00:00:00
you're the only person on Earth that followed Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for years and years so what did you learn
00:00:08
this is going to be a fun ride Walter Ison one of the greatest biography writers ever whose work allows all of us
00:00:14
to learn from some of the greatest Minds in history and all the people I've written about who are disruptors they
00:00:20
tend to have had demons driving them but for Elon Musk it was particularly brutal
00:00:26
a scrawny kid on the autism spectrum no friends beaten up quite often but the scars from that were minor compared to what happened when he went home it took traveling around with Elon for 2 years
00:00:39
morning noon and night before I could get him to open up about his father and then it started coming out everything
00:00:45
from his hardwiring to a psychologically abusive father helped make somebody who's addicted to drama he was at Twitter headquarters he decides they should get rid of one of the server
00:00:56
farms and the engineers say we can't do it fire s and then Christmas Eve Elon forces his way into the server facility with a set of wire cutters and cuts the
00:01:07
cable to the server it drove the teams crazy but it drove them to do things they didn't think they could do because
00:01:13
must spends 80% of his hardcore mental energy on but is he happy how did Steve Jobs change you when he was dying I was in his backyard with
00:01:27
him and he says I regret imagine that you could follow Steve Jobs and Elon Musk for years and years and years and years imagine what you would
00:01:41
learn imagine what you would see imagine the value that you would take from that
00:01:47
experience of following two of the greatest World shifting entrepreneurs that have ever lived well the man that
00:01:54
sits in front of me today was given that privilege he got to follow Steve Job jobs until the day that he died and he got to follow Elon Musk for years and
00:02:05
years and years in order to write down what he saw and share that information with you if you've ever wondered what it takes to be a genius what it takes to
00:02:17
change the world what the cost is the sacrifice how to make decisions how to think in how and what motivates these world changing entrepreneurs in the next
00:02:31
hour and a half you find out and before this episode starts I want to make a deal with you about 58% of you that watch this podcast frequently haven't yet hit the Subscribe button if you
00:02:42
enjoy what we do here here's the deal that I want to make with you if you hit that subscribe button I promise you that
00:02:49
we will keep making the show better in every single way and we have huge plans to turn this into more of a documentary
00:02:56
style conversation where we work incredibly hard to bring in footage of the things we're talking about to give
00:03:02
you greater context and greater meaning so if you hit the Subscribe button I promise you that we will deliver an even
00:03:09
greater version of this show I hope you choose to come along on this journey enjoy this
00:03:16
[Music] episode Walter you have a tremendous amount of insight from following and
00:03:27
studying some of the world's greatest minds but also from a tremendously successful career of your own as a CEO
00:03:33
and as a business person for anybody that doesn't know who are the individuals that you've been able to
00:03:39
follow and study and had unique exclusive access to it was mainly Steve Jobs who brought us into the digital Revolution with everything from Friendly Computers to a thousand songs in our
00:03:50
pocket and I spent about two years at his side doing a biography of him and then Jennifer dner who I think brought us into the LIF Sciences Revolution because she and her colleagues uh helped
00:04:03
invent crisper this tool that can edit our own DNA which is like whoa that's transformative and so I spent a lot of time at her Berkeley lab and learning how to addit human genes and then after
00:04:15
that the next logical Choice seemed to be Elon Musk bringing us into the era of space travel electric vehicles artificial intelligence and surprisingly
00:04:26
when I talked to him uh he had read a couple my books he said I said I just want to do this not based on five or 10
00:04:34
interviews but based on staying by your side for two years watching you morning noon and night whenever I want he went
00:04:42
okay and then I said but by the way I'm not going to show you the book in advance you get no control over it he
00:04:48
went okay I thought all right this is going to be a fun ride were you surprised uh I was a little bit
00:04:55
surprised but if you know musk he has sort of a little super hero complex and he thinks of himself playing big roles on the world stage and he loves to be transparent and I kind of suspected he
00:05:08
would want to have this uh there was a mutual friend who helped broker the deal and the friend said you know he he wants a biography I think he sees himself in the same trajectory as a Steve Jobs or
00:05:21
Jennifer dner and why did you want to do it I wanted to do somebody who was taking us back into the era of space
00:05:27
travel because I'm enough to be one of those Geeks Who remember the countdown of 10 N8 and you hold your breath and they launch from Cape Canaveral uh also
00:05:39
I believe very much sustainable energy is important to the planet which means not just electric vehicles but solar roofs and power walls and the things he's doing I also tend to think that
00:05:51
he's a great engineer he understands uh physical engineering he doesn't understand human emotions very well which is why he was better off with Tesla and SpaceX and not uh buying
00:06:03
Twitter uh but I wanted to understand the uh pioneering work that was being done he's the only person who can get astronauts from the US into orbit you know NASA can no longer do it Boeing
00:06:16
can't do it so how come H how did he make those rockets work and with Steve Jobs what was the um access that you were given to him oh I stayed I stayed
00:06:27
in his guest house right uh in his backyard for off and on for a couple of years it wasn't quite the access I got to Elon Musk with Steve Jobs it might be
00:06:40
one week every couple of months I'd spend uh with him with musk it was three or four weeks per month sometimes Steve Jobs was interesting but he was
00:06:53
mainly interested in the beautiful design and conceptualizing of products and so we'd spend a lot of time in Johnny IV's uh wonderful Design Studio
00:07:04
at Apple headquarters where Steve would spend the afternoon hour after hour walking around
00:07:10
even looking at things like the European plug for uh a charger and how it was going to be different from the American plug but how curved you know he just cared about God being in the details of
00:07:23
each design mus cares a lot more about executing the design through manufacturing and assembly lines mus spends about 80% of his hardcore mental
00:07:36
energy designing the machines that make the machines in other words the Raptor engines or the battery cells or the Teslas and so a lot of the time I spent
00:07:47
with him was on assembly lines when I sit here with CEOs or successful people um I always start with their childhood because I think it provides an important context as to the people that they are
00:07:59
it's almost like their child you're like a biographer you know it begins in childhood well I mean you're the the
00:08:05
king of biography so I had no idea that that's where it's meant to start it just seems like the most obvious place
00:08:10
because it's the foundation of people and those fingerprints seem to remain on them as adults when you look at elon's
00:08:17
childhood do you spot things that are the reason he is the man he is today absolutely but let me step back and talk
00:08:25
about almost all the people I've written about who are disruptors they tend to have had uh childhoods in which they were Misfits uh starting with
00:08:35
Leonardo D Vinci who I wrote about he grew up in a small village uh he was left-handed illegitimate his father doesn't legitimate him he was gay he was
00:08:46
distracted and so he has demons driving him as he runs away from the village of venci to go to Florence uh and you can
00:08:54
go all the way through Albert Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany Steve Job having been adopted and adoptive family didn't take to him and he moves on to another one for Elon Musk it was
00:09:07
particularly brutal he grew up in South Africa as a scrawny kid on the autism spectrum so he had no social input output skills he was no friends and he
00:09:20
was beaten up quite often but the scars from that were minor compared to uh what
00:09:27
happened when he went home after being beaten up once he was in the hospital for 4 days but he gets home and his
00:09:33
father makes him stand in front of him uh for 2 hours while the father tells him he's a loser and that it was his
00:09:40
fault and takes a side of the kid who beat up Elon and so it's one of the oldest tropes in mythology which is the aspiring young Superhero fighting the
00:09:52
dark side of the force and finding out Darth Vader is his father having to overcome those demons I think most of us
00:09:59
I mean you have a very interesting background yourself from Botswana to Manchester to here in London I think
00:10:06
most of us have things that drive us and sometimes there's some demons from childhood but the question is whether
00:10:12
you harness those demons or those demons harness you and in Elon Musk case the answer is both do you find that that's nearly always the case that that those demons create both your as Tim Grover
00:10:25
said to me Tim Grover was the coach for Michael Jordan Kobe and he speaks to everybody having a dark side and a light
00:10:31
side and they have a two-way relationship with each other they typically come from the same place so he had speak to Michael Jordan's greatness
00:10:37
coming from the same place that his Dark Side came from and you've just described
00:10:43
