0:00

Amika Insurance has partnered with Courageous

0:02

Studios, the branded content studio of Warner

0:04

Brothers Discovery, to create a short film series

0:06

called What You Leave Behind, real stories about

0:08

people who've lost loved ones and how a meaningful

0:11

object left behind can continue to represent

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their legacy. Visit Amikawhatyouleavebehind.com

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to watch the videos and submit your own story.

0:24

And now from the Institute of Politics at

0:26

the University of Chicago and CNN

0:29

Audio, the Axe Files with

0:31

your host, David Axelrod.

0:33

I had a public

0:35

conversation last week with the eminent journalist

0:37

and biographer, Walter Isaacson.

0:40

It was at the Chicago Humanities Festival

0:42

and the focus was his depthful new

0:45

book, Elon Musk, about the

0:47

brilliant, controversial and indisputably

0:50

impactful inventor and entrepreneur.

0:53

But true to the spirit of the Axe Files, we also

0:55

spoke about Isaacson himself, about

0:57

his life and his gifts and

1:00

his fascination with the nature of genius.

1:03

Here's that conversation.

1:08

Walter, there are a thousand things that I could ask

1:10

you about Elon Musk. I want to start

1:13

off by asking you something about

1:15

you. You

1:18

are a genius at writing about geniuses. One

1:21

of the tricks is if you write about geniuses,

1:23

people think you're a genius and you can fake them

1:26

out. That's very good. I

1:28

want to know a little about you. I know your dad was an engineer.

1:31

I think that

1:33

he had something to do with the

1:35

Superdome construction

1:38

and a lot of other major projects.

1:40

Did he inculcate you? Because you read this

1:42

book. It's 605 pages

1:45

or something. I say it's

1:47

hard to lift and hard to put down

1:50

if you start reading it. You

1:54

kind of

1:55

geek out in a wonderful way about

1:57

the technology and the science. Well,

2:00

I love technology and science, and

2:02

Steve Jobs at one point said to me, those

2:04

who stand at the intersection of the sciences

2:07

and humanities are those

2:09

where creativity

2:11

happens. And that's why he

2:14

suggested I did Leonardo da

2:16

Vinci, because his Vitruvian man is

2:18

the symbol of the intersection of the humanities

2:21

and the sciences. And

2:23

it comes from my father and my

2:25

uncle and my brother and my grandfather,

2:27

who are all engineers. So

2:30

what happened to you? I know. Well,

2:33

I'll take that question seriously, but it

2:35

does happen that

2:38

somehow or another, if you're in engineering,

2:41

you think, okay, maybe

2:45

the next generation will be in the humanities

2:47

that will earn that right. And this

2:49

is a humanities festival. And

2:52

we think of the

2:54

importance of the humanities, which

2:57

my father truly believed

2:59

in. He was a very geeky

3:01

engineer and scientist, but he subscribed

3:04

to Book of the Month Club and Saturday

3:07

Review. You're old enough to remember what that

3:09

was. Sadly, yes. Yes, and

3:12

the point was he wanted us, his

3:15

kids and grandkids to be humanists. I

3:18

followed that path, because I think

3:20

the humanities are important, but

3:23

then I began to rankle when people

3:25

in the humanities would give lectures

3:27

about how you had to know the difference, but

3:29

they'd be appalled if you don't know

3:31

the difference between King Lear and Macbeth,

3:34

but then they would happily admit

3:37

not to know science or math.

3:40

They wouldn't know the difference between an integral and

3:42

a differential equation or a capacitor

3:44

and a transistor. And I thought- There'd

3:47

be a quiz at the end. And I

3:49

thought, because I grew up in the

3:51

home in New Orleans, well, we made

3:54

radios. We made actually fixed

3:56

television sets, used vacuum

3:59

tubes and then- switch transistors

4:01

in for them. I had a feel

4:03

for circuits. Ezra Webber,

4:05

one of my students, is sitting over there. I teach

4:07

a course in the digital revolution in

4:10

which I try to get

4:13

students to understand what a circuit

4:15

is, what on-off switches are, why

4:18

you can do logic with yes, no, on-off

4:20

switches in a circuit. These are things

4:23

we've forgotten in this

4:25

day and age, and that's why

4:27

I like writing about people,

4:30

Steve Jobs, Jennifer Doudna,

4:33

and then Elon Musk, who

4:36

do have a feel for

4:38

the inner workings of technology. And

4:41

to get to Musk in particular, when

4:43

I started this book,

4:47

thanks to Antonio Gracias, who's a great

4:49

Chicago person, he put us together,

4:53

I thought, all right, here's a guy doing

4:55

sustainable energy, solar roofs,

4:57

battery packs, electric cars, rocket

5:00

ships, and satellites. How cool

5:02

is that? And then, of course, he buys

5:05

Twitter, which kind of messes up the narrative.

5:07

Yeah, yeah. Let

5:09

me ask you, we'll

5:11

get to that. Let me

5:13

ask you one question more about your biography

5:16

that relates to Musk. You

5:19

grew up in the South at a very

5:22

significant time. You grew up in an era

5:24

of segregation. I know you've

5:26

written and spoken about it, you, and

5:30

the height of the Civil Rights Movement.

5:33

He grew up in an apartheid South Africa.

5:36

I don't think there's anything in the book about that.

5:38

And I was wondering whether you, having had the

5:40

experience you had, had any kind of conversation

5:43

with him about that? Well, there are some things

5:45

in the book. He does go to the anti-apartheid

5:48

concerts. At

5:50

one point, Train Door opens, he's

5:52

with his brother, and there's a guy with a knife

5:55

sticking out of his head. Yes, yes, there

5:57

was. And the blood on the shoes. His father.

6:00

who's a not in my mind

6:02

an admirable character, but did

6:04

run as an anti-apartheid

6:07

city council election and

6:09

won in Pretoria. But did you talk to him about the

6:11

experience of living under,

6:14

did it impact on him? The

6:17

violence impacted and the danger

6:19

impacted, and of course he leaves

6:22

South Africa in order not to have to join the

6:24

army and also to get to Canada

6:26

as it turned out. How about the injustice of

6:29

it? No, I think

6:32

he, I mean this is a problem that you'll

6:34

see throughout the book that's reflected to today,

6:37

is that he has these epic hero

6:40

visions of himself that come from

6:42

being a lonely, socially

6:45

awkward. Yes. He retreated

6:47

into this world of science fiction.

6:50

Exactly. And his father was

6:52

brutally, psychologically brutal to

6:55

him. He was beaten up as a kid.

6:57

You're running through my notes here, man. Okay. Let

6:59

me say something. Okay, go ahead. No, no, no. But

7:02

anyway, that makes him retreat

7:06

into this almost as if he's making

7:08

himself a character in a

7:10

video game in which he gets to play

7:13

himself. Yes. And so

7:15

his ideas of truth and justice

7:19

are these almost Captain Underpants,

7:23

epic X-Men comic

7:25

book things, which to

7:28

some extent are admirable, which are

7:31

three big epic quests. One is

7:33

sustainable energy on the planet. Number

7:35

two is making us multi-planetary, back

7:37

to space again. And third is protecting

7:40

us against artificial intelligence and

7:42

robots gone rogue. But

7:45

those were his

7:47

epic quest. He

7:50

has a great feel

7:52

for engineering. He has a fingertip feel

7:55

that would have exceeded my father by two

7:57

orders of magnitude at looking

7:59

at the... material property. He talked

8:02

about having Asperger's. It's an interesting

8:04

thing how many people relate

8:06

to this stuff, but he does not have

8:10

the, which means, and there are many,

8:12

many forms of autism spectrum

8:14

disorder, which is the real name for it, but

8:18

in his case it means he doesn't have

8:20

deep emotional receptors.

