Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, it's not a requirement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Some people with happy childhoods who do quite well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they're harnessing the demons of their childhood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And for Elon, it's especially true because he had both a violent and difficult childhood and a very psychologically problematic father.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's got those demons dancing around in his head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And by harnessing them, it's part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was in the hospital for almost a week.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But when he came home...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yes, and there's also Veld School, which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And at one point, you know, he was scrawny.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He has very bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He talks about being Asperger's.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so he gets traumatized at a camp like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But the second time he went, he'd gotten bigger.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He had shot up to almost six feet and he'd learned a little bit of judo.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I spent a lot of time talking to Errol Musk, his father.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Elon doesn't talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimball.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's been years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Errol doesn't even have Elon's e-mail.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So a lot of times, Errol will be sending me emails.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Errol had one of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But he also would go into these dark periods in which he would just be psychologically abusive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And of course, May Musk says to me, his mother, who divorced Daryl early on, said, the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And every now and then, you've been with him so much, Lex, and you know him well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He'll even talk to you about the demons, about Diablo dancing in his head.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, he gets it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's self-aware.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But you've probably seen him at times where those demons take over and he goes really dark and really quiet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Grimes says, you know, I can tell a minute or two in advance when demon mode's about to happen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he'll go a bit dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I was, you know, here at Austin, wanted dinner with a group.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was going to go dark.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've watched it in meetings where somebody will say, we can't make that part for less than $200 or no, that's wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he'll berate them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he snaps out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
As you know that too, the huge snap out where suddenly he's showing you a Monty Python skit on his phone and he's joking about things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was Tallulah, his second wife.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And she's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She's an English actress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They've been married twice, actually.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Tallulah said that's just him from his childhood.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's a drama addict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Kimball says that as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I asked why.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Tallulah said...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, for him, love and family are kind of associated with those psychological torments.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And in many ways, he'll channel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, Tallulah would be with him in 2008 when the company was going bankrupt, whatever it may have been, or later.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he would be so stressed, he would vomit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he would channel things that his father had said, use phrases his father had said to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so she told me, deep inside the man is this man-child still standing in front of his father.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think it's true, but in many different ways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They were the kindest people you'd ever want to meet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I grew up in a magical place in New Orleans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
My dad was an engineer, an electrical engineer, and he was always kind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Perhaps...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm not quite as driven or as crazed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't have to prove things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I get to write about Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I get to write about 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle, sweet childhoods,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We grow up with fewer demons, but we grow up with fewer drives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And we end up maybe being Boswell and not being Dr. Johnson.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We end up being the observer, not being the doer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so I always respect those who are in the arena.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You don't see yourself as a man in the arena.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've had a gentle, sweet career.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I've got to cover really interesting people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But I've never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've never moved us into the era of electric vehicles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've never stayed up all night on the factory floor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't have quite those, either the drives or the addiction to risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, Elon's addicted to risk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's addicted to adventure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Me, if I see something that's risky, I spend some time calculating, okay, upside, downside here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But that's another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done, and people like me write about the Elon Musks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And we all have demons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Rule one in life is harness your demons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Know that you're ambitious or not ambitious or you're lazy or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think it's useful to know what's eating at you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Know how to harness it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Also know what you're good at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'll take Musk as another example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm a little bit more like Kimball Musk than Elon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I maybe got over-endowed with the empathy gene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And what does that mean?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It was a group of about 150 people on the editorial floors, and I knew them all, and we had a jolly time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
When I went to CNN, I was not very good at being a manager or an executive of an organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I cared a little bit too much that people didn't get annoyed at me or mad at me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Elon said that about John McNeil, for example, who was president of Tesla.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I talked to John McNeil a long time and he says, you know, Elon just would fire people, be really rough on people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He didn't have the empathy for the people in front of him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Elon says, yeah, that's right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And John McNeil couldn't fire people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the entire enterprise or getting things done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Being over-endowed with a desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that doesn't mean there aren't great people who are over-endowed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Ben Franklin?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
over-endowed with the desire to please people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But that turned out to be a good thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So to get back to the lessons you asked, and the first was harness your demons, the second is to know your strengths and your superpowers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
My superpower is definitely not being a tough manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, do I have other talents?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah, I think I have the talent to observe people really closely.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
to write about it in a straight, but I hope interesting narrative style.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's a power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's totally different from running an organization.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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 role.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's addicted to intensity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's an empathy towards humanity more than the empathy towards the three or four humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's a big deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You see that in a lot of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You see it, Bill Gates, Larry Summers, Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They always have...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Musk, as you said, is driven by mission more than any person I've ever seen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it's not only mission, it's like cosmic missions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
meaning he's got three really big missions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One is to make humans a space-faring civilization, make us multi-planetary, or get us to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And every now and then I'd talk to him and we'd be talking about Starlink satellites or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or he would be...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
pushing the people in front of him at SpaceX and saying, if you do this, we'll never get to Mars in our lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he would give the lecture how important it was for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But on like the 20th time I watched him, I realized, okay, I believe it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He actually is driven by this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
An impatience, a frustration, and it's also...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He joked at one point to me about how much he loved reading comics as a kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, all the people in the comic books...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're trying to save the world, but they're wearing their underpants on the outside and they look ridiculous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he paused and said, but they are trying to save the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And whether it's Starlink in Ukraine or Starship going to Mars or trying to get a global new Tesla, I think he's got this epic sense of the role he's going to play in helping humanity on big things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And like the characters in the comic books, it's sometimes ridiculous, but it also is sometimes true.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, that's an epic view of why we write biography, which is more epic than I had even thought of.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I say thank you, because in some ways what you're trying to do is say, okay,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he wanders off to the town of Florence, and he becomes the greatest artist and engineer of that part of the Renaissance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I hope this book inspires.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Codebreaker, she grew up feeling like a misfit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In Hawaii, in a Polynesian village, being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So if people can read the books...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I should have said about Jennifer Dowden, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don't do science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, science is not for girls.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You're not going to do math or science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so it pushes her to say, all right, I'm going to do math and science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I'm talking about when Jennifer Doudna was young and she felt really, really out of place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like you and me and a lot of people when they feel in that way, they read books.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They curl up with a book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She realizes, oh my God, girls can become scientists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
