Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin | Lex Fridman Podcast #395

I hope with my books I'm saying uh this isn't a how-to guide but this is somebody you can walk alongside you can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany you can see Jennifer doudner growing up or as an outsider or a 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 a man with a knife sticking out of his head and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their souls this causes you know scars that last the rest of your life and the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred it's you know how do you deal with it 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 we talked for hours on and off the mic I'm sure we'll talk many more times Walter is a truly special writer thinker Observer and human being I highly recommend people read his new book on Elon 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 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 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 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 ever I do like to celebrate the good in people to empathize and to understand but I also like to call people out on their with respect and with compassion if I fail I fail due to a lack of skill not a lack of Integrity I work hard to improve this is the Lex Friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's Walter Isaacson what is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great men and women great minds is that a requirement is it a catalyst or is it just a simple Coincidence of Fate well it's not a requirement some people with happy childhood to do quite well but it certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the Demons of their childhood even Barack Obama's uh sentence and his Memoirs which is I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of of his father or live down the sins of his father and for Elon it's especially true because he had both a violent and difficult childhood and a very psychologically problematic father he's got those demons uh dancing around in his head and by harnessing them it's part of the reason that he does riskier more adventurous Wilder things and maybe I would ever do you've written that Elon talked about his father and that at times it felt like mental torture the the interaction with him during his childhood can you describe some of the things you've learned 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 when he was in the hospital for almost a week but when he came home 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 of the person who had beaten him that's probably one of the more traumatic events of elon's Life yes and there's also veld school which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to and at one point you know he was scrawny he has very bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues he talks about being Asperger's and so he gets uh traumatized at a camp like that but the second time time he went he'd gotten bigger he had shot up to almost six feet and he learned a little bit of Judo and he realized that if he was getting beaten up he might it might hurt him but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible so that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon I spent a lot of time talking Arrow musk his father Elon done talked to Meryl musk anymore his father nor does Kimball it's been years and uh Errol doesn't even have elon's email so a lot of times Arrow will be sending me emails and arrow had one of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities he was you know a great mind of engineering and especially Material Science I knew how to build a Wilderness Camp in South Africa using Micah and how it would not conduct the heat but he also would go into these dark periods in which he would just be psychologically abusive and of course May musk says to me the his mother who divorced Daryl early on said the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father and every now and then you've been with him so much LAX and you know him well he'll even talk to you about the demons about Diablo dancing in his head I mean he he gets it he's self-aware but you've probably seen him at times where those demons take over and he goes really dark and really quiet and uh Grimes says you know I can tell a minute or two in advance when demon Mode's about to happen and he'll go a bit dark I was you know here at Austin wanted dinner with a group and you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was going to go dark 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 and then he steps out of it as you know that too the the huge snap out where suddenly he's showing you Monty pythons get on his phone he's joking about things so I think coming out of the childhood there were just mini facets maybe even many personalities the engineering mode the silly mode the charismatic mode the Visionary mode but also the demon in dark mode I'll quote you cited about elon's really stood out to me I forget uh who was from but inside the man he's still there as a child the child's standing in front of his dad that was Tallulah his second wife and she's great uh she's an English actress they've been married twice actually and Tallulah said that's just him from his childhood he's a drama addict Kimball says that as well and I asked why and he said and Tallulah said you know for him love and family are kind of associated with those psychological torments and in many ways he'll Channel I mean Tallulah would be with him in 2008 when the company was going back or whatever it may have been or later and he would be so stressed he would vomit and then he would Channel things that his father had said use phrases his father had said to him and so she told me deep inside the man is this man-child still standing in front of his father to a degree is that true for many of us do you think I think it's true but in many different ways I'll say something personal which is I was blessed and perhaps it's a bit of a downside too but the fact I had the greatest father he could ever imagine and mother they were the kindest people you'd ever want to meet I grew up in a magical place in New Orleans my dad was an engineer an electrical engineer and you know he was always kind perhaps I'm not quite as driven or as crazed I don't have to prove things so I get to write about Elon Musk I get to write about you know Einstein or Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci who as you know was totally torn by demons and had different difficult childhood situations not even legitimized by his father so sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle sweet childhood we grew up with fewer demons but we grow up with fewer drives and we end up maybe being Boswell and not being Dr Johnson we end up being the Observer not being the doer and so I always respect those who are in the arena I don't you know you don't see yourself as a man in the arena I've had a gentle sweet career and I've got to cover really interesting people but I've never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars I've never moved us into the era of electric vehicles I've never stayed up all night on the factory floor I don't have quite those either the drives or the uh addiction to risk I mean elon's addicted to risk he's addicted to Adventure me if I see something that's risky I spend some time calculating okay upside downside here uh but that's another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done and people like me write about the Elon musks one other aspect of this given a difficult childhood whether it's Elon or da Vinci I wonder if there's some wisdom some advice almost that you can draw that you can give to people with difficult childhoods I think all of us have demons even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents yes and we all have demons and rule one in life is harness your demons know that you're ambitious or not ambitious or you're lazy or whatever uh Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator you know I think it's usual to know what's eating at you know how to harness it um also know what you're good at I'll take musk as another example I'm a little bit more like Kimball musk than Elon I maybe got over endowed with the empathy Gene and what does that mean well it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine it was a group about a 150 people on the editorial floors and I knew them all and we had a jolly time when I went to CNN I was not very good at being a manager or an executive of an organization uh I cared a little bit too much that people didn't get annoyed at me or um mad at me and Elon said that about John McNeil for example who was president of Tesla it's in the book I talked to John McNeil a long time and he says uh you know Elon just would fire people be really rough on people he didn't have the empathy for the people in front of him and Elon says yeah that's right and John McNeil couldn't fire people he cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the entire Enterprise or getting things done being over endowed with a desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager and uh that doesn't mean there aren't great people over in doubt Ben Franklin over endowed with the desire to please people 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 uh but that turned out to be a good thing 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 so to get back to the lessons you asked and you know the first was harness your demons the second is to know your strengths and your superpower my superpower is definitely not being a tough manager 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 uh you know do I have other talents yeah I think I have the talent to observe people really closely to write about it in a straight but I hope interesting narrative style that's a power it's totally different from running an organization 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 situations Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situation 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 he's addicted to intensity um and that's his superpower which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good Observer but I think also uh to build on that it's not just addiction to like Risk and drama there's always a big mission above it so I would say uh it's an empathy towards people in the big picture it's an empathy towards Humanity Humanity more than the empathy towards the three or four humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you and that's a big deal and you see that in a lot of people you see it uh Bill Gates or Larry Summers uh Elon Musk they always have 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 musk as you said is driven by Mission more than any person I've ever seen and it's not only Mission it's like Cosmic missions meaning he's got three really big missions one is to make humans a space-faring civilization make us multi-planetary or get us to Mars 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 um battery packs and third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values and every now and then I'd talk to them and we'd be talking about startling satellites or whatever or he would be pushing the