Pod Insights Lex Fridman Podcast #395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin About this episode Walter Isaacson is an author of biographies on Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin, Leonardo da Vinci, and many others. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/walter-isaacson-transcript
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American Sketches: https://amzn.to/45LM4PN
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Kissinger: https://amzn.to/3RdTA1u
The Wise Men: https://amzn.to/45LQDJX
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OUTLINE:
Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
(00:00) – Introduction
(10:42) – Difficult childhood
(27:47) – Jennifer Doudna
(30:44) – Einstein
(36:02) – Tesla
(53:07) – Elon Musk’s humor
(57:17) – Steve Jobs’ cruelty
(1:00:41) – Twitter
(1:12:50) – Firing
(1:15:35) – Hiring
(1:24:38) – Time management
(1:32:22) – Groups vs individuals
(1:36:08) – Mortality
(1:39:40) – How to write
(2:00:38) – Love & relationships
(2:05:33) – Advice for young people
Transcript 20,724 words · 2 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Lex Fridman? 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
0:45 Lex Fridman? 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,
1:30 Lex Fridman? 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 bullshit with respect and with compassion. If I fail, I fail due to a lack of skill, not a lack of integrity. I'll work hard to improve. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got MasterClass for learning, NetSuite for business stuff, BetterHelp for mental health, ExpressVPN for security and privacy,
2:09 Lex Fridman? and Shopify for, well, buying and selling whatever on the internet. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our team, our amazing team, we're always hiring. Go to lexfridman.com/hiring. And now on to the full ad reads. As always, no silly ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out our sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show is brought to you by MasterClass. You can pay just a little bit of money and learn from the best people in the world at doing whatever it is they do. There's many ways to learn a thing.
2:53 Lex Fridman? One is by doing. Another is by reading or watching other people give tutorials on how to do the thing. And the other is to observe the people that do the thing at a world-class level or who are the best in the world at doing that thing. I think, oh, while it's not the only thing you should be doing, that is as good as it gets. That's the advice I've always been given and I've given. One of the best ways to excel in life, and not in some shallow way, but in a deep way, is to find the people in this world who you want to become
3:35 Lex Fridman? and do anything you can to work with them, to be around them, to learn from them. And not because they sit down and give their time to you to teach, but by just being in their presence and observing how they work and then giving everything you can to contribute to that effort, to that mission, to sort of the passion that pulls them and that drives them. In some sense, watching a masterclass is a way of doing that. I'm a big fan of watching not just teachers, but the doers in this world.
4:11 Lex Fridman? I can go on. The list is incredible from Chris Hadfield to Will Wright. Man, I should really talk to Will Wright. Carlos Santana, and I should talk to Carlos Santana. And not just talk. Talking is not enough, friends. Play guitar. Anyway, get unlimited access to every masterclass and get 15% off an annual membership at masterclass.com/lexpod. That's masterclass.com/lexpod. This show is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all-in-one cloud business management system. They are turning 25 years old this year. Oh, I remember when I was 25. Time flies, friends, when you're having fun. And NetSuite has been having a whole lot of fun,
4:56 Lex Fridman? helping people run their business as well. In fact, it's 36,000 companies have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. I love companies. Companies do stuff. They get together, a bunch of people get together. There's like a boss and there's employees and they have lunches and meetings. Some of them are horribly drowning bureaucracy. Some of them resist and fight that bureaucracy and actually get something done. And that's that little struggle of humanity in these little pockets of dreams and sweat and labor and just reaching for the stars with big goals and small goals.
5:38 Lex Fridman? That's what this podcast is about with Elon, with Steve Jobs, and all throughout history with Da Vinci, striving all kinds of different ways. And well, you want to be using the best tools for the job of running a business. And NetSuite should be there too, friends. Download NetSuite's popular KPI checklist for free at netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex for your own KPI checklist. This episode is also brought to you by BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P. Help. In this episode with Walter, we'll talk quite a bit about demons. Both demons and Diablo, I think we'll allude to that, and demons inside our own mind.
6:22 Lex Fridman? And those demons are not all bad. They're, in some sense, reminders of how difficult life can be, how much struggle, big and small, all of us can experience. And that struggle can break us, or it can strengthen us. That's the choice all of us make through hardship. And some of the greatest men and women in the world, in the history of the world, have been defined in their early days by the struggle and the overcoming of that struggle. Talking in general, but therapy, which is systematic,
7:04 Lex Fridman? rigorous exploration of the human mind through the talking method. I think should be one of the tools for that, for turning the demons into productive demons versus destructive demons. BetterHelp is super accessible and easy. So definitely something you should try. You can check them out at betterhelp.com/lex and save on your first month. That's betterhelp.com/lex.
7:33 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by ExpressVPN. I use them to protect my privacy on the internet. It's like a warm blanket for me of happiness that fights off the monsters that hide in the closet of our childhoods. That's very poetic. I never actually had monsters in the closet because grew up in a tiny place. There was no closets, nowhere for the monsters to hide.
7:59 Lex Fridman? That too is poetic. I'm not sure where I'm getting with that. But there is a sense of happiness that I associate with ExpressVPN because through some of the more difficult moments of my life, that was a piece of software that's running on my computer and it just works. It's silly how these little pieces of software can just bring a little bit of comfort to you. For a long time, Emacs as an IDE was that. I would open up the Emacs editor with a bunch of windows open, black background, white text. And I would see all that code laid out before me. And it was an escape from the hardness of life. In a simpler way, ExpressVPN is kind of like that.
8:41 Lex Fridman? Across different operating systems, Linux included, it works everywhere. And you can go check it out yourself at expressvpn.com/lexpod for an extra three months free.
8:52 Lex Fridman? This show is also brought to you by Shopify, a platform designed for anyone to sell anywhere with a great looking online store that brings your ideas to life and gives you tools to manage day to day operations. And boy, do I know how easy they make that now that friends,
9:11 Lex Fridman? let me plug myself and say that there's now a official podcast Shopify store. You can go there by clicking on, I think, lexfridman.com/store and they'll take you there. And it was so incredibly easy to set up. It just works. In this case, I'm just selling T-shirts, but it was so easy to go from zero to hero, although I never quite got to hero, but get the store set up. Super easy. I love it. So if you want to get the merch for this podcast, you can go there and get merch for all kinds of podcasts and all kinds of things by going to all the amazing stores that Shopify supports. I mean, it just really makes it easier to sell stuff.
9:56 Lex Fridman? So if you have stuff to sell, I highly recommend Shopify is obviously the thing you should be using to sell that stuff. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com/lex. All lowercase. Go to Shopify.com/lex to take your business to the next level today.
10:17 Lex Fridman? This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Walter Isaacson.
10:42 Lex Fridman? 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?
10:53 Speaker 01 Well, it's not a requirement. Some people with happy childhoods who 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 sentence in his memoirs, which is, I think, every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father. 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 dancing around in his head.
11:33 Speaker 01 And by harnessing them, it's part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.
