Lex Fridman PodcastWalter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin | Lex Fridman Podcast #395
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
150 min read · 30,105 words- 0:00 – 3:00
Introduction
- WIWalter Isaacson
I hope with my books I'm saying, uh, "This isn't a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up or... as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk, you know, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to an anti-apartheid concert with his brother, and there's a, a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their soles. 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?
- LFLex Fridman
(wind blowing) The following is a conversation with Walter Isaacson, one of the greatest biography writers ever, having written incredible books on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and now a new one on Elon Musk. We talked for hours on and off the mic. I'm sure we'll talk many more times. Walter is a truly special writer, thinker, observer, and human being. I highly recommend people read his new book on Elon. I'm sure there will be short-term controversy, but in the long term, I think it will inspire millions of young people, especially with difficult childhoods, with hardship in their surroundings or in their own minds, to take on the hardest problems in the world and to build solutions to those problems, no matter how impossible the odds. In this conversation, Walter and I cover all of his books and use personal stories from them to speak to the bigger principles of striving for greatness in science, in tech, engineering, art, politics, and life. There are many things in the new Elon book that I felt are best saved for when I speak to Elon directly again on this podcast, which will be soon enough. Perhaps it's also good to mention here that my friendships, like with Elon, nor any other influence like money, access, fame, power, will ever result in me sacrificing my integrity, ever. I do like to celebrate the good in people, to empathize and to understand, but I also like to call people out on their 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. 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.
- 3:00 – 20:04
Difficult childhood
- LFLex Fridman
What is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great men and women, great minds? Is it a requirement, is it a catalyst, or is it just a simple coincidence of fate?
- WIWalter Isaacson
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, uh, sentence in his memoirs, which is, I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of fa- of his father or live down the sins of his father. And for Elon, it's especially true 'cause he had both a violent and difficult childhood, and a very psychologically problematic father. He's got those demons, uh, dancing around in his head, and by harnessing them, it's part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.
- LFLex Fridman
You've written that, uh, Elon talked about his father a- and that at times it felt like mental torture, the, the interaction with him during his childhood. Can you describe some of the things you've learned?
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah. Well, Elon and Kimbal 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 Kimbal said, "I couldn't really recognize him," and he was in the hospital for almost a week. But when he came home, Elon had to stand in front of his father and his father berated him for more than an hour and said he was stupid, and took the side of the, of the person who had beaten him.
- LFLex Fridman
That's probably one of the more traumatic events of Elon's life.
- WIWalter Isaacson
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, uh, bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues. He talks about being Asperger's. And so he gets, uh, traumatized at a camp like that. But the second time 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, he might... it might hurt him, but it... 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, his father. Elon doesn't talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimbal. It's been years. And, uh, Errol doesn't even have, uh, 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, eh, you know, a great mind of engineering and especially material science, uh, 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. And of course, Maye Musk says to me, the, 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, he gets it. He's self-aware. But you've probably seen him at times where those demons take over and he goes really dark and really quiet. And, uh, Grimes says, you know, "I can tell a minute or two in advance when demon mode's about to happen." And he'll go a bit dark. I was, you know, here at Austin once at dinner with a group, and you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was gonna go dark. I've watched it at meetings where somebody'll 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, the huge snap out where-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... suddenly he's showing you a Monty 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 and dark mode.
- LFLex Fridman
A quote you cited about Elon s- really stood out to me. I forget, uh, who it's from, but inside the man, he's still there as a child, the child standing in front of his dad.
- WIWalter Isaacson
That was Tallulah, his second wife. And she's great. Uh, she's an English actress. They've been married twice actually. And Tallulah said that's just him from his childhood. He's a drama addict. Kimbal says that as well. And I asked why, and he sai- 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 bank- or whatever it may have been, or later, and he would be so stressed he would vomit. And then he would channel things that his father had said, use phrases his father had said to him. And so she told me, "Deep inside the man is this man-child still standing in front of his father."
- LFLex Fridman
To what degree is that true for many of us do you think?
- WIWalter Isaacson
I think it's true but in many different ways. I- 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 wanna meet. I grew up in a magical place in New Orleans. My dad was an engineer, an electrical engineer. And you know, he was always kind. Perhaps I'm not quite as driven or as crazed. I don't have to prove things, so I get to write about Elon Musk. I get to write about, you know, Einstein or Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci, who as you know, was totally torn by demons and had different difficult childhood situations, not even legitimized by his father. So sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle, sweet childhoods, 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. And so I always respect those who are in the arena. I don't, you know-
- LFLex Fridman
You don't see yourself as a man in the arena?
- WIWalter Isaacson
I've had a gentle, sweet career, and I've got to cover really interesting people. But I've never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars. I've never moved us into the era of electric vehicles. I've never stayed up all night on the factory floor. I don't have quite those, either the drives or the, uh, addiction to risk. I mean, Elon's addicted to risk. He's addicted to adventure. Me, if I see something that's risky, I spend some time calculating, okay, upside downside here. Uh, but that's another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done and people like me write about the Elon Musks.