people in front of him in SpaceX and saying if you do this we'll never get to Mars in our lifetime and then he would give the lecture how important it was for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime and I'm thinking okay this is the pep talk of somebody trying to inspire a team or maybe it's a type of of uh pontification you do on a podcast but on like the 20th time I watched them I realized okay I believe it he actually is driven by this his frustrated and angry that because of this particular minor engineering decision the big mission is not going to be accomplished it's not a pep talk it's a literal frustration and impatience of frustration and um it's also just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission 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 they're trying to save the world but they're wearing their underpants on the outside and they look ridiculous and then he paused and said but they are trying to save the world 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 going to play in helping Humanity on big things and like the the characters in the comic books it's sometimes ridiculous but it also is sometimes true when I was reading this part of the book 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 and it's really painful to read but also really damn inspiring that if you sort of walk side by side with those demons 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 well that's um an epic view of why we write biography which is more epic than I'd even thought of so I say thank you because in some ways what you're trying to do is say okay 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 and uh then he wanders off to the town of Florence and he becomes the greatest artist and engineer of the early Renaissance of that part of the Renaissance I hope this book inspires Jennifer Dowden of the gene editing Pioneer who discovers helps discover crispr Gene Eddington which my book The Code Breaker 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 so if people can read the books and I should have said about Jennifer dad and my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor no girls don't do science you know science not for girls you're not going to do math or science and so it pushes her to say all right I'm gonna do math and science let's just interrupt real quick but uh Jennifer Donna you've written an amazing book about her uh Nobel Prize winner crisper developers just incredible one of the great scientists in the 21st century right and I'm talking about when Jennifer doudner was young and she felt really really out of place like you and me and a lot of people when they feel in that way they read books they go into they curl up with the book 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 and she realizes oh my God girls can become scientists my school guidance counselor is wrong 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 and every one of my books is about people who are totally Innovative who weren't just smart because none of us are going to be able to match Einstein and mental processing power but we can be as curious as he was and creative and think out of the box the way he did or Steve Jobs put it think different and so I hope with my books I'm saying uh this isn't a how-to guide but this is somebody you can walk alongside you can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany you can see Jennifer doudner growing up or as an outsider or a 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 any apartheid concert with his brother and there's a a man with a knife sticking out of his head and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their souls this causes you know scars that last the rest of your life and the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred it's you know how do you deal with it Einstein too uh one of my and it's hard to pick my favorite of your um biographies but Einstein I mean you really paint a picture of another I don't want to call him a misfit but a person who doesn't necessarily have a standard trajectory through life of of success so absolutely and it's that's extremely inspiring I don't know exactly what question to ask there's a million well I'll talk about the misfit for a second because you know we talked about Leonardo being that way you know Einstein's Jewish in Germany at the time when it starts getting difficult uh he's slow in learning how to talk and he's a visual thinker so he's always daydreaming and imagining things 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 he gets rejected by the Zurich Polytech now it's the second best school in Zurich and they're rejecting Einstein I tried to find but couldn't the name of the admissions counselor at the apology yeah like you rejected Einstein uh and then he doesn't finish in the top half of his class and once he does and he goes to graduate school they don't accept his dissertation so he can't get a job he's not teaching it he even tries about 14 different high schools gymnasium uh to get a job and they won't take him so he's a third class examiner in the Swiss patent office in 1905. third class because they've rejected his doctoral dissertation and so he can't be second class of first class because he doesn't have a doctoral degree and yet he's sitting there in the stool in the patent office in 1905 and writes three papers that totally transform science and if you're thinking about being misunderstood or unappreciated in 1906 he's still a third class Patrick in 1907 he still is it takes until 1909 before people realized that this notion of the theory of relativity might be correct and it might upend all of Newtonian physics how is it possible for three of the greatest papers in the history of science to be written in one year by this one person is there some insights wisdoms you draw plus he had a day job as a patent examiner 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 uh he does a little addendum that's the most famous equation in all of physics which is E equals m c squared so it's a pretty good year 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 uh some professor at the Academy where he was supposed to follow the rules and so at the patent office that 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 you know Swiss they care if it strikes the hour in Basel it should do the same and burn at the exact answer so you have to send a light signal between two distant clocks and he's visualizing what's it look like to ride alongside a light beam he says well if you catch up with it if you go almost as fast it'll look stationary but Maxwell's equations don't allow for that and he said he's making my palm sweat that I was so worried and so he finally figures out because he's looking these devices to synchronize clocks that if you're traveling really really fast would look synchronous to you or synchronous eyes to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction and he makes a mental leap that time that the speed of light's always constant but time is relative depending on your state of motion so it was that type of out of the box thinking those leaps that made 1905 his miracle year likewise with Musk I mean after General Motors and Ford everybody gives up on electric vehicles 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 and then when it 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 poking fun of him and actually sped on them at one point in a drunken lunch this is very fortuitous because on the ride back home on the plane on the you know Delta Airlines flight he's like doing the calculations of how much materials how much metal how much fuel how much would it really cost and so he's visualizing things that other people would would just say is impossible it's what Steve Jobs's friends called the reality Distortion field and it drove people crazy it drove them mad but it also drove them to do things they didn't think they would be able to do you said visual thinking I wonder if you've seen parallels of the different styles and kinds of thinking that uh that operate the minds of these people so if uh is there parallels you see between Elon Steve Jobs Einstein Da Vinci specifically in how they think I think they were all visual thinkers perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children meaning you know Leonardo was left-handed a little bit dyslexic I think um and certainly Einstein had a career he would repeat things he was slow in learning to talk um so I think visualizing helps a lot and with Musk I say it all the time when I'm walking the factory lines with them or in product development where he'll look at say the heat shield under the Raptor engine of a Starship booster and it'll say why does it have to be this way couldn't we trim it this way or make it or even get rid of this part of it and he can visualize the material science isn't 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. it's a life or death situation and he's looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis and he insists that Drew Bagley uh not Drew but Lars moravi one of his great lieutenants come and they have to summon him and he says why are there six bolts here and Lars and others explain well for the crash tests or anything else the pressure would be in this way so you have to and they were blah blah blah blah blah and he said no if you visualize it you'll see if there's a crash it would the force would go this way and that way and it could be done with four bolts now that sounds risky and they go test and they engineer but it turns out to be right 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 that sounds pretty mundane 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 and of the product the machine that makes the machine and that's what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years we Outsource so much manufacturing I don't think you can be a good innovator if you don't know how to make this stuff you're designing and that's why musk puts his designer's desk right next to the assembly lines and the factories so that they have to visualize what they drew as it becomes the physical object so understanding everything from the physics all the way up to the to the software it's like end to end well having an end-to-end control is important certainly with Steve Jobs I'm looking my iPhone here it's a big deal that Hardware only works with Apple software and for a while the iTunes Store and only what worked you know so he has an end to end that makes it like a Zen Garden in Kyoto very carefully curated but a thing of beauty 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 person funding it they were Outsourcing everything they were making the batteries in Japan and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop in Thailand and that sent to the Lotus Factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise chassis and then that was a nightmare you did not have end-to-end control of the manufacturing process so he goes to the Other Extreme he gets a factory in Fremont from Toyota and he wants to do everything in his the software in-house the painting in-house you know the the the uh battery he makes his own batteries and I think that end-to-end control is part of his personality I mean there's a but it also what allows Tesla uh