8:23

He doesn't look people in the eye. He doesn't

8:26

have a feel for the,

8:29

or empathy for incoming

8:31

or outgoing emotion, which is why

8:34

he shouldn't have bought Twitter. I mean, you know, you

8:36

should have stuck to batteries and rocket chips.

8:39

Okay. Now that you've run through my entire list

8:42

of thank you very much for coming.

8:45

Well, I'll just start asking

8:47

Max questions. Let me, let me,

8:52

let's start from his dad

8:55

because if there is a character

8:57

in the book who looms almost

8:59

as large as Musk himself, it's his father.

9:02

He's a, he's a specter that hangs over

9:05

every, almost every page of this.

9:07

Talk about him and

9:09

the influence that

9:12

he had on Musk's

9:14

life. At the very beginning

9:16

of this process, may

9:19

Musk, the mother who had obviously

9:21

divorced Harold many,

9:24

many years ago said, here's

9:26

the story. The danger for

9:28

Elon is that he becomes his

9:30

father. Now this is a pretty old

9:33

trope in mythology. Yeah. It's

9:35

Luke Skywulf and in life. It's,

9:38

and except for for me, which is my,

9:41

my aspiration would be to be

9:43

my father. But I'm lucky.

9:46

I mean, I just had a kindly father. Do you

9:48

think you did? No, he

9:50

would rather me be an engineer. I'm sure.

9:55

But that notion

9:58

of fighting the dark side of the fall. of

10:01

imagining yourself as Luke Skywalker

10:03

and discovering Darth Vader as your father.

10:07

That is an old mythological

10:10

theme. And what

10:13

happens to Musk is when he's

10:15

beaten up at the playground, one

10:17

point has to go to the hospital for almost

10:19

a week. He was bullied as a kid. Bullied but

10:21

beaten up because he was so socially awkward

10:24

and that's a euphemism for just,

10:26

you know, not being able to deal with people.

10:28

Sadly, a common story as well.

10:31

Yeah, we could get there. I'm

10:33

gonna go quick detour here, which

10:35

is I have

10:36

been stunned and I can

10:38

use a couple of names like Andrew Yang who

10:40

interviewed me. They all say, I have a kid. Yes.

10:43

Like this. I'm talking to Andrew about it. So do

10:46

I. You know, in my family. I think almost anybody

10:48

in this room has somebody in the family. And

10:50

this notion of

10:53

being somewhere on the autism spectrum, you

10:55

can watch how different people

10:58

channel it. But

11:01

I won't use a name, but cable

11:03

TV

11:05

host, you know, well says,

11:07

my kid is that way. And I always put my

11:10

arm around him at the baseball game. And I'm when they give

11:12

the popcorn, I say, look the guy in the eye and say,

11:14

thank you. When somebody, you know, in coaches, his

11:18

father was the opposite. Elon gets

11:20

beaten up like this all the

11:22

time. And at one point after he comes back from

11:24

the hospital, his father makes him stand

11:26

in front of him erect for

11:29

like two hours almost. While

11:32

he tells Elon that he's stupid, he's worthless. It

11:35

was his fault and takes the side of the people who beat

11:37

him up. So this makes him withdraw,

11:39

obviously, and

11:42

have these demons in his head. Now,

11:45

all of us have some demons that

11:47

they don't know.

11:50

All of us have some demons

11:52

that probably come from childhood. That's the

11:54

oldest theme in biography is,

11:56

you know, Einstein growing up

11:59

Jewish in Germany. Ben Franklin running away

12:01

from Philadelphia, even Jennifer

12:03

Doudna. The question

12:05

is how do you harness those demons and to what

12:08

extent do those demons harness

12:10

you? And that's the theme of this

12:12

book because it works both ways in Matt's

12:15

case. Yeah, you

12:18

literally did sort of, you weren't

12:20

peeking at my notes in the green room, were you? No,

12:23

no, I'm sorry there. But the

12:25

things that really came through were

12:28

what you said. There's almost a messianic

12:31

quality to him if

12:33

SpaceX fails, we'll never be the

12:36

multi-planetary. I know.

12:38

It's odd. If Tesla

12:41

fails, the planet is doomed. If

12:44

I don't take over this AI issue, we're

12:46

gonna be overwhelmed by the robots

12:49

and computers. I mean, he

12:51

sees himself as the thin blue line between

12:53

humanity and disaster.

12:56

He has this epic sense

12:58

of his missions. And at first

13:01

I thought it was just the pontificating

13:04

you would do on a podcast or at a pep

13:06

talk for your team. But then

13:08

over and over again, I'd see him lapse

13:11

into where he'd get really angry in

13:13

South Texas at the launch site for

13:15

Starship. If you have the book, you

13:17

can show the back cover. Largest

13:20

movable object ever made and he's trying

13:22

to get it in his face. Here, just pass it around. Yes. And

13:26

he would just start murmuring to himself,

13:29

if I don't force this, we will never get

13:32

to Mars. We'll never be multi-planetary.

13:34

And likewise in 2008, when both SpaceX has

13:39

destroyed three rockets. Both of them almost

13:41

went down Tesla and SpaceX. December 2008,

13:44

both run out of money. He runs out

13:46

of all of his money. He runs out of all of his brother's

13:48

money. His wife to little O'Reilly's

13:51

parents are saying we'll sell our house. He's

13:54

writing personal checks to keep Tesla

13:56

and SpaceX alive. One

13:59

of the people running SpaceX says, hey,

14:01

give up on one or the other. And he says,

14:03

what you quoted, which is, if

14:06

Tesla doesn't work, the era

14:08

of getting into electric vehicles is going to

14:10

be set back. Because GM

14:12

and Ford had just gotten out of the business. And

14:15

he says, and if SpaceX fails, we'll

14:17

never go back into space

14:19

again. We've given up on the shuttle. We've

14:22

given up on going to the moon. So

14:24

he has this epic sense.

14:27

And I know it sounds odd,

14:30

and if you read the book, you can disagree with

14:32

me. But after a while,

14:35

I believed he believed it. This

14:38

isn't just, well, whatever.

14:41

It was he has

14:43

this mantra in his head that

14:46

if we don't start exploring

14:49

other planets, if we remain confined

14:51

to this Earth, and we allow this Earth to be destroyed

14:54

for many reasons, including not having sustainable

14:57

energy, this is

14:59

the epic quest he has to be on.

15:02

Yeah. So he did become

15:04

his father in one way, which

15:06

is, he does have this dark

15:09

side that is legendary. Obviously,

15:12

you saw it. You wrote about you talked to

15:15

people. But he can

15:17

turn his employees and even

15:20

his friends and relatives into

15:22

that little boy standing in front of his father.

15:25

Absolutely. And his father

15:27

was Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He'd switched

15:29

from being a charming engineer to

15:32

being cold and

15:34

psychologically brutal, neither violent

15:38

or even raise their voice. It's

15:40

that cold monotone brutality.