My school guidance counselor's wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I think books, like she read this book, and even if it's a comic book, like Elon Musk read,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Books can sometimes inspire you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And every one of my books is about people who are totally innovative, who weren't just smart, because none of us are going to be able to match Einstein in mental processing power.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But we can be as curious as he was and creative and think out of the box the way he did.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or Steve Jobs put it, think different.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so I hope with my books, I'm saying...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
This isn't a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You can see...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci, or Elon Musk 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
This causes, you know, scars that last the rest of your life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the question is not, how do you avoid getting scarred?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's, you know, how do you deal with it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, I'll talk about the misfit for a second because, you know, we talked about Leonardo being that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, Einstein is Jewish in Germany at a time when it starts getting difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's slow in learning how to talk, and he's a visual thinker, so he's always daydreaming and imagining things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The first time he applies to the Zurich Polytech, because he runs away from the German education system because there's too much learning by rote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He gets rejected by the Zurich Polytech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, it's the second best school in Zurich, and they're rejecting Einstein.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I tried to find, but couldn't, the name of the admissions counselor at the Zurich Polytech.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like, you rejected Einstein?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he doesn't finish in the top half of his class, and once he
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
does, and he goes to graduate school.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They don't accept his dissertation, so he can't get a job.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's not teaching it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He even tries about 14 different high schools, a gymnasium, to get a job, and they won't take him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So he's a third-class examiner in the Swiss Patent Office in 1905.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Third class because they've rejected his doctoral dissertation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so he can't be second class or first class because he doesn't have a doctoral degree.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And yet he's sitting there on the stool in the patent office in 1905 and writes three papers that totally transform science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And if you're thinking about being...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
misunderstood or unappreciated.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In 1906, he stole a third-class patent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In 1907, he stole it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And there's really three papers, but there's also an addendum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He does a little addendum.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's the most famous equation in all of physics, which is E equals MC squared.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So it's a pretty good year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so at the patent office, they're doing devices to synchronize clocks because the Swiss have just gone on standard time zones, and Swiss people, as you know, tend to be rather...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, Swiss, they care if it strikes the hour in Basel, it should do the same and burn at the exact instant.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So you have to send a light signal between two distant clocks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he's visualizing what's it look like to ride alongside a light beam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He says, well, if you catch up with it, if you go almost as fast, it'll look stationary.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But Maxwell's equations don't allow for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, it was making my palms sweat that I was so worried.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so he finally figures out, because he's looking at these devices, the synchronized clocks, that if you're traveling really, really fast, what looks synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he makes a mental leap.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That time...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That the speed of light is always constant, but time is relative depending on your state of motion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So it was that type of out-of-the-box thinking, those leaps that made 1905 his miracle year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Likewise with Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, after General Motors and Ford, everybody gives up on electric vehicles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
poking fun of him and actually spit on him at one point in a drunken lunch.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
This is very fortuitous because on the ride back home, on the Delta Airlines flight, he's like doing the calculations of how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
How much would it really cost?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so he's visualizing things that other people would just say is impossible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's what Steve Jobs' friends called the reality distortion field, and it drove people crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It drove them mad, but it also drove them to do things they didn't think they would be able to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think they were all visual thinkers, perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children, meaning...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, Leonardo was left-handed and a little bit dyslexic, I think.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And certainly Einstein had ecolia.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He would repeat things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was slow in learning to talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I think visualizing helps a lot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And with Musk...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he'll say, why does it have to be this way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Couldn't we trim it this way or make it or even get rid of this part of it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he can visualize the material science.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There's small anecdotes in my book, but at one point he's on the Tesla line and they're trying to get 5,000 cars a week in 2018.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's a life or death situation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he's looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he insists that Drew Bagley, not Drew, that Lars Moravy, one of his great lieutenants, come.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And they have to summon him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he says, why are there six bolts here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Lars and others explain, well, for the crash test or anything else, the pressure would be in this way, so you have to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And they were blah, blah, blah, blah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, no, if you visualize it, you'll see if there's a crash, the force would go this way and that way, and it could be done with four bolts.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, that sounds risky, and they go test it and they engineer it, but it turns out to be right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That sounds pretty mundane.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But for me, if you say, what makes him special?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There's a mission-driven thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I give you a lot of reasons.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But one of the reasons is he cares not just about the design of the product, but visualizing the manufacturing of the product, the machine that makes the machine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We outsourced so much manufacturing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't think you can be a good innovator
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
if you don't know how to make the stuff you're designing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, having an end-to-end control is important, certainly with Steve Jobs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm looking at my iPhone here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's a big deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That hardware only works with Apple software.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And for a while, the iTunes Store only works, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So he has an end-to-end that makes it like a Zen garden in Kyoto, very carefully curated, but a thing of beauty.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
For Musk, when he first was at Tesla and before he was the CEO, when he was just the executive chairman and basically the finance person funding it, they were outsourcing everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They were making the batteries in Japan and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop in Thailand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that sent to the Lotus factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise chassis and then –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
was a nightmare.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You did not have end-to-end control of the manufacturing process.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So he goes to the other extreme.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He gets a factory in Fremont from Toyota, and he wants to do everything in-house, the software in-house, the painting in-house, the battery.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He makes his own batteries.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I think that end-to-end control is part of his personality.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, there's a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it also would allow Tesla to be innovative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, vision only.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Getting rid of radar is huge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And everybody's against it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Everybody... And they're still fighting it a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're still trying to do a next generation, some form of radar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it gets back to the first principles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We're talking about visualizing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, he starts...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