- LFLex Fridman
One other aspect of this. Given a difficult childhood, whether it's, uh, 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.
- WIWalter Isaacson
I think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
... with sweet parents.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And we all have demons. And rule one in life is harness your demons. Know that you're ambitious or not ambitious or you're lazy or whatever. Uh, Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator, you know? I think...It's 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 Kimbal Musk than Elon. Uh, I maybe got over-endowed with the empathy gene. And what does that mean? Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine. It was a group of about 150 people on the editorial floors, and I knew them all, and we had a jolly time. When I went to CNN, I was not very good at being a manager or an executive of an organization. Uh, I cared a little bit too much, that people didn't get annoyed at me or, uh, mad at me. And Elon said that about John McNeil, for example, who was president of Tesla. It's in the book. I talked to John McNeil a long time, and he says, uh, "You know, Elon just would fire people, be really rough on people. He didn't have the empathy for the people in front of him." And Elon says, "Yeah, that's right. And John McNeil couldn't fire people. He cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the entire enterprise, or getting things done." Being over-endowed with the desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager, and, uh, 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. Uh, but that turned out to be a good thing. When they can't figure out the big state, little state issue at the Constitutional Convention, when they can't figure out the Treaty of Paris, whatever it is, he brings people together and that is his superpower. So to get back to the lessons, you asked, and, you know, the first was harness your demons. The second is to know your strengths and your superpower.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
My superpower is definitely not being a tough manager. After running CNN for a while, I said, "Okay."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
"I think I've proven I don't really enjoy this or know how to do this well." Uh... You know, do I have other talents? Yeah, I think I have the talent to observe people really closely, to write about it in a straight, but I hope interesting narrative style. That's a power. It's totally different from running an organization. It took me until three years of running CNN, then I realized, "I'm not cut to be an executive in a really high intense situations." Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situation. So much so, that when things get less intense, when they actually are making enough cars and rockets are going up and landing, he thinks of something else so he can surge and have more intensity. He's addicted to intensity, um, and that's his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.
- LFLex Fridman
But I think also, uh, to build on that, it's not just addiction to, like, risk and drama. There's always a big mission-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... above it. So I would say, uh, it's an empathy towards people in the big picture.
- WIWalter Isaacson
It's an empathy towards humanity-
- LFLex Fridman
Humanity.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... 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, uh, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, uh, Elon Musk. Uh, they always have empathy for these great goals of humanity, and at times they can be clueless about the emotions of the people in front of them, or callous sometimes. Musk, as you said, is driven by mission more than any person I've ever seen. And it's not only mission, it's like cosmic missions. Meaning, he's got three really big missions. One is to make humans a space-faring civilization, make us multi-planetary, or get us to Mars. Number two is to bring us into the era of sustainable energy, to bring us into the era of electric vehicles and solar roofs and, um, battery packs. And third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values. And every now and then I'd talk to 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 the type of, of, uh, pontification you do on a podcast." But on like the 20th time I watched him, I realized, "Okay, I believe it." He actually is driven by this.
- 20:04 – 23:01
Jennifer Doudna
- WIWalter Isaacson
I hope this book inspires. Jennifer Doudna, the-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... gene editing pioneer who discovers, helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Code Breaker... She grew up feeling like a misfit, you know, in Hawaii in a Polynesian vill- 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, I should've said about Jennifer Doudna, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, "No, girls don't do science. You know, science is not for girls. You're not gonna do math or science."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And so it pushes her to say, "All right, I'm gonna do math and science."
- LFLex Fridman
Just, just to interrupt real quick, but, uh, Jennifer Doudna, you've written an amazing book about her, uh, Nobel Prize winner-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... CRISPR developer, just incredible, one of the great scientists in the 21st century.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah. 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 was wrong." So I think books, like she read this book, and even if it's a comic book like Elon Musk read, books can sometimes inspire you. And every one of my books is about people who were totally innovative, who weren't just smart, 'cause 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 as Steve Jobs put it, "Think different." And so I hope with my books I'm saying, "Uh, this isn't a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up, or, as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk, you know, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to anti-apartheid concert with his brother, and there's a, a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticky on their soles. 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?
- 23:01 – 28:20
Einstein
- WIWalter Isaacson
- LFLex Fridman
Einstein too... Uh, one of my... And it's hard to pick my favorite of your, um, biographies, but Ein- Einstein, um, I mean, you really paint a picture of another... I don't wanna call him a misfit (laughs) -
- WIWalter Isaacson
(laughs) .
- LFLex Fridman
... but a person who doesn't necessarily have a, a standard trajectory through life of s- of success. So, uh-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Absolutely.