the entire theme of the Eline MK book which is darkness and lightness woven together each coming from the same place sometimes driving people crazy sometimes
00:10:54
driving them to do things they didn't think they'd be able to do and do you want to take out the dark
00:11:00
strands of Elon mus the demon mode as his girlfriend Grimes calls it where he just truly gets cold and in a very bad place but if you take out those strands
00:11:13
maybe you don't have Elon Musk at the end because the dark and the light all come from the same Roots Shakespeare as usual said it best
00:11:26
even the best are molded out of fall and indeed that's what you're talking about whether it's Michael Jordan a Kobe or Elon Musk what does Elon think of his father
00:11:40
did you speak to him directly about him yes uh he doesn't speak to his father anymore of course and uh it's
00:11:47
very brutal relationship but I spoke to his father and yeah for quite a long time and still
00:11:55
he's in contact with me it took a a year of traveling around with Elon Musk before I could get him to open up about his father and that's why a biography done the way Boswell did with Dr Johnson
00:12:10
and in a much smaller way I tried to do with Elon Musk or Steve Jobs is important because you're not just doing
00:12:17
a few interviews you're just with them day in and day out and after a year every now and then say tell me about your childhood tell me about your dad and he'd just stare blankly and be not
00:12:29
wanting to speak and then one day we're actually on this plane flying to California from Texas and once again I just it was very quiet finally said tell
00:12:40
me about your dad it was about the 20th time I'd asked him he must have been silent for two minutes three minutes I
00:12:47
didn't say a word and then it started coming out the stories of childhood and so yeah he's still rattled by the memory of it his father has had had two
00:13:00
children by a young woman that he had raised as a stepdaughter and so that really messed up elon's mind elon's father raised a
00:13:12
stepdaughter and then had two kids with the stepdaughter yes and so there's uh and he's talked about it Errol musk also is an astonishingly good engineer who
00:13:27
gave many uh good things in childhood he was at times successful at times less so
00:13:33
arrol is his father arrol is the father but he also instilled some of these demons so it's the most complex relationship now Barack Obama begins one
00:13:45
of his Memoirs by saying I think every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or
00:13:52
live down the sins of his father and uh Obama says in my case it's both well elon's case it's both and what did you learn if anything from speaking to elon's father I learned that he was like
00:14:08
a Dr Jackal and Mr Hyde in the Stevenson thing and uh novel In other words he could be a brilliant doctor but then he'd snap into these demon-like modes
00:14:21
and Mr Hyde and hardly remember when he would snap back out and became Dr Jackal
00:14:27
hardly remember what happened and that multiple personality was very much what Errol musk himself says yes I go through these things well guess what
00:14:40
you see that in Elon Musk based on what you saw in some of the resilient leaders
00:14:46
that you've followed if your job was to create a really resilient child what would you do to the child you know that's such an interesting question and those of us who have children in this
00:14:57
day and age I think we can't help but coddling them too much I watch the way Elon was raised in South Africa where they you know his father gave him a
00:15:11
motorcycle when he was 11 or 12 years old and drive you know going around he would uh almost free range be that way uh Elon would he could walk or go
00:15:23
wherever he wanted get beaten up uh and his parents weren't hovering well likewise I watch Elon who has 10 surviving children and Elon is deeply
00:15:35
committed to this children he's almost obsessed by them and yet especially with little ex I don't know if you've seen
00:15:42
the three-year-old kid who is always in the pictures with Elon like if you see a picture of Elon at the
00:15:48
F1 he's always holding his I I'd be there at night they'd be doing a solo roof installation at midnight and musk would be in you know hyperdrive uh
00:16:00
getting all the equipment and telling people what to do cuz must love to be Hands-On and I'd watch Lil XX playing
00:16:07
amid the cables and heavy equipment and my instincts are like go grab this kid and make sure he's safe but I think that musk I remember when they shot off
00:16:20
Starship this largest rocket ever for the first test which went well for about 3 minutes and afterwards were sitting in down in South Texas at the Launchpad
00:16:32
behind it and having drinks in their fire pits and Elon is there with his mother may his girlfriend Grimes and Little X and ex is playing in a fire pit
00:16:44
just putting things in and putting and my instincts are go grab the kid and musk says to me when I was a kid they used to say don't play with matches so I got a box of matches and I played with
00:16:56
them behind a tree and it was his way of saying I'm going to let X continue to do that and may mus said I think it's one
00:17:04
generation of risk Seekers training the next so maybe we should allow our kids to be a little bit more risk-taking as opposed to hovering the way my wife and I do and I I was reading in your book
00:17:17
about how when elon's parents got a divorce when he was young that meant that elon's mother he was taking care of
00:17:23
him had to then go and get a job which left Elon at home alone right right that's what I'm saying he was pretty much hom his mother had three jobs at
00:17:31
times and she's a great person but she wasn't somebody who doed and worried every moment of the day and so she was often not around and divorced from his
00:17:43
father at one point Elon as a very young teenager decides to move back in with his father which is
00:17:51
psychologically uh even now may must says I why did he do that and Kimble his brother says he Associates pain with love
00:18:04
and Elon Musk says to me adversity shaped me it made me who I am so there's a part of Elon mus that loves drama and R rushing into the fire he
00:18:17
Associates pain with love from your observations do you believe that regardless of whether it's healthy or
00:18:23
not we tend to seek out the environment of our childhood when we're older because familiarity is almost sometimes seems to be more important to us than whether it's
00:18:36
healthy you know that's a brilliant observation which is because certainly with Elon Musk he's almost always trying to recreate the drama the turmoil of his
00:18:47
childhood in apartheid South Africa seeing people killed and uh having an abusive psychologically abusive father and I think we're all different I'm
00:18:59
personally somebody had a pretty nice childhood my parents were the sweetest nicest smartest people I've ever known
00:19:06
and I grew up in New Orleans and still go back there still live with about eight blocks from where I was born and
00:19:13
see the kids I went to kindergarten with and I love going back to that magical we
00:19:18
call it the green trees of our childhood uh but it's also why I'm not driven I'm not as a disruptor the way jobs and musk are I'm a little bit more
00:19:30
suited to being amused and watching disruptors so my role is a little bit more as an observer you've been both you've been an observer on this podcast
00:19:43
or on TV but you're also a person in the arena by starting companies I was in the
00:19:48
arena quite a while I ran CNN during the Gulf War and it was a pretty intense thing to do but in some way ways I'm not as suited to running into fire and turmoil
00:20:02
as Elon Musk is and when the time came and the Gulf War was over I decided I'd rather write books and uh have a go back
00:20:13
to New Orleans so do you you did touch on this earlier but I just it just came back to mind again do you think that
00:20:19
these individuals who are most able to deal with running into the fire are those that were raised in the
00:20:24
fire it's not a onetoone corelation as people sometimes when they're arguing with me they say oh look there are people with really bad childhoods who become totally near to Wells and you
00:20:37
know never amount to anything they people with really wonderful childhoods who are very very driven I think though
00:20:45
it's a it may not be a onetoone correlation but it's certainly a nonzero correlation that having something to prove coming out of childhood and having
00:20:55
demons to harness tend ends to drive you a bit more one of the things that surprised me in your book was that you said Elon was a good student but not fantastic yeah even in South Africa and
00:21:09
at boy school and then when he goes to college his sats are fine but you know they're not all 800s which is the scale we use in the US uh for uh College
00:21:22
admissions test but he had an intense Focus so when he focused on something you know he would be awesomely smart problem is he doesn't like things that
00:21:34
don't interest him so when he had to learn Africans in school and you know he flunks it or when he has to learn
00:21:41
certain things uh but when it came to engineering especially Material Science he could focus like a laser on and I mean that figuratively but on the
00:21:55
properties of materials that or engineering problems and I I heard that when he discovered the computer that was another example of that that insane Focus he taught himself to cod in a sure I mean
00:22:09
he he grew up at that time that I can remember and you can't where computers suddenly pop up MH you can have your own computer and that's one of the things Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and uh brought
00:22:23
us to which is oh a computer you can actually plug in and have it home and code on well he got one and taught
00:22:30
himself C++ and I think uh maybe uh py uh Pascal and at age 12 or 13 coded his own video game called blastar which he published and he becomes addicted to two things one is computers and two is video