15:43

And Musk has

15:45

multiple personalities. Elon does,

15:48

which is he can be charming. He can be inspirational.

15:51

He can be funny. And then he goes into

15:53

what Grimes, one of his girlfriends, calls

15:56

demon mode. And you watch

15:58

it happen. And he goes, rah! really

16:00

dark and he'll just be coldly

16:03

brutal to the people in front

16:05

of him. And, uh, it,

16:10

it happens mostly on

16:12

engineering issues, but now, unfortunately

16:15

on politics. Did he

16:17

ever go dark on you? No,

16:19

I kept, people kept saying, man, it's going to happen. It's going

16:21

to happen. I kept a

16:24

good line between me and him. I wouldn't

16:26

as pal. We didn't go out, you know,

16:28

late at night. I didn't try. I

16:30

sat in the corner for two

16:32

years. Every meeting he, uh,

16:35

with a few, only, uh,

16:37

two classified national security meetings,

16:40

did he ask me to leave the room? Let's

16:42

just interrupt you for saying, what does it say about him?

16:45

Like when I was in politics and

16:47

I had candidates or presidents

16:49

or whatever, and people said, I just

16:51

want to sit in the corner in the room and watch. I

16:54

like the hell you will. Uh,

16:58

and, uh, and so what does it

17:00

say about him? I mean, there is

17:02

a radical transparency to

17:05

him and also this epic ego

17:07

and, um, superhero

17:10

comic quality that he

17:12

just wanted. Nothing

17:15

to be off limits. His text

17:17

messages, his emails, every

17:20

meeting, dinners at night.

17:23

Uh, and I was stunned

17:26

at two things, the openness

17:28

and transparency. And you've read the book

17:30

and you just go, whoa, why did he allow

17:32

Walter there? Yes. And, uh,

17:35

that open transparency and the fact that

17:37

he never turned the flamethrower

17:40

on me. And, uh, have you heard from him

17:42

since the book came out? Yeah, I

17:44

did, uh, Lex Fredman's podcast

17:47

down in Austin. I know, you know of

17:49

him. And that was about four

17:51

weeks ago. One of the, there were two rules

17:54

when I did this book and, uh, we

17:56

had a couple of hour discussion. I said,

17:58

I don't want to do. it based on five or

18:01

ten interviews or 15. I want to

18:03

be by your side at all times." And

18:05

he said, okay. Just in the monitoring.

18:07

I go, wow. And then I said, you

18:10

have no control over this book. You're not

18:12

even going to be able to read it in advance.

18:15

I'm not going to send you a copy. And he

18:17

said, okay. So about

18:20

two or three weeks ago, I guess maybe four, the

18:22

book came out three or four weeks ago, the

18:24

week the book was about to come out, I'm down

18:27

in Austin doing Lex Friedman's podcast.

18:30

And I've not sent Elon the book,

18:32

but other people have it, meaning the reviewers

18:35

have it and stuff. And so I thought he may have it. And

18:38

I went out to dinner with Friedman and

18:40

Musk pops up. And so

18:42

we all have dinner. On the way

18:45

to the parking lot, he says, I haven't

18:47

read the book, should I? And I said, no.

18:50

And he laughs and says, okay. And

18:53

then about two weeks ago, I happened

18:56

to cross, well, not, I crossed paths with

18:58

him again at a conference in Aspen

19:00

where I used to work. And somebody,

19:03

Gail King said, have you read the book?

19:05

And he said, no, I was in a parking lot with

19:08

Walter. He told me not to read it. So

19:12

you did have influence. Yeah, right.

19:14

I wish I could tell him not to do some other things. What

19:18

the, some of the reviews

19:21

were hard on you, accusing

19:24

you of sort of fanboying him

19:27

and not being hard enough on

19:29

him. You read the book,

19:31

I think it's not fanboying.

19:34

Well, every question I've asked has come from

19:36

what I read in your book. Yeah. So

19:39

no, it is a valid, I didn't

19:41

mean to push back too much. I certainly

19:43

don't think I fanboy because if you 40% of

19:46

the people in this country,

19:49

in this room probably hate him and 40%

19:51

think he's a

19:53

super genius, he's getting us to different

19:55

planets. And I had to say,

19:57

wait a minute, you can hold both things and you

19:59

have the same. time. He's actually able,

20:02

where NASA isn't and Boeing isn't, to

20:04

get astronauts to the space station. And

20:06

just this week, the Falcon

20:09

Super Heavy did something NASA couldn't do, which

20:11

is launch a mission to that asteroid.

20:13

I mean it's just a science thing. You got

20:15

to hold that in your head and hold in the

20:17

head the qualities that

20:20

begin with a word, begins with

20:22

A. Yeah. But

20:25

in the book, I mean, but there's a valid criticism.

20:29

That's me and Michael Lewis, who I grew

20:31

up with in New Orleans and did Sam Bankman free,

20:34

which is you're arriving right next to somebody

20:36

and you keep explaining and you're understanding

20:38

how he is. Does that mean you're excusing

20:41

or you're sugarcoating? I tried

20:43

hard not to sugarcoat and I

20:45

know Kara Swisher, my friend and others,

20:48

we've had this conversation.

20:50

Yeah. Oh, but we've had this conversation.

20:53

Oh, you didn't come down hard

20:55

enough on him. And I

20:58

said, well, I tell the story.

21:00

So if you're one of those people who doesn't like

21:02

certain traits of his, you're going to have about 10

21:05

times more ammunition after you read this book

21:07

because I don't sugarcoat those stories. And

21:10

likewise on the engineering stories, I don't.

21:13

We're going to take a short break and we'll be right

21:15

back with more of the X-Files. For

21:22

two decades, FBI agent Robert Hanson

21:24

sold secrets to the Kremlin. He violated

21:27

everything that my FBI stood for.

21:29

People died because of him. Hanson was the most

21:32

damaging spy in FBI history and his

21:34

betrayals didn't end there. Do I hate

21:36

him?

21:36

No, I don't hate anyone, but his

21:39

motive. I would love to know what his

21:41

two motives so I can get that out

21:43

of me.

21:43

How did he do it? Why?

21:46

Listen to Agent of Betrayal, the double life

21:48

of Robert Hanson, wherever you get your podcasts.

21:52

Amika Insurance

21:53

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studio of Warner Brothers Discovery, to

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create a short film series called What You Leave

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Behind. Real stories about people who've

22:15

lost loved ones and how a meaningful object

22:18

left behind can continue to represent

22:20

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22:22

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22:27

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22:31

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22:48

As Amika says, empathy is

22:51

our best policy. And now, back to the show. It

22:57

is an extraordinary story. His

23:00

prodigious talents

23:00

are, and what

23:04

is, the thing that was striking was,

23:06

I think Reed Hoffman is quoted in there

23:08

as saying, you know, he finally

23:11

figured out that Elon starts with a mission

23:13

and then sort of backfills. Backfills.

23:17

Backfills. And he's a great guy. He's a great

23:19

guy. And he finally figured out that Elon starts with a mission

23:21

and then sort of backfills. Backfills. And

23:23

tries to find a business model for

23:26

his mission. He's

23:28

the wealthiest guy on the planet. But

23:32

it's unlike some others. I

23:35

mean, he's not taking

23:37

long cruises in the Mediterranean. And

23:39

he makes fun of Bezos for that. Yeah.