to be Innovative 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 uh basically getting rid of all sensors that are not uh rich in data to make it AI friendly sort of saying that we can do it all with vision and like you said removing some of the bolts so sometimes it's small things but sometimes it's really big things like getting rid of radar well Vision only getting rid of radar is huge and everybody's against everybody and that's still fighting it a bit they're still trying to do a Next Generation some form of radar but it gets back to the first principles you're talking about visualizing well he starts with the first principles and the first principles are physics uh involve things like well humans drive with only visual input they don't have radar they don't have lidar they don't have sonar 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 now that becomes an Article of Faith to him and he gets a lot of pushback but now and he's by the way not been that successful in meeting his deadlines of getting self-driving he's way too optimistic but it was that first principles of get rid of unnecessary things now you would think lidar why not use it like why not use a crutch it's like yeah we can do things Vision only but when I look at the stars at night I'll use a telescope too well you could use lidar but you can't do millions of cars that way at scale at a certain point you have to make it not only a good product but a product that goes to scale 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 uh take for example full self Drive he has been obsessed with what he calls the robo taxi we're going to build the Next Generation car without a steering wheel without pedals because it's going to be full self-drive you just summon it you won't need to drive it well over and over again all these people I've told you about you know Lars maravi and Drew backlino and others they're saying okay fine that sounds really good but you know it ain't happened yet we need to build a 25 000 Mass Market Global car that's just normal with a steering wheel and yeah he finally turned around a few months ago and said let's do it and then he starts focusing on how's the assembly line going to work how are we going to do it and make it the same platform for robo taxi so you can have the same assembly on likewise for full self Drive they were doing it by coding hundreds of thousands of lines of code that would say things like if you see a red light stop if there's a blinking light if the two yellow lines do this there's a bike lane do this if there's a crosswalk do that well that's really hard to do now he's doing it through artificial intelligence and machine learning only fsd12 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 what did the human do and let's only pick the best humans the five star drivers or the Uber drivers as Elon says and so that's him changing his mind and going to first principles but saying all right I'm even going to change full self-driving so there's not rules based it becomes AI based just like chat GPT doesn't try to answer your question who are the five best popes or something by study chapter by having ingested billions of of uh pieces of writing that people have done this will be AI but real world done by ingesting video sometimes it feels like he and others they're building things in this world successfully are basically uh confidently exploring a dark room with a very confident ambitious Vision with that room actually looks like like they're just walking straight into the darkness there's no painful toys or Legos on the ground I'm just going to walk I know exactly how far the wall is and then very quickly willing to adjust as they run into they step on the Lego and or their their body uh is filled with a lot of pain 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 like to me since you know since a few years ago when you could see with Andre carpathy the software 2.0 evolution of autopilot it became obvious to me that this is not about the car this is about Optimus the robot this this is like if we look back 100 years from now the car will be remembered as a cool car nice Transportation but the the autopilot won't be the thing that controls the car it would be the thing that allows embodied AI systems to understand the world so broadly and so that kind of approach and it's and you kind of stumble into it well Tesla be a a car company will it be an AI company will it be a robotics company will it be a home robotics company will be an energy company and you kind of slowly discover this as you confidently uh like push forward with a vision so it's interesting to watch that kind of evolution as long as it's backed by this confidence there are a couple of things that are required for that one is being adventurous one doesn't enter a dark room without a flashlight and a map unless you're a risk taker unless you're adventurous the second is to have iterative uh brain Cycles where you can process information and do a feedback loop and make it work 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 going to blow things up you know first three rockets that the Falcon rocket that must does they blow up even Starship three and a half minutes but then it blows up the first time 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 and the people who created America whenever they came over you know whether the Mayflower is refugees from the Nazis they took a lot of rest to get here 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 then people willing to innovate and you need both I think you're also right on 50 100 years from now what musk will be most remembered for besides space travel is real world AI not just Optimus the robot but Optimus robot and the self-driving car uh they're they're pretty much the same they're using uh you know GPU clusters or Dojo chips or whatever it may be to process real world data we all got and you did on your podcast quite excited about large language model you know generative uh predictive text AI That's fine especially if you want to chit chat with your chat bot but the Holy Grail is artificial general intelligence and the tough part of that is real world AI and that's where Optimus the robot or full self Drive or I think far ahead of anybody else well I like how you said Chit Chat uh I I would say for for one of the greatest writers ever it's funny that you spoke about language and the Mastery of languages as merely chit chat you know people have fallen in love over some words people have gone to Wars over some Wars I think Wars have a lot of power It's actually an interesting question where the wisdom of the world the wisdom of humanity is in words or is it in visual in visual is it in the physical I don't really it's in mathematics it might maybe it all boils down to math and in the end this kind of discussion about uh real world AI versus language is all the same maybe I've um gotten a chance to hang out quite a bit in the metaverse with Mr Mark Zuckerberg recently and boy is the realism in there or the new like the the thing that's coming up in the future is incredible I got uh scanned uh in uh Pittsburgh for 10 hours into the metaverse and there's like a a virtual version of me and I got to hang out with that virtual version do you like yourself well I I never like myself but it was easier to like that other guy that was interesting because I like you he didn't seem to care much it's actually lack of the empathy but that was you know it made me start to question even more than before like well how important is this physical reality because I I got to see you know my myself and other people in that metaverse like the details of the face the 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 then others all those things were beautiful and it was like it was real and it was intense and it it uh it was scary because you're like well are you allowed to murder people in the metaverse because like are you allowed to because what are you allowed to do because you can replicate a lot of those things and it's you start to question what are the fundamental things that make life worth living here as we know as humans have you talked to Elon about his views of we're living in a simulation maybe and how you would figure out if that's true yes there's a constant light-hearted but also a serious sense that this is all a bit of a game one of my theories on Elon a minor theory is that he read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy once too often yeah and as you know there's a scene in there that says uh that there's a theory about the universe that if anybody ever discovers the secrets and meanings of the universe it will be replaced by an even more complex universe and then the next line Douglas Adams writes is and there's another theory that this has already happened so I'm gonna try to get my head around that but I know that Elon Musk tries to well there there's a humor to that there's an enormous humor to Hitchhiker's Guide 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 I wonder if this is a smaller side we could say just uh I haven't gotten to know Elon very well because the the silliness the willingness to engage in the absurdity of it all and have fun what is that what is that uh is that just a quirk of Personality or is that a fundamental aspect of a human who's running six plus companies well it's a relief valve just like video games and politopia and Elden ring or release valves for him um and he does have an explosive sense of humor as you know and the weird thing is when he makes the abrupt transition from dark demon mode and you're in the conference room and he has really become upset about something and not only their dog Vibes but there's dark words emanating and he's saying your resignation will be accepted if you die you know Etc and then something pops and he pulls out his phone and pulls up a Bonnie Python's get you know like the school of silly walks or whichever John Cleese and he starts laughing again and things break so it's 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 getting mode yeah you've actually opened the Elon book with the quotes from Elon and from Steve Jobs so elon's quote is to anyone of offended I just want to say this is an SNL I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship did you also think I was going to be a chill normal dude 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 so um what do you think is the role of the old uh Madness and genius what do you think they're all crazy in this well first of all let's both stipulate that musk is crazy at times I mean and then let's figure out and I try to do it through storytelling not through highfalutin preaching uh where that craziness works you know give me a story tell me another go tell me where he's crazy and you know the almost final example uh AI but him shooting off Starship for the first time uh and between an aborted countdown and the shoot-off he goes to Miami to an ad sales conference and meets Linda yaccarino for the first time make sure the CEO I mean there's a very impulsiveness to him then he flies back they launch Starship and you realize that there's a drive and there are demons and there's also craziness and you sometimes want to pull those out you want to take away his phone so he doesn't tweet at 3am you want to