11:44 Lex Fridman? You've written that Elon talked about his father and that at times it felt like mental torture, the interaction with him during his childhood. Can you describe some of the things you've learned?
11:58 Speaker 01 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. I mean, he was in a 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 person who had beaten him.
12:31 Lex Fridman? That's probably one of the more traumatic events of Elon's life.
12:34 Speaker 01 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 traumatized at a camp like that. But the second time he went, he'd gotten bigger. He had shot up to almost six feet and he'd learned a little bit of judo. And he realized that if he was getting beaten up, it might hurt him, but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible. So that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon. I spent a lot of time talking to Errol Musk as father.
13:19 Speaker 01 Elon doesn't talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimball. It's been years. And Errol doesn't even have Elon's email. So a lot of times, Errol will be sending me emails. And Errol had one of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities. He was, you know, a great mind of engineering and especially material science. Knew how to build a wilderness camp in South Africa using MICA 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.
14:01 Speaker 01 And of course, May Musk says to me, his mother, who divorced Errol 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, Lex, and you know him well, he'll even talk to you about the demons, about Diablo dancing in his head. I mean, 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 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.
14:43 Speaker 01 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 at 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 snaps out of it. As you know, that too, the huge snap out where suddenly he's showing you Armani Python skit on his phone and he's joking about things. So I think coming out of the childhood, there were just many facets, maybe even many personalities. The engineering mode, the silly mode, the charismatic mode, the visionary mode, but also the demon in dark mode.
15:25 Lex Fridman? A quote you cited about Elon really stood out to me. I forget who it's from, but "Inside the man, he's still there as a child, the child standing in front of his dad."
15:36 Speaker 01 That was Tallulah, his second wife. And she's great. 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 bankrupt, or whatever it may have been, or later. And he would be so stressed, he would vomit.
16:20 Speaker 01 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 what 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, with the fact that I had the greatest father you 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.
17:05 Speaker 01 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 grow 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.
17:50 Speaker 01 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...
18:26 Speaker 01 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.
18:52 Lex Fridman? 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.
19:12 Speaker 01 I think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents.
19:19 Lex Fridman? Yes.
19:20 Speaker 01 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. Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator, you know? I think it's useful 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?
20:02 Speaker 01 Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine. There was a group of about a hundred and fifty 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. I cared a little bit too much that people didn't get annoyed at me or 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, 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.
20:47 Speaker 01 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 the desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager. And that doesn't mean there aren't great people who are over endowed. 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. But that turned out to be a good thing.
21:29 Speaker 01 When they can't figure out the big state, little state issue at the Constitutional Convention, when they can't figure out the Treaty of Paris, whatever it is, he brings people together and that is his superpower. 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. You know, do I have other talents? Yeah, I think I have the talent to observe people really closely, to write about it
22:13 Speaker 01 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 situations, so much so that when things get less intense, when they actually are making enough cars and... Rockets are going up and landing. He thinks of something else so he can surge and have more intensity. He's addicted to intensity.
22:56 Speaker 01 And that's his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.
23:01 Lex Fridman? But I think also 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 it's an empathy towards people in the big picture.
23:21 Speaker 01 It's an empathy towards humanity.
23:24 Lex Fridman? Humanity.
23:24 Speaker 01 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. You see that in a lot of people. You see it, Bill Gates, or Larry Summers, or 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.
24:09 Speaker 01 One is to make humans a spacefaring 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 battery packs. And third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values.
24:37 Speaker 01 And every now and then I'd talk to him and we'd be talking about Starlink satellites or whatever, or he would be pushing the people in front of him at SpaceX and saying, if you do this, we'll never get to Mars in our lifetime. 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 pontification you do on a podcast. But unlike the 20th time, I watched him, I realized, okay, I believe it. He actually is driven by this.
25:14 Lex Fridman? He is 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.
25:27 Speaker 01 An impatience, a frustration. And 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,
26:08 Speaker 01 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 characters in the comic books, it's sometimes ridiculous, but it also is sometimes true.
26:26 Lex Fridman? When I was reading this part of the book.
26:30 Lex Fridman? 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.
27:06 Speaker 01 Well, that's 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 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.
27:49 Speaker 01 Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who discovers, helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Codebreaker, she grew up feeling like a misfit, you know, in Hawaii, in a Polynesian village, being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her. So if people can read the books, and I should have said about Jennifer Doudna, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don't do science. You know, science is 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.
28:30 Lex Fridman? Just to interrupt real quick, but Jennifer Doudna, you've written an amazing book about her, Nobel Prize winner, CRISPR developer, she's incredible, one of the great scientists in the 21st century.
28:41 Speaker 01 Right, and I'm talking about when Jennifer Doudna was young and she felt really, really out of place. Like you and me and a lot of people when they're feeling that way, they read books, they go into, they curl up with a 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 books, like Elon Musk read,
29:25 Speaker 01 books can sometimes inspire you. And every one of my books is about people who were totally innovative, who weren't just smart, because none of us are gonna be able to match Einstein in mental processing power. 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, this isn't a how to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside. You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany.
30:03 Speaker 01 You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up, or as an outsider, Leonardo da Vinci, or Elon Musk, you know, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father. And getting off the train when he goes to anti-apartheid concert with his brother, and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head. And they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their 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?
30:44 Lex Fridman? Einstein, too.
30:48 Lex Fridman? One of my, it's hard to pick my favorite of your 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 success. So.
31:08 Speaker 01 Absolutely.
31:09 Lex Fridman? And that's extremely inspiring. I don't know exactly what question to ask, there's a million.
31:14 Speaker 01 Well, I'll talk about the misfit for a second, because, you know, we talked about Leonardo being that way. You know, Einstein is Jewish in Germany at a time when it starts getting difficult. 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 rote. 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 Zurich Polytech. Like, you rejected Einstein?
31:56 Speaker 01 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 at, he even tries about 14 different high schools, gymnasium, 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 or first class, because he doesn't have a doctoral degree. And yet, he's sitting there on the stool in the Patent Office in 1905, and writes three papers that totally transform science. And if you're thinking about being...
32:41 Speaker 01 Misunderstood or unappreciated. In 1906, he's still a third-class patent. In 1907, he's still a third-class. It takes until 1909 before people realize that this notion of the theory of relativity might be correct and it might upend all of Newtonian physics.
32:58 Lex Fridman? 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?
33:09 Speaker 01 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, he does a little addendum. That's the most famous equation in all of physics, which is E equals mc 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 some professor at the academy where he was supposed to follow the rules. And so at the patent office, they're doing devices to synchronize clocks. Because the Swiss have just gone
33:53 Speaker 01 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 in Bern at the exact instant. 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, it's making my palm sweat that I was so worried. And so he finally figures out, because he's looking at these devices to synchronize clocks, that if you're traveling really, really fast, what looks synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody
34:37 Speaker 01 traveling really fast in the other direction. And he makes the 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?