23:42

I tried not to mention anyone. I didn't want to draw other

23:44

billionaires into the conversation. But

23:49

what comes across in your account

23:52

of these engineering exploits

23:55

is how

23:57

deeply he's involved in the process of

24:00

in the process as,

24:02

and he's kind of like a MacGyver, oh,

24:04

the rocket has a leak, go out and find some bubblegum.

24:08

You know, that kind of thing. That wasn't really a

24:10

story, but it was, it's almost

24:12

that. Let's take us some epoxy

24:14

and fix the valve on this Raptor engine.

24:17

Yeah. Which Boeing wouldn't do and

24:19

NASA wouldn't do and you have to figure

24:21

out how much risk do you wanna take?

24:24

So describe that quality of

24:26

his and how striking

24:29

that was. That was very striking to me.

24:31

And as I say, you'll see the other qualities

24:34

as well. But

24:36

he

24:37

has a maniacal, mono

24:40

focus ability. And this is

24:42

part of the psychology of how he's hardwired,

24:45

which is take, for example, the night

24:48

that the Twitter board decided

24:51

to accept his hostile offer to

24:54

buy Twitter. And Musk

24:58

goes that night, as he's hearing

25:00

it, to Boca Chica, the tiny

25:02

town in the spit south of Texas

25:05

where he's trying to launch Starship. And

25:07

he goes into a meeting

25:10

that night and the whole world

25:12

is a buzz that he's just gotten

25:14

Twitter. In the room, all the engineers,

25:17

I know they're in their bus. He doesn't

25:19

mention it and they don't mention it. And

25:21

they spend two hours looking

25:24

at a methane leak in

25:26

one of the engines in the booster of Starship.

25:29

And what could be done to do a work

25:31

around or how they could read it? And

25:34

he's the one who figures out both the material

25:36

qualities of Inconel, which is one

25:39

of the materials

25:42

you can use in a rocket, exactly

25:44

how to do it, and then never

25:48

mentions Twitter. So he will

25:50

focus serially, meaning

25:52

step by step, for a couple of

25:55

hours on how

25:57

do you make a left turn with full self-driving

25:59

when there's a rocket? bike lane, then

26:01

how are we going to fix this valve? Then

26:04

how, and he will

26:06

look at these little things and then leave 99% of what's

26:08

happening at SpaceX

26:10

or Twitter or Tesla

26:14

to the other managers. But he

26:16

says it's like Napoleon, you

26:18

got to be on the battlefield riding the horse

26:21

with the sword in the details. And

26:23

his management style is to

26:25

focus with an urgent intensity

26:28

on the details. And he says that

26:30

will ripple through the

26:32

enterprise. And then while others, when

26:35

others make decisions, then he tells

26:37

them how stupid the decisions are. If

26:40

he doesn't like the decisions. We

26:44

were having this discussion backstage.

26:47

I'm so interested in the psychology

26:50

of sort of genius

26:53

at that level because

26:57

it's disruptive genius, disruptive

26:59

genius. It requires

27:02

you to say, I don't care what the

27:04

rules are. I don't care what the norms

27:06

are. I don't care how we

27:08

did this for a thousand years.

27:11

I'm going to do it a different way. And

27:14

if that means breaking a rule or a regulation

27:17

or so on, so be it. I'm just focused on

27:20

that goal. Is that a common trait

27:24

of the people who you have studied?

27:26

Yeah, that's an interesting question. Wired

27:28

Magazine after I did a book on Steve

27:31

Jobs did a cover called Do

27:33

You Have to Be an A-Hole

27:36

to Be an Innovator?

27:40

And it is true. Out of

27:42

the closed caption people deal with

27:44

this. Actually,

27:46

right. Out of the closed caption. It

27:49

is true in order to be a disruptor,

27:52

you have to be disruptive. When

27:54

I did Jobs, early

27:57

on, Wozniak, his co-founder,

27:59

says the

28:00

the question you have to answer is did he have

28:02

to be such an a-hole? Did he have to

28:05

be asshole, I think is the word. Yes, you're right. Did

28:07

he have to be so mean? And

28:10

a few years later, we're at the launch

28:14

of the second iPod and

28:17

Steve Jobs is dying. He has two

28:19

turtlenecks on because he says skinny and

28:21

cold, but unstaked. And I see Woz

28:23

and I say, okay, what's the answer to that question? Woz

28:27

says, if I had run Apple,

28:29

I would have been nicer. I would have made

28:31

everybody get stock options. It would have run

28:33

it like a family. And

28:36

then Woz, he's a teddy bear of a guy,

28:38

said, but if I had run Apple, we probably would

28:41

never have done the Macintosh. We wouldn't have done

28:43

the iPhone. So do you have to

28:45

be disruptive to do it? In some

28:47

cases, I write about people who aren't

28:50

disruptive. Jen Franklin is the guy

28:52

who takes a lot of disruptive people from

28:54

Hamilton to Sam

28:57

Adams and brings them together. Jennifer

28:59

Dowd… Did you, are you sitting in the corner of the room then? No.

29:02

Well, I was sitting in the corner of the room with Jennifer

29:05

Dowdner, who is the most collegial. She's

29:07

the one who co-invents CRISPR

29:09

in my book, The Code Breaker, which edits

29:11

human genes. And when

29:13

they're bringing anybody into the lab

29:15

to be hired, even as a graduate student,

29:18

she makes them meet everybody in the lab.

29:21

And then they sit around later and talk, would this

29:23

person fit in? Do we like this

29:25

person? Musk is the opposite.

29:28

He says a few things. One,

29:30

he has an algorithm, which is step by step.

29:33

Question every rule, question every regulation.

29:36

Somebody says, the reason we have to

29:38

put this piece of felt

29:40

in is because the regulators

29:43

say so. He says, show me why.

29:45

And that's risk taking. And

29:47

he says, yeah, but everybody who came, we

29:50

used to be a nation of risk takers. Whether

29:53

you came on the Mayflower, across the Rio

29:55

Grande, or from Eastern Europe

29:57

in the 20s and 30s. You

30:00

took some risks and we've lost that ability

30:02

to be risk takers. And

30:05

then he says collegiality

30:09

is not your friend. Empathy

30:11

is not your friend. In other words, if you're

30:13

trying to please all people

30:16

around you, you'll lose sight

30:18

of the enterprise and the mission. And

30:21

he says... That serves his personality

30:23

as well. Absolutely. And it's why some

30:25

people... And Steve Jobs for that man. And

30:28

Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. So...

30:31

I sense a trend here. Yeah. Well,

30:33

that's an answer to your question in a way.

30:36

And to some extent, these

30:38

people don't have the empathy receptors

30:42

or transmitters, the input-output

30:45

empathy that you and I would have.

30:50

And Jobs told me once,

30:54

you have the luxury of being

30:56

empathetic. And you think that you're

30:59

kind, but you're actually being selfish because

31:01

you want people to like you too much. And

31:03

I did realize when I ran time, it was

31:06

very collegial family. We were doing

31:08

well. When I went to CNN, I

31:11

did not do well running CNN. It

31:13

was partly because I cared too much

31:16

about every person from Lou Dobbs,

31:18

the great... Liking me when

31:20

I needed to be a disruptor and

31:22

I wasn't a disruptor. So

31:25

this is a question in the

31:27

book, which is... He

31:30

said he learned it from playing polytopia,

31:32

the game. Yes. Don't

31:35

be collegial. Yeah. Obsessively.