say quit being so crazy but then you realize there's a wonderful line of Shakespeare and measure for measure at the very end he says even the best are molded out of faults and so you take the faults of musk for example which includes a craziness that can be endearing but also craziness that's just like effing crazy uh as well as this drive and Demon mode I don't know that you can take that strand out of the fabric and the fabric remains whole 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 as comes in one package it's the man in the arena versus the critic and the Man in the rain versus the regulator and to make it more prosaic um well let me ask about not just the crazy but the cruelty so in um you've written when reporting as Steve Jobs was told you that the big question to ask was did he have to be so mean so rough and cruel so drama addicted uh what is this answer for Steve Jobs did he have to be so cruel for for jobs I asked was at the end of my reporting because that's what he asked said at the beginning we're doing the launch of I think the iPad 2 it may have been Steve is emaciated because you know he's been sick and so I said it was what's the answer to your question and he said well if I had been running Apple I would have been nicer to everybody everybody got stock options and we've been like a family and then I I don't know if you know Wise he's like a teddy bear he paused he smiled and he said but if I'd been running Apple I don't think we would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone so yeah you have to sometimes be rough and job said the same thing that musk said to me which is he said people like you love wearing velvet gloves no I don't know that I've worn velvet cloths often but you like people to like you you like to sweet talk things you sugarcoat things he says I'm just a working class kid and I don't have that luxury if something sucks I got to tell people it sucks or I got a team of B players well musk is that way as well and it gets back to what I said earlier which is yeah I probably would wear velvet gloves if I could find them at my haberdasher uh and I do try to sugarcoat things but when I was running CNN it needed to be reshaped it needed to be broken it needed to have certain things blown up and I didn't do it you know so bad on me but it made me realize okay I'll just write about the people who can do it 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 by the way I've heard Jeff Bezos say that I've heard Bill Gates say that I've heard Steve Jobs say it I've heard Steve Jobs saying about a smoothie they were making it a whole food or something I mean people they use the word stupid really often and you know who else used it Errol musk 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 um I don't know you know as John McNeil the president of Tesla said do you have to be that way probably not there are a lot of successful people who are much kinder but um it's sometimes necessary to be much more brutal and honest brutally honest I would say than people like or when Boss Of The Year trophies well as you said this kind of idea did also send a signal this idea of Steve Jobs of eight players it did send a signal to everybody it was a kind of encouragement to the people that are all in right and that happened to Twitter when we went to Twitter headquarters the day before the Takeover he was having Andrew and um James as two young cousins and other people from the autopilot team going over lines of code and musk himself sat there with a laptop on the second floor of the building looking at the lines of code that had been written by Twitter engineers and they decided they were going to fire 85 percent of them because they had to be all in and this notion of psychological safety and mental days off and working remotely he said either and then it came up uh actually one of his um 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 let's ask them do you really want to be all in because this is going to be hardcore it's going to be intense you get to choose but by midnight tonight we want you to check the box I'm hardcore all in I'll be there in person I'll work you know as much or that's not for me I've got a family I got work balance and you got different type of people that way and different stages of their life I was a little bit more hardcore and all in when I was in my 20s than when I was you know in my 50s and you write about this it's a really nice idea actually that there's two camps and you find out I don't I wonder how true this is it it rings true you can just ask people which Camp are you in are you the kind of person that Prides themselves and enjoy staying up to 2 A.M programming or whatever or do you see the value of quote-unquote you know about life work life balance all this kind of stuff and it's interesting I mean you like you could people probably divide themselves in different stages in life and you can just ask them and it makes sense for certain companies in certain stages of their development to be like uh we always have teams it doesn't even have to be whole company 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 uh everything comes from Plato and Socrates but um and decide on this stage of my life am I do I want to be a hackathon all in all night and change the world or do I want to bring wisdom and stability but also have balance I think it's good to have different companies with different styles the problem was Twitter was at almost one extreme with yoga studios and mental health days off and uh enshrining psychological safety as one of the mantras that people should never feel psychologically threatened and he a member of the bitter laugh he Unleashed when he kept hearing that word he said no I like the words hardcore I like intensity I like a intense sense of urgency as our operating principle well yeah they're people that way as well and so know who you are and know what type of Team you want to build versus psychological safety and too many birds everywhere oh yeah a lot of times musk did things I go what the hell yeah and among them was changing the name Twitter and getting rid of the birds hey man there's a lot invested in that brand but when I watched him he thought okay these sweet little chirpy birds tweeting away in the name Twitter it's not hardcore it's not intense and so for better and for worse I think he's taking Acts into the hardcore realm with people who post hardcore things with people with hardcore views it's not a a polite playpen for the blue checked anointed Elite and I thought okay this is going to be bad the whole thing's gonna fall apart well it has had problems but the hardcore intensity of it is also meant that there's new things happening there so it's very Elon Musk to not like this sweetness of birds chirping and tweeting and saying I want something more hardcore as you've written in uh referring to the the previous Twitter CEO Elon said Twitter needs a a fire breathing dragon I think this is a good opportunity to um maybe go through some of the memorable moments of the Twitter Saga as you've written about extensively in your book like from the early days of considering the acquisition to uh how it went through to the details of uh like you mentioned the engineering teams well at the beginning of 2022 he was riding high but as we say he's a drama addict he doesn't like the ghost and you know Tesla told a million vehicles I think 33 boosters you know uh uh Falcon nines have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months um and he was the richest person on Earth and times person of the year and yet he said you know I'm still want to put all my chips back on the table I want to keep taking rest I don't want to savor things he had sold all of his houses so he started secretly buying shares of Twitter January February March becomes public at a certain point he has to declare it and we were here in Austin that gigafactory on the mezzanine and he was trying to figure out well where do I go from here and at that time it was early April they were going to offer him a board seat and he was going to do a standstill agreement and stop at 10 or something now remember you know we were standing around it was Luke nozick whom you know well Ken howery some of his friends on that mezzanine here and all afternoon and then late into the evening at dinner is like should we do this and I didn't say anything I'm just the Observer but everybody else is saying excuse me why do you want to own Twitter and Griffin his son joined it down in May for some reason was in town and like everybody says no we don't use Twitter why would you do that and may said well I use Twitter and it's almost like okay the demographics are people my age or May's aide um and so it looked like he wasn't going to pursue it they offered him a board seat and um then he went off to Hawaii to Larry Ellison's house which he sometimes uses he was meeting a friend Angela Bassett an actress and instead of enjoying three days of vacation he just became supercharged and started firing off text messages including the fire breathing dragon on me I think 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 and then by the time he gets to Vancouver where Grimes meets him they stay up all night playing Eldon ring he was doing a TED talk and then uh at 5 30 he finished his playing the Eldon ring and sends out that I've made an offer uh even when he comes back people are trying to intervene and say excuse me why are you doing it um and so it was a rocky period between late April and October when the deal closes and people ask me all the time well did he want to get out of the deal I said which Elon are you talking about at what time of day because there'll be times in the morning when he'd say oh the Delaware Court's going to force me to do it it's horrible talk to his lawyers you can win this case get me out of it he met here in Austin with three or four investment bankers Blair Ephron it's interview Bob Steele at perella Weinberg and they offered him options do you want to get out do you want to stay in do you want to reduce the price and I think his he was Mercurial there were times he would text me or say to me this is going to be great it's going to be the accelerant to do x.com the way we thought about 20 years ago uh and so it's not until they finally tell them at the beginning of October right when Optimus the robot is being unveiled in California actually um that the lawyer is saying you're not going to probably win this case but better go through with the deal and by then he's not only made his peace with it he's kind of happy with it at times eventually the deal is going to close on a I think a uh 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 and he and his lawyers and bankers hatched a plan to do a flash close and the reason for that was if they closed the deal after the markets had closed for the day and he could send a letter to parag and two others firing them quote for cause and this will be something the courts will have to figure out uh then he could save 200 million or so and it was both the money but for him a matter I won't say a principle but of hey they misled me about the numbers I got forced into doing it so I'm gonna I'm gonna try this Jiu Jitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them then when he takes