35:04 Speaker 01 To just say, I know how we're going to have a path to change the entire trajectory of the world into the era of electric vehicles. And then when he comes back from Russia, where he tried to buy a little rocket ship so he could send a experimental greenhouse to Mars, and they were poking fun of him and actually spit on him 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?
35:43 Speaker 01 And so he's visualizing things that other people 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.
36:02 Lex Fridman? You said visual thinking. I wonder if you've seen parallels of the different styles and kinds of thinking that operate the minds of these people. So is there parallels you see between Elon, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci, specifically in how they think?
36:26 Speaker 01 I think they were all visual thinkers, perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children, meaning Leonardo was left-handed and a little bit dyslexic, I think. And certainly Einstein had akkaya, he would repeat things, he was slow in learning to talk. So I think visualizing helps a lot. And with Musk, I see it all the time when I'm walking the factory lines with him or in product development, where he'll look at, say, the heat shield under the Raptor engine of a starship booster.
37:06 Speaker 01 And he'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. There's a small anecdote 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, not Drew, that Lars Maravi, 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 explained, well, for the crash tests or anything else, the pressure
37:50 Speaker 01 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 it and they engineer it, but it turns out to be right. I know that seems minor, but I could give you 500 of those, wherein 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.
38:35 Speaker 01 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 outsourced so much manufacturing. I don't think you can be a good innovator if you don't know how to make the stuff you're designing. And that's why Musk puts his designer's desk right next to the assembly lines in the factories so that they have to visualize what they drew. As it becomes the physical object.
39:12 Lex Fridman? So, understanding everything from the physics all the way up to the to the software. It's like end to end.
39:18 Speaker 01 Well, having an end to end control is important, certainly with Steve Jobs. I'm looking at my iPhone here. It's a big deal. That hardware only works with Apple software. And for a while, the iTunes Store, it only 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're making the batteries in Japan and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop
40:01 Speaker 01 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-house. The software in-house, the painting in-house, you know, the 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 to be innovative.
40:46 Lex Fridman? 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 Mobile Eye to in-house building the autopilot system to basically getting rid of all sensors that are not.
41:10 Lex Fridman? 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.
41:24 Speaker 01 Well, vision only, getting rid of radar is huge. And everybody's against it. Everybody, and they're still fighting it a bit. They're still trying to do in next generation, some form of radar. But it gets back to the first principles. We're talking about visualizing. Well, he starts with the first principles. And the first principles of physics 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.
42:06 Speaker 01 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 crush? 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.
42:48 Speaker 01 And you can't make it based on maps like Google Maps because it'll never be able to, you know, then drive from New Orleans to Slidell where I want to go when it's too hot in New Orleans. Take, for example, full self-drive. He has been obsessed with what he calls the robot 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 Baglino and others, they're saying, okay, fine, that sounds really good, but, you know, it ain't happened yet.
43:28 Speaker 01 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 RoboTaxi, so you can have the same assembly line. 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 there are two yellow lines, do this. If there's a bike lane, do this. If there's a crosswalk, do that. Well, that's really hard to do.
44:10 Speaker 01 Now he's doing it through artificial intelligence and machine learning only. FSD 12 will be based on the billion or so frames from Tesla each week of Tesla drivers and saying, what happened when a human was in this situation? What did the human do? And let's only pick the best humans, the five-star drivers, 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 that's not rules-based, it becomes AI-based. Just like ChatGPT doesn't try to answer your question, who were the five best popes
44:53 Speaker 01 or something by studying, ChatGPT does it 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.
45:09 Lex Fridman? Sometimes it feels like he and others, they're building things in this world successfully, are basically confidently exploring a dark room.
45:21 Lex Fridman? With a very confident, ambitious vision of what 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 their, their body 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,
46:00 Lex Fridman? since, you know, since a few years ago, when you could see with Andre Karpathy, 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 will be the thing that allows embodied AI systems to understand the world. So broadly, and so that kind of approach. And you kind of stumble into it. Will Tesla be a, a car company? Will it be an AI company?
46:45 Lex Fridman? Will it be a robotics company? Will it be a home robotics company? Will it be an energy company? And you kind of slowly discover this as you confidently,
46:57 Lex Fridman? like push forward with a vision. It's interesting to watch that kind of evolution as long as it's backed by this confidence.
47:05 Speaker 01 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 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.
47:40 Speaker 01 You know, first three rockets that Falcon rockets that Musk 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, the Mayflower as refugees from the Nazis, they took a lot of risks to get here. And now I think we have more referees than we have risk takers,
48:23 Speaker 01 more lawyers and regulators and others saying, you can't do that, that's too risky, than 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 the robot and the self-driving car. They're, they're pretty much the same. They're using, you know, GPU clusters or dojo chips or whatever it may be to process real world data.
49:05 Speaker 01 We all got, and you did on your podcast, quite excited about large language model, you know, generative predictive text AI. That's fine, especially if you want to chit chat with your chatbot. 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 are, I think, far ahead of anybody else.
49:40 Lex Fridman? Well, I like how you said chit chat. I would say for one of the greatest writers ever, it's funny that you spoke about language and the mastery of languages as merely chit chat. You know, people have fallen in love over some words. People have gone to wars over some words. I think words 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 visuals, is it in the physical? I don't really. It's in mathematics. Maybe it all boils down to math. And in the end, this kind of discussion about real world AI versus language is all the same, maybe.
50:21 Lex Fridman? I've gotten a chance to hang out quite a bit in the metaverse with Mr. Mark Zuckerberg recently, and boy, is the realism in there. Then you like the thing that's coming up in the future is incredible. I got scanned in Pittsburgh for 10 hours into the metaverse and there's like a virtual version of me and I got to hang out with that virtual version. Do you like yourself? Well, I never liked myself, but it was easier to like that other guy. That was interesting. Did he like you? He didn't seem to care much.
51:05 Lex Fridman? That's the 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 got to see, you know, 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 at yourself in the mirror are imperfections, all this kind of stuff. When I was looking at myself and at others, all those things were beautiful and it was like. It was real and it was intense and it it was scary because you're like, well,
51:48 Lex Fridman? 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 it as humans?
52:04 Speaker 01 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?
52:11 Lex Fridman? Yes, there's a constant lighthearted, but also a serious sense that this is all a bit of a game.
52:18 Speaker 01 One of my theories on Elon, a minor theory, is that he read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy once too often. And as you know, there's a scene in there that says that there's a theory about the universe that if anybody ever discovers the secrets or 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 not trying to get my head around that, but I know that Elon Musk tries to.
52:54 Lex Fridman? Well, there's a humor to that.
52:56 Speaker 01 There's an enormous humor to Hitchhiker's Guide. And I really think that helped Musk out of the darkest of his periods to have sort of a sense of fun of figuring out what life is all about.
53:07 Lex Fridman? I wonder if this is a small aside we could say, just having gotten to know Elon very well, like his, the silliness, the willingness to engage in the absurdity of it all and have fun. What is that? What is that? Is that just a quirk of personality or is that a fundamental aspect of a human who's running six plus companies?