31:38

Even the night he bought Twitter, he was

31:40

Elden Ring. He got to the final level.

31:43

And he said, empathy is your

31:45

enemy if you're trying to get to the next

31:47

level. So just as a parenthetically,

31:50

you mentioned CNN, you ran CNN. Do

31:53

you think they just hired a new

31:55

CEO, Mark Thompson, who had great success?

32:00

the New York Times and the BBC, do

32:03

you think that there is a

32:05

way to reinvent the model?

32:09

Is there positive disruption that can...

32:12

I'm asking for a friend. Mark?

32:15

For you. Well,

32:17

let me caveat this by saying I'm

32:20

one of the five or six people who

32:22

has proven on the national stage that

32:24

I don't know how to run CNN. And

32:27

so... But you do know this world.

32:30

I do. And I think in

32:32

an era in

32:35

which we have artificial

32:37

intelligence, scraping information,

32:40

misinformation, we're

32:42

going to have to place a higher value

32:45

on reliable, good

32:48

information that will be used to

32:50

train everything from our AI systems

32:54

to inform us in the middle of what's

32:56

happening right now, this horrible

32:58

terrorist attack and its aftermath.

33:02

And it means that people

33:05

will pay a premium at

33:07

some point for information

33:10

that's reliable. We went

33:12

astray when the

33:14

business model of journalism depended

33:17

mainly on advertisers, which meant

33:19

aggregating eyeballs and

33:22

click date. And now

33:24

we're getting into an era in which I

33:26

think if you're the one who has truthful

33:29

and reliable information, people

33:31

will pay for it. Henry Luce

33:34

who invented Time Magazine said, if

33:36

you're dependent totally on advertisers,

33:38

it's not only morally abhorrent, it's

33:41

economically self-defeating. You

33:43

have to be dependent on revenue from

33:46

users. And one of the things

33:49

Musk will do, which is on one

33:51

of the few upsides of Twitter, is

33:53

he's going to make small payment systems.

33:56

So if I hit the Chicago Tribune,

33:58

and I'm trying to read... a wonderful world

34:01

review of the Louis Armstrong play opening

34:03

here tonight. And it says, you have

34:05

to subscribe for a year to the Tribune. For

34:08

the Tribune, I'll do that. But with

34:10

the Minneapolis Star, the San Jose,

34:12

I want to be able to pay a dollar for the article.

34:15

I don't want to have to have a... And those are the type

34:17

of things, I'm sorry, there's a long answer, that

34:20

are in sent higher value

34:22

information that people could be willing

34:24

to pay for. So let's turn to... By

34:27

the way, just in this... The reason

34:29

I ask about the disruption is that

34:32

disruption can be... It can yield

34:35

extraordinary discoveries

34:38

and advances as

34:40

the rockets, the cars, and so on.

34:43

But we also see disruption in every element

34:46

of our lives now. Social

34:48

media has a lot to do with this. Politics

34:50

is now mirroring social media and

34:53

so on. It's concerning. It's

34:55

concerning because democracies

34:57

rely on laws and rules

35:00

and norms and institutions. And

35:02

institutions that aren't disrupted.

35:05

So I am not innately

35:07

a disruptor. I write about them. But

35:11

I do believe that

35:15

the wanton disruption of institutions,

35:17

whether it be general

35:20

interest news magazines where I come from,

35:23

or local papers where I come from, or churches, or civic

35:27

organizations... You could run the whole gamut of institutions.

35:31

Yeah. Democratic and Republican party structures.

35:35

I don't think disruption in and of itself

35:37

is of value. I like technological

35:40

disruption, meaning I

35:42

do think the major auto companies, when

35:45

they decided not to go into electric

35:47

vehicles and GM started crushing

35:49

the Chevy Bolt. It

35:52

was good. Somebody disrupted it. And

35:54

when NASA decided we're going

35:56

to ground the space shuttle and not

35:58

try to get astronauts in the oil. anymore. I

36:01

like that disruption. The disruption

36:04

of other institutions has been enormously

36:06

problematic. So let's, this

36:09

is a natural transition into this

36:11

phase of Musk. You

36:14

were with him during an interesting period

36:16

in his development and evolution because

36:19

he was not a particularly

36:22

political person as you noted in

36:24

the book earlier in his life. He worked with you to write Money for Obama.

36:27

Yes, which

36:29

we appreciated. But

36:35

he has become much more

36:38

outspoken, much more involved.

36:40

And let me just add an anecdote

36:43

in the middle of this because one

36:45

of his technological innovations is

36:47

Starlink, the internet

36:50

provider with low aperture

36:56

satellites that he's launched, many, many

36:58

of them. And

37:01

he has provided the internet service

37:04

that has kept Ukraine connected. There

37:07

was an episode in your book that you

37:09

wrote about it, created some controversy.

37:12

I think the controversy was overblown,

37:15

but the point was important. The

37:17

essence was this guy has a

37:19

power on that night to decide whether

37:22

Ukraine was going

37:24

to launch an attack on Russian

37:26

assets around

37:28

Crimea. And they

37:31

needed Starlink and

37:33

they did not know it had been disabled.

37:36

And that night, he gets the text

37:39

messages all in the book. They're

37:42

saying, you got to turn it on so we can do this sneak

37:44

attack on this fleet. And

37:47

even he feels, he says to me, how

37:50

did I get into this war? I created Starlink

37:53

so people could watch Netflix and chill. He called you by the way

37:55

in the midst of this. So you

37:57

weren't just the guy in the corner, you were also the guy in this.

38:00

It's weird if I want me to tell

38:02

a little story behind it or something. Well,

38:04

let's see. Okay, well, no. It depends how long

38:07

the story is. No, go ahead. Tell the story.

38:09

60 seconds, which is, as you

38:11

know, when the Russians have laid

38:13

Ukraine, you have to figure out how they get so much power.

38:16

One reason is, via SAT, the satellites

38:18

that they're using, totally conked

38:21

out when the Russians... The US military,

38:23

their own military, the only satellite

38:25

that can withstand Russian attacks is

38:28

Starlink. So you've got to say, how

38:30

come he could and NASA and

38:32

DIA couldn't? And

38:34

then he plays Captain Underpants superhero

38:37

because they start taxing him, saying, we've

38:39

got to defeat the Russians. And

38:42

he sends that night, a hundred,

38:44

and then next day, a thousand Starlink

38:46

services there. And

38:48

had he not, Ukraine would have

38:50

been overrun by Russia because the troops wouldn't

38:52

be able to... I'm sorry, this is taking more

38:54

than a minute. Well, flash forward real quick

38:57

to September. And

39:00

after spending a week with him and doing it, I'm

39:02

back home in New Orleans. And here was the backstory

39:04

I was going to do. I'm at my old high school,

39:07

watching a high school Friday night football

39:09

game because Arch Manning, the senior

39:11

at my high school, is this prep star.

39:14

And I want to see him. And

39:16

it's Musk. Musk. He says, okay, they're

39:18

asking me to enable Starlink

39:21

so they can do this Pearl Harbor deck. He

39:23

plays apocalyptic, which he is.

