times.
4
SPEAKER_01
Eventually, the deal is gonna close on a,
4
SPEAKER_01
I think a Friday morning, I have it in the book, and we re there on Thursday and he s wandering around looking at the Stay Woke t-shirts and psychological safety lingo they re all using.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he and his lawyers and bankers hatched a plan to do a flash close.
4
SPEAKER_01
And the reason for that was if they closed the deal after the markets had closed for the day,
4
SPEAKER_01
And he could send a letter to Parag and two others, firing them, quote, for cause.
4
SPEAKER_01
And this will be something the courts will have to figure out.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then he could save 200 million or so.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was both the money, but for him a matter, I won t say of principle, but of, hey, they misled me about the numbers, I got forced into doing it, so I m gonna,
4
SPEAKER_01
I m gonna try this jujitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then when he takes over, it s kind of a wild scene.
4
SPEAKER_01
Him trying to decide in three different rounds how to get the staff down to 15% of what it was.
4
SPEAKER_01
Him deciding on Christmas Eve after he d been at a meeting.
4
SPEAKER_01
where they told him, we can t get rid of that Sacramento server farm because it s needed for redundancy.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he says, no, it s not.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he s flying here to Austin.
4
SPEAKER_01
And young James says, why don t we just do it ourselves?
4
SPEAKER_01
He turns the plane around, they land in Sacramento, and he pulls him out himself.
4
SPEAKER_01
So it was a manic period.
4
SPEAKER_00
We should also say that underneath of that, there was
4
SPEAKER_00
a running desire or consideration to perhaps start a new company to build a social media company from scratch?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, Kimball wanted to do that, and Kimball here at a wonderful restaurant in Austin at lunch is like, hey, why are you buying Twitter?
4
SPEAKER_01
Let s start one from scratch and do it on the blockchain.
4
SPEAKER_01
Now, it took him a while, and you can argue it one way or the other,
4
SPEAKER_01
to come to the conclusion that the blockchain was not fast enough and responsive time enough to be able to handle a billion tweets in a day or so.
4
SPEAKER_01
He gets mad when they keep trying to get him to talk to Sam Bankman-Fried, who s trying to say, I ll invest, but we have to do it on the blockchain.
4
SPEAKER_01
Kimball is still in favor of starting a new one and doing it on blockchain-based.
4
SPEAKER_01
In retrospect,
4
SPEAKER_01
I think starting a new media company would have been better.
4
SPEAKER_01
He wouldn t have had the baggage or the legacy that he s breaking now in breaking the way Twitter had been.
4
SPEAKER_01
But it s hard to have millions and millions, hundreds of millions of true
4
SPEAKER_01
true users, not just trolls, and start from scratch, as others have found, as Macedon and Blue Sky and Threads, and Threads even had a base, so it would have been hard.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and to do that in the way he did requires
4
SPEAKER_00
Another part that you write about with the three musketeers and the whole engineering, the firing and the bringing in the engineers to try to sort of go hardcore.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there s a lot of interesting sort of questions to ask there, but the high level, can you just comment about that part of the saga, which is bringing in the engineers and seeing like, what can we do here?
4
SPEAKER_01
Right, he brought in the engineers and figured that the amount of people doing Tesla, full self-driving, autopilot, and all the software there was about one-tenth of what was doing software for Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said this can t be the case.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he fired 85% in three different rounds.
4
SPEAKER_01
The first was
4
SPEAKER_01
just firing people because they looked at the coding and they had a team of people from Tesla s autopilot team grading the codes of all that was written in the past year or so.
4
SPEAKER_01
Then he fired people who didn t seem to be totally all-in or loyal, and then another round of layoffs.
4
SPEAKER_01
At each step of the way, almost everybody said, that s enough, it s going to destroy things.
4
SPEAKER_01
from Alex Sparrow, his lawyer, to Jared Birchall.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
4
SPEAKER_01
And even Andrew and James, the young cousins who are tasked with making a list and figuring out who s good or bad, said, we ve done enough.
4
SPEAKER_01
We re going to be in real trouble.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they were partly right.
4
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there was degradation of the service some, but not as much as half the services I use half the time.
4
SPEAKER_01
I d wake up each morning and hit the app and okay, still there.
4
SPEAKER_01
What do you think, was that too much?
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that he has an algorithm that we mentioned earlier that begins with question every requirement.
4
SPEAKER_01
What it s up to is delete, delete, delete.
4
SPEAKER_01
Delete every part.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then a corollary to that is if you don t end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, then you didn t delete enough in the first round, because you were too timid.
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, so you ask me, did he overdo it?
4
SPEAKER_01
He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they re probably trying to hire people now to keep things going.
4
SPEAKER_00
But it sends a strong signal to people that are hired back, or the people that are still there, the April idea.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and what Steve Jobs and many other great leaders felt, and certainly Bezos, and certainly,
4
SPEAKER_01
in the early days of Microsoft Bill Gates, it was hardcore only A players.
4
SPEAKER_00
So how much of Elon s success would you say, Elon s and Steve Jobs  success is the hiring and managing of great teams?
4
SPEAKER_01
When I asked Steve Jobs at one point what was the best product you ever created, I thought he d say maybe the Macintosh or maybe the iPhone.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said no, those products are hard.
4
SPEAKER_01
The best thing I ever created was the team
4
SPEAKER_01
that made those products.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s the hard part, is creating a team.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he did, from Johnny Ive to Tim Cook and Eddie Cue and Phil Schiller.
4
SPEAKER_01
Elon has done a good job bringing in people.
4
SPEAKER_01
Gwynne Shotwell, obviously.
4
SPEAKER_01
Linda Iaccarino, she s, you know, can navigate through the current crises.
4
SPEAKER_01
Certainly stellar people at SpaceX, like Mark Giancosa.
4
SPEAKER_01
And then at Tesla, like Drew Baglino and Lars Marvy and Tom Zhu and many others.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s not as much of a team collaborator as say Benjamin Franklin, who by the way, that s the best team ever created, which is the founders.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you had to have really smart people like Jefferson and Madison and really passionate people like John Adams and his cousin Samuel and really,
4
SPEAKER_01
a guy of high rectitude like Washington, but you also needed a Ben Franklin who could bring everybody together and forge a team out of them and make them compromise with each other.
4
SPEAKER_01
Musk is a magnet for awesome talent.
4
SPEAKER_00
Magnet, interesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
But there s the priorities of hiring based on excellence, trustworthiness, and drive.
4
SPEAKER_00
These are things you ve described throughout the book.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s a pretty,
4
SPEAKER_00
a concrete and rigorous set of ideas based on which the hiring is done.
4
SPEAKER_00
So.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh yeah, and he has a very good, spidey, intuitive sense, just looking at people who could, I mean, not looking at them, but studying them, who could be good.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of his ways of operating is what he calls a skip-level meeting,
4
SPEAKER_01
And let s take a very specific thing, like the Raptor engine, which is powering the Starship.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it wasn t going well.