- LFLex Fridman
... and it's... That's extremely inspiring. Uh, I don't know exactly what question to ask. There's a million.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, I'll talk about the misfit for a second, 'cause you know, we talked about Leonardo being that way. You know, Einstein's Jewish in Germany at a time when it starts getting difficult. Uh, he's slow in learning how to talk, and he's a visual thinker, so he's always daydreaming and imagining things. The first time he applies to the Zurich Polytech, 'cause he runs away from the German...... education system, 'cause 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, uh-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
... Zurich Polytech.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Like, you rejected Einstein? Uh...
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
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, uh, gymnasium, uh, to get a job and they won't take him. So he's a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office in 1905. Third class 'cause they've rejected his doctoral dissertation, and so he can't be second class or f- first class 'cause 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 m- misunderstood or unappreciated, in 1906, he's still a third-class patent... In 1907, he still is. 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.
- LFLex 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?
- WIWalter Isaacson
Plus, he had a day job as a patent examiner.
- LFLex Fridman
Right.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And there's really three papers, but there's also an addendum, 'cause once you figure out quantum theory and then you figure out relativity, and you're understanding Maxwell's equations and the speed of light, uh, he does a little addendum that's the most famous equation in all of physics, which is E equals MC squared. So it's a pretty good year. (laughs) It partly starts because he's a visual thinker, and I think it was helpful that he was at the patent office rather than being the acolyte of, uh, some professor at the academy where he was supposed to follow the rules. And so at the patent office, they're doing devices to synchronize clocks, 'cause the Swiss have just gone on standard time zones, and Swiss people, as you know, tend to be rather, you know, Swiss. They care if it strikes the hour in Basel, it should do the same 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'll 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 was making my palms 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's looks synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction.
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And he makes the mental leap that time... uh, that the speed of light's always constant, but time is relative depending on your state of motion. So it was that type of out-of-the-box thinking, those leaps, that made 1905 his miracle year. Likewise with Musk. I mean, after General Motors and Ford, everybody gives up on electric vehicles, to just say, "I know how we're going to have a path to change the entire trajectory of the world into the era of electric vehicles." And then when 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, "Well, how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel, how much would it really cost?" And so he's visualizing things that other people would ju- would just say is impossible. It's what Steve Jobs' 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.
- 28:20 – 45:24
Tesla
- WIWalter Isaacson
- LFLex Fridman
You said visual thinking. I wonder if you've seen parallels of the different styles and kinds of thinking that, um, that operate the minds of these people. So if, uh, is there parallels you see between Elon, Steve Jobs, Einstein, da Vinci, specifically in how they think?
- WIWalter Isaacson
I think they were all visual thinkers-
- LFLex Fridman
Visual thinkers.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children, meaning, you know, Leonardo was left-handed and a little bit dyslectic, I think. Um, and certainly Einstein had echolalia. He would repeat things. He was slow in learning to talk. Um, so I think visualizing helps-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... 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, 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 an... small anecdotes in my book, but at one point he's on the Tesla line and they're trying to get 5,000 cars a week in 2018.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 Baglione... uh, not Drew, but Lars Moravy, 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 test or anything else, the pressure would be in this way, so you have to..." And they went 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 where in any given day he's visualizing the physics of an engineering or manufacturing problem. That sounds pretty mundane. But for me, if you say, "What makes him special?" there's a mission-driven thing, I can give you a lot of reasons. But one of the reasons is, he cares not just about the design of the product, but visualizing the manufacturing and... of the product, the machine that makes the machine. And that's what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years. We 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.
- LFLex Fridman
So understanding everything from the physics all the way up to the, to the software. It's like end-to-end.