with the first principles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the first principles of physics involve things like, well, humans drive with only visual input.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They don't have radar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They don't have LIDAR.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They don't have sonar.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, that becomes an article of faith to him, and he gets a lot of pushback.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But now, and he's, by the way, not been that successful in meeting his deadlines of getting self-driving.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's way too optimistic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it was that first principles of get rid of unnecessary things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, you would think LIDAR, why not use it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like, why not use a crush?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's like, yeah, we can do things vision only, but when I look at the stars at night, I use a telescope too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, you could use LiDAR, but you can't do millions of cars that way at scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
At a certain point, you have to make it not only a good product, but a product that goes to scale.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Take, for example, full self-drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He has been obsessed with what he calls the robo-taxi.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We're going to build the next generation car without a steering wheel, without pedals, because it's going to be full self-drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You just summon it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You won't need to drive it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, over and over again, all these people I've told you about, you know, Lars Moravey and Drew Baglino and others, they're saying, okay, fine, that sounds really good, but...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, it ain't happened yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We need to build a $25,000 mass market global car that's just normal with a steering wheel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And yeah, he finally turned around a few months ago and said, let's do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he starts focusing on how's the assembly line going to work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
How are we going to do it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And make it the same platform for robo-taxi so you can have the same assembly line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Likewise, for full self-drive,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If there's a blinking light, if there are two yellow lines, do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If there's a bike lane, do this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If there's a crosswalk, do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
really hard to do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now he's doing it through artificial intelligence and machine learning only.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What did the human do?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And let's only pick the best humans, the five-star drivers, the Uber drivers, as Elon says.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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 it's not rules-based.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It becomes AI-based.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Just like ChatGPT doesn't try to answer your question, who are the five best popes or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
ChatGPT does it by having ingested billions of...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
pieces of writing that people have done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
This will be AI but real world done by ingesting video.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There are a couple of things that are required for that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One is being adventurous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One doesn't enter a dark room without a flashlight and a map unless you're a risk taker, unless you're adventurous.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The second is to have iterative brain cycles where you can process information and do a feedback loop and make it work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The third, and this is what we fail 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, first three rockets, the Falcon rockets that Moshe does,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
they blow up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Even Starship, three and a half minutes, but then it blows up the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the people who created America, whenever they came over,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, whether the Mayflower is refugees from the Nazis, they took a lot of risks to get here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you need both.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Not just Optimus the Robot, but Optimus the Robot and the self-driving car.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're pretty much the same.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're using GPU clusters or dojo chips or whatever it may be to process real-world data.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We all got, and you did on your podcast, quite excited about large language model generative predictive text AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's fine, especially if you want to chit-chat with your chatbot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But the holy grail is artificial general intelligence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the tough part of that is real world AI.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's where Optimus, the robot, or full self-drive are, I think, far ahead of anybody else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of my theories on Elon, a minor theory, is that he read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy once too often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And as you know, there's a scene in there that says...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That there's a theory about the universe that if anybody ever discovers the secrets of meanings of the universe, it will be replaced by an even more complex universe.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then the next line Douglas Adams writes is, there's another theory that this has already happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I'm not sure I get my head around that, but I know that Elon Musk tries to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, there's a humor to that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There's an enormous humor to Hitchhiker's Guide.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I really think that helped Musk out of the darkest of his periods to have sort of the sense of fun of figuring out what life is all about.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, it's a relief valve, just like video games and Polytopia and Elden Ring are release valves for him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
and he does have an explosive sense of humor, as you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the weird thing is when he makes the abrupt transition from dark demon mode, and you're in the conference room, and he has really become upset about something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And not only are there dark vibes, but there's dark words emanating, and he's saying your resignation will be accepted if you don't, you know, etc.,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he starts laughing again, and things break.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So it's almost as if he has different modes, the emulation of human mode, the engineering mode, the dark and demon mode, and certainly there is the silly and giddy mode.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, first of all, let's both stipulate that Musk is crazy at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then let's figure out, and I try to do it through storytelling, not through highfalutin preaching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
where that craziness works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, give me a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Tell me an anecdote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Tell me where he's crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And, you know, the almost final example, AI, but him shooting off Starship for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, there's a very impulsiveness to him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Then he flies back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They launch Starship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you realize that there's a drive and there are demons and there's also craziness.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You sometimes want to pull those out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You want to take away his phone so he doesn't tweet at 3 a.m.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You want to, say, quit being so crazy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But then you realize there's a wonderful line of Shakespeare in Measure for Measure at the very end.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He says, even the best are molded out of faults.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so you take the faults of Musk, for example.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't know that you can take that strand out of the fabric and the fabric remains whole.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the man in the arena versus the regulator to make it more prosaic.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
For Jobs, I asked Woz at the end of my reporting, because that's what he said at the beginning,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We're doing the launch of, I think, the iPad 2, it may have been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Steve is emaciated because, you know, he's been sick.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so I say to Woz, what's the answer to your question?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, well, if I had been running Apple, I would have been nicer to everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Everybody got stock options.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We've been like a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then, I don't know if you know Woz, he was like a teddy bear.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He paused, he smiled, and he said, but if I had been running Apple...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't think we would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So, yeah, you have to sometimes be rough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Jobs said the same thing that Musk said to me, which is he said, people like you love wearing velvet gloves.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, I don't know that I've worn velvet gloves often, but you like people to like you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You like to sweet talk things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You sugarcoat things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He says, I'm just a working class kid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I don't have that luxury.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If something sucks, I got to tell people it sucks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or I got a team of B players.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, Musk is that way as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I do try to sugarcoat things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But when I was running CNN...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
it needed to be reshaped.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It needed to be broken.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It needed to have certain things blown up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I didn't do it, you know?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So bad on me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it made me realize, okay, I'll just write about the people who can do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
By the way, I've heard
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Jeff Bezos say that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've heard Bill Gates say that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've heard Steve Jobs say it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've heard Steve Jobs say it about a smoothie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They were making it a whole food or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
People, they use the word stupid really often.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you know who else used it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Errol Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He kept baking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You don't stand in front of him and saying that's the stupidest thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You're the stupidest person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You'll never amount to anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
As John McNeil, the president of Tesla, said, do you have to be that way?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Probably not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There are a lot of successful people who are much kinder, but it's sometimes necessary to be much more brutal and honest, brutally honest, I would say, than people like
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