4
SPEAKER_01
It looked like a spaghetti bush, and it was gonna be hard to manufacture.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he got rid of the people who were in charge of that team.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I remember that he spent a couple of months doing what he calls skip level, which means instead of meeting with his direct reports on the Raptor team, he would meet with the people one level below them.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so he would skip a level and meet with them.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, and I just ask them what they re doing, and I drill them with questions.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, and this is how I figure out who s going to emerge.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said it was particularly difficult, I was sitting in those meetings, because people were wearing masks.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was during the height of COVID.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said it made it a little bit harder for him, because he has to get the input.
4
SPEAKER_01
But I watched as a young kid, dreadlocks, named Jacob McKenzie, he s in the book,
4
SPEAKER_01
is sitting there, and he s a bit like you, engineering mindset speaks in a bit of a monotone.
4
SPEAKER_01
Musk would ask a question, and he would give an answer, and the answer would be very straightforward, and he didn t get rattled.
4
SPEAKER_01
He was like this.
4
SPEAKER_01
And Musk said one day, called him up at 3 a.m., well, I won t say 3 a.m., but after midnight, said, you still around?
4
SPEAKER_01
And Jake said, yeah, I m still at work.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he said, okay, I m gonna make you in charge of the team building Raptor.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that was like a big surprise.
4
SPEAKER_01
But Jacob McKenzie has now gotten a version of Raptor, and they re building him at least one a week, and they re pretty awesome.
4
SPEAKER_01
And that s where his talent, must-talent for Raptor is.
4
SPEAKER_01
finding the right person and promoting them, that s where it is.
4
SPEAKER_00
And promoting it in a way where it s like, here s the ball, here, catch.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And you run with it.
4
SPEAKER_00
I ve interacted with quite a few folks from even just the Model X, all throughout, where people on paper don t seem like they would be able to run the thing, and they run it extremely successfully.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he does it wrong sometimes.
4
SPEAKER_01
He s had a horrible track record with the solar roof division.
4
SPEAKER_01
Wonderful guy named Brian Dow.
4
SPEAKER_01
I really liked him.
4
SPEAKER_01
And when they were doing the battery factory surge in Nevada, Musk got rid of two or three people and there s Brian Dow.
4
SPEAKER_01
Can do, can do, can do.
4
SPEAKER_01
Stays up all night and he gets promoted and runs it.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so finally Musk goes through two or three people running the solar roof division.
4
SPEAKER_01
finally calls up Brian Dow.
4
SPEAKER_01
I was sitting in Musk s house in Boca Chica, that little tiny two-bedroom he has, and he offers Brian Dow the job of running solar roof.
4
SPEAKER_01
And you know, Brian there, okay, can do, can do.
4
SPEAKER_01
And two or three times, Musk insisted that they install a solar roof in one of those houses in Boca Chica.
4
SPEAKER_01
This is this tiny village at the south end of Texas.
4
SPEAKER_01
And late at night, I mean, I d have to climb up to the top of the roof on these ladders and stand on this peaked roof as Musk is there saying, why do we need four screws to put in this single leg?
4
SPEAKER_01
And Brian was just sweating and doing everything.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then after a couple of months, it wasn t going well, and boom.
4
SPEAKER_01
Musk just fired him.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I always try to learn what is it that makes those who stay thrive?
4
SPEAKER_00
What s the lesson there?
4
SPEAKER_00
What do you think?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, I think it s self-knowledge like an Andy Krebs or others.
4
SPEAKER_01
They say, I am hardcore, I really wanna get a rocket to Mars, and that s more important than anything else.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of the people, I think it s Tim Zeman, I hope when he hears this I m getting him the right person, who took time and was working for Tesla Autopilot.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was just so intense, he took some time off and then went to another company.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, I was burned out at Tesla, but then I was bored at the next place.
4
SPEAKER_01
So I called, I think it was Ashok at Tesla.
4
SPEAKER_01
I said, can I come back?
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, sure.
4
SPEAKER_01
He said, I learned about myself.
4
SPEAKER_01
I d rather be burned out than bored.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s a good line.
4
SPEAKER_00
Well, can you just linger on one of the three that seem interesting to you in terms of excellence, trustworthiness, and drive?
4
SPEAKER_00
Which one do you think is the most important and the hardest to get at?
4
SPEAKER_00
The trustworthiness is an interesting one.
4
SPEAKER_00
Like, are you ride or die kind of thing?
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I think that, especially when it came to taking over Twitter, he thought half the people there were disloyal.
4
SPEAKER_01
And he was wrong.
4
SPEAKER_01
About two-thirds were disloyal, not just half.
4
SPEAKER_01
And it was, how do we weed out those?
4
SPEAKER_01
And he did something and made the firing squad, I call it, or the Musketeers, I think is my nickname for them,
4
SPEAKER_01
which is the young cousins and two or three other people, he made them look at the Slack messages these people had posted, everybody at Twitter had posted.
4
SPEAKER_01
And they went through hundreds of Slack messages.
4
SPEAKER_01
So if anybody posted on the internal Slack, that jerk Elon Musk is gonna take over and I m afraid that he s a maniac or something.
4
SPEAKER_01
they would be on the list because they weren t all in loyal.
4
SPEAKER_01
They did not look at private Slack messages and I guess people who are posting on a corporate Slack board should be aware that your company can look at them.
4
SPEAKER_01
But that s more than I would have done or most people would have done.
4
SPEAKER_01
And so that was to figure out who s deeply committed and loyal.
4
SPEAKER_01
I think that was mainly the case at Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
He doesn t sit around at SpaceX saying who s loyal to me.
4
SPEAKER_01
At other places, it s excellence, but that s...
4
SPEAKER_01
pretty well a given.
4
SPEAKER_01
Everybody is like a Mark Giancosa, just whip smart.
4
SPEAKER_01
It s, are you hardcore and all in?
4
SPEAKER_01
Especially if you have to move to this bit of a town in the south tip of Texas called Boca Chica, you know, you gotta be all in.
4
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_00
And that s the drive, the last piece.
4
SPEAKER_00
So you, in terms of collaborating, one of the great teams of all time, Ben Franklin, I like that.
4
SPEAKER_00
I thought it was the Beatles, but Ben Franklin is pretty good.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, no, no, no.
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I m sorry.
4
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
4
SPEAKER_01
I m sorry to offend you.
4
SPEAKER_01
Read the Constitution and read Abbey Road, listen to Abbey Road.
4
SPEAKER_01
They re both good, but they re in a different league.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, different league.
4
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management.
4
SPEAKER_00
Is there something you could say about
4
SPEAKER_00
Ben Franklin and about Steve Jobs.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think the interesting with Elon is that he, as you write, runs six companies, seven, I mean, it depends how you count.
4
SPEAKER_00
Starlink is its own thing, I don t know.
4
SPEAKER_00
What can you say about these people in terms of time management?
4
SPEAKER_01
Well, Musk is in a league of his own in the way he does it.