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 wo- worked... You know. Uh... 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 a CEO, when he was just the executive chairman and basically the finance person, person funding it, they were outsourcing everything. They were making the batteries in Japan, and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop in Thailand, and they'd send it to the Lotus factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise cha- uh, chassis and then chass-... 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... 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 d- the, uh, battery. He makes his own batteries. And I think that end-to-end control is part of his personality. I mean, there's a... Uh, but it also would allows Tesla, uh, to be innovative.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah. And I got to see and understand in detail one example of that, which is the development of the brain of the car in autopilot going from Mobileye to in-house building the autopilot system to-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... uh, basically getting rid of all sensors that are not, uh, rich in data to make it AI friendly. Sort of saying that we can do it all with vision. And like you said, removing some of the bolts. So sometimes it's small things, but sometimes it's really big things like getting rid of radar.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, vision only. Getting rid of radar is huge. And everybody's against it. Everybody... And s- they're still fighting it a bit. They're still-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... trying to do a next generation, some form of radar. But it gets back to the first principles. We're talking about visualizing. Well, he starts n- uh, with the first principles. And the first principles of physics, uh, involve things like, well, humans drive with only visual input. They don't have radar. They don't have LiDAR. They don't have sonar. And so there is no reason in the laws of physics that make it so that vision only won't be successful in creating self-driving. Now that becomes an article of faith to him, and he gets a lot of pushback. But now... And he's, by the way, not been that successful in meeting his deadlines of getting self-driving. He's way too optimistic. But it was that first principles of get rid of unnecessary things. Now you would think LiDAR, why not use it? Like, why not use a crutch? It's like, "Yeah, we can do things vision only, but when I look at the stars at night, I'll use a telescope too." Well, you could use LiDAR, but you can't do millions of cars that way at scale. At a certain point, you have to make it not only a good product, but a product that goes to scale. And you can't make it based on maps like Google Maps 'cause it'll never be able to, you know, then drive from New Orleans to Slidell where I wanna go when it's too hot in New Orleans. Uh... Take for example, full self-drive. He has been obsessed with what he calls the robo-taxi.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
"We're gonna build the next generation car without a steering wheel-"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
"... without pedals." Because it's gonna 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 Moravy and Drew Baglino and others, they're saying, "Okay, fine. That sounds really good, but, uh, you know, it ain't happened yet. We need to build a $25,000 mass market global car that's just normal with a steering wheel." And yeah, he finally turned around a few months ago and said, "Let's do it." And then he starts focusing on, "How's the assembly line gonna work? How are we gonna do it and make it the same platform for robo-taxi 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." That's really hard to do. 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, or the Uber drivers," as Elon says. And so that's him changing his mind and going to first principles, but saying, "All right. I'm even gonna change full self-driving so that it's not rules-based, it becomes AI-based." Just like ChatGPT doesn't try to answer your question, "Who were the five best popes?" or something, by study... 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Sometimes it feels like, uh, he and others, uh, that are building things in this world successfully, are, are basically, uh, confidently exploring a dark room with a very confident, ambitious vision of what that room actually looks like. Like...
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
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 (laughs) as they run into, or they step on a LEGO and, or their, their body, uh, is filled with a lot of pain. What I mean by that is th- there's this kind of evolution that seems to happen where you discover really good ideas along the way that allow you to pivot. Like, to me, since, uh, you know, uh, since a few years ago when you could see with Andrej Karpathy, the Software 2.0 evolution of Autopilot, it became obvious to me that this is not about the car. This is about Optimus, the robot. Th- this is like, if we look back 100 years from now, the car will be remembered as a c- 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, and so broadly. And so that kind of approach... And it's... And you kinda stumble into it. Will Tesla be a, a car company? Will it be an AI company? Will it be a robotics company? Will it be a home robotics company? Will it be an energy company? And then you kind of slowly discover this as you confidently, um, like, m- push forward with a vision. So it's interesting to watch that kind of evolution, as long as it's backed by this confidence.
- WIWalter Isaacson
There are a couple of things that are required for that. One is being adventurous. One doesn't enter a dark room without a flashlight and a map, unless you're a risk-taker, unless you're adventurous. The second is to have iterative, uh, brain cycles where you can process information and do a feedback loop and make it work. The third, and this is what we failed to do a lot in the United States and perhaps around the world, is when you, uh, take risks, you have to realize you're gonna blow things up. 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, uh, the Mayflower is 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, 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. Uh, not just Optimus the robot, but Optimus the robot and the self-driving car, uh, they're, they're pretty much the same. They're using, uh, you know, GPU clusters, or DOJO chips, or whatever it may be, to process real world data. We all got, and you did on your podcast, quite excited about large language model-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... you know, generative, uh, predictive text, uh, AI. That's fine, especially if you wanna 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, (laughs) I like how you said "chit-chat." Uh, I, I would say, (laughs) for, for, for one of the greatest writers ever, it's funny that you spoke about language and the mastery of languages as merely chit-chat. You know, people have fallen in love over some words. People have gone to wars over some 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 visu- in, in visuals, in the physical? I don't really-
- WIWalter Isaacson
It's in mathematics.
- LFLex Fridman
Maybe it all boils down to math, and in the end this kind of discussion about, uh, real world AI versus language is all the same. Maybe. I've, um, gotten a chance to hang out quite a bit in the metaverse with Mr. Mark Zuckerberg recently, and boy, is the realism in there, the ne- like, the- the thing that's coming up in the future is incredible. I got, uh, scanned, uh, in, uh, Pittsburgh for 10 hours into the metaverse, and there's like a- a virtual version of me, and I got to hang out with that virtual ver- version.
- 45:24 – 49:34
Elon Musk's humor
- WIWalter Isaacson
is all about.
- LFLex Fridman
I wonder if there's a small aside we could say, just, uh, having gotten to know Elon very well, like his, the- the silliness, the willingness to engage in the absurdity of it all and have fun. What is that? What ... is that, uh, is that just a quirk of personality, or is that a fundamental aspect of a human who's running six plus companies?