00:22:47
games did did did um you you spoke to his mother quite a lot yeah still do she's very much around what did she think of him at that age when he's 11 12 did they did she think he was a genius
00:22:58
yes she uh for better or worse uh was not a doting mother was not somebody hovering all the time but was when Elon was five or six years old she decided he
00:23:10
was a genius and used to fight with the schools when the schools would sometimes
00:23:16
say he's not doing well in school and he'd be distracted he's always looking out of the window and staring blankly
00:23:24
and she would say because he's a genius and you're not challenging him enough and and I think she still feels he's a
00:23:29
genius do you think if someone wanted to be like Elon Musk they could choose to be no um there are certain types of
00:23:41
curiosity and drive that we can Will ourselves to being I've written about Benjamin Franklin for example Benjamin Franklin was very wise but he's probably not the smartest of the founders and I
00:23:53
don't mean that in a disparaging way but you have Hamilton and Jefferson and people really brilliant what you have in
00:23:59
Franklin is somebody who's purely curious always open to new ideas and unbelievably observant well we can all push ourselves to be that way more but
00:24:11
can we push ourselves to be Einstein and no we can't and for musque he has a certain intensity that I think that even if you drank 50 cups of coffee and you know you
00:24:25
put an electric uh volt uh uh prod in the back of your head that focus and maniacal intensity and sense of urgency is something that's not instilled in
00:24:38
most of us do you think it's a trauma response of sorts it's a trauma response it's
00:24:45
also and the book is got a lot you know of P you know it's you can't have a one sentence here's why but you start in childhood with the trauma you also start
00:24:58
with a guy who's on the autism spectrum talks about having Asbergers as he calls it and that means he doesn't have good
00:25:05
input output signals for emotional you doesn't have good emotional human receptors but he does have this
00:25:16
intense Focus almost in the geek like way on certain engineering or mathematical or coding issues I think everything from his hard wirring to his
00:25:30
childhood and upbringing help make somebody who's addicted to turmoil who has a maniacal
00:25:38
intensity of focus and also has multiple personality mood swings he ends up leaving South Africa and studies uh physics and business at the same time and I was I thought it was
00:25:49
so fascinating that the reason why he took up business which is quite rare for someone to do physics in business I
00:25:55
think he said he didn't want to end up working for somebody who studied business uh and didn't understand the
00:26:02
science and he felt that if he didn't understand the business side he'd end up having to work for somebody else it's almost the first evidence of like well not the first evidence but it's again
00:26:13
evidence of his first principal thinking in place yes you know first principal thinking is key that doesn't know and
00:26:21
first principal thinking is whenever you're faced with a problem you just go back to the very basic physics of it not all the rules and regulations and not
00:26:33
all the metaphors you may have saying here's a way to do things but you you first off say there are no rules there's no regulations there's no protocols except
00:26:45
for the laws of physics everything else is just a recommendation and to give you a concrete example when he decides that
00:26:51
he wants to send people into space as a young guy at first he goes to Russia to see if he can buy used rockets and they Jack them around it
00:27:04
doesn't work and on the plane fight home he says let me go to first principal thinking exactly how much is the cost of
00:27:12
each material in a rocket how much is the Incan now how much is the carbon fiber how much is the fuel and then how much is the total cost of a rocket
00:27:23
compared to the cost of each of the components and that's first principal thinking which is I get it if I can I
00:27:30
know the material cost but if I can reduce by a factor of 10 the manufacturing cost then I can make a
00:27:38
rocket and so somebody will tell them hey we need to have this patch or this piece of felt in the bottom of a Tesla
00:27:45
and he'd say tell me what the physics of of the principles of physics that make that true are when he's pursuing first
00:27:52
principles what is he trying to get around and past that that frustrates him regulations rules people who won't take risks he says that you know the US was a
00:28:06
nation of risk-takers whether you came on the Mayflower you came across a Rio Grand or you came from Eastern Europe
00:28:12
fleeing oppression your family took risks but now we've got more Regulators than we have Risk Takers we have more referees and people building guard rails and lawyers telling you that's probably
00:28:23
not a good idea then we have people willing to shoot up a rock ET and I think by going back to First principles he wants to be able to not
00:28:36
only calculate risk but take risk more than most people would was Steve Jobs the same and that regard Steve Jobs was not focused on Hardware Engineering in
00:28:48
the same way wnc was his partner uh but yes jobs had a particular phrase very famous now which was think different and when
00:29:00
Steve Jobs went back to Apple after his like sort of like Sam mman you know come
00:29:06
and go come and go it took Steve Jobs a decade not a weekend to do it um he wrote an ad uh for apple and it had pictures of Einstein
00:29:19
and other disruptive intellects and it said here's to the Mi Here's To The Crazy Ones The Misfits the Rebels the round pegs in the square hole the ones who think different and then it ends by
00:29:31
saying because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do and that was
00:29:39
Steve Jobs's way of thinking and it also describes Elon Musk have you seen moments yourself when you were following him where he was confronted by someone who had a default to telling him why
00:29:50
things couldn't happen and why they couldn't be done oh absolutely I mean there's like 20 30 times in the book
00:29:55
it's just and he goes Bist like I'll tell you a fun one which is just last Christmas you know not too long ago he
00:30:03
was at Twitter headquarters and he looks at all the engineering things and they have three
00:30:09
server farms uh for uh one in Portland one in Sacramento and one I think in Atlanta and he does the calculus in his head and he said we don't really need three different redundant server farms
00:30:22
and the engineers say well yes we do because we need backups and we need caching or whatever and he says now
00:30:28
you're not going back to first principal linking if you look at this anyway he decides they should get rid of the servers in Sacramento well they say fine but that'll take six months because and
00:30:40
he said no you can do it in six weeks and the engineer and I'm sitting there in the meeting and he's getting really
00:30:46
dark and they don't know how to deal with him because it is like a month after he took over Twitter so they don't know this dude and they're saying well
00:30:53
no I'm sorry Elon we can't do it and that and he'd say you can do it in six weeks and by the end of the meeting he
00:30:58
said you can do it in six days it gets really dark and he decides he's going to fire them but it's December 23rd so it's like two days before Christmas he does
00:31:10
fire them but the next day Christmas Eve he's flying from San Francisco to Austin Texas to go home for Christmas he's with
00:31:17
two young cousins on the plane who are engineers and one of them says why don't we just take those servers out ourselves Elon must makes a U-turn in his airplane
00:31:27
tells the pilot to go to Sacramento they were already over Nevada they land he rents there by four of them on the plan they rent a truck a sort of what we call
00:31:39
a U-Haul truck a rental truck and they go to the server facility and they the guard there is like flumix it's Christmas Eve and they're forcing their way in and they're looking at the
00:31:51
servers and one of the engineers say well you know we can't take them out because we need Engineers to take off
00:31:58
these elevated floors you know those floor tiles where people and mus turns to his bodyguard and says do you got a
00:32:07
pocket knife the guy goes yeah he takes a pocket knife and pulls up one of the vents rips up the floor thing goes
00:32:14
underneath the floor panel with a set of wire cutters that he got from Home Depot
00:32:19
and cuts the cable to the servers and they start moving them out and put them in the U-Haul truck and this is must
00:32:26
just and by the way it's typical of musk because it works fine for a few days then you can see the service getting a
00:32:32
bit degraded but then eventually it comes back and he says you got to take risks if if you're not sort of causing
00:32:39
20% of the problems from the risk you take you're not taking enough risk but there it is and they got rid of that
00:32:45
server Farm in Sacramento what happens to the people that musk works with when they see that
00:32:52
case study that in that moment he when he presented that they could do it in six weeks and it turns out he was right
00:32:59
that it could be done quicker is that what sort of galvanizes the totally and about 20 to 30% of the people who work
00:33:07
with him can go March through fire with him that way and realize what he can do but it's why 80% of the people who worked at Twitter when he took it over are
00:33:18
gone but it's tough to work with there's another scene in the book where on a late Friday night he's down in the Sou Tip of Texas where they have the Launchpad for Star base and it's a
00:33:31
Friday night after 10 p.m. and he looks at the Launchpad area says why are there
00:33:37
only three or four people working and this poor guy Andy Krabs nice tall you know Southern young engineer says well it's a Friday night and we don't have any launches scheduled and musk goes