53:30 Speaker 01 Well, it's a relief valve, just like video games and Polotopia and Elden Ring, a release valve for him. 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 a conference room and he has really become upset about something. And not only their dark vibes, but there's dark words emanating and he's saying, your resignation will be accepted if you don't, you know, et cetera. And then something pops and he pulls out his phone and pulls up a Monty Python
54:11 Speaker 01 skit, you know, like the School of Silly Walks or whichever John Cleese it was. And then 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 giddy mode.
54:34 Lex Fridman? Yeah, you've actually opened the Elon book with quotes from Elon and from Steve Jobs. So Elon's quote is, to anyone I've offended, I just want to say this on 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 what do you think is the role of the old madness and genius? What do you think the role of crazy in this?
55:13 Speaker 01 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, where that craziness works. You know, give me a story. Tell me an anecdote. Tell me where he's crazy. And, you know, the almost final example, AI, but him shooting off Starship for the first time. In between an aborted countdown and the shoot off, he goes to Miami to an ad sales conference and meets Linda Iaccarino for the first time, makes her the CEO. I mean, there's a very impulsiveness to him. Then he flies back.
55:57 Speaker 01 They launch Starship and you realize that there's a drive and there are demons and there's also craziness. And
56:10 Speaker 01 You sometimes want to pull those out. You want to take away his phone so he doesn't tweet at 3 a.m. You want to say, quit being so crazy. But then you realize, there's a wonderful line of Shakespeare in 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, 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.
56:54 Lex Fridman? I wonder, sometimes it saddens me that we live in a society that doesn't celebrate even the darker aspects of crazy, in acknowledging that it all comes in one package. It's the man in the arena versus the critic.
57:10 Speaker 01 And the man in the arena versus the regulator, to make it more prosaic.
57:14 Lex Fridman? Well, let me ask about not just the crazy, but the cruelty. So in, you've written, when reporting on Steve Jobs, Woz told you that the big question to ask was, did he have to be so mean, so rough and cruel, so drama addicted? What is this answer for Steve Jobs? Did he have to be so cruel?
57:39 Speaker 01 For Jobs? I asked Woz at the end of my reporting, because that's what he 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 say to Woz, 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. We'd have been like a family." And then, I don't know if you know Woz, but he's like a teddy bear. He paused, he smiled, and he said, "But if I had been running Apple, I don't think we would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone." So, yeah, you have to...
58:19 Speaker 01 Sometimes be rough. And Jobs said the same thing that Musk said to me, which is he said, people like you love wearing velvet gloves. Now, I don't know that I've worn velvet gloves often, but you like people to like you, you like to sweet talk things, you sugarcoat things. He says, I'm just a working class kid and I don't have that luxury. If something sucks, I gotta 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. And I do try to sugarcoat things.
59:02 Speaker 01 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.
59:18 Lex Fridman? 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.
59:26 Speaker 01 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 say it about a smoothie. They were making it a Whole Foods or something. People, they use the word stupid really often. And you know who else used it? Errol Musk. He kept baking, Elon standing in front of him and saying, that's as stupid as saying you're the stupidest person, you'll never amount to anything. 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...
1:00:11 Speaker 01 It's sometimes necessary to be much more brutal and honest, brutally honest, I would say, than people like who are win boss of the year trophies.
1:00:26 Lex Fridman? 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.
1:00:39 Speaker 01 Right, and that happened to Twitter. When we went to Twitter headquarters the day before the takeover, he was having Andrew and James, his two young cousins and other people from the autopilot team, going over lines of code. 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% 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, actually, one of his,
1:01:21 Speaker 01 I think it was one of the cousins, or maybe Ross Nordin, 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've 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 twenties than when I was, you know, in my fifties.
1:01:58 Lex Fridman? Yeah, and you write about this, it's a really nice idea, actually, that there's two camps, and you find out, I wonder how true this is. 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 till 2:00 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,
1:02:29 Lex Fridman? Like you could, people probably divide themselves in different stages of life. And you could just ask them, and it makes sense for certain companies at certain stages of their development to be like, uh, we only want hardcore people.
1:02:41 Speaker 01 Certain teams, it doesn't even have to be whole company. And you're right, 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.
1:03:23 Speaker 01 And uh, enshrining psychological safety as one of the mantras that people should never feel psychologically threatened. And he, I remember 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, there are people that way as well. And so know who you are and know what type of team you want to build.
1:03:52 Lex Fridman? Versus psychological safety and too many birds everywhere.
1:03:56 Speaker 01 Oh yeah, a lot of times Musk did things, I go, what the hell? And among them was changing the name Twitter and getting rid of the birds. I say, 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.
1:04:27 Speaker 01 Post hardcore things with people with hardcore views. It's not a polite playpen for the blue checked, anointed elite. And I thought, OK, this is going to be bad. The whole thing's going to fall apart. Well, it has had problems, but the hardcore intensity of it has 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.
1:05:06 Lex Fridman? As you've written, in referring to the the previous Twitter CEO, Elon said Twitter needs a fire breathing dragon. I think this is a good opportunity to maybe go through some of the memorable moments of the Twitter saga, as you've written about extensively in your book, like from the early days of considering the acquisition to how it went through to the details of, like you mentioned, the engineering teams.
1:05:35 Speaker 01 Well, at the beginning of 2022, he was riding high. But as we say, he's a drama addict. He doesn't like to ghost. And, you know, Tesla's sold a million vehicles. I think 33 boosters, you know, Falcon 9s have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months. And he was the richest person on earth and Time's Person of the Year. And yet, he'd said, you know, I'm still want to put all my chips back on the table. I want to keep taking risks. I don't want to savor things. He had sold all of his houses.
1:06:15 Speaker 01 So he starts 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 at 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. And I 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?
1:07:00 Speaker 01 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 at dinner, and 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, OK, the demographics are people my age or May's age. And so it looked like he wasn't going to pursue it. They offered him a board seat. And then he went off to Hawaii, to Larry Ellison's house, which he sometimes uses. He was meeting a friend, Angela Bassett, an actress.
1:07:44 Speaker 01 And instead of enjoying three days of vacation, he just became supercharged and started firing off text messages, including the fire-breathing dragon one, I think, 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 Elden Ring. He was doing a TED Talk. And then at 5:30, he finishes playing Elden Ring and sends out that, I've made an offer. Even when he comes back, people are trying to intervene and say, excuse me, why are you doing it?