39:26

He says Russian doctrine means they could

39:28

go tactical nuke on us if

39:30

that happens. He talked to some Russian ambassador or something.

39:32

He talked to the Russian ambassador who said, here's

39:35

our doctrine. We consider

39:37

Crimea the homeland. So anyway,

39:40

and so I'm not enabling it. And

39:45

I'm very Socratic. I don't give him advice

39:47

even though I was like, why am I... And

39:49

I said, have you talked to General Mark Milley,

39:51

which is my Socratic way of saying, Yeah,

39:55

I'll move it up your pay grade. And he does

39:57

talk to Milley. And there's a story to be written

39:59

there. That's interesting, but

40:02

we don't have it in the 60 seconds here. And

40:04

eventually he gives up control

40:08

over a significant number of Starlink

40:11

services to the US military

40:13

and the CIA and that

40:15

they can make the decision, not he. I read

40:18

the account of this because

40:20

it became a thing when your book came out

40:23

and I, because I

40:26

want to help

40:28

Musk's business, I tweeted and

40:32

I said, do we really want Elon

40:34

Musk making national security decisions?

40:38

And I thought it was a, I don't think it was like

40:40

a hugely path-breaking

40:43

observation. He tweeted back.

40:46

What do you say? I think he said, since when have

40:48

you become a warmonger? So

40:51

I guess that his point was had he

40:53

done that, then we would have

40:56

had the nuclear attack and so

40:58

on. But first of all, what's he doing

41:00

responding to me? I don't know. I mean,

41:02

this is, yeah. And I've mentioned

41:04

and some of you may know Antonio, but I

41:07

mentioned before they were traveling together

41:09

and Musk keeps like late at night

41:11

responding to people like Axe on Twitter

41:13

saying things. And Antonio

41:16

said, let me take your phone and puts it in the

41:18

safe in the hotel room, punches in the cup. So

41:20

Musk can't tweet that night because he's

41:22

gone on these bad tweets. At 3

41:25

a.m. Musk called hotel security

41:27

and made them open the safe. This

41:30

is an addiction. He has an addiction to video

41:32

games and to tweeting

41:34

that the latter is sometimes

41:37

not a pretty sight. We're

41:40

going to take a short break and we'll be right

41:42

back with more of the Axe files.

41:52

And now back to the show.

41:59

about that yeah I decided not to prolong

42:02

the discussion I just mostly

42:05

because my wife my

42:07

wife threw my phone in the safe as

42:10

well so

42:12

let's talk about though his

42:16

politics as you describe

42:18

in the book you know he was for

42:20

the longest time kind of a liberal on social

42:22

issues libertarian on economic issues

42:25

obviously he was in business doesn't like regulation

42:27

doesn't like rules but

42:30

now it seems like it's morphed into something

42:33

else what what has happened part

42:35

of the book which I won't recap but

42:37

it's the past three years the evolution

42:40

you were there for most of it yeah I mean I'm like and

42:43

first of all let's say there's not one musk

42:45

I mean in the middle of the day when he's in a cheery

42:47

mood says we need more moderate

42:49

I'm gonna start a pack for you know

42:52

centrist and then he'll get into

42:54

a dark mood his demon

42:56

mode and he will the darker

42:59

side of his politics will come out as

43:01

his mother said he could become his father his father

43:03

is a conspiracist who thinks that everybody

43:06

from Fauci to stolen elections

43:09

and even though must does not speak to his

43:11

father and it doesn't as blocked

43:14

his father's emails somehow

43:16

may is right that channeling happens

43:19

but over the past three years he

43:21

shifted from being what I would call an

43:23

Obama Democrat to

43:25

I won't say conservative but

43:28

to this populist right

43:30

that includes even a Bobby Kennedy

43:33

you know so go yes well I mean there are there

43:35

are rumors I think I know

43:38

I trafficked in some of it that he

43:40

is that he's thinking about support

43:42

and they now say that he's thinking

43:44

about supporting a super PAC to

43:47

help Bobby Ken I'm sure it's

43:49

a variable mercurial feeling he

43:51

has and we'll see where it turns out they have they

43:53

have a kind of kinship I mean he's Bob

43:55

Kennedy or a toy is shares his view

43:57

on climate and shares his They're

44:00

both very much in favor

44:03

of fixing the climate, I mean, saving

44:05

us from climate disaster, but also

44:08

conspiratorial. Now,

44:11

I mean, the problems on conspiratorial,

44:13

as Musk would argue, I wouldn't, because

44:15

I'm the least conspiratorial person really,

44:18

is that some things that were called

44:21

conspiracy theories like the Barrington

44:23

Doctrine about lockdowns will

44:25

cause more harm than good, get

44:27

censored on Twitter and they turn out to

44:29

at least be debatably

44:32

correct, if not totally correct. But

44:36

to get to your question, he does evolve

44:39

on the past three years. There are multiple

44:41

reasons, and I'll try to tick him off quickly.

44:45

One is he really hates rules

44:47

and regulations and the COVID lockdowns,

44:50

it just bristle, made them bristle. He

44:52

took on the state of California And

44:55

then the assembly women of, there's about 10 others

44:57

who just say, get out of our state, you're

45:00

horrible. He pays that

45:02

year more tax than any

45:05

person has ever paid to any entity

45:07

in the history. And Elizabeth Warren

45:09

keeps attacking him for not paying taxes.

45:12

So he's, we, Biden decides

45:14

to have an EV Summit of people taking his electric

45:16

vehicles, says Barry Barra of GM,

45:19

you're leading the way. She had made 26 electric

45:22

vehicles that year, Musk had made 1 million,

45:25

and Musk was not invited to it. So

45:27

he's- Because his plants are not unionized.

45:30

Correct. And so he's reacting

45:32

to that. There's also, and

45:34

I'm gonna try to be careful here. There

45:37

was a personal thing, which

45:40

is his oldest

45:43

surviving child, the other child who

45:45

died in infancy, was named

45:47

after his favorite character in the X-Man

45:49

comics. And that child,

45:53

while I'm covering this, sends

45:55

a message saying, I'm transitioning,

45:58

and my name is now Jenna. but

46:01

don't tell my dad this is to her aunt

46:03

and then Elon gets his head around the

46:06

fact that his oldest child is transitioned but

46:09

Jenna goes to court and

46:12

she's so anti-capitalist,

46:15

you know progressive

46:18

that she hates him for having so much money

46:20

and says so and changes

46:22

her last name as well and he

46:25

said this has hurt me any more than anything

46:28

since the death of his first child

46:30

Nevada and he

46:32

blamed it and everybody's

46:35

gonna go because nobody does what

46:37

this phrase means but he blamed

46:39

it on what he called the woke mind

46:42

virus that she picked up in her very

46:44

progressive school so he sells all

46:46

five of his houses as you say he

46:48

doesn't have yachts or anything like that decides

46:51

to live just in a two-bedroom house

46:54

is pained by this thing is

46:56

not but he decides that and

46:58

this is one of 20 things that goes into

47:00

his houses have to do with the Senate because

47:02

she was criticizing him for being a rich

47:05

person who has you

47:07

know and he said I'm gonna sell all my

47:09

houses and all my money is gonna be reinvested

47:11

back in Tesla and SpaceX for the mission

47:14

I'm gonna live in this two-bedroom house and

47:18

he's just rankling at the fact that

47:21

she's become so he

47:23

calls it you know Marxist

47:26

but whatever word you want to use

47:28

this must be one of the reasons

47:31

why he hosted it turned out

47:33

to be a disaster but Ron DeSantis

47:36

on a Twitter live feed

47:38

at the beginning of that's how DeSantis tried to

47:40

announce his campaign it

47:44

was a technological actual technological

47:46

disaster on Christmas Eve

47:49

had decided that he had been told by

47:51

the Twitter engineers you can't get rid

47:53

of these servers in Sacramento and he

47:55

figured out you could and

47:58

he decides to go with his nephews

48:00

and used pliers from Home Depot

48:02

and pry up the floors and cut the cables.