00:33:49
dark on them and says I want tomorrow a hundred people working I want them to come from California Florida get them in here and we're going to stack this rocket even though we're not planning to
00:34:01
launch anytime soon but we're going to have What's called the Surs and they fly people in people are sleeping on the
00:34:06
ground on the floors to do this Surge and Andy kreb survives it and does pretty well but eventually he quits he says man I'm have a kid I just can't
00:34:18
keep going through these things with Elon and so that's in the book about 3 weeks ago I was in Los Angeles
00:34:25
and talking about the book and I see this tall guy I recognized coming up after the speech it's Sandy Krabs I said what's happened he said well as you know I quit and I came back to Los Angeles
00:34:36
and I got a much easier job but I decided I'd rather be burned out than bored and I've asked Elon if it could
00:34:43
come back because I don't want to miss working for SpaceX so interesting the um you know the acquisition of Twitter Twitter was a very from you know think about where it's based and how it was
00:34:54
run and all the things we've come to learn about the company and it sort of political leanings it was very much the
00:35:00
antithesis of the musk approach to and he had become over the past three or four years he's edged from being what I would call A Center left uh somebody who
00:35:13
donated to Obama and voted for Biden uh to somebody who has become I think far too worked up about what he calls the woke mind virus you know the
00:35:28
progressive uh mindset that he sees in colleges and in schools multiple reasons which I go through in the book what's the most important reason well the most personal
00:35:40
reason is he had uh five older children teenagers uh surviving one died in infancy and the oldest of them was named Xavier after
00:35:54
his favorite uh character in the X-Men comics and Xavier Transitions and sends a note about three years ago saying I'm transitioning my name is now Jenna and
00:36:06
don't tell my father now he gets his head around the fact that she transitioned and he loves her but she
00:36:14
becomes very anti- capitalist very woke hates all billionaires thinks capitalism
00:36:20
is theft and rejects him and changes her last name and this causes him an enor amount of pain and he partly blames it on Los Angeles where you live sometimes there's this very Progressive school she
00:36:33
went to called Crossroads and that was one of about seven or eight factors that led to this
00:36:41
political Evolution where he felt the progressive left was overdoing covid lockdowns was overdoing gender ideology questions in
00:36:55
some ways it echoed his father who was also somewhat conspiratorial in his thinking and didn't believe in vaccines or Dr fouchy or and it's a weird
00:37:07
Evolution that we still see reverberating in the waters of Twitter today you say that it caused him a
00:37:14
tremendous amount of pain that Xavier transitioned and is now a woman how do you know that it caused him pain well he said so and he he's easy to read even
00:37:25
though he don't read people's emotions well I mean he will say nothing caus has caused me more pain he says this
00:37:32
outright than uh his daughter rejecting him not transitioning but just totally rejecting him other than the death of his first child through in infancy his
00:37:44
first child died and he gets very dark and you know you talk to his sister You' talk to his brother or his brother's wife they say that's the thing that's caused him enormous personal pain and he
00:37:58
says so going back to when he acquired Twitter um I as a great fan of what Elon has achieved in the service that he's sort of served to humanity with some of these companies like Tesla and SpaceX I
00:38:14
was really hoping he didn't buy the company because I thought it would just be a great distraction from Bingo really important other things
00:38:22
100% you were you were there right at the time I was there so I'm sitting here just open Giga Texas which is the
00:38:28
largest Factory manufacturing things that's a Tesla Factory in Austin Texas on the mezzanine the factory is not even open yet uh I guess this is April 2022
00:38:41
and he tells me that he still needs more drama in his life he can accept the fact that he's now become the richest person
00:38:48
on Earth he's person of the year for financial times and time he sent up 33 rockets that year that landed safely and were reused and yet he says okay I'm buying
00:38:59
Twitter and his brother his son Griffin his we're all like his friends three or four friends is like is this a good idea aren't you going to be distracted and everybody is sort of
00:39:14
trying to talk them out of it I'm not because I'm just taking notes I'm just the Observer but I'm thinking boy this
00:39:21
is a bad idea not simply because it'll be a distraction but because you don't have I'm thinking of
00:39:28
musk he doesn't have emotional human emotional awareness and so I asked him why are you doing it and he said well it's a product problem
00:39:40
they need better engineering they haven't put any new features in they don't have full motion video so it's an
00:39:46
engineering challenge I'm thinking no Twitter's not an engineering product you've been through all these before
00:39:53
it's an advertising medium it's supposed to gather eyeball calls for advertisers in a friendly environment
00:40:01
and that's not elon's specialty so I think it was was then and is now both a distraction and does not play to his strengths did you see it at any point
00:40:15
and do you believe it will hurt the trajectory of Tesla and SpaceX in any way that acquisition I think that it
00:40:23
probably hurts his reputation especially among more Progressive people uh it obviously has hurt which means it probably has hurt Tesla
00:40:35
sales Esra SpaceX I don't think it matters too much he has been able to be intensely focused including I mean just today while we're taping this I think
00:40:47
he's doing the 40th launch this year of the Falcon 9 sending up 20 more starlinks satellites he launched Starship and got it all the way into
00:41:01
space all 33 Raptor engines working and he's down there intensely focused so I think SpaceX is okay I think Tesla will be okay but it' be better off if he
00:41:13
wen't if a he weren't distracted by Twitter and B if his reputation hadn't become 10 times more controversial which is not great if you're just trying to do a mass market car sales when he went
00:41:26
into Twitter one of the um the very alarming things that he did was there was rumors that he called everyone up to
00:41:32
the top floor and said this is going to be the new company culture if you don't like it absolutely I mean I was there I
00:41:38
walked in with I it was there that the day before he took over he marches in and I think there's a whole chapter in the book almost in the rapid change
00:41:49
in corporate culture that happened something you're very familiar with from companies you've dealt with which is a
00:41:55
two way two extremes of doing a company one was the way Twitter was which is nurturing and sweet and having yoga rooms and artisanal coffee bars and when
00:42:09
musk walks in they're showing him how we have quiet spaces for people who need you know to get their mental energy restored and they said we value
00:42:21
psychological safety and musk looked at me and kind of did his raspy laugh it says psychological safety blank that you know screw
00:42:33
that an urgent intensity is our operating principle psychological safety is our enemy and so he turns it into a hardcore Allin
00:42:45
environment where you have to say I'm Allin you're going to work 247 some weekends cuz you're all in and he said I
00:42:52
want a team that's 20% of the size but that an order of magnitude more intense and
00:42:59
more Allin and you've probably seen companies with your own eyes who are very nurturing and you've seen companies
00:43:07
in which everybody's doing a hardcore all-in hackathon on a Saturday night and he's in the latter Camp do you believe I often speak to large organizations that have cultural
00:43:19
problems they they're not Innovative they're being eroded away by um New Market entrance Etc and the problem they
00:43:27
have is they can't turn the ship around quickly enough before the Innovation takes them out big companies that have 50,000 people big I I've often want because then I saw this Elon Musk
00:43:39
approach to Turning culture around where you basically let off a grenade in the building
00:43:44
totally do you believe there's Merit in that that approach yes but I also believe there's
00:43:51
a big old downside and like everything with Elon Musk including the shooting off of the Rockets you get amazing
00:43:57
things happen but also Rubble in the wake and damage in the wake and personal damage uh Tesla he
00:44:06
did that once there's a guy John mcneel in the book who was president of Tesla another couple of people did they all
00:44:11
say it which is maybe that's the price you have to pay if you want to be this disruptive but is it a price that I want
00:44:19
to pay the answer is no and maybe it's too high of a price causing so much emotional turmoil but there are people including the guy Andy Krebs I told you about who wants to go back to work at
00:44:34
SpaceX who like the challenge who like the emotional turmoil I ran Time Magazine it was the good old days and it was about as wonderful of an environment
00:44:47
even you would be in the clouds thinking about in the uh 1990s we were rolling in
00:44:53
money before the disruption of the internet takes away the idea of a general interest paper
00:45:00
magazine and we had there was a drinks cart that would come around every day at 5: and make cocktails for all the
00:45:07
writers there was a roast beef carv cart in the evenings there were Town Cars that would take you out to your weekend houses it was totally great and that
00:45:19