1:08:26 Speaker 01 And so it was a rocky period between late April and October, when the deal closed. 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? Yeah. 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 Efron at Centerview, 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 he was mercurial. There were times he would text me or say to me, this
1:09:09 Speaker 01 is going to be great. It's going to be the accelerant to do X.com the way we thought about 20 years ago. And so it's not until they finally tell him at the beginning of October, right when Optimus the Robot is being unveiled in California, actually, that the lawyer say, you're not going to probably win this case, 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 Friday morning, I have it in the book. And we're there on Thursday, and he's wandering around, looking at the
1:09:52 Speaker 01 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 to others, firing them, quote, for cause, and this will be something the courts will have to figure out, then he could save 200 million or so. And it was both the money, but for him, a matter, I won't say of principle, but of, hey, they misled
1:10:33 Speaker 01 me about the numbers. I got forced into doing it. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this jujitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them. Then when he takes over, it's kind of a wild scene. Him trying to decide in three different rounds how to get the staff down to 15% of what it was, him deciding on Christmas Eve after he'd been at a meeting where they told him, we can't get rid of that Sacramento server farm because it's needed for 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 them out himself. So it was a manic period.
1:11:17 Lex Fridman? We should also say that underneath of that, there was a running desire to or consideration to perhaps start a new company, to build a social media company from scratch.
1:11:31 Speaker 01 Well, Kimball wanted to do that. And Kimball here at a wonderful restaurant in Austin of Lunch is like, hey, why are you buying Twitter? Let's start one from scratch and do it on the blockchain.
1:11:42 Lex Fridman? Yes.
1:11:42 Speaker 01 Now, it took him 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 Fried, 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 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
1:12:23 Speaker 01 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 I mean, Threads even had a base. So it would have been hard.
1:12:46 Lex Fridman? Yeah. And to do that in the way he did requires 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 at a 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?
1:13:14 Speaker 01 Right. He brought in the engineers and figured that the amount of people doing Tesla, full self-driving autopilot and all the software there was about one tenth of what was doing software for Twitter. And he said, this can't be the case. And he fired eighty-five 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 all that was written in the past year or so. Then he fired people, you know, who didn't seem to
1:13:52 Speaker 01 be totally all in or loyal. And then another round of layoffs. So at each step of the way, almost everybody said, that's enough. It's going to destroy things.
1:14:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:14:07 Speaker 01 From Alex Spiro, his lawyer, to Jared Burchill. 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 some, 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.
1:14:40 Lex Fridman? What do you think? Was that too much?
1:14:41 Speaker 01 I think that he has an algorithm that we mentioned earlier that begins with question every requirement. What's up to is delete, delete, delete, delete every part. And then a corollary to that is if you don't end up adding back twenty percent of what you deleted, then you didn't delete enough in the first round because you were too timid. Well, so you asked me, did he overdo it? He probably overdid it by twenty percent, which is his formula. And they're probably trying to hire people now to keep things going.
1:15:16 Lex Fridman? But it sends a strong signal to people that are hired back or the people that are still there, the A player idea.
1:15:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, 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.
1:15:34 Lex Fridman? So, how much of Elon's success would you say Elon's and Steve Jobs' success is the hiring and managing of great teams?
1:15:42 Speaker 01 When I asked Steve Jobs at one point, what was the best product you ever created? I thought he'd say maybe the Macintosh, or maybe the iPhone. 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 Eddie Q, and Phil Schiller. Elon has done a good job bringing in people. Gwen Shotwell, obviously. Linda Iaccarino, she's, you know, can navigate through the current crises.
1:16:23 Speaker 01 Certainly stellar people at SpaceX, like Mark Jancosa. And then at Tesla, like Drew Baglino, and Lars Maravi, and Tom Zhu, and many others. He's not as much of a team collaborator as, say, Benjamin Franklin. Who, by the way, that's the best team ever created, which is the founders. 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 high rectitude like Washington. But you also needed a Ben Franklin, who could bring everybody together and forge a team out of them, and make them compromise with each other.
1:17:07 Speaker 01 Musk is a magnet for awesome talent.
1:17:10 Lex Fridman? Magnet, interesting. But there's the priorities of hiring of, based on excellence, trustworthiness, and drive, these are things you've described throughout the book. I mean, there's a pretty... Concrete and rigorous, the set of ideas based on which the hiring is done.
1:17:33 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah, and he has a very good, spidey, intuitive sense, just looking at people who could, I mean, not looking at them, but studying them, who could be good. One of his 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 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 I remember that he spent a couple of months doing what he calls skip level,
1:18:16 Speaker 01 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'd just ask them what they're doing and I'd drill them with questions. And he said, and 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 during the height of COVID. 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.
1:19:00 Speaker 01 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. And Musk said, one day, called him up at three, well, I won't say three AM, but after midnight, said, you still around? And Jake said, yeah, I'm still at work. And he said, okay, I'm going to 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 where they're building them at least one a week and they're pretty awesome.
1:19:37 Speaker 01 And that's where his talent, Musk's talent, for finding the right person and promoting them, that's where it is.
1:19:48 Lex Fridman? And promoting it in a way where it's like, here's the ball, here, catch.
1:19:53 Speaker 01 Yeah, yeah.
1:19:54 Lex Fridman? And you run with it. I have, I've interacted with quite a few folks from even just the Model X, 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.
1:20:09 Speaker 01 And he does it wrong sometimes. He's had a horrible track record with the solar roof division. Wonderful guy named Brian Dow. I really liked him. And when they were doing the battery factory surge in Nevada, 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, Musk goes through two or three people running the solar roof division. Finally calls up Brian Dow. I was sitting in Musk's house in Boca Chica, that little tiny two-bedroom he has, and he offers Brian Dow the job of running solar roof. And, you know, Brian there, okay, can do, can do.
1:20:51 Speaker 01 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 Brian was just sweating and doing everything. But then after a couple of months, it wasn't going well and boom. Musk just fired him. So I always try to learn, what is it that makes those who stay thrive?
1:21:34 Lex Fridman? What's the lesson there? What do you think?
1:21:36 Speaker 01 Well, I think it's self-knowledge, like an Andy Krabs or others. They say, I am hardcore. I really want to get a rocket to Mars and that's more important than anything else. One of the people, I think it's, I think it's Tim Zamen. I hope when he hears this, I'm getting him the right person. Who, you know, took time, was working for Tesla Autopilot. And it was just so intense, he took some time off 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 at Tesla, said, can I come back? He said, sure. He said, I learned about myself. I'd rather be burned out than bored.
1:22:17 Lex Fridman? That's a good line. Well, can you just linger on one of the three that seem interesting to you in terms of excellence, trustworthiness and drive? Which one do you think 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?
1:22:36 Speaker 01 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 half. And it was, how do we weed out those? And he did something and made 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 posted, everybody at Twitter had 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.
1:23:19 Speaker 01 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 excellence, but that's pretty well a given. Everybody is like a Mark Jancosa, just whip smart.
1:24:04 Speaker 01 It's are 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 gotta be all in.
1:24:15 Lex Fridman? 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 Ben Franklin is, is pretty good.
1:24:27 Speaker 01 Oh, no, no, no.
1:24:28 Lex Fridman? I'm sorry.
1:24:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:24:30 Lex Fridman? Sorry to offend you so much.
1:24:30 Speaker 01 Read the Constitution and read Abbey Road, listen to Abbey Road. They're both good, but they're in a different league.