who win Boss of the Year trophies.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Right, and that happened to Twitter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Musk himself sat there with a laptop on the second floor of the building.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Let's ask them, do you really want to be all in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Because this is going to be hardcore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's going to be intense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You get to choose.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But by midnight tonight, we want you to check the box.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm hardcore, all in.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'll be there in person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'll work, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or that's not for me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've got a family.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've got work balance.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you got different type of people that way and different stages of their life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or certain teams.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It doesn't even have to be a whole company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you're right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It goes back to what I was saying about rule.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The first secret is sort of know thyself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Obviously, it comes from Plato, and everything comes from Plato and Socrates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But... And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In this stage of my life, do I want to be a hackathon all in all night and change the world?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or do I want to bring wisdom and stability but also have balance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think it's good to have different companies with different styles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The problem was Twitter was at almost one extreme with yoga studios and mental health days off and enshrining psychological safety issues.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
as one of the mantras that people should never feel psychologically threatened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he, I remember the bitter laugh he unleashed when he kept hearing that word.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, no, I like the words hardcore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I like intensity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I like a intense sense of urgency as our operating principle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, yeah, there are people that way as well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So know who you are and know what type of team you want to build.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
A lot of times Musk did things, and I go, what the hell?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Among them was changing the name Twitter and getting rid of the birds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I say, hey, man, there's a lot invested in that brand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But when I watched him, he thought, okay, these sweet little chirpy birds tweeting away in the name Twitter, it's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Not hardcore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's not intense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's not a polite playpen for the blue-checked, anointed elite.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I thought, okay, this is going to be bad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The whole thing's going to fall apart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, it has had problems, but the hardcore intensity of it has also meant that there's new things happening there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So it's very Elon Musk to not like this sweetness of birds chirping and tweeting and saying, I want something more hardcore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, at the beginning of 2022, he was riding high.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But as we say, he's a drama addict.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He doesn't like to coast.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And, you know, Tesla sold a million vehicles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think 33 boosters, you know, Falcon 9s have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he was the richest person on earth and Times Person of the Year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And yet he said, you know, I still want to put all my chips back on the table.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I want to keep taking risks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't want to savor things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He had sold all of his houses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So he started secretly buying shares of Twitter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
January, February, March, becomes public at a certain point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He has to declare it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And at that time, it was early April,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They were going to offer him a board seat, and he was going to do a standstill agreement and stop at 10% or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, remember, you know, we were standing around.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It was Luke Nozick, whom you know well, Ken Howery, some of his friends on that mezzanine here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And all afternoon and then late into the evening at dinner is like, should we do this?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I didn't say anything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm just the observer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But everybody else is saying, excuse me, why do you want to own Twitter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Griffin, his son, joined at dinner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And May, for some reason, was in town.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And like everybody says, no, we don't use Twitter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Why would you do that?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And May said, well, I use Twitter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it's almost like, okay, the demographics are people my age or May's age.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so it looked like he wasn't going to pursue it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They offered him a board seat.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he went off to Hawaii to Larry Ellison's house, which he sometimes uses.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was meeting a friend, Angela Bassett, an actress.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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—
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then by the time he gets to Vancouver where Grimes meets him, they stay up all night playing Elden Ring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was doing a TED Talk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then at 5.30, he finishes playing Elden Ring and sends out that, I've made an offer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Even when he comes back, people are trying to intervene and say, excuse me, why are you doing it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so it was a rocky period between late April and October when the deal closed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And people ask me all the time, well, did he want to get out of the deal?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I said, which Elon are you talking about at what time of day?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Because there'll be times in the morning when he'd say, oh, the Delaware court's going to force me to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's horrible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Talk to his lawyers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You can win this case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Get me out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Do you want to get out?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Do you want to stay in?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Do you want to reduce the price?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I think he was mercurial.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There were times he would text me or say to me, this is going to be great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's going to be the accelerant to do X.com the way we thought about 20 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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 lawyers say, you're not going to probably win this case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Better go through with the deal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And by then, he's not only made his peace with it, he's kind of happy with it at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Eventually, the deal is going to close on October.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think a Friday morning, I have it in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And we're there on Thursday and he's wandering around looking at the stay woke t-shirts and psychological safety lingo they're all using.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he and his lawyers and bankers hatched a plan to do a flash close.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the reason for that was if they close the deal after the markets had closed for the day,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he could send a letter to Parag and two others firing them, quote, for cause.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And this will be something the courts will have to figure out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Then he could save $200 million or so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it was both the money but for him a matter, I won't say of principle, but of, hey, they misled me about the numbers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I got forced into doing it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I'm going to.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm going to try this jujitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Then when he takes over, it's kind of a wild scene.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Him trying to decide in three different rounds how to get the staff down to 15% of what it was.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Him deciding on Christmas Eve after he'd been at a meeting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
where they told him we can't get rid of that Sacramento server farm because it's needed for redundancy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he says, no, it's not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he's flying here to Austin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And young James says, why don't we just do it ourselves?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He turns the plane around, they land in Sacramento, and he pulls them out himself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So it was a manic period.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, Kimball wanted to do that, and Kimball here at a wonderful restaurant in Austin over lunch is like, hey, why are you buying Twitter?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Let's start one from scratch and do it on the blockchain.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, it took him a while, and you can argue it one way or the other,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
to come to the conclusion that the blockchain was not fast enough and responsive time enough to be able to handle a billion tweets, you know, in a day or so.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Kimball is still in favor of starting a new one and doing it on blockchain-based.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In retrospect...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think starting a new media company would have been better.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He wouldn't have had the baggage or the legacy that he's breaking now in breaking the way Twitter had been.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it's hard to have millions and millions, hundreds of millions of true
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
true users, not just trolls, and start from scratch, as others have found, as Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads, and Threads even had a base, so it would've been hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, this can't be the case.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He fired 85% in three different rounds.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The first was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Then he fired people who didn't seem to be totally all in or loyal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then another round of layoffs.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So at each step of the way, almost everybody said, that's enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's going to destroy things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