environment needed to be disrupted but it was a glorious when it happened then I went to CNN and for a while the Gulf War we know exactly what we're doing but
00:45:31
once the Gulf War was over CNN needed deep disruption and I was not very good at being a disruptive leader of firing like Elon mus could 80% of the people so
00:45:45
sometimes CNN was one of those big old battleships was as you said lots of people working
00:45:51
there it probably needed a more disruptive leader than I was so interesting so do you think that there's a certain type of cultural approach that Su suits a certain type of
00:46:02
company especially as we look at the world of AI and Robotics and how things are going to be accelerating so quickly in technology it seems to be the case
00:46:09
that companies are going to need to disrupt themselves faster than ever if you believe some of the forecasts about the future that people like Ray kwell
00:46:15
posit yeah and not only it used to be tech companies would have to be disruptive but now if you're an
00:46:21
insurance company if you're a law firm you know if you're a bank the disruption is going to happen uh if you're a healthc care company so yeah we're going to have to be disruptive that doesn't
00:46:34
necessarily mean an Allin intense hackathon work all weekend culture is necessary I think it's great to have corporate cultures in both sides it's
00:46:47
like return to work after covid I'm not sure there's exactly one answer there's some companies that say you know what remote working get us really good people
00:46:57
who uh can do better things and there are other people who say Noah I got to have my people back in the office I
00:47:05
think it's good to experiment or not just experiment but have Alternatives some people work better in some
00:47:11
environment some in others and you could also ask the question not just about corporate environments but corporate
00:47:17
leaders which is what you discuss most of the time some corporate leaders have got to be you know Steve Jobs or Bill Gates in the early days of Microsoft or
00:47:28
Bezos in the early days of Amazon or musk you know basically at times and uh but then some corporate leaders like Jennifer dower or even a
00:47:39
Ben Franklin lead by being collaborative and inspiring and nice and I think the advice any CEO needs is the oldest piece of advice on this planet may be for
00:47:52
humans which is on the Oracle of Deli Arch which is just know thyself and you got to know here's my Approach and here's where I feel most comfortable interesting cuz I was just about to ask
00:48:04
you which approach you think is generally more effective but you know for me I couldn't do the
00:48:11
Allin jerk you know the like approach and there were times I needed to do that and jobs Steve Jobs would say to me it's why you were never quite as good but I
00:48:24
also think he would say that to you yeah he would say you all he called it velvet
00:48:30
gloves I guess a matter he said people like yourself when you ran companies you had velvet gloves on and you were always trying to make people feel comfortable he said for me I got to make them feel
00:48:42
uncomfortable I have to make them feel challenged I don't have the luxury I don't have the luxury of uh uh
00:48:50
tolerating B players and coddling them so I you know I know what type I am but I think at times you can create a very creative place where people feel very
00:49:04
comfortable and it allows great creativity to flourish but I think you have to sometimes
00:49:10
say we got to be hardcore here we're being challenged I would also say it's not just about the leader it's about the leadership team if you're going to make a good company you have to make the
00:49:23
right team and when I ran CNN time I realized maybe I was a little bit too velvet gloved as Steve Jobs would say but I made sure in my leadership team there were people who had Iron Fists and
00:49:36
could take Intel a great company when it was founded and leadership team you had
00:49:43
to have Andy Gro you had to have um Bob noise who was the nicest friendliest CEO ever he put his desk in the middle of the room and just
00:49:55
Lov you know people you had to have somebody like Gordon Moore of Moore's Law who was
00:50:00
a Visionary but you also they have to bring in Andy Grove who is really tough and gets the microchips out the door and so every leadership team needs to have
00:50:12
the Hammer as well as the inspiring nice guy both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk did they what was their view on being liked as a
00:50:23
leader both of them told me that that could be a failing that that could be a weakness which is if you try too hard to
00:50:36
be liked you're not going to be disruptive enough and musk even said empathy and collegiality can be your
00:50:47
enemy and M uh jobs told me you think you're very empathetic and you care about other people's feelings but sometimes you take it too far and you do it out of vanity you want people to like
00:51:02
you you care too much about whether the people working with you love you and he said that's not the way to create a disruptive organization did you agree with him yeah
00:51:16
I agree I think I ran Ty magazine just fine we can ask other people but uh uh but with CNN I sat there worrying about I won't name
00:51:28
names but these anchors on CNN who truly uh were problematic and yet I wanted them all to like me and I was probably not tough enough but I also finally got
00:51:42
to the know thyself which is all right this is not the job for me because I'm better off trying to inspire teams that are friendly and collegial
00:51:55
the way Jennifer dner the hero in of my book the Codebreaker the one who helped invent crisper technology in her lab and in her companies if they're going to hire
00:52:06
somebody new even a graduate student to be in you know working with the pipets and the test tubes they make sure the whole team meets that person and then they all discuss will this person fit in
00:52:19
well whereas and that's a culture that I can relate to but in El mus says no I remember him yelling at some of his Finance people who were friendly with some of the engineers and said no
00:52:33
collegiality is your enemy you do not want them to like you you're there to challenge them if they like you too much
00:52:40
you're not doing your job but do elon's employees like him elon's employees generally uh will walk through a wall for him those who have survived whether it be Gwen Shotwell or
00:52:56
uh who is a president of SpaceX or people uh at Mark juncosa or the people at Tesla like Drew balino or fron V holzen but he burns out people pretty
00:53:08
fast so if he's in an organization after a few years maybe 20% are totally loyal and survive but he's not afraid of burning people out
00:53:22
and having him leave sounds like they either love him will leave yeah and as I say sometimes with Andy Krebs they love him but then they leave but then they
00:53:33
come back some people truly want the challenge as Steve Jobs said to Scully the guy he um hired to run uh Apple for a while he was at Pepsi he said do you
00:53:49
want to make sugar water the rest of your life or do you want to change the world and I've seen mus talk to the
00:53:55
people at SpaceX late at night maybe midnight where they're all still working uh at the Launchpad or the factory and they'll say I know how hard you're working but this is the most
00:54:08
exciting job you could possibly have it's the most exciting important job on Earth which is getting people to Mars
00:54:15
whatever is the second most exciting you can't even think of it what it is because this is by far the most exciting
00:54:22
thing you could be doing and there are people who buy into that and I could sit there watching the moon rise over the Gulf of Mexico and him saying that and I
00:54:33
could see why people buy into that I could also see why some people say I'd rather have a wife and kids and get off
00:54:39
Friday night at 5:00 p.m. does he believe it when he says that and to typically people believe it when they
00:54:45
hear it when he first say said to me that he had three missions to get Humanity to
00:54:52
Mars to have sustainable energy on this plan planet and to make robots safe I thought it was a type of pontification you do on podcasts like this one or pep talks for your team but then I'd hear
00:55:05
him say it over and over again and I'd hear him say it almost to himself as he walked around and saw something B he
00:55:11
said we'll never get to Mars we'll never get and almost staring into the distance
00:55:17
sometimes he said we've got to get to Mar you we've got to if we don't do this we'll never get Humanity tomorrow we'll
00:55:23
never get the world to electric vehicles I totally think he believes it why does he care so much about Mars he believes in space fairing in other words
00:55:39
we have to be space adventurers for two or three reasons one is he believes that human consciousness is rare and maybe
00:55:47
unique they nowhere else in the universe do we know that there's Consciousness and why because if Consciousness existed
00:55:53
somewhere else it it probably never became multiplanetary before the planet it was on got destroyed there not something you and I wake up worrying about but it's a kid there a 15-year-old
00:56:06
he's worried about the extinguishing of human consciousness if something happens to our
00:56:11
planet secondly he says it's the Great Adventure we wake up every morning we got all sorts of problems to worry about there more problems in Ukraine to the Middle East to Congress to you know
00:56:25
whatever it may be at whiteall at the moment but we have to have our vision set on some things that Inspire us that are truly make humans what they are and
00:56:37
there's nothing more inspiring than the notion of being an adventurer of going to New Frontiers and the greatest New
00:56:45
Frontier is space so I think those are the reasons is not because he wants to make money if you if you decide you want to be the richest person on Earth you know step one isn't start a rocket
00:56:59