4
SPEAKER_01
First of all, Steve Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while, but Musk every couple of hours is switching his mindset from
4
SPEAKER_01
how to implant the neural link chip and what will the robot that implants it in the brain look like and how fast can we make it move, and then the heat shield on the Raptor, or switching to human imitation, machine learning, full self-drive.
4
SPEAKER_01
On the night that the Twitter board agreed to the deal, this is huge around the world, I m sure you remember, like Musk,
4
SPEAKER_01
buys Twitter.
4
SPEAKER_01
It wasn t when the deal closed.
4
SPEAKER_01
It was when the Twitter accepted his offer.
4
SPEAKER_01
And I thought, okay.
4
SPEAKER_01
But then he went to Boca Chica, to South Texas, and spent time fixating on, if I remember correctly, a valve in the Raptor engine that had a methane leak issue.
4
SPEAKER_01
And what were the possible ways to fix it?
4
SPEAKER_01
And all the engineers in that room, I assume, are thinking about, this guy just bought Twitter, should we say something?
4
SPEAKER_01
And then he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing really him being there.
4
SPEAKER_01
One of the things that s one of his strengths and sort of weaknesses in a way is in a given day,
5
SPEAKER_00
he ll focus serially, sequentially on many different things.
5
SPEAKER_00
He will worry about uploading video onto X.com or the payment system and then immediately switch over to some issue with the FAA giving a permit for Starship or with how to deal with Starlink and the CIA.
5
SPEAKER_00
And when he s focused on any of these things, you cannot distract him.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s not like he s also thinking about dealing with Starlink, but I ve gotta also worry about the Tesla decision on the new $25,000 car.
5
SPEAKER_00
Now, he ll, in between these sessions, process information, then let off steam.
5
SPEAKER_00
And for better or worse, he lets off steam by either playing a friend in Polytopia,
5
SPEAKER_00
or fire off some tweets, which is often not a healthy thing.
5
SPEAKER_00
But it s a release for him, and he doesn t, I once said he was a great multitasker, and that was a mistake.
5
SPEAKER_00
People corrected me.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s a serial tasker, which means focuses intensely on a task for an hour, almost has a, what do they call it at restaurants where they give you a palate cleanser.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he does some palate cleanser with polytopia and then focuses on the next task.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, is there some wisdom about time management that you can draw from that?
5
SPEAKER_00
There are some things that these people do and you say, OK, I can be that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
I can be more curious.
5
SPEAKER_00
I can question every rule and regulation.
5
SPEAKER_00
I just don t think anybody should try to emulate Musk s time management style, because it takes a certain set of teams who know how to deal with everything else other than the thing he s focusing on, and a certain mind that can shift just like his moods can shift.
5
SPEAKER_00
You and I go through transitions, and also if I m thinking about what I m gonna say on this podcast, I m also thinking about the email my daughter just sent about a house that she s looking, and I m multitasking.
5
SPEAKER_00
He doesn t actually do that.
5
SPEAKER_00
He single tasks sequentially with a focus that s hardcore.
5
SPEAKER_01
I don t know.
5
SPEAKER_01
I think there s wisdom to draw from that.
5
SPEAKER_01
First of all, he makes me, Ben Franklin makes me feel that way, that there s a lot of hours in the day.
5
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of minutes in the day.
5
SPEAKER_01
Like, there s no excuse not to get a lot done.
5
SPEAKER_01
And it requires just an extreme focus.
5
SPEAKER_01
An extreme focus and like an urgency.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think the fierce urgency that drives him is important.
5
SPEAKER_00
And it s sometimes ginned up.
5
SPEAKER_00
Like I say, the fierce urgency of getting to Mars.
5
SPEAKER_00
And on a Friday night at the launch pad in Boca Chica at 10 p.m., there are only a few people working because it s a Friday night, they re not supposed to launch for another eight months.
5
SPEAKER_00
And he orders a surge.
5
SPEAKER_00
He says, I want 200 people here by tomorrow working on this pad.
5
SPEAKER_00
We have to have a fierce sense of urgency or we will never get to Mars.
5
SPEAKER_01
That sense of urgency, you know, is also a vibrancy that s like really taking on life fully.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, to me, that s the lesson is like,
5
SPEAKER_01
Even the mundane can be full of this just richness, and you just have to really take it in intensely.
5
SPEAKER_01
So the switching enables that kind of intensity, because most of us can t hold that intensity in any one task for a prolonged period of time.
5
SPEAKER_01
Maybe that s also a lesson.
5
SPEAKER_00
Right, and I guess it goes back to also know who you are, meaning there are people who
5
SPEAKER_00
can focus intensely and there are people who can see patterns across many things.
5
SPEAKER_00
Look, Leonardo da Vinci, he was not all that focused.
5
SPEAKER_00
He was easily distracted.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s why he has more unfinished paintings than finished paintings in his canon.
5
SPEAKER_00
But his ability to see patterns across nature and to in some ways process, procrastinate, be distracted,
5
SPEAKER_00
That helped him some, but Musk is not that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there, every few months, there s a new surge.
5
SPEAKER_00
You don t know where it ll be, but you ll be on solar roofs, and all of a sudden, we ll have a surge, and there has to be 100 solar roofs built, or this has to be done by tomorrow, or make a starship dome by dawn and surge and do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
And there are people who are built that way.
5
SPEAKER_00
It is inspiring.
5
SPEAKER_00
But also let s appreciate that there are people who can be really good, but also can savor the success, savor the moment, savor the quiet sometimes.
5
SPEAKER_00
Musk s big failing is he can t savor the moment or success.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that s the flip side of hardcore intensity.
5
SPEAKER_01
In Innovators, another book of yours that I love, you write about individuals and about groups.
5
SPEAKER_01
So one of the questions the book addresses is, is it individuals or is it groups that turn the tides of history?
5
SPEAKER_00
When Henry Kissinger was on the shuttle missions for the Middle East Peace, this is the first book I ever wrote, he said, when I was a professor at Harvard,
5
SPEAKER_00
I thought that history was determined by great forces and groups of people.
5
SPEAKER_00
But when I see it up close, I see what a difference an individual can make.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s talking about Sadat and Golda Meir, probably talking about himself too, or at least in his mind.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we biographers have this dirty secret that we know we distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by an individual.
5
SPEAKER_00
But sometimes it is driven by an individual.
5
SPEAKER_00
Musk is a case like that.
5
SPEAKER_00
And sometimes, as I did with the innovators, there s teams and people who build on each other.
5
SPEAKER_00
And Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce then getting Andy Grove and doing the microchip, which then comes out, and Wozniak and Jobs find it at some electronics store and they decide to build the Apple.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so sometimes there,
5
SPEAKER_00
flows of forces and groups of people.
5
SPEAKER_00
I guess I err a little bit on the side of looking at what a Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Albert Einstein can do.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I also try to figure out if they hadn t been around with the forces of history and the groups of people have done it without them.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s a good historical question as somebody who loves history.