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, it's a release valve, just like video games and Polytopia and Elden Ring are release valves for him. Um, and he does have an explosive sense of humor, as you know. And the weird thing is when he makes the abrupt transition from dark demon mode, and you're in a conference room, and he has really become upset about something. And not only there are dark vibes, but there's dark words emanating, and he's saying, "Your resignation will be accepted if you d-" you know, et cetera. And then something pops, and he pulls out his phone and pulls up a Monty Python 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(inhales) Yeah, you've actually opened the Elon book with the quotes from Elon and from Steve Jobs. So Elon's quote is, "To anyone I've offended, I just wanna say," this is on SNL, "I just wanna say, I reinvented electric cars and I'm sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you also think I was going to be a chill normal dude?" And then the quote from Steve Jobs, of course, is, "The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do." So, um, what do you think is the role of the old, uh, madness and genius? What do you think is the role of crazy in this?
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, first of all, let's both stipulate that Musk is crazy at times, I mean. And then let's figure out, and I try to do it through storytelling, not through highfalutin preaching, uh, where that craziness works, you know.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Gimme 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. Uh, and between an aborted countdown in the shoot off, he goes to Miami to an ad sales conference and meets Linda Yaccarino for the first time, makes her the CEO. I mean, there's a very impulsiveness to him. Then he flies back, they launch Starship, and you realize that there's a drive, and there are demons, and there's also craziness. And you sometimes wanna pull those out. You wanna take away his phone so he doesn't tweet at 3:00 AM. You want to say, "Quit being so crazy."But then you realize, there's a wonderful line in, 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 a craziness that's just like, effing crazy. Uh, as well as his drive in demon mode. I don't know that you can take that strand out of the fabric and the fabric remains whole.
- LFLex 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 is, comes in one package. It's the man in the arena versus the critic.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And the man in the arena versus the regulator, and to make it more prosaic.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- 49:34 – 52:58
Steve Jobs' cruelty
- LFLex Fridman
Um, well let me ask about, not just the crazy but the cruelty. So in, um... 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?" Uh, what is this answer for Steve Jobs? Did he have to be so cruel?
- WIWalter Isaacson
For, for Jobs, I asked Woz at the end of my reporting, 'cause that's what he asked, said at the beginning. We were 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. I would, everybody got stock options. It would have been like a family." And then I... 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 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-
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
... but you like people to like you, you like to sweet talk things-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
Uh, and I do try to sugarcoat things.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
But when I was running CNN-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... it needed to be reshaped. It needed to be broken. It needed to have certain things blown up.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And I didn't do it.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
You know? So bad on me.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
But it made me realize, okay, I'll just write about the people who can do it.
- LFLex 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."
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm. 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 at a Whole Foods or something.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
People, they use the word "stupid" really often.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And you know who else used it? Errol Musk. He kept making Elon stand in front of him and saying, "That's the stupidest thing, you're the stupidest person. You'll never amount to anything." Um, I don't know. (sighs) You know, as John McNeil, the president of Tesla said, do you have to be that way? Probably not. There are a lot of successful people who are much kinder. But, um, it's sometimes necessary to be much more brutal and honest, brutally honest I would say, than people like ... who are, win boss of the year trophies.
- LFLex Fridman
Well, as you said, this kind of idea did also send a signal, this idea of Steve Jobs of A players, it did send a signal to everybody. It was a kind of encouragement to the people that are all in.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Right, and that
- 52:58 – 1:05:07
Twitter
- WIWalter Isaacson
happened at Twitter. When we went to Twitter headquarters the day before the takeover, he was having Andrew and, um, 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... of the building looking at the lines of code that had been written by Twitter engineers, and they decided they were gonna 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 he either... And then it came up, uh, actually one of his, um, I think it was one of the cousins or maybe Ross Nordean came up with the idea of let's not be so rough and just fire all these people. Let's ask 'em, "Do you really wanna be all in? 'Cause this is gonna be hardcore."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
"It's gonna 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 20s than when I was, you know, in my 50s.
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah, and you write about this, this really nice idea actually, that there's two camps-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... and you find out... I don't, I wonder how true this is. It- it rings true. That you can just ask people, "Which camp are you in?"
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah, sure.
- LFLex Fridman
Are you the kind of person that prides themselves and enjoy staying up till 2:00 AM programming or whatever? Or do you see the value of, quote unquote, you know, bal- life, work/life balance, all this kind of stuff? And it's interesting, I mean-You, like you, you could, people probably divide themselves in different stages of life, and you could just ask them, and it makes sense for certain companies, in certain stages of their, their development to be like, "Uh, we only want-"
- WIWalter Isaacson
Or certain teams.
- LFLex Fridman
... hardcore people."
- WIWalter Isaacson
It doesn't even-
- LFLex Fridman
Certain teams.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... have to be a 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.
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
But, um... And decide on this stage in my life, am I, do I wanna be a hackathon all in all night, and change the world? Or do I want to bring wisdom and stability, but also have balance? I think it's good to have different companies with different styles. The problem was Twitter was at almost one extreme, with yoga studios and mental health days off, and, uh, enshrining psychological safety as one of the mantras that people should never feel psychologically threatened. And he, I remember the bitter laugh he unleashed when he kept hearing that word. He said, "No, I like the words hard- hardcore. I like intensity. I like a intense sense of urgency as our-"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... operating principle." Well, yeah, there are people that way as well. So know who you are and know what type of team you wanna build.