company so I think he believes in the mission and do you think that he's at all scared that he might not get there in his lifetime yeah I think that he
00:57:11
wakes up all the time calculating that he's 50 whatever two or three years old that maybe he's got 30 years not that he necessarily wants to go to Mars
00:57:23
but he wants a mission to Mars and he believes it'll be within 10 years but he's always wrong by you know two or
00:57:31
three times like how fast self-driving will come to be how fast the Cyber truck will be made how fast we'll get to Mars
00:57:38
I think in 30 years there will be missions to Mars I think in 10 years it's unlikely and I think that's the spread that he's worried about as someone like Elon that thinks in terms
00:57:50
of first principles when he's trying doing those calculations about how how long he's got left to live and the
00:57:56
development of SpaceX and Rockets and trying to correlate whether trying to figure out if he'll get there in his
00:58:02
lifetime does he not then look at his health and go well one way to extend the amount of time I have on Earth is to
00:58:08
really obsess about my health from everything I've read he doesn't seem particularly interested in his health now he makes fun of his Tech Bros who
00:58:15
are sitting there with longevity uh plans of how they're going to live to be much longer uh and no he
00:58:22
does not care enough about his health for a he's very he's overweight now for a while a year ago he decided to go on an intermittent fasting diet and also
00:58:36
was using whatever those drugs are called you know the diet weight loss drugs yeah those weight loss drugs and I
00:58:43
remember being with him one morning he could only have one meal a day because of this and we went to something called
00:58:49
the paloalto creery I think it's called some Diner and Little X was with us and musk ordered a double bacon cheeseburger with sweet potato fries and an Oreo
00:59:01
chocolate chip milkshake and said okay it's my one meal of the day and I'm thinking I'm not a diet uh expert but
00:59:12
this does not seem like the healthiest way to either lose weight or remain healthy does that seem like a bit of a
00:59:19
contradiction to you in some respects that he's not he's crazy I mean and yeah but he's not I mean I look at say sam Altman Sam Altman is very disciplined in
00:59:31
both exercise and diet uh Jeff Bezos is now that way elon's not that way you know you're probably pretty good at die and exercise you know me I try pretty
00:59:43
hard but I'm not quite as good elon's at the side where he's he's fanatic on many
00:59:50
many things but uh getting on the treadmill and taking care of himself is not one of them did you ever see him exercise while you with him he has only one home now because when his daughter
01:00:01
transitioned and became very anti- capitalist he thought that if selling all five of his pretty nice homes he
01:00:10
would just live very frugally and that would please her which didn't work but he's got this two-bedroom house and a
01:00:17
town in South Texas where star base is and there's a little room that has one of those trainers and every now and then I'd be just sitting in that house day in
01:00:29
and day out and' say maybe I should use that more I don't use it that much I've never seen him say Well I've got to go to the gym he
01:00:40
doesn't meditate do yoga swim or do things that would both clear your mind and relax your body how would you characterize his mental health incredibly Mercurial what what
01:00:54
does that mean means that it goes through multiple phases personalities and there will be times when he's perfectly cheerful inspiring sometimes
01:01:07
funny sometimes focused on engineering there'll be times when he gets into a very what Grimes calls demon mode and he
01:01:18
says he's probably bipolar he's never been diagnosed but he uses some medication has been prescribed and so he will get into these mood swings where he
01:01:32
can be Manic and depressive and bipolar and so his mental health is not great the difficult question and the book wrestles with him with this and you
01:01:46
said at the beginning smart thing you said at the beginning of this show was to what extent is that woven
01:01:53
into who he is and do those strands also cause him to have the drives in the time that you observed him in the years that you were with him were
01:02:04
you ever concerned about him yeah I mean there times when he would go into what I
01:02:09
would almost feel was a tail spin and even times before I knew him like 2018 he goes into total melt down he almost catatonic lying on the floor of the
01:02:22
factory in Fremont Texas and the people who work with him can't Rouse him because he's in a you know
01:02:28
catatonic State he's sending off horrible tweets back then calling some cave diver a pedophile or saying he's going to take Tesla private and you see
01:02:40
that recur every now and then even this past month he hasn't been as far as I know in any bad catatonic state but he'll get into a dark mood late at night and do tweets that are conspiratorial
01:02:53
and dark and self-destructive at Christmas he was with his brother and some other relatives and they all sit around talking this is the day after the server
01:03:05
uh Farm anecdote I told you about and they asked what do you regret most this year and he says I regret the fact that
01:03:13
every now and then I start shooting myself in the foot or stabbing myself in the thigh that he gets into these
01:03:21
periods with all these um great leaders there's a word you use throughout which is the word team um the definition of
01:03:28
the word company is group of people how do they go about hiring great people with musk he says that you always look first
01:03:39
for the right attitude skills knowledge they can all be acquired but a change in Attitude requires a brain
01:03:51
transplant so you make sure they have an all-in hardcore for attitude early on first few years of SpaceX and Tesla he interviewed everybody uh that they were
01:04:02
hiring he's built a good team but an unstable one people come and go more often but there are people like Gwen Shotwell who for more than 20 years has helped run SpaceX and Mark junos has
01:04:15
been probably the chief technology officer there likewise you have a pretty stable team at Tesla Steve J was a
01:04:26
specialist at building teams when he was dying uh I was in his backyard with him
01:04:33
and I asked him what's the best product you ever made and I thought he'd say the iPhone or maybe the Mac he said well
01:04:40
building those products is hard but what's really important is building a team that will continue to build
01:04:45
products so the best thing I did was the team at app and that's the Johnny i Phil
01:04:52
Schiller Ed a q uh Tim Cook team musque is not as much of a superstar building team but he does get hardcore dedicated
01:05:05
leaders to work for him and do they both think that the team is the most important thing hiring great people I
01:05:13
would say that jobs definitely thought that I think musk if you ask him would say he
01:05:20
thinks that but one of the things he hasn't done perfect ly is if he left Tesla you know there's Tom zuu there's Drew bino there's some people but it's
01:05:34
not as if he has a big team in place as easily uh it's he's a little bit more the total boss and uh he'll not try
01:05:51
to run everything but he'll Focus man Aly on specific things and he does not de I guess the best way to say it is he doesn't delegate Authority as easily as
01:06:04
I think other leaders do on the flip side of that his maniacal intensity to detail means that unlike Boeing he knows how to get Rockets into orbit what are
01:06:18
the um principles of success or leadership that both Steve and Elon share first of all a passion musk had a passion for beauty and even the beauty
01:06:29
of the parts unseen I remember when I was first working with Steve Jobs he had the same Steve would take me around the
01:06:36
backyard of his house where he grew up in a small track home in California and there's a fence and he made me look at the back of the fence which fac scrub he said my dad said we had to make the back
01:06:47
of the fence just as beautiful as the front of the fence and Steve said to his father why nobody will see it nobody will know and he said yes but you will know if you have a passion for
01:06:58
Perfection you care even about the beauty of the parts unseen and so both Steve Jobs and Elon Musk cared more about details than your average CEO they
01:07:11
cared in Jobs's case how the chips on the circuit board and the original McIntosh looked and whether the circuit board itself was beautiful even though nobody would ever see it it was in a
01:07:24
sealed case and MK the night he the Twitter board accepted his offer he spends two hours in the Tiny Town in South Texas going over a valve in the
01:07:36
Raptor engines under Starship and why it was leaking and there was a methane leak and just became involved in the details
01:07:44
and both of them felt that if you have a passion and intensity on the details the rest will follow more easily what what was their um approach to kind
01:07:57
of linked to that their approach to experimentation it's something that I'm absolutely obsessed with conducting as
01:08:02
many experiments as we possibly can in the shortest amount of time we can to get information back yeah one of the
01:08:08
things that must is successful because of is his ability to iterate to take risks to conduct experiments twice now he's launched
01:08:21
Starship which as I say is by far the biggest rocket ever made and both times you saw Stories the next day saying must launches rocket it explodes well he
01:08:31
thinks both those were a success because he says if you're not failing 20% of the time you're not risking enough and so
01:08:39
each of those are attempts to figure out to take a risk shoot something off and see what goes wrong and then to fix it if you have a risk averse culture like
01:08:51
NASA or Boeing or locked or others you're not experimenting enough and the experim by definition an
01:09:04