from Alex Spiro, his lawyer, to Jared Birchall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We're going to be in real trouble.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And they were partly right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, there was degradation of the service some, but not as much as half the services I use half the time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'd wake up each morning and hit the app and, okay, still there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Was that too much?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think that he has an algorithm that we mentioned earlier that begins with question every requirement.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What it's up to is delete, delete, delete.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Delete every part.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then a corollary to that is if you don't end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, then you didn't delete enough in the first round because you were too timid.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, so you ask me, did he overdo it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And they're probably trying to hire people now to keep things going.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah, and what Steve Jobs and many other great leaders felt, and certainly Bezos, and certainly
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates, it was hardcore, only A players.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, no, those products are hard.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The best thing I ever created was the team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
that made those products.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's the hard part is creating a team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he did, you know, from Johnny Ive to Tim Cook and Eddie Q and Phil Schiller.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Elon has done a good job bringing in people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Gwen Shotwell, obviously.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Linda Iaccarino, she can navigate through the current crises.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Certainly stellar people at SpaceX, like Mark Giancosa, and then at Tesla, like Drew Baglino and Lars Maravy and Tom Zhu and many others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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 –
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Musk is a magnet for awesome talent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of his ways of operating is what he calls a skip-level meeting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And let's take a very specific thing, like the Raptor engine, which is powering the Starship.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it wasn't going well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It looked like a spaghetti bush, and it was going to be hard to manufacture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he got rid of the people who were in charge of that team.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I'll 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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so he would skip a level and meet with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, and I just ask them what they're doing, and I drill them with questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, and this is how I figure out who's going to emerge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said it was particularly difficult.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I was sitting in those meetings because people were wearing masks.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It was during the height of COVID.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said it made it a little bit harder for him because he has to get the input.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But I watched as a young kid, dreadlocks, named Jacob McKenzie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's in the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's sitting there, and he's a bit like you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Engineering mindset speaks in a bit of a monotone.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was like this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Musk said one day, called him up at 3 a.m.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, I won't say 3 a.m., but after midnight, said, you still around?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Jake said, yeah, I'm still at work.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he said, okay, I'm going to make you in charge of the team building Raptor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that was like a big surprise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But Jacob McKenzie has now gotten a version of Raptor, and they're building him at least one a week, and they're pretty awesome.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's where his talent, Musk's talent, for...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Finding the right person and promoting them, that's where it is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he does it wrong sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's had a horrible track record with the solar roof division.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Wonderful guy named Brian Dow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I really liked him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And when they were doing the battery factory surge in Nevada, Musk got rid of two or three people, and there's Brian Dow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Can do, can do, can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Stays up all night, and he gets promoted and runs it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so finally, Musk goes through two or three people running the solar roof division, and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Finally, he calls up Brian Dow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Brian there, okay, can do, can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Two or three times, Musk insisted that they install a solar roof in one of those houses in Boca Chica.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
This is this tiny village at the south end of Texas.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Brian was just sweating and doing everything.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But then after a couple of months, it wasn't going well, and boom!
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Musk just fired him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I always try to learn, what is it that makes those who stay thrive?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, I think it's self-knowledge like an Andy Krebs or others.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They say, I am hardcore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I really want to get a rocket to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's more important than anything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of the people, I think it's Tim Zaman.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I hope when he hears this, I'm getting him the right person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Who took time and was working for Tesla autopilot.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it was just so intense.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He took some time off and then went to another company.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, I was burned out at Tesla, but then I was bored at the next place.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I called, I think it was Ashok at Tesla, said, can I come back?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, sure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, I learned about myself.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'd rather be burned out than bored.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah, I think that especially when it came to taking over Twitter, he thought half the people there were disloyal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he was wrong.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
About two-thirds were disloyal, not just half.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it was how do we weed out those?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he did something and made the firing squad, I call it, or the musketeers, I think is my nickname for them, which is the young cousins and two or three other people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He made them look at the Slack messages these people had posted, everybody at Twitter had posted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And they went through hundreds of Slack messages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
they would be on the list because they want all-in loyal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They did not look at private Slack messages.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I guess people who are posting on a corporate Slack board should be aware that your company can look at them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But that's more than I would have done or most people would have done.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so that was to figure out who's deeply committed and loyal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think that was mainly the case at Twitter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He doesn't sit around at SpaceX saying who's loyal to me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
At other places, it's excellence, but that's...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
pretty well a given everybody is like a Mark Jankosa just whip smart 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 got to be all in yeah and that's the drive the the last piece
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Oh, no, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm sorry.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm sorry to offend you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Read the Constitution and read Abbey Road, listen to Abbey Road.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're both good, but they're in a different league.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, Musk is in a league of his own in the way he does it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
First of all,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Steve Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But Musk, every couple of hours, is switching his mindset from how to implant the neural link chip and what will the robot that implants it in the brain look like and how fast can we make it move, and then the heat shield on the Raptor, or switching to human imitation, machine learning, full self-drive.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
On the night that the Twitter board agreed to the deal, this is huge around the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm sure you remember, like, Musk buys Twitter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It wasn't when the deal closed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It was when the Twitter accepted his offer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I thought, okay.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But then he went to Boca Chica, to South Texas, and spent time watching
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
fixating, if I remember correctly, a valve in the Raptor engine that had a methane leak issue.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And what were the possible ways to fix it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And all the engineers in that room, I assume, are thinking about, this guy just bought Twitter, should we say something?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing really him being there.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He will worry about
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
uploading video onto x.com or the payment system and then immediately switch over to some issue with the FAA giving a permit for Starship or with how to deal with Starlink and the CIA.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And when he's focused on any of these things,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You cannot distract him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Now, he'll, in between these sessions, process information, then let off steam.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And for better or worse, he lets off steam by either playing a friend in Polytopia,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or fire off some tweets, which is often not a healthy thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it's a release for him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he doesn't, I once said he was a great multitasker, and that was a mistake.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