1:24:35 Lex Fridman? Yeah, different league. Okay, so, uh, one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management. Uh, is there something you could say about Ben Franklin and about Steve Jobs? I think interesting with Elon is that he, as you write, runs six companies, seven, I mean, it depends how you count. Starlink is its own thing, I don't know. Um, what can you say about these people in terms of time management?
1:25:07 Speaker 01 Well, Musk is in a league of his own in 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 Neuralink 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 agreed to the deal, this is huge around the world.
1:25:50 Speaker 01 I'm sure you remember, like Musk buys Twitter. It wasn't when the deal closed, it was when the Twitter accepted his offer. And I thought, okay. But then he went to Boca Chico, to South Texas, and spent time fixating, 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?
1:26:29 Speaker 01 And he's like, and then he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing really him being there. One of the things that's 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 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
1:27:14 Speaker 01 with Starlink and the CIA. And when he's focused on any of these things...
1:27:22 Speaker 01 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.
1:28:02 Speaker 01 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-
1:28:13 Lex Fridman? Pallet.
1:28:13 Speaker 01 Pallet cleanser.
1:28:15 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:28:15 Speaker 01 He does some palate cleanser with Politopia-
1:28:18 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:28:18 Speaker 01 And then focuses on the next task.
1:28:20 Lex Fridman? I mean, is there some wisdom about time management that you can draw from that?
1:28:24 Speaker 01 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 should try to emulate Musk's time management style. Because it takes a certain set of teams who know how to deal with everything else other than the thing he's focusing on. And a certain mind that can shift, just like his moods can shift. You and I go through transitions. And also, if I'm thinking about what I'm gonna say on this podcast, I'm also thinking about the email my daughter just sent about the house that she's looking, you know? And I'm, I'm multitasking.
1:29:09 Speaker 01 He doesn't actually do that. He single-task sequentially with a focus that's hardcore.
1:29:16 Lex Fridman? I don't know. I think there's wisdom to draw from that to like, first of all, he makes me, frankly, 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 and like an urgency.
1:29:37 Speaker 01 I think the fierce urgency that-
1:29:43 Speaker 01 Drives him is important. And it's sometimes ginned up. Like I say, the fierce urgency of getting to Mars. And on a Friday night at the launch pad in Boca Chica at 10:00 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 a 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.
1:30:14 Lex Fridman? That sense of urgency, you know, is also a vibrancy. That's like really taking on life fully. I mean, to me, that's the lesson is like even the mundane can be full of this just richness. And like, you just have to really take it in intensely. So like the switching enables that kind of intensity because most of us can't hold that intensity on any one task for a prolonged period of time. Maybe that's also a lesson.
1:30:48 Speaker 01 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.
1:31:06 Lex Fridman? Procrastinate.
1:31:06 Speaker 01 It's why he has more unfinished paintings than finished paintings in his canon.
1:31:11 Lex Fridman? Yeah.
1:31:13 Speaker 01 But his ability to see patterns across nature and to in some ways process, procrastinate, be distracted, that helped him some. But Musk is not that way. And there, every few months, there's 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. 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.
1:32:01 Speaker 01 But also can savor the success, savor the moment, savor the quiet sometimes. Musk, big failing is he can't savor the moment or success. And that's the flip side of hardcore intensity.
1:32:21 Lex Fridman? In 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?
1:32:37 Speaker 01 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 Meir, probably talking about himself too, or at least in his mind. And 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. Musk is a case like that. And sometimes, as I did with
1:33:21 Speaker 01 the Innovators, there's teams and people who build on each other. And Gordon Moore and Bob Noyes then getting Andy Grove and doing the microchip, which then comes out. And Wozniak and Jobs find it at some electronics store and they decide to build the Apple. And so sometimes there are flows of forces and groups of people. I guess I err a little bit on the side of looking at what Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Albert Einstein can do. And I also try to figure out if they hadn't been around, would the forces of history
1:34:03 Speaker 01 and the groups of people have done it without them? That's a good historical question, as, you know, somebody loves history. And you think about special relativity, one of the 1905 papers.
1:34:17 Speaker 01 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 have gotten that yet. How, what about moving us into the era of an iPhone, in which it's so beautiful that you can't live without a thousand songs in your pocket, email and the internet in your pocket and the phone? There are a lot of brain-dead people, 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.
1:34:59 Speaker 01 Jim and Ford, all the great people there, they crushed the bolt, 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 there'll be people who say and read the book, well, if they read the book, they'll see the full story. Well, they say it wasn't Musk who did Tesla, it was Martin Abrahaj or Mark Tarponi. 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.
1:35:42 Speaker 01 But the guy who actually gets us to a million electric vehicles a year is Elon Musk, and without him, I don't think we... Look, if anybody five years from now buys a car that's gasoline-powered, will think, "That's quaint, you know, that's odd." I mean, suddenly, we've changed. We're not going to do it. Ninety percent of that is Elon Musk.
1:36:08 Lex Fridman? We're all mortal. When and how do you think Elon will retire from the insanely productive schedule he's on now?
1:36:17 Speaker 01 I would think that he would hate to retire. I think that he can't live without the pressure, the drama, the all-in feeling.
1:36:31 Speaker 01 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 vac. I mean, he goes on vacation at one point and they ousted him from PayPal. And then he goes to Africa one point, he gets malaria. He says, I've learned vacations kill you.
1:37:00 Lex Fridman? Lesson learned. Well, it's interesting because the projects are hundred plus year projects. Many of these.
1:37:06 Speaker 01 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 through 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? And 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?
1:37:51 Speaker 01 And likewise, whenever he's in a tense moment, like there's a rocket's about to be launched, he'll start asking people or something in the way future, like the new Liette 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?
1:38:34 Speaker 01 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. There are no Robo Taxis. I mean, there's Waymo maybe doing a little experiment. But there's not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways. Yeah, so he's always looking way into the future is my point.
1:38:59 Lex Fridman? I just hope that there's a lot of DaVincis and Steve Jobses and Einsteins and Elon Musks that carry the flame forward.
1:39:11 Speaker 01 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.
1:39:40 Lex Fridman? Let me ask you about your mind, your genius, your process.
1:39:47 Speaker 01 I'll give you two out of three.
1:39:48 Lex Fridman? All right. Take me through your process of writing a biography, I mean, 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 underlying 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.
1:40:22 Speaker 01 Well, step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works. What causes Einstein to make that leap? For Elon Musk to say stainless steel while he's looking at a carbon fiber rocket? Or how do you make the mental leap? Because I write about smart people, but 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?
1:41:05 Speaker 01 So you look at all that and you try to observe really carefully the person. One of the more mundane things I do is
1:41:17 Speaker 01 A lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions and preach or whatever. As I said, this mentor said, two people types come out, preachers storytellers. Be a storyteller. I try, whenever I'm trying to convey a thought, there's six magic words that I almost should have written on a card pinned 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.
1:42:02 Speaker 01 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 opening 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 nonfiction narrative editors, Alice Mayhew at Simon Schuster, who, among other things, created All the President's Men with Woodward and Bernstein.