5
SPEAKER_00
And you think about special relativity, one of the 1905 papers.
5
SPEAKER_00
Even after he writes it, it s four years before people truly get what he s saying, which is it s not just how you observe time is relative, it s time itself is relative.
5
SPEAKER_00
And on the general theory, which he does a decade later, I m not sure we would have gotten that yet.
5
SPEAKER_00
What about moving us into the era of an iPhone in which it s so beautiful that you can t live without a thousand songs in your pocket, email and the internet in your pocket and a phone?
5
SPEAKER_00
There are a lot of brain-dead people from Panasonic to Motorola who didn t get that, and it may have been a while.
5
SPEAKER_00
I certainly think it s true of the era of electric vehicles.
5
SPEAKER_00
Jim and Ford, all the great people there, they crushed the boat.
5
SPEAKER_00
And I mean that literally.
5
SPEAKER_00
They ended up smashing them because they decided to discontinue it.
5
SPEAKER_00
Likewise, nobody was sending up rockets.
5
SPEAKER_00
Our space shuttle was about to be grounded 12 years ago.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so Musk does things, and there ll be people who say and read the book, well, if they read the book, they ll see the full story.
5
SPEAKER_00
But they ll say, it wasn t Musk who did Tesla, it was Martin Eberhard or Mark Tarpetty.
5
SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
5
SPEAKER_00
There were people who had helped create the shells of companies and other things, and they were all deserved to be called co-founders.
5
SPEAKER_00
But the guy who actually gets us to a million electric vehicles a year,
5
SPEAKER_00
is Elon Musk, and without him, I don t think we, look, if anybody five years from now buys a car that s gasoline powered, will think, that s quaint, you know, that s odd.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, suddenly we ve changed, we re not gonna do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
90% of that is Elon Musk.
5
SPEAKER_01
We re all mortal.
5
SPEAKER_01
When and how do you think Elon will retire from the insanely productive schedule he s on now?
5
SPEAKER_00
I would think that he would hate to retire.
5
SPEAKER_00
I think that he can t live without the pressure, the drama, the all-in feeling.
5
SPEAKER_00
It s never
5
SPEAKER_00
been anything that seemed to have crossed his mind.
5
SPEAKER_00
He s never said, maybe I love Larry Ellison s house on the beach in Hawaii.
5
SPEAKER_00
Maybe I should spend time in doing.
5
SPEAKER_00
Instead, he says things like, I learned early on that vacations will kill you.
5
SPEAKER_00
He gets malaria when he goes on one vacation.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he goes on vacation at one point and they oust him from PayPal.
5
SPEAKER_00
And then he goes to Africa at one point, he gets malaria.
5
SPEAKER_00
He says, I ve learned vacations kill you.
5
SPEAKER_00
Lesson learned.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well it s interesting because the projects are 100 plus year projects, many of these.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the weird things is watching him think incredibly long term.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the meetings every week early on when I was watching him was Mars Colonizer.
5
SPEAKER_00
And we did do a two hour meeting about what would the governance structure be on Mars?
5
SPEAKER_00
What would people wear?
5
SPEAKER_00
How would the robots work?
5
SPEAKER_00
And would there be democracy or should there be a different form of governance?
5
SPEAKER_00
I m sitting there saying, what are they doing?
5
SPEAKER_00
What are they talking about?
5
SPEAKER_00
They re trying to build rocket ships and everything else.
5
SPEAKER_00
They are worrying about the governance structure of Mars and likewise,
5
SPEAKER_00
whenever he s in a tense moment, like there s a rocket that s about to be launched, he ll start asking people something in the way future, like the new lead engine or something, if we re gonna build that, do we have enough materials ready to order?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or, I don t know, he ll just ask questions
5
SPEAKER_00
Like when he s building RoboTaxi, the global car, the $25,000 inexpensive global car, that s not a total passion.
5
SPEAKER_00
He was talked into doing that.
5
SPEAKER_00
His passion is RoboTaxis.
5
SPEAKER_00
But his passion is, how are we going to make this factory to do a million cars a year?
5
SPEAKER_00
Even the robo-taxi is a longer range vision.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he s been touting it since 2016, but you know, we re not, there are no robo-taxis.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s Waymo maybe doing a little experiment, but there s not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so he s always looking way into the future is my point.
5
SPEAKER_01
I just hope that
5
SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of Da Vinci s and Steve Jobs s and Einstein s and Elon Musk s that carry the flame forward.
5
SPEAKER_00
That s one of the reasons you write books about these people is so that if you re a young woman in a school where you re not being told to do science and you read The Codebreaker about Jennifer Doudna, you say, okay, I can be that.
5
SPEAKER_00
And when you say, oh, maybe I ll be a regulator, or you say, oh no, maybe I ll be the person who pushes
5
SPEAKER_00
the boundaries, who pushes the lines, who pushes, as Steve Jobs said, the human race.
5
SPEAKER_01
Well, let me ask you about your mind, your genius, your process.
5
SPEAKER_01
I ll give you two out of three.
5
SPEAKER_01
All right.
5
SPEAKER_01
Take me through your process of writing a biography.
5
SPEAKER_01
I mean, the full of it.
5
SPEAKER_01
Not just writing a biography, but understanding
5
SPEAKER_01
deeply, which your books have done, for the human story and the bigger ideas underlying the human story.
5
SPEAKER_01
So you ve written biographies both of individuals, which are hardly individuals, it s a really big, complex picture, and biographies of ideas that involve individuals.
5
SPEAKER_00
Well, step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works.
5
SPEAKER_00
What causes Einstein to make that leap?
5
SPEAKER_00
Rilon Musk to say stainless steel while he s looking at a carbon fiber rocket?
5
SPEAKER_00
Or how do you make the mental leap?
5
SPEAKER_00
Because I write about smart people, but smart people are a dime a dozen.
5
SPEAKER_00
They don t usually amount to much.
5
SPEAKER_00
You have to be creative, imaginative, to think different, as Jobs would say.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so what makes people creative?
5
SPEAKER_00
What makes them take imaginative leaps?
5
SPEAKER_00
That s the key question you gotta ask.
5
SPEAKER_00
You also ask the questions like you ve asked earlier, which is what demons are jangling in their head and how do they harness them into drives?
5
SPEAKER_00
So you look at all that and you try to observe really carefully the person.
5
SPEAKER_00
One of the more mundane things I do
5
SPEAKER_00
is a lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions and preach or whatever.
5
SPEAKER_00
As I said, this mentor said two people types come out, preachers, storytellers.
5
SPEAKER_00
Be a storyteller.
5
SPEAKER_00
I try, whenever I m trying to convey a thought, there s six magic words that I almost should have
5
SPEAKER_00
written on a card penned above my desk, which is, let me tell you a story.
5
SPEAKER_00
So if somebody says, how does Elon Musk figure out good talent, as you did, I think, well, let me tell you the story.
5
SPEAKER_00
I ll tell you the story of Jake McKenzie.