48:05

It's a beautiful scene in the book. Sounds like the

48:07

Santa's campaign. Yeah. And pulled

48:09

out those servers and he turns

48:12

out like everything with bus.

48:15

It turns out to be correct sort of, but then

48:17

there's debris in the wake and a month later

48:19

there's not the backup system

48:21

when he does. So the book has

48:23

a lot of rockets that get into orbit

48:26

and some that leave debris in the way. Well, it does

48:28

raise this question and you and I were talking about this

48:30

before we came out here. Can

48:33

you run, we're going to get back to the

48:35

politics in a second, but can you run

48:37

Twitter the way

48:40

you run these? It's

48:42

a much different enterprise. Absolutely

48:44

not. And when he was buying Twitter

48:47

and we were at the gigafactory in Austin,

48:50

which he was just opening up. And

48:52

no, it's the biggest car factory in, you know, I've

48:54

ever made bringing manufacturing back

48:57

to America and he had a feel for each station

48:59

on the assembly line. And I said, but what

49:01

about Twitter? He said, well, it's basically just an

49:03

engineering issue. They haven't made the product.

49:05

They haven't added video. They have. And

49:08

I'm thinking it's not an engineering question.

49:11

Twitter's not a technology company. It's

49:13

an advertising medium that tries

49:16

to gather eyeballs in a friendly

49:18

suite's place so Pepsi Cola

49:21

and others can do that. And he

49:23

does not have the emotional feel,

49:25

as we discussed earlier, to

49:27

apply to Twitter the type of feel

49:29

he has for an engineering issue. Well,

49:33

I mean, central to our dilemma

49:36

as a country, I believe this

49:38

is my opinion, is that we

49:40

have social media where the

49:42

business model is to keep

49:44

people online. And the great inspiration

49:46

of these algorithms is that outrage,

49:49

alienation, anger keeps

49:52

people online. So

49:54

the very premise of the

49:57

business flies

50:00

in the face of any kind of... Yeah, we

50:02

used to think that social

50:05

media was gonna connect us. That

50:08

was the dream of Facebook and other things.

50:11

And instead, as you say, the algorithm

50:14

has figured out that the more you

50:16

play on people's resentment and the

50:18

more you enrage them, the more they'll

50:20

retweet and the more engaged they'll

50:23

be online. And that's true on

50:25

Twitter and Facebook, but also on Talk

50:27

Radio now and on cable. And

50:29

at the core of that is the aggregation of

50:32

data. These

50:34

algorithms have access to more information

50:37

about us than we have about ourselves.

50:39

Which is why I like the notion that you should

50:41

have to pay for some content, because

50:44

otherwise you're paying with your data and

50:46

your enragement. Yeah, data

50:48

was one of the things that he was chasing according

50:51

to your book. He's big, and I know we're running out of time,

50:53

but his big next thing is

50:55

to go for artificial intelligence

50:58

because he's worried, as I said,

51:00

about it. But he believes

51:03

it should be artificial general intelligence.

51:05

So at the end of the book, way

51:07

after Twitter, way after even Starship

51:10

tries its first launch, he asked me to come

51:12

back to Austin, and we

51:14

sit in the back of his Siobhan

51:17

Zillis who runs Duralink by the pool. And

51:20

he says, I have to start an AI company that's

51:22

gonna do real world AI. It's

51:24

not only gonna do chatbot-like

51:27

stuff where you read documents

51:29

on the internet, and then you can ask the chatbot

51:32

who are the five best boats or something, and

51:34

it'll chat away with you. But it's gotta

51:37

do- If it will say, I'm not allowed to. Yeah,

51:39

right. It will do visual data. Make subjective

51:41

judgment. It will take the feed of

51:44

visual data from Optimus Robot,

51:46

Tesla, the cars, as well as the

51:48

Twitter feed, the language data,

51:50

and he's got some of the best data feeds.

51:53

He has eight billion frames a day

51:55

from Tesla cameras. So he's

51:57

now trying to do self-driving, not-

52:00

based on rules and algorithms, but

52:02

on how humans navigate. And

52:05

I hope, among other things, that's

52:08

his new fixation, which is actually going

52:10

to be a good one, as opposed

52:12

to worrying about Twitter, which he should leave

52:14

to Linda Gackarino, who knows what she's doing.

52:17

The other thing who he brought into to run Twitter.

52:22

The other thing is he said,

52:26

I don't believe in any, I forget

52:28

the exact quote, but I don't believe in laws.

52:31

I believe in the only laws. I believe

52:33

in the laws of physics. Question every

52:35

rule. Question every regulation. The

52:38

only rules that are unbreakable are the

52:40

laws of physics. So, I mean, he's

52:42

committed to the idea that there

52:45

are actual immutable rules

52:48

of science and laws of science.

52:50

One of the things about these conspiracy theories

52:53

is they fundamentally assault the

52:55

idea that very notion.

52:59

And I'm wondering if that paradox

53:02

hasn't occurred to him. He

53:04

believes that the

53:07

other extreme is also anti-science

53:10

and anti-discourse. I

53:13

think free speech is a great thing,

53:15

but I also think it's a complex thing. And

53:18

I don't think he understands the complexities.

53:22

Yeah, and you're not here

53:24

to explain or interpret or

53:29

certainly to defend every practice

53:31

of Twitter, but it is a fact

53:34

that there has been, that

53:37

he's lowered barriers. He fired

53:39

a whole bunch of people, which is a practice.

53:42

They're now fortunately hiring like

53:44

crazy and setting up because

53:46

of the events, the horrors

53:49

of the past weekend too. We've

53:51

seen sort of maligned state actors

53:55

who now are back in on Twitter.

53:59

whatever it is that they think is in

54:01

their interest to propagate. We've seen an

54:03

increase in hate

54:05

speech that's been pretty significant.

54:09

There are consequences. This is not...that's

54:13

another place in which

54:16

this is not like the

54:18

other things that he's done. I agree. Well

54:21

that's no fun. Let

54:24

me ask you about... I don't want to end

54:26

on that note. No, we're not gonna end on that. No, we're not gonna

54:29

end until someone makes us. So...

54:32

We do have to be out of the web. You've got a plane and

54:34

you probably have stuff to do. They've got other

54:37

speakers. I've got all day. But I want

54:39

to ask you about the process

54:45

as a writer. One very sort of mundane

54:48

question, but as a fellow writer I'm interested

54:50

in it. As I said, this is a lengthy

54:52

book, but it's a page-turner. And

54:55

one of the things that's noteworthy about it that

54:58

I actually appreciate as a reader is the paragraphs...