experiment involves the unknown and taking a risk how do they keep their cultures to
01:09:11
be pro- risk and um to stop them getting complacent with their success well I don't think musk has a problem with complacency because he's so intense and hardcore that the minute
01:09:25
you know I've watched so many meetings where even at Twitter where somebody says we can't do this we can't take away the blue checks we can't uh change from
01:09:37
uh carbon fiber to stainless steel on a particular compound or we can't do cyber
01:09:42
truck because cyber truck is too edgy and it's made of stainless steel and it it's frightening to look at and it'll scare people and he'll just either run rough
01:09:55
shot over them or fire them or push them to realizing yeah let's make cyber truck
01:10:02
look very futuristic and let's make it totally out of stainless steel and let's have the stainless steel being an e exoskeleton so you don't have to have internal chassis as much these are wild
01:10:15
out-of-the-box things and they resisted him on Cyber TR they resisted him on Starship they resisted him on even some of the battery changes he's made or
01:10:28
things but or resist him on the amount of servers you need at uh Twitter or the rules for engagement on Twitter I think sometimes it doesn't work I think Twitter is kind of toxic in places
01:10:44
because he thought you could get rid of the moderation teams and do it through an
01:10:49
algorithm but he pushes things 80% of which succeed it means there's a lot of rubble in the Wake though do do you think they're somewhat delusional these people I think they're crazy and as Jobs
01:11:04
would say crazy enough to think they can change the world and thus they become the ones who
01:11:10
do delusional the phrase they used for Steve was reality Distortion field which is just a geek Geeks way of saying delusional meaning uh you can wish
01:11:25
something and think hard enough on something and try to make it happen and often at work with jobs he'd say you got
01:11:34
to shave 10 seconds off the boot up time and they say that's reality it can't be done and he'd say he'd stare without
01:11:39
blinking something his Guru had taught him in India he'd say don't be afraid you can do it and they would been
01:11:45
reality and 80% of the time he'd get it done sometimes it doesn't work he tried it on his cancer didn't work uh I mean he just tried to will it
01:11:57
away likewise with musk full self-driving I mean for the past 10 eight years he's always said it's only a year away we're going to get there well that's reality
01:12:09
Distortion it's driven his team to go further with machine learning on full self-driving than most companies but
01:12:17
it's also a reality Distortion that hasn't yet paid off deadlines you talked kind of about it that that's the same thing which is being delusional about
01:12:28
deadlines but they're forcing functions as musk himself said when I was talking to him once I said deadlines man you always he says yes but I'm a
01:12:40
specialist at turning the impossible into the merely very late so he misses deadlines but he tends to eventually deliver the the reason he's setting deadlines even though he knows sometimes
01:12:53
they might might not be hit is because it speeds up the team yeah he says you a all in
01:13:00
intensity a hardcore intensity is our operating principle and you're not going to have that without deadlines I remember so many times there were what he his team calls
01:13:13
surges I'd see it happen almost every month in a different field he'd say all right we have to stack this rocket by Friday and they say you know no it's
01:13:25
going to take months no it needs to be stacked by Friday and they'd walk around the clock and do it and then a few weeks
01:13:31
later he'd be on a house where they were putting a Tesla solar uh pan solar roof tiles and he say
01:13:41
you have 24 hours to redo this house theyd say well that's nuts but he'd be there and midnight on top of the roof himself himself with a little X playing on the cables down below and he would
01:13:55
use it as a forcing function it drove the teams crazy but it drove them to do things they didn't think they could do is he happy no he's somebody who not only is not usually
01:14:08
happy but he doesn't value happiness if you said what are the top 10 things you want in
01:14:14
life I don't think happiness pleasure calmness sweetness going to the beach none of those would be in the top 10
01:14:26
he uh Tula rilly who lives here who was married to him the English actress great
01:14:33
English actress she said he's not the type who can stop and Savor or smell the flowers he doesn't want to sit back and be content and be happy and I asked him
01:14:46
about it I said okay you ever happy at what you've achieved he said no I'm like a video game addict when I get to to one
01:14:53
level of the game and I've succeeded all I can think about is moving to the next level of the game be it Elden ring or
01:15:00
polyopia is that common amongst the great leaders that you've studied no it um was it was definitely true of Steve Jobs who having built the Great
01:15:12
computers suddenly says I want a thousand songs in my pocket and then when he has the iPod it's so successful
01:15:19
and all he does is worry about the fact that something bad could happen and they says well what if people the brain dead
01:15:26
people who make cell phones realize they could put music on cell phones then we'd be out of business so he starts working
01:15:33
on the iPhone and the iPod team says well that's going to cannibalize us that's going to hurt our business he said we have to be able to cannibalize
01:15:39
ourselves or other people will eat us for lunch and likewise musk is always pushing for the next thing as a opposed to happiness is that true of everybody
01:15:52
no I mean Jeff Bezos has the biggest yacht you can imagine and more vacation homes uh and he's happier I think uh I mean he likes to savor his
01:16:05
success it's also true that his bace company blue origin hasn't yet gotten anybody into orbit I don't know if there's a particular tradeoff there but
01:16:17
I know musk would say yeah I could be on a yacht somewhere but that's not what I
01:16:23
want do you think Jeff and uh Steve do you think Elon likes Jeff I think they're competitors and
01:16:31
there's two chapters in the book called Bezos and musk where they compete compete for a pad at Cape Canaveral the
01:16:38
story pad 39a with they get into big disputes and lawsuits over satellite levels mus says if uh but I want Bezos to succeed I want him to be driving us
01:16:51
into space because the more do it the better I wish he would get out of his hot tub and off his yacht more often so
01:16:58
that blue origin could be more successful so that's not exactly a compliment uh they don't hang out
01:17:05
together but I know that musk respects Bezos Bezos once tried to patent the concept of a self-landing a a a booster rocket that could land upright
01:17:21
and be reused which musk was already working on and the idea that basos would try to patent
01:17:28
the idea went cause musk to go ballistic but since then he hasn't gone ballistic
01:17:33
on Bezos and that got resolved how did Steve Jobs change you I think that Steve and all the people I've written about caused me to think more about what's the
01:17:48
larger Mission and to care about even things people couldn't see as I said like the circuit board inside the
01:18:00
mac and you always know whether you're cutting Corners when you're writing a book doing a podcast starting a
01:18:08
company and being honest with yourself about that is you know I admire deeply Steve Jobs's passion for beauty his passion
01:18:22
for the product and all of them felt they weren't trying to make the most money or
01:18:29
build the most valuable company although they did Apple becomes that you know Tesla becomes that they become the
01:18:36
richest people but they're doing it not for a passion for profits but a passion for the product and specifically Elon spending that time with
01:18:48
him yeah you know I I go back to the know thyself I can admire musk I can respect what he does I also know it's the price he pays
01:19:02
for his success is a price that I think is too high for me meaning I'm not going
01:19:09
to be that rough on the people around me I've been married more than four almost 40 years and you know I care about this
01:19:18
balance of work and life and other things mus doesn't care about that so I know that each of us has to decide how
01:19:30
do we do the balances that make us feel the most comfortable and I watch Elon and can admire his
01:19:41
intensity but also know the downsides of it and then in a more complex way which is what the book is about understand how the
01:19:54
downsides and you said this at the very beginning of the show The downsides and bad traits are so
01:20:03
interwoven with the good traits that you can't disentangle the fabric the algorithm you write about in the book this five-step approach that Elon
01:20:16
takes towards sort of product development when I read about it it kind of just seems like more of the same Elon which is like this sense of urgency
01:20:21
speeding things up and caring a lot about the small stuff is that your characterization of the algorithm and what is the algorithm well the algorithm
01:20:28
goes back to what you called first principles which is step one of the algorithm is question every rule
01:20:34
question every requirement somebody says we need to have a felt pad between the battery and the chassis and you you say
01:20:42
why and they say well it's a regulation or it's a rule and you say who made that rule who made that does it really work
01:20:48
bring me the person the name of the person who actually made it and let me Grill that person to see if there's a
01:20:55
physics reason that has to happen and so that's step one in the algorithm and step two is uh Steve Jobs step which is simplify even on the iPod when Steve
01:21:06
made it it's like I want to be able to get to any song with only three clicks I don't want a whole lot of buttons I
01:21:12