5
SPEAKER_00
Or, this is not something I invented.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, this is the way the good Lord does it in the Bible.
5
SPEAKER_00
I mean, has the best opening lead sentence ever, you know, in the beginning, comma, and then it s stories.
5
SPEAKER_00
And secondly, to pick up on that lead sentence in the beginning, make it chronological.
5
SPEAKER_00
Everybody,
5
SPEAKER_00
in the 40th year of their life has grown from the 39th year and the 38th year.
5
SPEAKER_00
And so you want to show how people evolve and grow.
5
SPEAKER_00
I had the greatest of all nonfiction narrative editors, Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster, who, among other things, created All the President s Men with Woodward and Bernstein.
5
SPEAKER_00
But she had a note she d put in the margins of my books that was a tigta, and it meant all things in good time.
5
SPEAKER_00
Keep it chronological.
5
SPEAKER_00
If it s good enough for the Bible, it s good enough for you.
5
SPEAKER_01
Interesting, to me that s a small note, but to you it s extremely important.
5
SPEAKER_00
Because it s the framework for how you structure things, but also how you understand things, which is if you keep it a chronological narrative, then you re showing how a person has grown from one experience you ve talked about to the next one.
5
SPEAKER_00
And that moral growth, creative growth, risk-taking growth,
5
SPEAKER_00
Wisdom, that s the essences of creativity, but you can t do it.
5
SPEAKER_00
There s a term, Bildungsroman, which is a book that carries a narrative and tells how people learn something.
5
SPEAKER_00
I m a big believer in narrative.
5
SPEAKER_00
If you re an academic, you sometimes, not today, but in like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were two things you thought were bad.
5
SPEAKER_00
having a great person theory of history in which you decide to do biography.
5
SPEAKER_00
I had a great professor when I was in college.
5
SPEAKER_00
Her name was Doris Kearns.
5
SPEAKER_00
She later married Dick Goodwin.
5
SPEAKER_00
And she
6
SPEAKER_00
when she was going for tenure at the university, wrote a biography of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
6
SPEAKER_00
And they denied her tenure because it was beneath the dignity of the academy to write history through one person.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s great, it opened up the field of biography to us non-academics, starting with David McCullough,
6
SPEAKER_00
Bob Caro, but maybe John Meacham and myself are in a new generation, and certainly there s a generation coming after us.
6
SPEAKER_00
But the second thing besides telling it through people, which...
6
SPEAKER_00
is the academy tended to disdain what they called imposing a narrative, in which you made it storytelling.
6
SPEAKER_00
Because that meant you were leaving things out and making it into a narrative.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s how we form our views of the world.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, let me ask you this question.
6
SPEAKER_01
In terms of gathering an understanding,
6
SPEAKER_01
How much of it is, one, observing, and how much of it is interviews?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, and obviously depends on the subject.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, with Ben Franklin, it s all based on archives, and every, of course, we have 40 volumes of letters he wrote.
6
SPEAKER_00
That was the good old days, when every day you d write 20 letters.
6
SPEAKER_00
The must book is based much more on observation than almost any of my books because he opened up in a way that was breathtaking to me.
6
SPEAKER_00
Even when he d be sitting playing polytopia or seething at other people, he d have me just sitting there watching.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I spent a lot of time with Jennifer Doudna at her side.
6
SPEAKER_00
I went to her lab and edited a human gene and, you know, with a pipette and a test tube.
6
SPEAKER_00
But I would say I spent 30 hours with her.
6
SPEAKER_00
I can t count, you know, 100 hours or more just observing Musk.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I m not sure that any biographer, perhaps since Boswell took on Dr. Johnson,
6
SPEAKER_00
has ever had quite as much up close, meaning five feet away at all times, access.
6
SPEAKER_00
And because of that, I ll go back to what I said a moment ago, I try to get out of the way of the story.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s not about me, it s not about, I try to just say, okay, here s what happened, here s this story, here s what happened the night he came in to Twitter for the first time, and let you form your own judgment.
6
SPEAKER_01
What about the interviews?
6
SPEAKER_01
You ve had a lot of conversations.
6
SPEAKER_01
You give acknowledgement to the people you ve done interviews with.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, one, I have to ask, as an aspiring interviewer myself, how?
6
SPEAKER_00
People love to talk.
6
SPEAKER_00
People just love, you know that.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I ve had 140, maybe 150 people, they re all listening in the back.
6
SPEAKER_00
One of the little things that people won t notice, but I ll say it now, is all of them are on the record.
6
SPEAKER_00
Getting them to talk is easy.
6
SPEAKER_00
They all want to talk about Musk.
6
SPEAKER_00
But then at a certain point say, I don t put anonymous quotes in my book.
6
SPEAKER_00
I cite things.
6
SPEAKER_00
I say, if you re tough enough and you ve gone through this, and a lot of times it takes two or three calls back.
6
SPEAKER_00
Somebody will tell me a story, say, oh, no, no, no, I don t want to, but I think it s important to know where everything came from.
6
SPEAKER_00
And with Musk, it s, you know, I had that from the very beginning because I was a Time Magazine reporter.
6
SPEAKER_00
I d worked, reported for the Times-Picayune on New Orleans.
6
SPEAKER_00
I, first day on the job, I had to go cover a murder.
6
SPEAKER_00
I phoned in the story from a pay phone and my editor, you know, the city editor said, well, did you talk to the family?
6
SPEAKER_00
I went, no, Billy, I mean, the family, you know, the daughter just got, he said, go knock on the door.
6
SPEAKER_00
I knocked on the door.
6
SPEAKER_00
An hour later, they were still talking.
6
SPEAKER_00
They were bringing out her yearbook.
6
SPEAKER_00
Lesson one I learned, people want to talk if you re willing to just listen.
6
SPEAKER_00
And whether it be Henry Kissinger, you just push the button and say Kissinger and people tell you the stories, all the way through Elon Musk, everybody talked.
6
SPEAKER_00
Everybody in his family, everybody he fired, everybody, I mean, I think it s important to listen to people.
6
SPEAKER_00
And the other thing I learned as a reporter, back when I was covering politics in New Hampshire in the early campaigns, I learned from two or three great reporters, a guy named David Broder and Tim Russert, the late NBC guy.
6
SPEAKER_00
They do what was called door knocking.
6
SPEAKER_00
You just walk in a neighborhood, knock on a door, and ask people about the election.
6
SPEAKER_00
But they said, here s the secret.
6
SPEAKER_00
Don t ask any leading questions.
6
SPEAKER_00
Don t have any premise.
6
SPEAKER_00
Just say, hey, I m trying to figure out this election, what s going on?
6
SPEAKER_00
What do you think?
6
SPEAKER_00
And then stay silent.
6
SPEAKER_00
With Musk, a third secret.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know this well.
6
SPEAKER_00
He ll go silent at times.
6
SPEAKER_00
sometimes a minute, two minutes, four minutes, don t try to fill the silences.
6
SPEAKER_00
If you re a listener, you gotta learn.