1:42:47 Speaker 01 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 for the Bible, it's good enough for you.
1:42:59 Lex Fridman? Interesting. To me, like, that's a small note, but to you, it's extremely important.
1:43:04 Speaker 01 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.
1:43:28 Speaker 01 Wisdom, that's the essences of creativity, but you can't do it. You know, there's a term 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 having a great person theory of history in which you decided to do biography. I had a great professor when I was in college. Her name was Doris Kearns. She later married Dick Goodwin.
1:44:10 Speaker 01 And she, when she was going for tenure at the university, wrote a biography 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. That's great. It opened up the field of biography to us non-academics, starting with David McCullough, Bob Caro, but maybe John Meacham and myself are in a new generation and certainly there's a generation coming after us.
1:44:47 Speaker 01 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.
1:45:12 Lex Fridman? Well, let me ask you this question. In terms of gathering an understanding.
1:45:19 Lex Fridman? How much of it is one observing? And how much of it is interviews?
1:45:27 Speaker 01 Yeah, and obviously depends on the subject. I mean, with Ben Franklin, it's all based on archives. And 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 Musk 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. Even when he'd be sitting playing Politopia or seething at other people, you know, he'd have me just sitting there watching. I mean, I spent a lot of time with Jennifer Doudna at her side. I went to her lab and edited a human gene and, you know, with a pipette in a test tube.
1:46:11 Speaker 01 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, it's not about... I try to just say, okay, here's what happened. Here's this story.
1:46:55 Speaker 01 Here's what happened the night he came in to Twitter for the first time, and let you form your own judgment.
1:47:00 Lex Fridman? What about the interviews? You've had a lot of conversations. You give acknowledgement to the people you've done interviews with. Well, one, I have to ask, as an aspiring interviewer myself, how?
1:47:18 Speaker 01 People love to talk. People just love... You know that. And I've had 140, maybe 150 people, they're all listed in the 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 a story, I say, oh, no, no, no, I don't enjoy it. But I think it's important to know where everything came from. And with Musk, it's, you know, I had that from the very beginning.
1:48:03 Speaker 01 Because I was a Time Magazine reporter. I'd worked, a reporter for the Times-Picayune on New Orleans. I, first day on the job, I had to go cover a murder. And I phoned in the story from a payphone. 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 out her yearbook. 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 Kissinger, and people tell you the stories, all the way through Elon Musk, everybody talked.
1:48:45 Speaker 01 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 Russert, the late NBC guy. They do what was called door knocking. You just walk in a 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. With Musk, a third secret, you know this well.
1:49:29 Speaker 01 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.
1:49:41 Speaker 01 Okay, he's not saying anything for four minutes. I can outlast him.
1:49:45 Lex Fridman? It's tough. As humans, it's very tough. Respecting in silence is really, really difficult. Speaking of demons, when there's silence, all the demons show up in my head.
1:49:56 Speaker 01 Oh, dear.
1:49:57 Lex Fridman? The fear, I think, is if I don't say anything, it's boring. And if I say something, it's gonna be stupid. And that's 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.
1:50:14 Speaker 01 You can never go wrong by staying silent 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,
1:50:29 Speaker 01 don't ask complex questions, don't interject. And when somebody hasn't fully answered the question, don't say, well, let me. Just stay silent, and then they'll keep talking.
1:50:45 Lex Fridman? Just give them a chance to keep talking, even if they've kind of finished, you're still.
1:50:49 Speaker 01 Sometimes they haven't given you enough. Instead of following up, I'll just nod and keep waiting.
1:50:56 Lex Fridman? You're making it sound simple. Is there a secret to getting people to open up more?
1:51:00 Speaker 01 I'm somewhat lucky because I started off working for a daily newspaper. And people back then, they wanted to talk to the newspaper reporter.
1:51:12 Lex Fridman? But you also have a way about you. Like, I feel like you have a cowboy in a saloon. Like, you just kind of want to talk. Like, there's a draw. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's, I don't know if it's developed or you're born with it, but there's a, it feels like I want to tell you a story of some sort.
1:51:28 Speaker 01 Good, tell me a story.
1:51:32 Speaker 01 A couple of 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, 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, are either trying to play gotcha or trying to get a news scoop or trying to, you know, gig something that can make a lead.
1:52:15 Speaker 01 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.
1:52:32 Lex Fridman? I'm sure some of them off the record, some of them on the record. You had maybe, you know, just some incredible conversations. I was gonna 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 is there a advice you can give from what you've learned to somebody like me on how to have good conversation, especially when it's recorded?
1:53:04 Speaker 01 Well, to be 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.
1:53:23 Lex Fridman? Yeah, so that's just genuine curiosity. But there's something, when you talk about just one-on-one interaction.
1:53:32 Lex Fridman? Whether it's Elon or Steve Jobs, there's something beautiful about that person's mind. And it feels like it's possible to reveal that, to discover that together efficiently. And that's kind of the goal of a conversation.
1:53:53 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, look, you're amongst the top podcasters and interviewers in the world today. You have an earnestness to you.
1:54:06 Speaker 01 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.
1:54:20 Speaker 01 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 corps in Philadelphia, he would go to his group that he called the Leather Apron Club, and they would pose a question. Why don't we have it? 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.
1:55:04 Speaker 01 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 at dinner or something, and I'm with somebody,
1:55:23 Speaker 01 I'm usually curious and I'll, the conversation will proceed, you know, with questions. And I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing, whoever I happen to be with.
1:55:38 Speaker 01 And that's a talent you you have, which is you're pretty genuine in your interests. There are 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. 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.
1:56:11 Lex Fridman? But there's a different aspect of this, which is that I would love to hear how you've solved it or if you faced it, that you're certainly disarming. See, I'm like peppering you with compliments here, trying to get you.
1:56:28 Speaker 01 That's a very disarming method.
1:56:29 Lex Fridman? Yeah. I've recently talked to Benjamin Netanyahu, we'll talk again, we unfortunately, because of scheduling and complexities, only had one hour, which is very difficult, very difficult with a charismatic politician.
1:56:41 Speaker 01 He is a prime minister.
1:56:42 Lex Fridman? I understand this, but he's also a charismatic talker, which is very difficult to break through in one hour. But there are 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, I wonder if there's some advice, some wisdom you've learned on how to sort of wear down through water or whatever, whatever method the walls that we've built up as individuals.
1:57:15 Speaker 01 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, they've got a shell, or he won't do that, but he was almost.
1:57:50 Speaker 01 crazily open and did not seem to want to be spinning or hiding or faking things. And I've been lucky. Doudna was that way. Steve Jobs was that way. But you have to put in time, too. In other words, 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.
1:58:20 Lex Fridman? Yes. Well, actually, that's 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 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 with many of the people I've spoken with, sometimes the trust happens like after the interview, which is really sad because it's like, oh, man.