don't want a manual and they eventually make the most beautiful simple thing that comes the iPhone after a while
01:21:19
intuitive nobody has to read the manual for how to use an iPhone so step two is simplify then you speed
01:21:25
up the processes and final step is automate and the problem must said is when you try to automate processes that you should have deleted you're not going to do it but it's it's that just the
01:21:39
algorithm it's the algorithmic way of thinking which is the manufacturing matters as much as the design of the product so he puts his engineers and
01:21:49
designers with their desk facing the assembly L line so every hour they can watch if there's a hold up if there's something that's a a piece of you know
01:22:00
strip around the headlight or uh wiring in the Raptor engine that's causing a hold up in the manufacturing process the engineers and designers can see it every hour which is why he doesn't do what
01:22:13
most automakers now do which is send something off and Outsource all the manufacturing he's got to watch it
01:22:20
happen and people write he makes people write their on the parts of the rocket that they're responsible for yeah and
01:22:25
you got to it's like who's in charge who's in charge of this valve and who's in charge of the cost of this valve and who's going to get this valve to be uh
01:22:36
cost down by 80% and if you don't think you can do it your name is on that mission then step
01:22:44
aside you know we're not going to tolerate people who can't be on the mission a quick word on hu as you know their respons sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company it is
01:22:55
finally here 3 years of work from here to try and make a bar a snack bar that is nutritionally complete as of the
01:23:01
recording of this episode they finally released these bars that are high in protein 27 vitamins and minerals and
01:23:09
just 2 g of sugar The Impossible has been done and it tastes so godamn good often these snack bars these like high protein snack bars taste like you're eating Play-Doh or cardboard or
01:23:20
something it's so hard to make one that is nutritionally complete and that tastes good and ladies and gentlemen
01:23:27
here we have it I'm going to put the link in the description to get your bar below try it out and tag me and let me
01:23:32
know exactly how you get on because it's so nice to finally have a bar that is nutritionally complete and that actually
01:23:37
doesn't taste like cardboard and that tastes delicious The Impossible has been accomplished you mentioned your own
01:23:44
family and your own um relationships last question is about elon's love life you know now Elon loves drama and turmoil right that's from childhood he
01:23:58
Associates it with childhood in love and whether it's at Twitter or SpaceX or Tesla he's always surging and wants drama well for better or worse I would
01:24:11
say For Worse his emotional personal love life tends to be that way he likes drama and fighting and intensity in his
01:24:25
relationships of the people he's been with most have had this fiery intensity to them from his first wife Justine all the way through Amber herd
01:24:37
who I think's legendary uh in the intensity shall we say of the relationships and to some extent Grimes now there been a couple of exceptions
01:24:47
one of whom I mentioned is tulula Riley whom he was married to uh English actress and she's great and
01:24:56
loving and calm and was a calming influence and was the best thing to happen to him in my opinion when it came
01:25:03
to romance but he always valued the intensity and she rightly knew herself and said this
01:25:15
is amazing and I really love everything happening but this is not who I am I'm want to be back in a more calm environment and
01:25:27
eventually she leaves and comes back to England so with his own children his lovers his wives there is the same intensity that's baked into everything
01:25:38
he does but he seems to have a longing to be with somebody he seems to be he's always afraid of being alone he said
01:25:45
that he was so lonely as a child that his biggest fear is being alone he always loves having one of his children I mean down at the rocket launch there's
01:25:56
Griffin there's X he was uh some he has a child uh who's autistic and you know needs a minder generally I mean enough so uh that he's still a very
01:26:12
wise uh teenager and even ask things like why doesn't the future look like the future dad which is one of the
01:26:20
things that Spurs Elon into making cyber truck so futuristic so he always likes having
01:26:26
some of his children around him he always likes having a companion but that doesn't mean he likes
01:26:34
calmness so interesting we have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the
01:26:39
next guest not knowing who they're going to be leaving the question for and the question that's been left for
01:26:46
you with all you know about the nature of what it is to live a happy successful life what do you think is the single most important characteristic to be happy and
01:26:59
or to be successful knowing your mission and knowing yourself I maybe that's two
01:27:06
things but it took me a while to know myself meaning what I was good at as a leader and what I didn't want to be good at but also I know the mission that I'm
01:27:17
trying to do uh in life and it's not getting Humanity to Mars is not the grandest of all missions but uh I
01:27:30
think if you know yourself and what you value then the happiness follows and what is your mission my mission is that there's certain things
01:27:45
that Inspire us that make us aim higher and make us better and as a a journalist as a writer
01:27:55
and now as a biographer and historian I like to tell the stories about people who moved us who rippled the surface of history and from
01:28:08
those lessons we all in a smaller way can be on a journey that's not just about ourselves when I speak to my college students there's always graduation
01:28:22
speakers that say follow your passion and I say no it's not about your stupid little passion it's about connecting
01:28:29
your passion to something higher than yourself so figure out what that mission is for you and I do it through
01:28:36
storytelling now storytelling isn't as elevated as Rocket building or automaking but it is the oldest most venerable valuable way we have of
01:28:51
passing on values is telling stories whether it's around the first campfire ever built or whether it's Homer doing
01:29:02
it in the Odyssey or the Bible with a great opening sentence in the beginning comma telling us these stories I think there's a role in society for
01:29:14
storytellers that try to make us better well you have very much taken on that role in a remarkable way I very rarely pre-order or pre-save books ever
01:29:29
but based on the books you've written previously this was one of the books that I bought on both audiobook and both
01:29:35
physically and it far exceeded my expectations because of the depth and detail you go into these people this is
01:29:41
not a surface level from a distance audit or analysis or deconstruction of these individuals it is as if you are living in their mind and writing from the place of their mind mind and for
01:29:52
someone like me who I think of myself at the start of my career that wants to do great things yeah knowing everything
01:29:59
about these individuals that you've covered allows me to pick and choose elements that will get me closer towards
01:30:07
my own version of happiness and success and I think know thyself is such an important thing when you read these books because you have to assemble the parts of an Elon or a Steve Jobs or a
01:30:19
Jennifer and take from them um to complete your own little jigsaw piece and we're all our own individual shapes
01:30:26
there'll probably never be a book ever that comes close to the detailed in depth of insight and understanding and storytelling which is so unbelievably captivating as this one that's written
01:30:37
on Elon Musk so it's um it's a must read for everybody regardless of what discipline or Pursuit you're in I think
01:30:42
it's just an absolute fascinating read about trauma about Humanity about humans and about what it takes to reach the
01:30:49
very top so Walter thank you for the service to humanity that you've done by the work that you do it's a huge honor
01:30:54
to get to meet you today wow it's a huge honor to get to meet you and a actual pleasure too thank
01:31:01
you quick one I discovered a product which has changed my life called Eight sleep this product eight sleep which are
01:31:08
a sponsor of this podcast has been a revelation in my life because the eight sleep pod cover which is basically a
01:31:13
fitted sheet that goes over your mattress controls the temperature of your bed throughout the night and it
01:31:19
follows Nature's natural Rhythm it starts C gets colder while you go into different phases of sleep and then heats
01:31:25
up slightly as you wake up in the morning which is effectively guiding you to have a deeper more restorative sleep
01:31:31
I genuinely think of all the things that we would include in health and fitness I think sleep now is the the most
01:31:38
important factor the thing that I'm thinking about most often every single day when I wake up in the morning the
01:31:44
first thing I do is I check my sleep and I use that information to determine how to proceed in that day how hard to work
01:31:50
out how many meetings to have what I need to cancel what time I need to get to bed so to celebrate them being a new
01:31:55
podcast sponsor I always want to get a discount for you guys and I've got one go to 8sleep.com which is EIG ghts
01:32:03
sleep.com slst and if you do that you'll save a $150 on the Pod cover that I have on my bed the one I'm talking about grab your pod cover send me a DM and let me know
01:32:16
how you get on do you need a podcast to listen to next we've discovered that people who
01:32:22
liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we've done so I've linked that episode
01:32:29
in the description below I know you'll enjoy [Music] it