over it's kind of a wild scene um him trying to decide in three different rounds how to get the staff down to 15 percent of what it was him deciding on Christmas Eve after he'd been in a meeting where they told him we can't get rid of that Sacramento server Farm because it's native of redundancy he says no it's not and he's flying here to Austin and young James says why don't we just do it ourselves he turns the plane around they land in Sacramento and he pulls him out himself so it was a manic period we should also say that underneath of that there was a a running desire to or consideration to perhaps start a new uh companies to build the social media company from scratch well Kimball wanted to do that and Kimball here at a wonderful restaurant in Austin of launches like hey why are you buying Twitter let's start one from scratch and do it on the blockchain yeah now it took them a while and you can argue it one way or the other to come to the conclusion that the blockchain was not fast enough in responsive time enough to be able to handle a billion tweets you know in a day or so he gets mad when they keep trying to get him to talk to Sam bankman freed who's trying to say I'll invest but we have to do it on the blockchain Kimball is still in favor of starting a new one and doing it on uh blockchain based in retrospect I think starting a new Media Company would have been better he wouldn't have had the baggage or the Legacy that he's breaking now in Breaking the way Twitter had been but it's hard to have millions and millions hundreds of millions of true true users not just trolls and start from scratch as others have found as Mastodon and blue sky and threads and not any threads even had a base so it would have been hard yeah and uh to do that in the way he did requires uh 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 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 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 and he said this can't be the case and he fired 85 percent in three different rounds the first was 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 ever of all that was written in the past year or so then he fired people you know who didn't seem to be totally all in or loyal and then another round of layoffs so uh at each step of the way almost everybody said that's enough it's going to destroy things yeah uh from Alex Sparrow his lawyer to Jared Burchell he's like whoa whoa whoa you know and even Andrew and James the young cousins who are tasked with making a list and figuring out who's good or bad saying we've done enough we're going to be in real trouble and they were partly right I mean there was degradation of the service sum but not as much as half the services I use half the time you know and I wake up each morning and hit the app and okay still there what do you think was that too much I think that he has an algorithm that we mentioned earlier that begins with question every requirement but it's up to is delete delete delete every part there 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 tempted well so you asked me did he overdo it he probably overdid it by 20 percent which is his formula and they're probably trying to hire people now to keep things going but it sends a strong signal to people that are hired back or the people that are still there the the API and what Steve Jobs and many other great leaders felt and certainly Bezos and certainly in the early days of Microsoft Bill Gates it was Hardcore only a players so how much of Elon success would you say elon's uh Steve Jobs's success is the hiring and managing of great teams 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 he said no those products are hard the best thing I ever created was the team that made those products and that's the hard part is creating a team and he did you know from Johnny Ive to Tim Cook and at EQ and Phil Schiller Elon has done a good job bringing in people Gwen Shotwell obviously Linda yaccarino she's you know can navigate through the current crises uh certainly Stellar people at SpaceX like Moncton Cosa and then at Tesla like Drew backlino and Lars maravi and Tom Zhu and many others um he's not as much of a team collaborator essay Benjamin Franklin who by the way that's the best team ever created which is the founders 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 a guy of higher 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 musk is a magnet for awesome Talent magnet interesting but there's the there's like the priorities of hiring of um based on Excellence trustworthiness and drive these are things you described throughout the book I mean there there's a pretty uh concrete and rigorous the set of ideas based on which the hiring is done oh yeah and he has a very good Spidey uh intuitive sense just looking at people who could I mean not looking at them but studying them who could be good one of his uh uh ways of operating is what he calls a skip level meeting and let's take a very specific thing like the Raptor engine which is powering the um Starship and it wasn't going well it looked like a spaghetti Bush and it was going to be hard to manufacture and he got rid of the people who were in charge of that team and now remember that he spent a couple of months doing what he called 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 and so he would skip a level and meet with them and he said this is and I just ask them what they're doing and I drill them with questions and he said this is how I figure out who's going to emerge he said it was particularly difficult I was sitting in those meetings because people were wearing masks it was doing the height of covid uh and he said it made it a little bit harder for him because he has to get the input but I watched as a young kid dreadlocks named Jacob McKenzie he's in the book is sitting there and he's a bit like you engineering mindset speaks in a bit of a monotone musk would ask a question and he would give an answer and the answer would be very straightforward and he didn't you know get rattled he was like this it must said one day called him up at three well let's say three a.m but after midnight said you still around yeah Jake said yeah I'm still at work and he said okay I'm Gonna Make You in charge of the team building Raptor and that was like a big surprise but Jacob McKenzie has now gotten a version of raptor and when they're building him at least one a week and they're pretty awesome and um that's where his talent must Talent for finding the right person and promoting them that's where it is and promoting it in a way where it's like here's the ball here catch yeah yeah and you run with it I have I've interacted with quite a few uh folks from even just the model X the the all throughout where people you know on paper don't seem like they would be able to run the thing and they run it extremely successfully and he does it wrong sometimes he's had a horrible track record with the solo roof division wonderful guy named Brian Dow I really liked him uh and when they were doing the battery Factory surge in Nevada uh musk got rid of two or three people and there's Brian Dow can do can do can do stays up all night and he gets promoted and runs it and so finally goes uh musk goes through two or three people running the solo roof division finally calls up Brian down I was sitting in Moss house in Boca Chica that little tiny two-bedroom he has and he offers Brian Dow the job of running solar roof and you know buying their okay can do can do and two or three times musk insisted that they put install a solar roof in one of those houses in Boca Chica this is this tiny village at the south end of Texas 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 and and Brian was just sweating and doing everything but then after a couple of months it wasn't going well and boom uh musk just fired him so I always try to learn what is it that makes those who stay thrive what's the lesson there what do you think well I think it's self-knowledge like an Andy Krebs or others they say uh I am hardcore I really want to get a rocket to Mars and that's more important than anything else uh one of the people I think it's I think it's Tim Zaman I hope uh when he hears this I'm getting him the right person who you know took time it was working for Tesla autopilot and it was just so intense he took some time off and and then went to another company he said I was burned out at Tesla but then I was bored at the next place so I called I think it was Ashok it I said can I come back he said sure he said I've learned about myself I'd rather be burned out than born that's a good line um well can you just uh Linger on one of the three that seemed interesting to you in in terms of Excellence trustworthiness and drive which one do you think is is the most important and the hardest to get at the trustworthiness is an interesting one like are you ride or die kind of thing yeah I think that especially when it came to taking over Twitter he thought half the people there were disloyal and he was wrong about two-thirds were disloyal not just that and it was how do we weed out those and he did something and made um the firing squad I call it or the Musketeers I think is my nickname for them which is you know the young cousins and two or three other people he made them look at the slack messages these people had post everybody at Twitter and posted and they went through hundreds of slack messages so if anybody posted on the internal Slack you know that jerk Elon Musk is going to take over and I'm afraid that he's a maniac or something they would be on the list because they want all in loyal uh 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 but that's more than I would have done or most people would have done and so that was to figure out who's deeply committed and loyal I think that was mainly the case at Twitter he doesn't sit around at SpaceX saying who's loyal to me at um other places it's excellent but that's pretty well a given everybody is like a mark jencosa just whip smart it's all you hardcore and all in especially if you have to move to this spit of a town in the South Tip of Texas called Boca Chica you know you got to be all in yeah and that's the drive the the last piece so you in terms of collaborating one of the great teams of all time Ben Franklin I like that um I thought it was the Beatles but Bank Franklin is pretty good no no no no no no I'm sorry yeah I'm sorry to offend you so read the Constitution and read Abby Road look at Abbey Road they're both good but they're in a different League yeah different League okay so uh one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management um is there something you could say about Ben Franklin and about um Steve Jobs I think interesting with Elon is that he as you write uh run six companies depends how you count startling because its own thing I don't know um what can you say about these people in terms of time management well musk is in a league of his own and the way he does it first of all yeah Steve Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while but musk every couple of hours is switching his mindset from 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 on the night that the Twitter board uh agreed to the deal this is huge around the world I'm sure you'll remember