6
SPEAKER_00
okay, he s not saying anything for four minutes.
6
SPEAKER_00
I can outlast him.
6
SPEAKER_01
It s tough.
6
SPEAKER_01
As humans, it s very tough.
6
SPEAKER_01
Respecting the silence is really, really difficult.
6
SPEAKER_01
Speaking of demons, when there s silence, all the demons show up in my head.
6
SPEAKER_01
Oh, dear.
6
SPEAKER_01
The fear, I think, is if I don t say anything, it s boring, and if I say something, it s gonna be stupid.
6
SPEAKER_01
that the basic engine that just keeps running, not on the podcast, but also in human interaction.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so I think there s that nervous energy when interacting with people.
6
SPEAKER_00
You can never go wrong by staying silent, if there s nothing you have to say.
6
SPEAKER_00
Not something I ve mastered, but I do, when I m a reporter, try to master that, which is,
6
SPEAKER_00
Don t ask complex questions.
6
SPEAKER_00
Don t interject.
6
SPEAKER_00
And when somebody hasn t fully answered the question, don t say, well, let me, I haven t fully, just stay silent.
6
SPEAKER_01
And then they ll keep talking.
6
SPEAKER_01
Just give them a chance to keep talking.
6
SPEAKER_01
Even if they ve kind of finished, they re still.
6
SPEAKER_00
Sometimes they haven t given you enough, instead of following up, I ll just.
6
SPEAKER_00
nod and keep waiting.
6
SPEAKER_01
You re making it sound simple.
6
SPEAKER_01
Is there a secret to getting people to open up more?
6
SPEAKER_00
I m somewhat lucky because I started off working for a daily newspaper and people back then
6
SPEAKER_00
they want to talk to the newspaper reporter.
6
SPEAKER_01
But you also have a way about you, like I feel like you have like a cowboy in a saloon, like you just kind of want to talk, like there s a draw to, I don t know, I don t know what it is, maybe it s, I don t know if it s developed or you re born with it, but there s a, it feels like I want to tell you a story of some sort.
6
SPEAKER_00
Good, tell me a story.
6
SPEAKER_00
A couple things.
6
SPEAKER_00
I did learn to be more quiet.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m sure I know when I was younger or even I ll see videos of me at, you know, news things where I m always trying to interject a question.
6
SPEAKER_00
And so you learn to be quieter sometimes.
6
SPEAKER_00
I haven t mastered it.
6
SPEAKER_00
I haven t learned it enough.
6
SPEAKER_00
You learn to be naturally curious.
6
SPEAKER_00
Many reporters today, when they ask a question, are either trying to play gotcha or trying to get a news scoop or trying to, you know, gig something that can make a lead.
6
SPEAKER_00
And if you actually are curious and you really want to know the answer to a question,
6
SPEAKER_00
then people can tell that you asked it because you want the answer, not because you re playing a game with them.
6
SPEAKER_01
I m sure some of them off the record, some of them on the record, you had maybe, you know,
6
SPEAKER_01
just some incredible conversations.
6
SPEAKER_01
I was gonna say some of the greatest conversations ever, but who knows?
6
SPEAKER_01
Some of the best conversations ever are probably somewhere in South America between two drunk people that we never get to hear.
6
SPEAKER_01
So I don t know.
6
SPEAKER_01
But is there advice you can give from what you ve learned to somebody like me on how to have good conversation, especially once recorded?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, to be actually curious.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, every question you ve asked me is because I think you actually want to know the answer, and you ve done your homework.
6
SPEAKER_00
To be open, and not to have an agenda.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, we all suffer from there being too many agendas in the world today.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so that is just genuine curiosity, but there s something, when you talk about just one-on-one interaction,
6
SPEAKER_01
whether it s Elon or Steve Jobs, there s something beautiful about that person s mind.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it feels like it s possible to reveal that, to discover that together efficiently.
6
SPEAKER_01
And that s kind of the goal of a conversation.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, I mean, look, you re amongst the top podcasters and interviewers in the world today.
6
SPEAKER_00
you have an earnestness to you.
6
SPEAKER_00
Ben Franklin is the person who taught me, I mean, by reading him, the most about on conversation.
6
SPEAKER_00
He wrote a wonderful essay on that.
6
SPEAKER_00
It includes on silence.
6
SPEAKER_00
But it includes trying to ask sincere questions rather than
6
SPEAKER_00
get a point across.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s somewhat Socratic, but whenever he wanted to start a fireman s corps in Philadelphia, he would go to his group that he called the Leather Apron Club, and they would pose a question, why don t we have it?
6
SPEAKER_00
What would it take, what would be good?
6
SPEAKER_00
And then the second part is to make sure that you listen, and if somebody has even just the germ of an idea, give them credit for it.
6
SPEAKER_00
Like as Joe said, the real problem is this.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I do think that if I m in situations, and I just mean even at dinner or something, I m with somebody,
6
SPEAKER_00
I m usually curious and the conversation will proceed with questions.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I guess it s also because I m pretty interested in what anybody s doing, whoever I happen to be with.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that s a talent you have, which is you re pretty genuine in your interests.
6
SPEAKER_00
There are people like Benjamin Franklin, like the
6
SPEAKER_00
I ll say Charlie Rose, even though he s in disfavor, who are interested in a huge number of subjects, and I think that helps as well, to be interested in basketball and opera and physics and metaphysics.
6
SPEAKER_00
That was a Ben Franklin, that was a Leonardo trick, which is...
6
SPEAKER_00
They wanted to know everything you could possibly know about every subject knowable.
6
SPEAKER_01
But there s a different aspect of this, which is that I would love to hear how you ve solved it, or if you ve faced it, that you re certainly disarming.
6
SPEAKER_01
See, I m like peppering you with compliments here, trying to get you to open up.
6
SPEAKER_00
That s a very disarming method.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_01
I recently talked to Benjamin Netanyahu.
6
SPEAKER_01
We ll talk again.
6
SPEAKER_01
We unfortunately, because of scheduling and complexities, only had one hour, which is very difficult, very difficult with the charismatic politician.
6
SPEAKER_01
He is a prime minister.
6
SPEAKER_01
I understand this.
6
SPEAKER_01
But he s also a charismatic talker, which is very difficult to break through in one hour.
6
SPEAKER_01
But people have,
6
SPEAKER_01
built up walls, whether it s because of demons or because of their politicians, and so they have agendas and narratives and so on, and so to break through those, I wonder if there s some advice, some wisdom you ve learned of how to sort of wear down through water or whatever method the walls that we ve built up as individuals.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, you call it disarming, which I don t know that I am, but disarming basically means you re taking down their shields also.
6
SPEAKER_00
And you know when people have a shield and you try to give them comfort.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had zero of that problem with Elon Musk.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it was like disarming to me, which is, I kept waiting to say, okay, he s not going to, they ve got a shell or he won t do that.
6
SPEAKER_00
But he was,
6
SPEAKER_00
I m almost crazily open and did not seem to want to be spinning or hiding or faking things.