- LFLex Fridman
Versus psychological safety and too many birds everywhere.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Oh, yeah. A lot of times Musk did things, I go, "What the hell?"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And among them was changing the name Twitter and getting rid of the birds. I'm like, "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 X into the hardcore realm, with people who post hardcore things, with people with hardcore views. It's not a polite playpen for the blue checked anointed elite. And I thought, "Okay, this is gonna be bad. The whole thing is gonna 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 the sweetness of birds chirping and tweeting and saying, "I want something more hardcore."
- LFLex Fridman
As you've written in, uh, referring to the, the previous Twitter CEO, uh, Elon said that Twitter needs a, a fire-breathing dragon. I think this is a good opportunity to, um, maybe go through some of the memorable mo- moments of the Twitter saga as you've written about extensively in your book.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Like from the early days of considering the acquisition, to uh, how it went through, to the details of, uh, like you mentioned, the engineering teams.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, at the beginning of 2022, he was riding high. But as we say, he's a drama addict. He doesn't like to coast. And you know, Tesla had sold a million vehicles, I think 33 boosters had, uh, s-, uh, you know, uh, uh, Falcon 9s had been shot up and landed safely in the past few months. Um, 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 wanna put all my chips back on the table. I wanna keep taking risks. I don't wanna savor things." He had sold all of his houses. So he starts secretly buying shares of Twitter, January, February, March, becomes public at a certain point, he has to, uh, 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 gonna offer him a board seat, and he was gonna do a standstill agreement and stop at 10% or something. Now remember, you know, we were standing around. It was Luke Nosek, 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, he's like, "Should we do this?" And I didn't say anything. I'm just the observer. But everybody else is saying, "Excuse me, why do you want to own Twitter?"
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 then it was almost like, okay, the demographics are people my age or May's age. Um, and so it looked like he wasn't gonna pursue it. They offered him a board seat, and, um, then he went off to Hawaii to, uh, Larry Ellison's, uh, house, which he sometimes uses. He was meeting a friend, Angela Bassett, an actress. And instead of enjoying three days of vacation, he just became supercharged-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- 1:05:07 – 1:07:52
Firing
- LFLex Fridman
uh, another part that you write about with The Three Musketeers and the whole engineering. The firing and the bringing in the engineers to try to sort of go hardcore. So there's a lot of interesting sort of questions to ask there, but the high level, can you just comment about that part of the saga, which is bringing in the engineers and seeing like, "What can we do here?"
- WIWalter Isaacson
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. He said-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... "This can't be the case." And he fired 85% 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 every... of all that was written in the past year or so. Then he fired people, you know, who didn't seem to be totally all in or loyal, and then another round of layoffs. So, uh, at each step of the way, almost everybody said, "That's enough. It's going to destroy things."
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Uh, from Alex Spiro, his lawyer, to Jared Birchall, it'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, say, "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.
- LFLex Fridman
What do you think? Was that too much?
- WIWalter Isaacson
I think that...... he has an algorithm, that we mentioned earlier, that begins with question every requirement. What it's up to is delete, delete, delete, delete every part there. And then, a corollary to that is, if you don't end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, then you didn't delete enough in the first round 'cause you were too timid. Well... So you ask me, "Did he overdo it?" He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula. And they're probably trying to hire people now to keep things going.
- LFLex Fridman
But it sends a strong signal to people that are hired back, or the people that are still there, the, the A-player idea.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah, and what Steve Jobs and many other great leaders-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... felt, and certainly Bezos, and certainly... in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates, he was hard-core only A players.
- 1:07:52 – 1:16:55
Hiring
- WIWalter Isaacson
- LFLex Fridman
So, how much of Elon's success would you say... Elon's and, uh, Steve Jobs's success is the hiring and managing of great teams?
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 Jony Ive to Tim Cook and Eddy Cue and Phil Schiller. Elon has done a good job bringing in people. Gwynne Shotwell, obviously. Linda Yaccarino, she's... you know, can navigate through the current crises. Uh, certainly stellar people at SpaceX, like Mark Juncosa, and then at Tesla, like Drew Baglino, and Lars Maravieh, and Tom Zhu, and many others. Um, he's not as much of a team collaborator as, say, Benjamin Franklin-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... who, by the way, that's the best team ever created, which is the founders. And you had to have really smart people-
- LFLex Fridman
Yes.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... 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. Musk is a magnet for awesome talent.