People corrected me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's a serial tasker, which means focuses intensely on a task for an hour.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Almost has a, what do they call it at restaurants where they give you a palate cleanser.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He does some palate cleanser with polytopia and then focuses on the next task.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There's some things that these people do and you say, okay, I can be that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I can be more curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I can question every rule and regulation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You and I go through transitions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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 at.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I'm multitasking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He doesn't actually do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He single tasks sequentially with a focus that's hardcore.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think the fierce urgency that drives him is important.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it's sometimes ginned up.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like I say, the fierce urgency of getting to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And on a Friday night at the launch pad in Boca Chica at 10 p.m., there are only a few people working because it's a Friday night.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're not supposed to launch for another eight months.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And he orders a surge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He says, I want 200 people here by tomorrow working on this pad.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We have to have a fierce sense of urgency or we will never get to Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Right.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I guess it goes back to also know who you are, meaning there are people who,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
can focus intensely, and there are people who can see patterns across many things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Look, Leonardo da Vinci, he was not all that focused.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was easily distracted.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's why he has more unfinished paintings than finished paintings in his canon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But his ability to see patterns across nature and to, in some ways, process, procrastinate, be distracted,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That helped him some, but Musk is not that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And every few months, there's a new surge.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You don't know where it'll be, but you'll be on solar roofs, and all of a sudden, we'll have a surge, and there has to be 100 solar roofs built, or this has to be done by tomorrow, or make a starship dome by dawn and surge and do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And there are people who are built that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It is inspiring.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But also let's appreciate that there are people who can be really good, but also can savor the success, savor the moment, savor the quiet sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Musk's big failing is he can't savor the moment or success.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's the flip side of hardcore intensity.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I thought that history was determined by great forces and groups of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But when I see it up close, I see what a difference an individual can make.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's talking about Sadat and Golda Meir, probably talking about himself too, or at least in his mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And we biographers have this dirty secret that we know we distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But sometimes it is driven by an individual.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Musk is a case like that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And sometimes, as I did with the innovators, there's teams and people who build on each other.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce then getting Andy Grove and doing the microchip, which then comes out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Wozniak and Jobs find it at some electronics store and they decide to build the Apple chip.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so sometimes there are flows of forces and groups of people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I guess I err a little bit on the side of looking at what a Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Albert Einstein can do.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's a good historical question as somebody who loves history.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you think about special relativity, one of the 1905 papers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And on the general theory, which he does a decade later, I'm not sure we would have gotten that yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What about moving us into the era of an iPhone in which it's so beautiful that you can't live without a thousand songs in your pocket, email and the internet in your pocket and a phone?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There are a lot of brain-dead people from Panasonic to Motorola who didn't get that, and it may have been a while.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I certainly think it's true of the era of electric vehicles.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Jim and Ford, all the great people there, they crushed the boat, and I mean that literally.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They ended up smashing them because they decided to discontinue it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Likewise, nobody was sending up rockets.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Our space shuttle was about to be grounded 12 years ago.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so Musk does things, and there'll be people who say and read the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, if they read the book, they'll see the full story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, they'll say it wasn't Musk who did Tesla.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It was Martin Eberhardt or Mark Tarpon.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
No, no, no.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There were people who had helped create the shells of companies and other things, and they were all deserved to be called co-founders.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But the guy who actually gets us to a million electric vehicles a year,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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, we'll think, that's quaint, you know, that's odd.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, suddenly we've changed.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We're not going to do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
90% of that is Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I would think that he would hate to retire.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I think that he can't live without the pressure, the drama, the all-in feeling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's never...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
been anything that seemed to have crossed his mind.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He's never said, maybe I love Larry Ellison's house on the beach in Hawaii.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Maybe I should spend time in doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Instead, he says things like, I learned early on that vacations will kill you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He gets malaria when he goes on one vacation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, he goes on vacation at one point and they oust him from PayPal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then he goes to Africa at one point, he gets malaria.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He says, I've learned vacations kill you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Lesson learned.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of the weird things is watching him think incredibly long-term.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of the meetings every week early on when I was watching him was Mars Colonizer.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And we did a two-hour meeting about what would the governance structure be on Mars, right?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What would people wear?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
How would the robots work?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And would there be democracy or should there be a different form of governance?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm sitting there saying, what are they doing?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What are they talking about?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're trying to build rocket ships and everything else.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They are worrying about the governance structure of Mars.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And likewise...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Whenever he's in a tense moment, like there's a rocket that's about to be launched, he'll start asking people something in the way future, like the new lead engine or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If we're going to build that, do we have enough materials ready to order?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or, I don't know, he'll just ask questions...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like when he's building RoboTaxi, the global car, the $25,000 inexpensive global car, that's not a total passion.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He was talked into doing that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
His passion is RoboTaxis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But his passion is, how are we going to make this factory to do a million cars a year?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Even the robo-taxi is a longer-range vision.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, he's been touting it since 2016, but, you know, we're not.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There are no robo-taxis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, Waymo may be doing a little experiment, but there's not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah, so he's always looking way into the future is my point.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's one of the reasons you write books about these people is so that if you're a young woman in a school where you're not being told to do science and you read The Codebreaker about Jennifer Doudna, you say, okay, I can be that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And when you say, oh, maybe I'll be a regulator or you say, oh, no, maybe I'll be the person who pushes...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The boundaries, who pushes the lines, who pushes, as Steve Jobs said, the human race.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What causes Einstein to make that leap, Elon Musk, to say stainless steel while he's looking at a carbon fiber rocket?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or how do you make the mental leap?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Because I write about smart people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Smart people are a dime a dozen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They don't usually amount to much.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You have to be creative, imaginative, to think different, as Jobs would say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so what makes people creative?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What makes them take imaginative leaps?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's the key question you've got to ask.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So you look at all that and you try to observe really carefully the person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of the more mundane things I do is,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
is a lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions and preach or whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
As I said, this mentor said, two people types come out, preachers, storytellers.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Be a storyteller.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I try, whenever I'm trying to convey a thought, there's six magic words that I almost should have
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
written on a card penned above my desk, which is, let me tell you a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So if somebody says, how does Elon Musk figure out good talent?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
As you did, I think, well, let me tell you the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'll tell you the story of Jake McKenzie.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or this is not something I invented.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, this is the way the good Lord does it in the Bible.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, it has the best opening lead sentence ever, you know, in the beginning, comma, and then it's stories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And secondly, to pick up on that lead sentence in the beginning, make it chronological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Everybody...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