like musk buys Twitter it wouldn't win the deal closed it was when the Twitter accepted is offer and I thought okay 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 and what were the possible ways to fix it and all the engineers in that room I assume are thinking about this guy just bought Twitter should we say something and he's like and then he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint uh in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing really him being there one of the things that one of his strengths and sort of weaknesses in a way is in a given day he'll Focus serially sequentially on many different things he will worry about uh 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 and when he's focused on any of these things you cannot distract him it's not like he's also thinking about I'm dealing with starlink but I've got to also worry about the Tesla decision on the new 25 000 car now he'll in between these sessions process information then let off steam and for better or worse he lets off steam by either playing a friend in politopia or fire off some tweets which is often not a healthy thing but it's a release for him and he doesn't I once said he was a great multitasker and that was a mistake people corrected me 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 palette cleanser yeah he does some palette cleanser with polytopia yeah and then focuses on the next task I mean is there some wisdom about time management that you can draw from that there are some things that these people do and you say okay I can be that way I can be more Curious I can question every Rule and regulation I I just don't think anybody to try to emulate musk time management style because it takes a certain set of teams you 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 uh you and I go through Transitions and also if I'm thinking about what I'm going to say on this podcast I'm also thinking about the email my daughter just sent about a house that she's looking you know and I'm I'm multitasking he doesn't actually do that he single tasks sequentially with a focus that's hardcore I don't know I think there's wisdom to draw from that to like first of all he makes me Ben Franklin makes me feel that way that there's a lot of hours in the day there's a lot of minutes in the day like there's no excuse not to get a lot done and that requires just an extreme Focus an extreme focus in like an urgency I think the fierce urgency that drives him is important and it's sometimes gend up like I say the fierce urgency of getting to Mars and on a Friday night at the launch pad in Boca Chica at 10 pm there are only a few people working because it's a Friday night they're not supposed to launch for another eight months and he orders The Surge he says I want 200 people here by tomorrow working on this pad we have to have a fierce sense of urgency or we will never get to Mars that sense of urgency you know is also a vibrancy that's like really taking on life fully I mean that to me this the lesson is like even the mundane can be full of this just richness and like you just have to really uh take it in intensely so like the switching enables that kind of intensity because most of us can't hold that intense than any one tasks for a prolonged period of time maybe that's also a lesson right and I guess it goes back to also know who you are meaning there are people who can focus intensely and there are people who can see patterns across many things look Leonardo da Vinci he was not all that focused he was easily distracted it's why he has more unfinished paintings and finished paintings in his Canon yeah um but his ability to see patterns across nature and to in some ways process procrastinate be distracted that helped him some but musk is in not that way and there every few months as a new surge 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 you know 100 solar roofs built or this has to be done by tomorrow or make a Starship dome by Dawn and Surge and do it um and there are people who are built that way it is inspiring but also let's appreciate you know that there are people who can be really good uh but uh also can savor the success Savor the moment Savor the quiet sometimes must big failing is he can't save her the moment or success and that's the flip side of Hardcore intensity in uh innovators another book of yours that I love you write about individuals and about groups so one of the questions the book addresses is is it individuals or is it groups that turn the tides of History 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 I thought that history was determined by great forces and groups of people but when I see it up close I see what a difference an individual can make he's talking about Sadat and Golda May are probably talking about himself too or at least in his mind and um we biographers have this dirty secret that we know we distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by an individual but sometimes it is driven by an individual mask is a case like that and sometimes as I did with the innovators there's teams and people build on each other and Gordon Moore and Bob Noyes than 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 and so sometimes they're flows of forces and groups of people I guess I air a little bit on the side of looking at what is Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Albert Einstein can do and 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 that's a good historical question as uh it's you know somebody loves history and you think about special relativity one of the 1905 papers 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 and on the general theory which he does a decade later I'm not sure we would gotten that yet uh 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 uh the internet in your pocket and the phone uh there are a lot of brain dead people are from Panasonic to Motorola who didn't get that and it may have been a while I certainly think it's true of the era of electric vehicles Jim and Ford all the great people there they crushed the boat and I mean that literally they ended up smashing them because they decided to discontinue it likewise nobody was sending up Rockets our space shuttle was about to be grounded 12 years ago and so musk does things and they'll be people who say and read the book if they read the book they'll see the full story but they say it wasn't musk who did Tesla it was Martin Eberhard or Mark tarponing no no no you know there were people who had helped create you know the shells of companies and other things and they were all deserved to be called co-founders but the guy who actually gets us to a million electric vehicles a year is Elon musking without him I don't think we look if anybody five years is from now buys a car that's gasoline powered well think that's quaint you know that's odd I mean suddenly we've changed we're not going to do it ninety percent of that is Elon Musk we're all mortal when and how do you think Elon will retire from the insanely productive schedule he's on now I would think that he would hate to retire I think that he can't live without the pressure the drama they all in feeling um it's never been anything that seemed to have crossed his mind he's never said maybe I love Larry Ellison's house on the beach in Hawaii maybe I should spend time in doing instead he says things like I learned early on that vacations will kill you he gets malaria when he goes on one big I mean he goes on vacation at one point and they oust him from PayPal and then he goes to Africa one boy he gets malaria he says I've learned vacations kill you lesson learned well it's interesting because the projects are 100 plus year projects many of these one of the weird things is watching him think incredibly long term one of the meetings every week early on when I was watching him was Mars colonizer and we did to a two-hour meeting about what would the governance structure be on Mars what would people wear how would the robots work and would there be democracy or should there be a different form of governance I'm sitting there saying what are they doing what are they talking about they're trying to build rocket ships and everything else they are worrying about the governance structure of Mars and likewise whenever he's in an intense Moment Like There's a Rocket's about to be launched he'll start asking people it's not in the way future like the new leaked engine or something if we're going to build that do we have enough materials ready to order or I don't know he'll just ask questions like when he's building Robo taxi the global car the 25 000 inexpensive Global car that's not a total passion he was talked into doing that his passion is Robo taxis but his passion is how are we going to make this Factory to do a million cars a year so even the robo taxi is a longer range Vision I mean he's been touting it since 2016. but you know we're not I don't know Robo taxis I mean there's waymo may be doing a little experiments but there's not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways yet so he's always looking way into the future as my point I just hope that uh there's a lot of Da Vinci's and Steve Jobs's and Einsteins and Elon musk's that carry the the flame forward 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 code breaker about Jennifer doudna you say okay I can be that and when you say oh maybe I'll be a regulator or you say oh no maybe I'll be the person who pushes the boundaries who pushes the lines who pushes as Steve Jobs said the human race well let me ask you about your mind your Genius your process I'll give you two out of three all right uh take me through your process of writing a biography I mean the the full of it and not just writing a biography but understanding deeply which your books have done for the human story and like the bigger ideas underline the human story 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 well step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works um what causes Einstein to make that leap free-line musk to say stainless steel while he's looking at a carbon fiber Rob rocket or how do you make the mental leap because I write about smart people smart people are a dime a dozen they don't usually amount to much you have to be creative imaginative to think different as Jobs would say and so what makes people creative what makes them take imaginative leaps that's the key question you gotta ask 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 so you look at all that and you try to observe really carefully uh the person of one of the more mundane things I do is a lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions and preach or whatever uh as I said this Mentor said two people types come out preacher's storytellers be a Storyteller um I try whenever I'm trying to convey a thought there's six magic words that I almost should have written on a card penned above my desk which is let me tell you a story so if somebody says how does Elon Musk figure out good talent as you did I think well let me tell you the story I'll tell you the story of Jake McKenzie or this is not something I invented I mean this is where the good Lord does it in the Bible I mean has the best openings lead sentence ever you know in the beginning comma and then it's