- LFLex Fridman
Magnet? Interesting. But there's the... There's, like the priorities of hiring of... Um, based on excellence, trustworthiness, and drive. These are things you've described-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... throughout the book. I mean, there, there's a pretty, uh, concrete and rigorous, uh, set of ideas based on which the hiring is done.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Oh, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
So-
- WIWalter Isaacson
And he has a very good spidey, uh, intuitive sense, just looking at people, h- who could... I mean, not looking at them, but studying them, who could be good. One of his, uh, uh, m- ways of operating is what he calls a skip-level meeting. And let's take a very specific thing, like the Raptor engine, which is powering the, um, Starship-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... and it wasn't going well. It looked like a spaghetti bush and it was gonna be hard to manufacture. And he got rid of the people who were in charge of that team.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And I remember that he spent a couple of months doing what he calls skip-level, which means instead of meeting with his direct reports on the Raptor team, he would meet with the people one level below them. And so he would skip a level and meet with them. And he said, "This is..." And I just ask them what they're doing and I drill them with questions. And he said, "And this is how I figure out who's going to emerge." He said it was particularly difficult. I was sitting in those meetings 'cause people were wearing masks, it was during the height of COVID-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... uh, and he said it made it a little bit harder for him because he has to-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... get the input. But I watched as a young kid, dreadlocks, named Jacob Mackenzie, he's in the book, is sitting there and he's a bit like you, e- engineering mindset, speaks in a bit of a monotone.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 3:00 AM... Well, I won't say 3:00 AM, but after midnight, said, "You still around?" And J- Jake said, "Yeah, I'm still at work." (laughs) And he said, "Okay, I'm gonna make you in charge of the team building Raptor." And that was like, a big surprise. But Jacob Mackenzie has now gotten a version of Raptor and when... They're building
- NANarrator
(rustling sound)
- WIWalter Isaacson
... him at least one a week and they're pretty awesome. And, um, that's where his talent, Musk's talent, for finding the right person and promoting them. Uh, that's where it is.
- LFLex Fridman
And promoting it in a way where it's like, uh, here's the ball, here, catch-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah, yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
... and you run with it. I have... (laughs) I've interacted with quite a few, uh, folks from even just the Model X, the, the... All throughout, where people, you know, on paper don't seem like they would be able to run the thing and they run it extremely successfully.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And he does it wrong sometimes. He's had a horrible track record with the Solar Roof-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- 1:16:55 – 1:24:39
Time management
- LFLex Fridman
uh, o- one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Um, is there something you could say about Ben Franklin and about, um, Steve Jobs? I think interesting with Elon is that he, as you write, uh, runs six companies.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
Seven c- I mean, how... It depends how you count.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Starlink is its own thing. I don't know.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Yeah.
- LFLex Fridman
Um, what can you say about these people in terms of time management?
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, Musk is, uh, 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, uh, agreed to the deal, this is huge around the world. I'm sure you remember, like, "Musk buys Twitter." It wasn't when the deal closed. It was when the... Twitter accepted his offer.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And I thought, "Okay." But then he went to Boca Chica, to South Texas, and spent time fixating on, uh, 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, oh, I assume, are thinking about, "This guy just bought Twitter. Should we say something?"
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And he's like... And then he goes with Kimbal to a roadside joint, uh, in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing, really, him being there.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-k-
- WIWalter Isaacson
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, uh, uploading video onto x.com or the payments system, and then immediately switch over to some issue with the FAA giving a permit for Starship, or with how to deal with Starlink and the CIA. And when he's focused on any of these things, you cannot distract him. It's not like he's also thinking about, "I'm dealing with Starlink, but I've got to also worry about the Tesla decision on the new $25,000 car." Now he'll, in between these sessions, process information then let off steam. And for better or worse, he lets off steam by either playing a friend in Polytopia or fire off some tweets, which is often not a healthy thing, but it's a release for him, and he doesn't... I once said he was a great multitasker, and that was a mistake. People corrected me. He's a serial-tasker-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Palate?
- WIWalter Isaacson
... palate cleanser. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs) Yes.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Uh, he does some palate cleanser with Polytopia-
- LFLex Fridman
Yeah.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... and then focuses on the next task.
- LFLex Fridman
I mean, is there some wisdom about time management that you can draw from that?
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 (laughs) mind that can shift just like his moods can shift. Uh, you and I go through transitions, and also if I'm thinking about what I'm going to say on this podcast, I'm also thinking about the email my daughter just sent about a house that she's looking... you know, and I'm, I'm multitasking.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
He doesn't actually do that. He single tasks sequentially with a focus that's hardcore.
- LFLex Fridman
I don't know. I think there's wisdom to draw from that, to like... First of all, he makes me, Ben Franklin makes me feel that way, that there's a lot of hours in the day.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- 1:24:39 – 1:28:25
Groups vs individuals
- WIWalter Isaacson
- LFLex Fridman
In, uh, Innovators, another book of yours that I love, you write about individuals and about groups. So one of the questions the book addresses is, is it individuals or is it groups that turn the tides of history?