1:58:55 Speaker 01 I've never been in your situation where I have a show. I usually have mini cracks at the wheel. I'm not a first date person.
1:59:06 Lex Fridman? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you know.
1:59:08 Speaker 01 But then I'm lucky. I mean, I say lucky, but I'm in print, you know.
1:59:12 Lex Fridman? I understand.
1:59:13 Speaker 01 Print is a couple thousand year old medium, but there are those of us who love it.
1:59:18 Lex Fridman? Well, the nature of the podcast medium is that I'm a one night stand kind of girl. Let me ask you about objectivity. You've followed Elon and you've followed Steve. I mean, I don't even know if you would say you're front. You have to be careful with words like that, but there's an intimacy. And how do you remain objective? Do you want to remain objective while telling a deeply human story?
1:59:46 Speaker 01 Yeah, I mean, I want to be honest, which I think is akin to being objective. 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 him the book. I don't know if he, I don't think he's read it yet. I've got one person I'm writing for, the open minded reader. And
2:00:16 Speaker 01 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's will the reader have a better understanding because I've put this story in the book?
2:00:40 Lex Fridman? I'm a bit of a romantic.
2:00:43 Lex Fridman? So to me, even your Einstein book
2:00:46 Speaker 01 Yeah.
2:00:46 Lex Fridman? had lessons on romance and relationships.
2:00:50 Speaker 01 Oh, dear.
2:00:52 Lex Fridman? So how important are romantic relationships to the success of great men, great women, great minds?
2:00:58 Speaker 01 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. His, you know, Mileva, his first wife was a sounding board and helped with the mathematics of the special relativity paper in particular.
2:01:25 Speaker 01 But he didn't treat her well. I mean, he made her like sign a letter that she wouldn'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 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, you know, I'll give you the money.
2:01:59 Speaker 01 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 bet. Is that until, what, 1919 that he wins his Nobel Prize?
2:02:15 Speaker 01 And she gets all the money. She buys three apartment buildings in Zurich. With his second wife, Elsa, it was more a partnership of convenience. It was not a romantic love. But he knew, and that's sometimes what people need in life, is just a partner. I mean, somebody who's gonna handle the stuff you're not gonna handle. So I guess if you look at my books, they're not great, inspiring guides to personal relationships.
2:02:49 Lex Fridman? 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 maybe even just the silly mundane question of what do you eat for breakfast before you start writing? When do you write?
2:03:06 Speaker 01 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 look askance.
2:03:15 Lex Fridman? Yes.
2:03:16 Speaker 01 And morning is not my favorite day part, so I write at night. And because I love narrative, it's easy to structure a book. Which is, I can make an outline that if I printed it out, or notes, would be 100 pages, but everything's in order. In other words, if we serve, 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,
2:04:00 Speaker 01 my first editor, which is, all things in good time. Don't get ahead of the story, don't have to flashback. And then after you get it, so that it's all chronological, you know, things, 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.
2:04:39 Lex Fridman? Well, what about the actual process of telling the story?
2:04:45 Speaker 01 Well, that's the mantra I mentioned earlier, which is whenever I get paused, or I don't know how to say something, I just say, let me tell you a story. 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 don't, 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,
2:05:28 Speaker 01 you know, one day in January in the factory in Texas, comma.
2:05:33 Lex Fridman? Well, one of the things I'd love to ask you is, 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 biographies, having studied so many great men and women, what advice could you give to people of how to live this, this life?
2:06:05 Speaker 01 Well, I keep going back to the classics, and Plato, and Aristotle, and Socrates. And I guess it's Plato's maxim, but he may be quoting Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. And it gets back to the know thyself, and other things, which is, you don't have to figure out what is the big meaning of it all. But you have to figure out why you're doing what you're doing. 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.
2:06:50 Lex Fridman? Where does the examination leave you? Is it to a shift in life trajectory?
2:07:00 Speaker 01 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 of years at CNN.
2:07:39 Speaker 01 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. 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, that was when I was in my salad days in Green and 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.
2:08:24 Speaker 01 And after a while, I realized, that wasn't really totally what I'm suited to be, especially when I got put in charge of CNN. I mean, all young people are almost by definition in their salad days in 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?
2:08:56 Lex Fridman? One of the big examinations you can do is the fact that you and everybody dies one day. How much you, Walter Isaacson, think about death? Are you afraid of it?
2:09:08 Speaker 01 No, and I don't think about it a lot, but I do think about Steve Jobs's, let me tell you a story, you know, which is the wonderful Steve Jobs story of, 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 that are looking for ways to live forever. I can think, Musk says, of nothing worse. We read the myth of Sisyphus, and we know how bad it is to be condemned to eternal life.
2:09:52 Speaker 01 So there was in ancient Greece, the person who walked behind the king and said, memento mori, remember you're gonna die. And it kept people from losing it a bit.
2:10:11 Lex Fridman? Do you think about legacy?
2:10:13 Speaker 01 The lucky thing about being a biographer is that you kind of know what your legacy is. There's gonna be a shelf, and it'll be of interesting people. And you will have inspired a 17-year-old biology student somewhere to be, you know, the next great biochemist, or somebody to start a company like Elon Musk.
2:10:41 Speaker 01 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 vice chair of 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.
2:11:24 Speaker 01 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 Tulane, 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 are 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,
2:12:08 Speaker 01 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 architect. So when I think of, I won't say legacy, but what am I going to do to pay it forward, which is a lower-level way of saying legacy,
2:12:51 Speaker 01 I pay it forward by going back to the place where I began and trying to know it for the first time. That was a rip off of a T.S. Eliot line. I don't want you to think I thought of that one.
2:13:05 Lex Fridman? Always cite your sources. I appreciate it.
2:13:07 Speaker 01 T.S. Eliot, if you ever need to figure it out, the four quotes, that's that part at the end, which is, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place we started and know it for the first time, 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 V. Well, you go back to the place where you came and
2:13:43 Lex Fridman? See, for the first time.
2:13:44 Speaker 01 And don't sit there worrying about legacy, but you'll sit there saying, "How do I make sure that somebody else can have a magical trajectory, starting in New Orleans?"
2:13:56 Lex Fridman? Well, to me, you're one of the greatest storytellers of all time. I've been a huge fan.
2:14:02 Speaker 01 That's definitely not true, but it's so sweet of you. You see, you can be.
2:14:05 Lex Fridman? Rudely interrupting.
2:14:09 Lex Fridman? From, I think, probably Ben Franklin, so for I don't know how many years, 15 years, Einstein, all the way through today. I've just been a huge fan of yours. And you're one of the people that I thought surely would not lower themselves to appear and have a conversation with me. And it's just a giant gift to me.
2:14:32 Speaker 01 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.
2:14:41 Lex Fridman? Thank you a thousand times. Thank you for respecting me and for inspiring just millions of people with your stories. Again, an incredible storyteller, incredible human. And thank you for talking today.
2:14:52 Speaker 01 Thank you, Alex.
2:14:53 Lex Fridman? 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 Jung. "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.
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