6
SPEAKER_00
And I ve been lucky.
6
SPEAKER_00
Doudna was that way.
6
SPEAKER_00
Steve Jobs was that way.
6
SPEAKER_00
But you have to put in time, too.
6
SPEAKER_00
In other words, you can t say, okay, there s a one hour interview and I m gonna break down every wall.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s like on your fifth visit.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yes, well actually that s one of the things in my situation you learn.
6
SPEAKER_01
Fifth visit is very nice, but sometimes you don t get a fifth visit.
6
SPEAKER_01
Sometimes it s just the first date.
6
SPEAKER_01
And I think what it boils down to, and we said disarming, but there s something about this person that you trust.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think a lot of it just boils down to trust.
6
SPEAKER_01
in some deep human way.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think with many of the people I ve spoken with, sometimes the trust happens like after the interview, which is really sad because it s like, oh man.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ve never been in your situation where I have a show, I usually have
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not a first-date person.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, you know, but then I m lucky I mean, I mean I say lucky but I m in print, you know print is a
6
SPEAKER_00
couple thousand-year-old medium, but there are those of us who love it.
6
SPEAKER_01
Well, the nature of the podcast medium is that I m a one-night-stand kind of girl.
6
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you about objectivity.
6
SPEAKER_01
You ve followed Elon, you ve followed Steve Jobs.
6
SPEAKER_01
I mean, I don t even know if you would say you re front, you have to be careful with words like that, but there s an intimacy.
6
SPEAKER_01
And how do you remain objective
6
SPEAKER_01
Do you want to remain objective while telling a deeply human story?
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I mean, I want to be honest, which I think is akin to being objective.
6
SPEAKER_00
I try to keep in mind
6
SPEAKER_00
Who am I writing for?
6
SPEAKER_00
I m not writing for Elon Musk.
6
SPEAKER_00
As I say, I haven t sent him the book.
6
SPEAKER_00
I don t think he s read it yet.
6
SPEAKER_00
I ve got one person I m writing for, the open-minded reader.
6
SPEAKER_00
If I can put in a story and say, well, that will piss off the subject or that will really make the subject happy, that s irrelevant or I try to make that a minor consideration.
6
SPEAKER_00
It s will the reader have a better understanding because I ve put this story in the book.
6
SPEAKER_00
I m a bit of a romantic.
6
SPEAKER_01
So to me, even your Einstein book had lessons on romance and relationships.
6
SPEAKER_01
So how important are romantic relationships to the success of great men, great women, great minds?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, sometimes people who affect the course of humanity,
6
SPEAKER_00
have better relationships with humanity than they do with the humans sitting around them.
6
SPEAKER_00
Einstein had two interesting relationships with wives.
6
SPEAKER_00
Mileva, his first wife, was a sounding board and helped with the mathematics of the special relativity paper in particular.
6
SPEAKER_00
But he didn t treat her well.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, he made her sign a letter that she wouldn t interrupt him.
7
SPEAKER_00
And finally, when she wanted a divorce, he couldn t afford it, because he was still a patent clerk.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so, he offered her a deal, which is, I think, totally amazing.
7
SPEAKER_00
He said, one of these days, one of those papers from 1905 is gonna win the Nobel Prize.
7
SPEAKER_00
If we get a divorce, you know, I ll give you the money.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was a lot of money back then, like a million dollars now or something.
7
SPEAKER_00
And she s smart, she s a scientist, she consults with a few other scientists, and after a week or so, she takes the bet.
7
SPEAKER_00
Is that until, what, 1919 that he wins his Nobel Prize?
7
SPEAKER_00
And she gets all the money, she buys three apartment buildings in Zurich.
7
SPEAKER_00
With his second wife, Elsa, it was more a partnership of convenience.
7
SPEAKER_00
It was not a romantic love, but he knew, and that s sometimes what people need in life, is just a partner.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, somebody who s gonna handle the stuff you re not gonna handle.
7
SPEAKER_00
So I guess if you look at my books,
7
SPEAKER_00
They re not great inspiring guides to personal relationships.
7
SPEAKER_01
Let me ask you about actually the process of writing itself.
7
SPEAKER_01
When you ve observed, when you ve listened, when you ve collected all the information, what s, maybe even just the silly mundane question of what do you eat for breakfast before you start writing?
7
SPEAKER_00
When do you write?
7
SPEAKER_00
First of all, breakfast is not my favorite meal.
7
SPEAKER_00
And those people who tell you that you have to start with a hearty breakfast,
7
SPEAKER_00
Luke Askins.
7
SPEAKER_00
And morning is not my favorite day part, so I write at night.
7
SPEAKER_00
And because I love narrative, it s easy to structure a book, which is I can make a outline that if I printed it out or notes would be
7
SPEAKER_00
a hundred pages, but everything s in order.
7
SPEAKER_00
In other words, if there s a burning man and he s coming back from grimes and then there s a solar roof thing and then there s something, I put it all in order day by day.
7
SPEAKER_00
as an outline, and that disciplines me when I m starting to write to follow the mantra from Alice Mayhew, my first editor, which is all things in good time.
7
SPEAKER_00
Don t get ahead of the story, don t have to flashback.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then after you get it so that it s all chronological, then you have to do some clustering.
7
SPEAKER_00
You have to say, okay, we re going to,
7
SPEAKER_00
do the decision to do Starship or to build a factory in Texas or to whatever.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then you sometimes have the organizational problem of, yeah, and that gets us all the way up to here.
7
SPEAKER_00
Do I keep that in that chapter or do I wait until later when it s better chronologically?
7
SPEAKER_00
But those are easy.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, what about the actual process of telling the story?
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, that s the mantra I mentioned earlier, which is whenever I get pause or I don t know how to say something, I just say, let me tell you a story.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then I find the actual anecdote, the story.
7
SPEAKER_00
the tale that encompasses what I m trying to convey.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then I don t say what I m trying to convey.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t have a transition sentence that says, you know, Elon sometimes changes mind so often he couldn t remember whether he had changed his mind.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, you don t need transition sentences.
7
SPEAKER_00
You just say, all right, here s the point I need to make next.
7
SPEAKER_00
And so you start with a sentence that says,
7
SPEAKER_00
you know, one day in January in the factory in Texas, comma.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, one of the things that I d love to ask you is for advice for young people.
7
SPEAKER_01
To me, first advice would be to read biographies.
7
SPEAKER_01
In the sense, because
7
SPEAKER_01
They help you understand of all the different ways you can live a life well lived.
7
SPEAKER_01
But from having written biographies, having studied so many great men and women, what advice could you give to people of how to live this life?
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, I keep going back to the classics and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I guess it s Plato s maxim, but he may be quoting Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it gets back to the know thyself, which is, you don t have to figure out what is the big meaning of it all, but you have to figure out why you re doing what you re doing.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that requires something that I did not have enough of when I was young, which is self-awareness and examining every motive, everything I do.
7
SPEAKER_01
Where does the examination leave you?