- WIWalter Isaacson
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, um, we biographers have this dirty secret that we know we distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by an individual. But sometimes it is driven by an individual. Musk is a case like that. And sometimes, as I did with the innovators, there's teams and people who build on each other, and Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce then getting Andy Grove and doing the microchip which then comes out, and Wozniak and Jobs find it at, uh, some electronic store and they decide to build the Apple. Um, 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 a Steve Jobs, an Elon Musk, an Albert Einstein can do. Um, and I also try to figure out if they hadn't been around, would the forces of history and the groups of people have done it without them? That's a good historical question as a his- you know, somebody who loves history. And you think about special relativity, one of the 1905 papers. Even after he writes it, it's four years before people truly get what he's saying, which is, it's not just how you observe time as relative, it's time itself is relative. And on the general theory, which he does a decade later, I'm not sure we would s- 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... email and, uh, the internet in your pocket, and a phone. Uh, 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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Jim and Ford, all the great people there-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... they crushed the bolt. And I mean that literally. They ended up smashing 'em 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 b- well, if they read the book, they'll see the full story. But they'll say, "It wasn't Musk who did Tesla. It was Martin Eberhard or Marc Tarpenning." No, no, no. You know, there were people who had helped create, you know, the shells of companies and other things, and they were all deserved to be called co-founders. But the guy who actually gets us to a million electric vehicles a year is Elon Musk. And without him, I don't think we... Look, if anybody five years from now buys a car that's gasoline powered, they'll think, "That's quaint." You know, "That's odd."
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
I mean, suddenly we've changed. We're not gonna do it. 90% of that is Elon Musk.
- 1:28:25 – 1:31:57
Mortality
- WIWalter Isaacson
- LFLex Fridman
We're all mortal. When and how do you think Elon will retire from the insanely productive schedule he's on now?
- WIWalter Isaacson
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. Um, it's never been anything that seemed to have crossed his mind. He's never said, "Maybe I love Larry Ellison's house on the beach in Hawaii. May- maybe I should spend time in doing." Instead he says things like, "I learned early on that vacations will kill you."
- LFLex Fridman
(laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
Uh, he gets malaria when he goes on one vaca- I mean, he goes on vacation at one point and they oust him from PayPal. And then he goes to Africa one point. He gets malaria. He says, "I've learned vacations kill you."
- LFLex Fridman
Lesson learned. Well, it's interesting because the projects are 100-plus-year projects, many of these.
- WIWalter Isaacson
One of the weird things is watching him think incredibly long term. One of the meetings every week early on when I was w- watching him was Mars Colonizer, and we sat through a two-hour meeting about, "What would the governance structure be on Mars? What would people wear? How would the robots work?"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
"And would there be democracy or should there be a different form of governance?" I'm sitting there saying, "What are they doing? What are they talking about?" And they're trying to build rocket ships and everything else. They are worrying about the governance structure of Mars?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
And likewise, whenever he's in a tense moment, like there's a rocket's about to be launched, he'll start asking people something in the way future, like the new, uh, engine or something, "If we're going to build that, do we have enough materials ready to order?"
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
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.
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
His passion is robo-taxis. But his passion is, how are we gonna make this factory c- to do a million cars a year?
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
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 experiments. But there's not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways. Yeah, I'd say he's always looking way into the future is my point.
- LFLex Fridman
I just hope that, uh...... there's a lot of da Vincis and Steve Jobses and Einsteins and Elon Musks that carry the f- the flame forward.
- WIWalter Isaacson
That's one of the reason 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-
- LFLex Fridman
Mm-hmm.
- WIWalter Isaacson
... about Jennifer Doudna, you say, "Okay. I can be that." And when you say, "Oh, maybe I'll be a regulator or bu-" 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."
- 1:31:57 – 1:52:56
How to write
- WIWalter Isaacson
- LFLex Fridman
Well, let me ask you about your mind, your genius-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well. (laughs)
- LFLex Fridman
... your process. (laughs)
- WIWalter Isaacson
I'll give you two out of three.
- LFLex Fridman
All right. Uh, take me through your process of writing a biography, I mean, the f- the, the full of it. And n- not just writing a biography, but understanding deeply, which y- 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-
- WIWalter Isaacson
Mm-hmm.
- LFLex Fridman
... it's a really big, complex picture, and biographies of ideas that involve individuals.
- WIWalter Isaacson
Well, step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works. Um, what causes Einstein to make that leap, for Elon Musk to say "stainless steel" while he's looking at a carbon fiber ro- rocket? Or how do you make the mental leap? Because I write about smart people. Smart people are a dime a dozen. They don't usually amount to much. You have to be creative, imaginative to think different, as Jobs would say. And so what makes people creative? What makes them take imaginative leaps? That's the key question you gotta ask. You also ask the questions like you've asked earlier, which is, what demons are jangling in their head and how do they harness them into drives? So you look at all that, and you try observe really carefully, uh, the person. Uh, one of the more mundane things I do is a lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions, and preach, or whatever. Uh, as I said, uh, this mentor said two people c- types come out, preachers, storytellers.
Episode duration: 2:07:49
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