in the 40th year of their life, has grown from the 39th year and the 38th year.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so you want to show how people evolve and grow.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But she had a note she'd put in the margins of my books that was a tic-tac, and it meant all things in good time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Keep it chronological.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If it's good enough for the Bible, it's good enough for you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that moral growth, creative growth, risk-taking growth,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
wisdom.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's the essences of creativity, but you can't do it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There's a term, Bildungsroman, which is a book that carries a narrative and tells how people learn something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm a big believer in narrative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One was
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Having a great person theory of history in which you decided to do biography.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I had a great professor when I was in college.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Her name was Doris Kearns.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She later married Dick Goodwin.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And she, when she was going for tenure at the university, wrote a biography of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And they denied her tenure because it was beneath the dignity of the academy to write history through one person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's great.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But the second thing besides telling it through people, which...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
is the Academy tended to disdain what they called imposing a narrative, in which you made it storytelling.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Because that meant you were leaving things out and making it into a narrative.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, that's how we form our views of the world.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And obviously depends on the subject.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, with Ben Franklin, it's all based on archives and every, of course we have 40 volumes of letters he wrote.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was a good old days when every day you'd write 20 letters.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Even when he'd be sitting playing polytopia or seething at other people, he'd have me just sitting there watching.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, I spent a lot of time with Jennifer Dowden at her side.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I went to her lab and edited a human gene and, you know, with a pipette and a test tube.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But I would say I spent 30 hours with her.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I can't count, you know, 100 hours or more just observing Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I'm not sure that any biographer, perhaps since Boswell took on Dr. Johnson...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
has ever had quite as much up close, meaning five feet away at all times, access.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's not about me.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I try to just say, okay, here's what happened.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Here's this story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Here's what happened the night he came in to Twitter for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And let you form your own judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
People just love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I've had 140, maybe 150 people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They're all listed in the back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
One of the little things that people won't notice, but I'll say it now, is all of them are on the record.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Getting them to talk is easy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They all want to talk about Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But then at a certain point say, I don't put anonymous quotes in my book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I cite things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Somebody will tell me a story, I say, oh, no, no, no, I don't enjoy it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But I think it's important to know where everything came from.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And with Musk, it's, you know, I had that from the very beginning because I was a Time magazine reporter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'd worked reporter for the Times-Picayune on New Orleans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
First day on the job, I had to go cover a murder and
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I phoned in the story from a pay phone and my editor, you know, the city editor said, well, did you talk to the family?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I went, no, Billy.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, the family, you know, the daughter just got, he said, go knock on the door.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I knocked on the door.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
An hour later, they were still talking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They were bringing out her yearbook.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Lesson one, I learned people want to talk if you're willing to just listen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And whether it be Henry Kissinger, you just push the button and say Kissinger and people tell you the stories.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
All the way through Elon Musk, everybody talked.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Everybody in his family, everybody he fired, everybody.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, I think it's important to listen to people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They do what was called door knocking.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You just walk in a neighborhood, knock on a door, and ask people about the election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But they said, here's the secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Don't ask any leading questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Don't have any premise.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Just say, hey, I'm trying to figure out this election.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What's going on?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What do you think?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then stay silent.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
With Musk, a third secret.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know this well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He'll go silent at times.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
sometimes a minute, two minutes, four minutes, don't try to fill the silences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If you're a listener, you gotta learn
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
okay, he's not saying anything for four minutes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I can outlast him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You can never go wrong by staying silent if there's nothing you have to say.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Not something I've mastered, but I do, when I'm a reporter, try to master that, which is
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
don't don't ask complex questions don't interject and when somebody hasn't fully answered the question don't say well let me you know i haven't just stay silent and then they'll keep talking just give them a chance to keep talking even if they've kind of finished you're still sometimes they haven't given you enough instead of following up i'll just
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
nod and keep waiting.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm somewhat lucky because I started off working for a daily newspaper and people back then
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They want to talk to the newspaper reporter.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Good.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Tell me a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
A couple of things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I did learn to be more quiet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm sure I know when I was younger or even I'll see videos of me at news things where I'm always trying to interject a question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so you learn to be quieter sometimes.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I haven't mastered it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I haven't learned it enough.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You learn to be naturally curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Many reporters today, when they ask a question, are either trying to play gotcha or trying to get a news scoop or trying to gig something that can make a lead.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And if you actually are curious and you really want to know the answer to a question,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
then people can tell that you asked it because you want the answer, not because you're playing a game with them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, to be actually curious.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
To be open and not to have an agenda.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, we all suffer from there being too many agendas in the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, I mean, look, you're amongst the top podcasters and interviewers in the world today.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You have an earnestness to you.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Ben Franklin is the person who taught me, I mean, by reading him, the most about on conversation.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He wrote a wonderful essay on that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It includes on silence.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it includes trying to ask sincere questions rather than
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Get a point across.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, it's somewhat Socratic, but whenever he wondered or wanted to start a fireman's corps in Philadelphia, he would go to his group that he called the Leather Apron Club, and they would pose a question.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Why don't we have it?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What would it take?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What would be good?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then the second part is to make sure that you listen.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And if somebody has even just the germ of an idea, give them credit for it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like, as Joe said, you know, the real problem is this.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I do think that if I'm in situations, and I just mean even at dinner or something, I'm with somebody,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm usually curious, and the conversation will proceed with questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing, whoever I happen to be with.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's a talent you have, which is you're pretty genuine in your interests.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There are people...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was a Ben Franklin, that was a Leonardo trick, which is...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
They wanted to know everything you could possibly know about every subject knowable.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That's a very disarming method.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you know when people have a shield.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And you try to give them comfort.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I had zero of that problem with Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, it was like disarming to me, which is I kept waiting to say, okay, he's got a shell or he won't do that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But he was...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
almost crazily open and did not seem to want to be spinning or hiding or faking things.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I've been lucky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Doudna was that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Steve Jobs was that way.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But you have to put in time, too.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In other words...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You can't say, okay, there's a one-hour interview, and I'm going to break down every wall.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's like on your fifth visit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've never been in your situation where I have a show.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I usually have many facts at the wheel.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm not a first date person.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But then I'm lucky.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, I say lucky, but I'm in print, you know.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I understand.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Print is a...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