stories and secondly to pick up on that lead sentence in the beginning make it chronological everybody in the 40th year of their life has grown from the 39th year and the 38th year and so you want to show how people evolve and grow I had the greatest of all non-fiction narrative editors Alice Mayhew at Simon Schuster who among other things created All the President's Men with wood and burns 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 keep it chronological if it's good enough of the Bible it's good enough for you interesting to me like that's a small note but to you it's it's extremely important 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 and that moral growth creative growth risk-taking growth wisdom that's the Essences of creativity but you can't do it uh you know there's a Tom buildings woman you know which is a you know book of you know that carries a narrative and tells how people learn something I'm a big believer in narrative 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 one was uh having a great person theory of history in which you decide to do biography I had a great Professor when I was in college her name was Doris Kearns she later married dick Goodwin and she when she was going for tenure at the University photobiography of Lyndon Johnson and The American Dream and they denied her tenure because it was beneath the Dignity of the academy to write history through one person uh that's great it opened up the field of biography to us non-academics uh starting with David McCullough Bob Carroll but maybe John Meacham and myself are in a new generation and certainly there's a generation coming after us but the second thing besides telling it through people which is the academy tended to disdain what they called imposing a narrative in which you made it storytelling because that meant you were leaving things out and making it into a narrative well that's how we form our views of the world well let me ask you this question in terms of gathering and understanding how much of it is one observing and how much of it is interviews yeah um and obviously depends on the subject I mean whether Ben Franklin it's all based on archives and every of course we have 40 volumes of letters he wrote that was the good old days when every day you'd write 20 letters 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 you know even when he'd be sitting playing polytopia or seething at other people you know he had me just sitting there watching I mean I spent a lot of time with Jennifer Dowden in her side I went to her lab and edited a human gene and you know with a pipette and a test tube but I would say I spent 30 hours with her I can't count you know 100 hours or more just observing Musk and I'm not sure that any biographer perhaps since Boswell took on Dr Johnson has ever had quite as much up close meaning five feet away at all times access 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 it's not about me is that 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 what about the interviews you've had a lot of conversations uh you give acknowledgment to the people you've you've done interviews with uh well one I have to ask as an inspiring interviewer myself uh how people love to talk people just love you know that and I've had 140 maybe 150 people they're all listening back one of the little things that people won't notice but I'll say it now is all of them are on the record getting them to talk is easy they all want to talk about musk but then at a certain point say I don't put Anonymous quotes in my book I cite things 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 somebody will tell me so I say oh no no I don't enjoy but I think it's important to know where everything came from and with mosque it's you know I had that from the very beginning because I was a Time Magazine reporter I'd worked reporter for the Times Picayune on New Orleans I first day on the job I had to go cover a murder and uh 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 I went no Billy I mean the family you know the daughter just got he said go knock on the door I knocked on the door an hour later they were still talking they were bringing me out her yearbooks lesson one I learned people want to talk if you're willing to just listen and whether it be Henry Kissinger you just push the button and say kiss and Jordan people tell you the stories all the way through Elon Musk everybody talked everybody in his family everybody he fired everybody I mean I think it's important to listen to people 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 Rosser the late NBC guy they do what was called door knocking you just walk in the neighborhood knock on a door and ask people about the election but they said here's the secret don't ask any leading questions don't have any premise just say hey I'm trying to figure out this election what's going on what do you think and then stay silent but musk a third secret you know this well he'll go silent at times sometimes a minute two minutes four minutes don't try to fill the silences if you're a listener you gotta learn okay he's not shining thing for four minutes I can Outlast him it's tough It's as humans it's very tough respecting the silence is really really difficult I've speaking of demons when there's silence all the demons show up in my head oh dear the fear I think is if I if I don't say anything it's boring and if I say something it's going to be stupid that that the basic engine that just keeps running not on the podcast well on the podcast but also in human interaction and so I think there's that nervous energy when interacting with people you can never go wrong by staying silent if if there's nothing you have to say not something I've mastered but I do when I'm a reporter try to master that which is don't don't ask complex questions don't interject and when somebody hasn't fully answered the question don't say well let me I haven't fully just stay silent and then they'll keep talking just give them a chance to keep talking even if they've kind of finished you're still sometimes they haven't given you enough instead of following up I'll just nod and key Point you're making it sound simple is there a secret to getting people to open up more I'm somewhat lucky because you know I started off working for a Daily newspaper and people back then they want to talk to the newspaper report but you also have a way about you like I feel like you have uh like a cowboy in a saloon like you just kind of want to talk like there's a draw I don't know I don't know what it is maybe this I don't know if it's developer you're born with it but there's a it feels like I want to tell you a story of some sort good tell me a story a couple things I did learn to be more quiet I'm sure I know when I was younger or even I'll see videos of me at you know it news things where I'm always trying to interject a question and so you learn to be quieter sometimes I haven't mastered it I haven't learned it enough you learn to be naturally curious many reporters today when they ask a question or either trying to play gotcha or trying to get a news scoop or trying to you know gig something that can make a lead and if you actually are curious and you really want to know the answer to a question then people can tell that you asked it because you want the answer not because you're playing a game with them I'm sure some of them off the Record some of them on the records you had maybe you know what just some incredible conversations I was going to say some of the greatest conversations ever but who knows some of the best conversations ever are probably somewhere in South America between two drunk people that we never get to hear so I don't I don't know but uh is there a device you can give from what you've learned to somebody like me and how to have good conversation especially when it's recorded well do we actually curious 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 to be open and not to have an agenda I mean we all suffer from there being too many agendas in the world today yeah so they're just genuine curiosity but um there's something when you talk about just one-on-one interaction whether it's Elon or Steve Jobs or there's something beautiful about that person's mind and it feels like it's possible to reveal that to discover that together uh efficiently and that's kind of the goal of a conversation well I mean look you're amongst the top podcasters and interviewers you know in the world today you have an earnestness to you um Ben Franklin is the person who taught me I mean by reading him the most about on conversation he wrote a wonderful essay on that it includes on silence uh But it includes trying to ask sincere questions rather than get a point across I mean it's somewhat Socratic but whenever he wondered I wanted to like start a fireman's core 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 what would it take what would be good 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 like as Joe said you know the real problem is this and I do think that if I'm in situations and I just mean even a dinner or something I'm with somebody I'm usually curious and I'll the conversation will proceed you know with with questions and I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing whoever I happen to be with and tell you that's a Talent you you have which is you're pretty genuine in your interests the people like Benjamin Franklin like the 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 uh that was a Ben Franklin that was a Leonardo trick which is they wanted to know everything you could possibly know about every subject knowable but there's a different aspect of this which is um that I would love to hear how you've solved it or if you faced it that you're certainly disarming uh see I'm like uh pepperoni with compliments here trying to get you that's a very disarming method yeah I've recently talked to Benjamin Netanyahu we'll we'll talk again we unfortunately because of scheduling and complexities only had one hour which is very difficult very difficult with the charismatic politician Minister I understand this but he's also a charismatic talker which is very difficult to break through in one hour but there people have 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 um I wonder if there's some advice some wisdom you've learned on how to uh sort of wear down through water or whatever whatever method the the walls that we've built up as individuals 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 and you know when people have a shield and you try to give them Comfort I had zero of that problem with Elon Musk I mean it was like disarming to me which is I kept waiting to say okay he's not gonna always they've got a shell or he won't do that but he was um almost crazily open and did not seem to uh want to be spinning or hiding or faking things um and I've been lucky daltona was that way Steve Jobs was that way but you have to put in time too in other words um you can't say okay there's a one hour interview and I'm gonna break down every wall it's like on your fifth visit yes well actually it was one of the things in my situation you learn fifth visit is very nice but sometimes you don't get a fifth visit sometimes it's just the first date and um I think what it boils