7
SPEAKER_01
Is it to a shift in life trajectory?
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it s not for me sort of, all right, I ve now decided, having been a journalist, I ll run a think tank or I ll run a network or I ll write a bio.
7
SPEAKER_00
It is actually something that s more useful on an hourly basis.
7
SPEAKER_00
Like, why am I about to say that to somebody?
7
SPEAKER_00
Or why am I going to do this particular act?
7
SPEAKER_00
What s my true motive here?
7
SPEAKER_00
And also, in the broader sense, to learn, as I did after a couple years at CNN,
7
SPEAKER_00
My examination of my life is that I m not great at running complex organizations.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m not great as a manager, given the choice.
7
SPEAKER_00
I d rather somebody else have to manage me than me have to manage people.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it took me a while to figure that out.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I was probably too ambitious when I was young and at Time Magazine.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was when I was green and, oh well, that was when I was in my salad days and green in judgment.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it was like chasing the next level at Time Incorporated, whatever it might be.
7
SPEAKER_00
And then one day I caught the brass ring and I became an editor and then the top editor
7
SPEAKER_00
And after a while, I realized that wasn t really totally what I m suited to be, especially when I got put in charge of CNN.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, all young people are almost by definition in their salad days in Green and Judgment.
7
SPEAKER_00
But you learn what s motivating you, and then you learn to ask, is that really what I want?
7
SPEAKER_00
Should I be careful of what I m wishing for?
7
SPEAKER_01
One of the big examinations you can do is the fact that you and everybody dies one day.
7
SPEAKER_01
How much you, Walter Isaacson, think about death?
7
SPEAKER_01
Are you afraid of it?
7
SPEAKER_00
No, and I don t think about it a lot, but I do think about Steve Jobs  Let Me Tell You a Story, which is the wonderful Steve Jobs story of, I think after he was diagnosed, but before it was public,
7
SPEAKER_00
and he gave both a Stanford talk but other things, in which he said the fact that we are going to die gives you focus and gives you meaning.
7
SPEAKER_00
If you re gonna live, and Elon Musk has said that.
7
SPEAKER_00
which is a lot of the tech bros out in the Silicon Valley, they re looking for ways to live forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
I can think, Musk says, of nothing worse.
7
SPEAKER_00
We read the myth of Sisyphus, and we know how bad it is to be condemned to eternal life.
7
SPEAKER_00
So,
7
SPEAKER_00
There was an ancient Greece, the person who walked behind the king and said, memento mori, remember you re gonna die.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it kept people from losing it a bit.
7
SPEAKER_00
Do you think about legacy?
7
SPEAKER_00
The lucky thing about being a biographer,
7
SPEAKER_00
is that you kind of know what your legacy is.
7
SPEAKER_00
There s gonna be a shelf and it ll be of interesting people and you will have inspired a 17-year-old biology student somewhere to be the next great biochemist or somebody to start a company like Elon Musk.
7
SPEAKER_00
And what I think more about, I won t say giving back, that s such a trite thing.
7
SPEAKER_00
I moved back to New Orleans for a reason.
7
SPEAKER_00
First of all, the hurricane hit.
7
SPEAKER_00
And after Katrina, I was asked to be Vice Chair of the Recovery Authority.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I realized everything I ve got going for me, it all comes from this beautiful gem of a troubled city.
7
SPEAKER_00
the wonderful high school I went to, the wonderful streets where I learned to ride a bike, you know, and it s got challenges.
7
SPEAKER_00
I m never gonna solve challenges at the grand global level, but I can go back home and say, part of my legacy is going to be, I tried to pay it back.
7
SPEAKER_00
to my hometown, even by teaching at Tulane, which I don t do as a favor.
7
SPEAKER_00
I mean, I enjoy the hell out of it.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it s like, all right, I m part of a community.
7
SPEAKER_00
And I think we lose that in America because people who are lonely are lonely because they re not part of a community.
7
SPEAKER_00
But I ve got all my high school kids, they re friends, they re all still in New Orleans.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve got my family, but I also have Tulane, institutions in New Orleans that have been there forever.
7
SPEAKER_00
And if I can get involved in helping the school system in New Orleans, of helping the youth empowerment programs, of helping the innovation center at Tulane, I was even on the city planning commission, which worries about zoning ordinances for short-term rentals.
7
SPEAKER_00
You know, go figure.
7
SPEAKER_00
But it was like, no, immerse myself in my community, because my community was just so awesomely good at allowing me to become who I became,
7
SPEAKER_00
and has trouble year by year, hurricane by hurricane, making sure that each new generation can be creative.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it s a city of creativity, from jazz to the food to the architecture.
7
SPEAKER_00
So when I think of, I won t say legacy, but what am I gonna do to pay it forward, which is a lower level way of saying legacy, I pay it forward by going back to the place where I began and trying to know it for the first time.
7
SPEAKER_00
That was a ripoff of a T.S.
7
SPEAKER_00
Eliot line.
7
SPEAKER_00
I don t want you to think I thought of that one.
7
SPEAKER_01
Always cite your sources, I appreciate it.
7
SPEAKER_00
T.S.
7
SPEAKER_00
Eliot, if you ever need to figure it out, the four quartets, there s that part at the end which is, we shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place we started and know it for the first time, to the unknown but half-remembered gate.
7
SPEAKER_00
It s just beautiful.
7
SPEAKER_00
And that s been an inspiration of what do you do in
7
SPEAKER_00
I guess if it s a Shakespeare play, you d call it Act Five.
7
SPEAKER_00
Well, you go back to the place where you came and don t sit there worrying about legacy, but you ll sit there saying, how do I make sure that somebody else can have a magical trajectory starting in New Orleans?
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, to me, you re one of the greatest storytellers of all time.
7
SPEAKER_01
I ve been a huge fan.
7
SPEAKER_01
That s definitely not true, but it s so sweet of you.
7
SPEAKER_01
See, you can be- Rudely interrupting.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think probably Ben Franklin, so for I don t know how many years, 15 years, Einstein, all the way through today, I ve just been a huge fan of yours, and you re one of the people
7
SPEAKER_01
that I thought surely would not lower themselves to appear and have a conversation with me.
7
SPEAKER_01
And it s just a giant gift to me.
7
SPEAKER_00
Hey, I flew into Austin for this because I am a big fan, and especially a big fan because you take people seriously and you care.
7
SPEAKER_01
Thank you, a thousand times thank you for respecting me and for inspiring just millions of people with your stories.
7
SPEAKER_01
Again, an incredible storyteller, incredible human, and thank you for talking today.
7
SPEAKER_01
Thank you, Alex.
7
SPEAKER_01
Thanks for listening to this conversation with Walter Isaacson.
7
SPEAKER_01
To support this podcast, please check out our sponsors in the description.
7
SPEAKER_01
And now, let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Carl Jung.
7
SPEAKER_01
People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls.
7
SPEAKER_01
One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.
7
SPEAKER_01
Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.
7
you