couple thousand-year-old medium, but there are those of us who love it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Yeah.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, I want to be honest, which I think is akin to being objective.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I try to keep in mind
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Who am I writing for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm not writing for Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
As I say, I haven't sent him the book.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't think he's read it yet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've got one person I'm writing for, the open-minded reader.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or I try to make that a minor consideration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's, will the reader have a better understanding because I've put this story in the book?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, sometimes people who affect the course of humanity...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
have better relationships with humanity than they do with the humans sitting around them.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Einstein had two interesting relationships with wives.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Maleva, his first wife, was a sounding board and helped with the mathematics of the special relativity paper in particular.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But he didn't treat her well.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, he made her sign a letter that she wouldn't interrupt him.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And finally, when she wanted a divorce, he couldn't afford it because he was still a patent clerk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so he offered her a deal, which is, I think, totally amazing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
He said, one of these days, one of those papers from 1905 is going to win the Nobel Prize.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
If we get a divorce, you know, I'll give you the money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was a lot of money back then, like a million dollars now or something.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And she's smart.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She's a scientist.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She consults with a few other scientists.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And after a week or so, she takes the bet.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Is that until, what, 1919 that he wins his Nobel Prize?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She gets all the money.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
She buys three apartment buildings in Zurich.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
With his second wife, Elsa, it was more a partnership of convenience.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It was not a romantic love, but he knew, and that's sometimes what people need in life, is just a partner.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, somebody who's going to handle the stuff you're not going to handle.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So I guess if you look at my books...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
they're not great inspiring guides to personal relationships.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
When do you write?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
First of all, breakfast is not my favorite meal.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And those people who tell you that you have to start with a hearty breakfast, I...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
look askance yes uh 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 a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
outline that if I printed it out or notes would be a hundred pages, but everything's in order.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
In other words, if there's a burning man and he's coming back from Grimes and then there's a solar roof thing and then there's something, I put it all in order day by day
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
as an outline and that disciplines me when i'm starting to write to follow the mantra from alice mayhew my first editor which is all things in good time don't get ahead of the story don't have to flashback um 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
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
do the decision to do Starship or to build a factory in Texas or to whatever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then you sometimes have the organizational problem of, yeah, and that gets us all the way up to here.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Do I keep that in that chapter or do I wait until later when it's better chronologically?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But those are easy questions.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, that's the mantra I mentioned earlier, which is whenever I get pause or I don't know how to say something, I just say, let me tell you a story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then I find the actual anecdote, the story.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
the tale that encompasses what I'm trying to convey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then I don't say what I'm trying to convey.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, you don't need transition sentences.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You just say, all right, here's the point I need to make next.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And so you start with a sentence that says...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
you know, one day in January in the factory in Texas, comma.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Well, I keep going back to the classics and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I guess it's Plato's maxim, but he may be quoting Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it gets back to the know thyself, which is you don't have to figure out what is the big meaning of it all, but you have to figure out why you're doing what you're doing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It is actually something that's more useful on an hourly basis.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Like, why am I about to say that to somebody?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Or why am I going to do this particular act?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
What's my true motive here?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And also, in the broader sense, to learn, as I did after a couple years at CNN,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
My examination of my life is that I'm not great at running complex organizations.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm not great as a manager.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Given the choice, I'd rather somebody else have to manage me than me have to manage people.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it took me a while to figure that out.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I was probably too ambitious when I was young and at Time Magazine.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was when I was green and... Oh, well...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was when I was in my salad days in Green and Judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it was like chasing the next level at Time Incorporated, whatever it might be.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And then one day I caught the brass ring and I became an editor and then the top editor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And after a while, I realized that wasn't
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
really totally what I'm suited to be, especially when I got put in charge of CNN.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, all young people are almost by definition in their salad days in Green and Judgment.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But you learn what's motivating you, and then you learn to ask, well, is that really what I want?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Should I be careful of what I'm wishing for?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
No, and I don't think about it a lot, but I do think about Steve Jobs' Let Me Tell You a Story, which is the wonderful Steve Jobs story of, I think after he was diagnosed but before it was public,
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And Elon Musk has said that.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
which is a lot of the tech bros out in the Silicon Valley that are looking for ways to live forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I can think, Musk says, of nothing worse.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
We read the myth of Sisyphus, and we know how bad it is to be condemned to eternal life.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There was an ancient Greece, the person who walked behind the king and said, memento mori, remember you're going to die.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it kept people from losing it a bit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Do you think about legacy?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The lucky thing about being a biographer...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
is that you kind of know what your legacy is.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
There's going to be a shelf, and it'll be of interesting people, and you will have inspired a 17-year-old biology student somewhere to be the next great biochemist or somebody to start a company like Elon Musk.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And what I think more about, I won't say giving back, that's such a trite thing.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I moved back to New Orleans for a reason.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
First of all, the hurricane hit.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And after Katrina, I was asked to be vice chair of the recovery authority.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I realized everything I've got going for me, it all comes from this beautiful gem of a troubled city.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
The wonderful high school I went to, the wonderful streets where I learned to ride a bike, you know, and it's got challenges.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I'm never going to solve challenges at the grand global level, but I can go back home and say part of my legacy is going to be I tried to pay it back.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
to my hometown, even by teaching at Tulane, which I don't do as a favor.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I mean, I enjoy the hell out of it.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it's like, all right, I'm part of a community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And I think we lose that in America because people who are lonely are lonely because they're not part of a community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But I've got all my high school kids, they're friends, they're all still in New Orleans.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I've got my family, but I also have Tulane institutions in New Orleans that have been there forever.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I was even on the city planning commission, which worries about zoning ordinances for short-term rentals.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
You know, go figure.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
But it was like, no, immerse myself in my community.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Because my community...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And it's a city of creativity from jazz to the food to the architecture.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
So when I think of, I won't say legacy, but what am I going to do to pay it forward, which is a
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
a lower level way of saying legacy, I pay it forward by going back to the place where I began and trying to know it for the first time.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
That was a ripoff of a T.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Eliot line.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
I don't want you to think I thought of that one.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
T.S.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
Eliot, if you ever need to figure it out, the four quartets, there's that part at the end which is, we shall not cease from exploration.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place where we started and know it for the first time, to the unknown but half-remembered gate.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
It's just beautiful.
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
And that's been an inspiration of what do you do in...
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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 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?
Lex Fridman Podcast
#395 – Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin
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.