down to and we said disarming but there's something about this person that you trust I think a lot of it just boils down to trust in some deep human way and I think uh with with uh with many other people I've spoken with sometimes the trust happens like after the interview which is really sad because it's like oh man I've never been in your situation where I have a show I usually have I'm not a first date person yeah yeah well you know but then I'm lucky I mean I'm in I say lucky but I'm in print you know print is a couple thousand Euro medium but they're those of us who love it well the nature of the podcast medium is that I'm a one one night stand kind of girl uh let me ask you about objectivity you've followed Elon and it follows like you're I mean I don't know if you would say your friend you have to be careful with words like that but you're there's an intimacy um and how do you remain objective do you want to remain objective while telling a deeply human story yeah I mean I want to be honest which I think is akin to being objective uh I try to keep in mind who's who am I writing for I'm not writing for Elon Musk as I say I haven't sent them the book I don't know if he I don't think he's read it yet um I've got one person I'm writing for the open-minded reader and 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 it will the reader and have a better understanding because I've put this story in the book I'm a bit of a romantic so to me even your Einstein book yeah had lessons on on romance and relationships oh dear so how important are romantic relationships to the success of Great Men great women great minds well sometimes people who affect the course of humanity have better relationships with Humanity than they do with the humans sitting around them Einstein had two interesting relationships with wives That's what you know maleva his first wife was a sounding board and help with the mathematics of the special relativity paper in particular um but he didn't treat it well I mean he uh made her like sign a bladder that she wasn't interrupt him she wouldn't you know and finally when she wanted a divorce he couldn't afford it because he was still a patent Clerk and so uh he offered her a deal which is I think totally amazing he said one of these days one of those papers from 1905 is going to win the Nobel Prize if we get a divorce uh you know I'll give you the money um that was a lot of money back then like a million dollars now or something and she's smart she's a scientist she consults with a few other scientists and after a week or so she takes the bat it's not until what 1919 that he wins his Nobel Prize uh and she gets all the money she buys three apartment buildings in Zurich uh with his second wife Elsa it was more a partnership of convenience it was not a romantic love but he knew and that sometimes what people need in life is just a partner I mean somebody who's going to handle the stuff you're not going to handle so I guess if you look at my books they're not great inspiring guides to personal relationships let me ask you about actually the process of writing itself when you've observed when you've listened when you've collected all the information what's uh maybe even just the silly mundane question of uh what do you eat for breakfast before you start writing when do you write first of all breakfast is not my favorite meal and those people who tell you that you have to start with a hearty breakfast I uh look Askins yes uh and morning is not my favorite day part it's all right at night 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 a hundred pages but everything's in order in other words if we sort 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 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 don't get ahead of the story don't have to flash back um and then after you get it so that it's all chronologically nothing then you have to do some clustering you know you have to say okay we're going to do the decision to do Starship or to build a factory in Texas or to whatever and then you sometimes have the organizational problem of yeah and that gets us all the way up to here do I keep that in this that chapter or do I wait until later when it's better chronologically but those are easy well what about the actual process of telling the story 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 yeah and then I find the actual anecdote the story the tale that encompasses what I'm trying to convey and then I don't say what I'm trying to convey I don't have a transition sentence that says you know Elon sometimes changed his mind so often he couldn't remember whether he had changed his mind you know you know you don't need transition sentences you just say all right here's the point I need to make next and so you start with a sentence that says you know one day in January in the factory in Texas comma well one of the things I'd love to ask you is uh for advice for for young people to me first advice would be to read biographies in the sense because they help you understand of all the different ways you can live a life well lived but from having written biography having studied so many great men and women what advice could you give to people of how to live this this life well I keep going back to the classics and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates uh and I guess it's Plato's maximum but he may be quoting Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living and it gets back to the know thyself or nothing which is you don't have to figure out what is the big meaning of it all well but you have to figure out why you're doing what you're doing 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 where does the examination Lead You is it uh to uh to a shift in in life trajectory 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 it is actually something that's more useful on an hourly basis like why am I about to say that to somebody or why am I going to do this particular Act what's my true motive here and also in the broader sense to learn as I did after a couple years at CNN I I my examination of my life is that I'm not great at running complex organizations I'm not great as a manager given the choice I'd Rather somebody else have to manage me than me have to manage people ah but it took me a while to figure that out and I was probably too ambitious when I was young and at Time Magazine that was when I was green and oh well uh that was when I was in my salad days in Green in judgment and it was like chasing the next level at time Incorporated whatever it might be and then one day I caught the brass ring and I became an editor and then the top editor and after a while I realized uh that wasn't really totally what I'm suited to be especially when I got put in charge of CNN I mean all young people are almost by definition in their salad days and green and judgment but you learn what's motivating you and then you learn to ask but is that really what I want should I be careful of what I'm wishing for one of the big examinations you can do is the fact that you and everybody dies one day how much you are there I think so think about death are you afraid of it no and I don't think about it a lot but I do think about Steve Jobs is let me tell you a story you know which is the wonderful Steve Jobs story of um I think after he was diagnosed but before it was public 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 if you're gonna live and Elon Musk has said that to me which is a lot of the tech Bros out in the Silicon Valley they're looking for ways to live forever forever I can think much as of nothing worse uh we read the myth of Sisyphus and we know how bad it is to be condemned to eternal life so there was an ancient Greece the person who walked behind the king and said momento Mori remember you're gonna die and it kept people from losing it a bit do you think about Legacy the lucky thing about being a biographer is that you kind of know what your legacy is there's going to be a shelf it'll be of interesting people and you will have inspired a 17 year old biology student somewhere to be gen you know the next great biochemist or somebody to start a company like Elon Musk um and what I think more about I won't say giving back that's such a trite thing I moved back to New Orleans for a reason first of all the hurricane hit and after Katrina I was asked to be by share the recovery Authority and I realized everything I've got going for me it all comes from this beautiful Gem of a troubled City the wonderful high school I went to the wonderful streets where I learned to ride a bike you know and it's got challenges I'm never going to 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 to my hometown even by teaching at tooling which I don't do as a favor I mean I enjoy the hell out of it but it's like all right I'm part of a community and I think we lose that in America because people who are lonely or lonely because they're not part of a community but I've got all my high school kids their friends they're all still in New Orleans I've got my family but I also have Tulane institutions in New Orleans that have been there forever 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 you know go figure 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 and has trouble year by year Hurricane by hurricane making sure that each new generation can be creative and it's a city of creativity from Jazz to the food to the architecture so when I think of I want to say Legacy but what am I going to 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 mm-hmm that was a uh rip-off of a T.S Eliot line I don't want you to think I thought of that one uh always cite your sources I appreciate it T.S Elliott if you ever need to figure it out the four questions that part at the end which is we shall not see some exploration in the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place where we started and know it for the first time through the unknown but half-remembered gate it's just beautiful and that's been an inspiration of what do you do in I guess if it's a Shakespeare play you'd call it Act five well you go back to the place where you came and see if you 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 well to me you're one of the greatest storytellers of all time I've been a huge fan definitely not true but it's so sweet of me you see you can be rudely interrupting is this is uh the from um I think probably Ben Franklin so far I don't know how many years 15 years Einstein all the way through today has just been a huge fan of yours and you're one of the people that I thought surely would not lower themselves to appear and have a conversation with me uh and it's just a giant gift to me 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 thank you a thousand times thank you for respecting me and for inspiring just millions of people with your stories again an incredible storytelling incredible human and thank you for talking today thank you Alex thanks for listening to this conversation with Walter Isaacson to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Carl Young people will do anything no matter how absurd in order to avoid facing their own Souls one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious thank you for listening and hope to see you next time