55:01

I mean the chapters are very short. Is

55:03

that by intention? It's intention

55:06

because I was trying

55:09

to mimic... not

55:11

mimic, but capture

55:14

must own day

55:16

and world, which is incredibly

55:19

fast-paced but leaping

55:22

from

55:23

intense focus on this to intense focus

55:25

on that. And I figured that the way

55:28

to make the book feel

55:30

like you were alongside Musk

55:32

was to make it storytelling, as

55:35

opposed to me bloviating and preaching,

55:37

and to make it fast-paced

55:40

narrative stories that

55:43

you almost feel you're rushing

55:46

along in a day with Musk. Interesting.

55:48

Yeah, well it was conscious. It

55:51

works. And do

55:53

you... are there other things that

55:56

you are focused on now that

56:00

other projects that you have any other geniuses

56:02

in your sites? Yeah

56:05

how on the record are we? We live-streamed?

56:08

We're not live-streaming it's just you and me and

56:10

my podcast audience. Two things I'm thinking

56:12

about. First of all, whenever

56:16

I do somebody who's a bit

56:18

rough

56:19

I say okay I got to go to the way

56:21

back machine and go back in here so like after

56:23

I did Kissinger's I'm gonna do somebody's been

56:26

dead 200 years. Well explain that.

56:28

Explain that. Well Kissinger was a tough ride

56:30

too for me. He was unhappy with your book. Somebody

56:34

said did you like the book? He said well I like

56:36

the title. But

56:41

after dealing with it was like all right I'm gonna go

56:43

back and do Ben Franklin. You know he's been dead 200

56:46

years. After doing Steve Jobs

56:48

it was like all right I'm gonna go back 500 years.

56:51

I did Leonardo.

56:55

Part of me wants to do an Alan touring

56:58

to the present AI book

57:00

but I think it's too early. So the

57:03

book in Alan went this that I'm next

57:06

thinking of doing and I haven't really

57:08

told my editors so this

57:10

may change. There

57:13

were two of them. One is

57:15

Louis Armstrong because I grew up in that neighborhood

57:17

and that's why I was because

57:20

I saw a wonderful world down in New

57:22

Orleans last week. It's opening last night.

57:27

But another I'm thinking of doing because I still

57:29

love science is other

57:32

than Einstein the person who makes one of

57:34

the most fundamental discoveries at the beginning

57:36

of the last century is the discovery

57:38

that chemistry is basically

57:41

physics. It's just a question of the

57:43

electrons moving around the nucleus

57:45

and that they can radiate and you get

57:48

new things when radiation

57:50

occurs and the discoverer

57:52

of radiation of course wins the Nobel

57:55

Prize in physics Marie Curie

57:58

and then she wins the Nobel Prize in in chemistry,

58:00

the only person to have won, the

58:03

first woman to have won, but the only person to have

58:05

won two science Nobel's. And

58:08

she has an amazing struggle

58:11

of a life, including

58:14

after her husband Pierre dies, she's

58:16

having an affair with the married student

58:18

of Pierre, and it becomes a scandal

58:21

in Paris just as she's winning

58:24

her second Nobel. So Arrhenius,

58:26

ahead of the Swedish Academy, says, you

58:28

shouldn't come accept it. It's too much of a controversy.

58:31

And she writes back basically saying,

58:34

if I were a man, you wouldn't have said that.

58:36

I'm coming. And she does, and

58:38

she gives this beautiful speech about

58:41

how her science is on a different

58:43

level than worrying about her personal life.

58:45

So I think I might do her next. Madam

58:48

Curie fans here. We had more

58:50

Louis Armstrong fans. Maybe I'll go back

58:52

to Louis. Yeah, yeah. You just

58:54

sort of, you've come full circle. Which

58:58

is, we started with your

59:00

lifelong passion

59:02

for science. And

59:05

it's a gift to make science

59:07

and technology colloquial

59:11

enough for people to absorb

59:13

it. And it's also a joy.

59:16

You know, when they ask Ada Lovelace, who

59:18

was in one of my books, Lorde Bynum's daughter, isn't

59:21

science and math hard. She cites

59:24

a line of poetry from her father. She

59:26

walks in beauty like the night. She

59:29

says, that's hard. But

59:31

a mathematical equation or science

59:34

is also hard, but just

59:37

as beautiful. And so it's always a joy

59:39

to look at the beauty of the connection of the

59:41

humanities and scientists. I meant to

59:43

ask you this earlier. We will end on this. I

59:45

know we have to. People

59:49

holding up, well, so it's a flashing wrap.

59:52

Yeah, so five minutes. Thank you. A

59:56

few weeks ago, I did a podcast

59:58

with Larry Wright. from the

1:00:00

New Yorker. And it

1:00:03

turns out his mentor was Walker

1:00:05

Percy. Dr. Percy, Uncle

1:00:08

Walker, a novelist

1:00:10

from Louisiana. Yes,

1:00:13

who was a very gifted novelist

1:00:16

in the 60s. And was your? I

1:00:20

have a story about him, which

1:00:24

is when I was very young, we

1:00:28

used to go water skiing

1:00:31

and hunting for turtles and fishing on the

1:00:33

Bogaflaya. And there was a girl,

1:00:36

Ann, who was a friend of ours. And he

1:00:38

was called Uncle Walker. And

1:00:42

my father said, Ann, what does your dad do? He's always

1:00:44

sitting on the dock drinking bourbon and eating

1:00:46

hog said cheese. Said, well, he's a

1:00:49

writer. And I knew you could be an engineer

1:00:51

like my dad. Or you could be a fisherman. I didn't know you

1:00:53

could be a writer. When I was 12, his

1:00:56

movie go, the movie go came out. Yeah, the

1:00:59

movie go was his first book. Huge. And so I read

1:01:01

it. And I said, wow, I

1:01:04

get it. You can be a writer. So this affected

1:01:06

me. And there were all sorts

1:01:08

of messages in there. And

1:01:11

so I sat with him once. I said, Uncle

1:01:13

Walker, what are you trying to

1:01:16

teach? What's your message in

1:01:18

this book? And he said, there

1:01:21

are two types of people who come out of Louisiana.

1:01:24

Preachers

1:01:25

and storytellers.

1:01:27

He said, for heaven's sake, be a storyteller.

1:01:30

This world has too many preachers. And

1:01:32

that's what I try to do.

1:01:41

Thank you, Walter. Thank you. Thank

1:01:44

you for becoming a storyteller. And

1:01:46

thank Uncle Walker

1:01:48

for encouraging you. Thank you. Thank

1:01:54

you for listening to the Ax Files, brought

1:01:56

to you by the Institute

1:01:57

of Politics at the University of

1:01:59

Chicago.

1:01:59

and CNN Audio. The

1:02:02

executive producer

1:02:03

of the show is Miriam Fender

1:02:05

Annenberg. The show is also produced

1:02:07

by Sarah Lena Berry, Jeff Fox,

1:02:10

and Hannah Grace McDonald. And special

1:02:12

thanks to

1:02:12

our partners at CNN, including

1:02:14

Steve Licktai and Haley Thomas. For

1:02:17

more programming from the ILP, visit

1:02:19

politics.uchicago.edu.

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