Transcripts For CSPAN2 Walter 20240703

Television companies supports cspan2 as a public service. Now about our featured attraction, Walter Isaacson. I would be surprised if you havent already seen him on tv in the past few days, or read a bit about his new book, because, well, hes been everywhere. And for good reason. The release of another biography has become ancson event in itself. He staked out a wellearned reputation as the preeminent biographer of geniuses, and what hes writing about brilliant people from long ago like leonardo da vinci, Benjamin Franklin and albert einstein, a more contemporary innovative figures of our age, like steve jobs, or henry kissinger, you can bet the result will be a fascinating, revealing comprehensive and vividly told book. And the story turned out to be even more than walter bargained for when he set out a couple of years ago to do the biography. Back then, walter thought hed be writing mainly about moscows technological trailblazer, a leader in the fields of electric vehicles and private space exploration. Then came musks impulsive purchase of twitter a purchased twitter and his central role in providing ukraine with satellite communication links during the war with russia and the questions and comments about moscow grew. All of which enhanced the timeliness of walters in depth portrait of musk and of the demons that drive him. Now, predictbly hes come in for criticism what he decided to put in the book or leave out or the extent to which he refrains from judging musk. Legitimate questions have been raised about both the risks and advantages of access journalism and about how far a biographer should go in offering personal opinions about the person that hes writing about. In public appearances so far, walter has certainly not shied away from addressing such matters and im sure he wont this evening. But i also know that if you read musks biography, which i encourage all of you to do if you havent already, youll find it presents a full account not only of musks influential and consequential achievements, but also, his dark mercural and offensive sides and make your own judgment about musk which is what walter has intended. The conversation with walter will being Michael Duffy opinion editor at large at Washington Post nearly five years, and before that several decades with Time Magazine and various positions as correspondent and editor. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Walter Isaacson and mike duffy. [applause] do you want to start . Hi. Michael came all the way from missoula. Well, some events matter. Youre welcome, thank you for coming and thank you, walter for coming. We are going to talk about the new elon musk book by walter. This is the mic. Okay, ill get used to it. Ive read this book and i love it. I dont know i didnt know much about elon musk when i started reading it now i feel like i know a great deal. Its hard to imagine Going Forward without having read it now that ive read it. So read it. Tell about the arrangement with musk and how it happened and whether your relationship with him changed over the course of writing it. I always like doing people pushing the edge of innovation. He was bringing us in the era of electric vehicles and space adventure, space travel. And that was cool. Had a mutual friend and put us on the phone and we talked an hour and a half. Id love to do this, but not based on interviews. I want to be by your side, i want to spend weeks on end, you know, just living in the air stream trailer down in boca chicha, texas, near the launch pad and walk the factory lines with them. He said, fine, you can be with me all the time, nothing is off limits, really. No control over the book. You dont im not going to send it to you first. I dont know if hes read it now. And he said fine. I said, okay, thats pretty amazing. And because he controls things and i went back with kathy. We were visiting somebody and we went to the main house because we were house guests in a Little Cottage and after a while i said, my god, youre doing what do you mean . Well, he just tweeted out and it was like in the middle of the conversation he tweeted out i was going to do it. And i said i guess im on for the ride. [laughter] did that relationship stay the same in that arrangement . It was really, really interesting. Hes never asked to see the book. He never pushed, pressured anything. And he just didnt i thought id be subject it would be the heisenberg principle, by observing him it would change him. His mercurial moods, dark things, they were in full and never seemed to notice me. I mean, i would always be by his side. I never tried to spin or do anything. Sometimes wed sit in the Conference Room after meetings and there would be a break and sit there for 15, 20 minutes half in silence and he would Start Talking in a monotone, telling me about his childhood or telling me about other things. Biographies youve written before, franklin, einstein, kissinger, dudna, jobs. Did any of them prepare you for this project . Well, steve jobs is a little like that. Somebody really strongwilled, had a reality distortion field as does musk. Meaning . Meaning that he drove people to do things that they were sure were impossible and he drove them crazy so then they eventually were able to do it. And he had a strong will. Steve jobs, he had been taught by his guru in india to just stare without blinking and say dont be afraid, you can do it. And so, even early on when woz, he and Steve Wozniak were trying to do the original apple two, i cant code it by the weekend. Weve got to code it back, weve got to get back to the apple farm, hence the name, the company they founded. And woz said he stared without blinking and said dont be afraid you can do it and i got so freaked out i did it. [laughter]. Over and over again, even to the end with a guy named a guy who owns corning glass, Wendell Weekes. Jobs wanted a beautiful piece of glass for the iphone he was thinking of and described it and Wendell Weekes said maybe, we used to do a formula for gorilla glass and jobs says i want this much by october and weekes says theres no way. Weve not started it and weekes said he stared without blinking and said dont be afraid, you can do it. And thats the reality distortion field. Take elon musk, one order of magnitude up. He just was always pushing people and driving them crazy, but driving them to do things they didnt think they could do. And had the stare, too. He definitely has the stare, but hes mercurial much more than steve jobs was. He can be role cold, elon musk and he can be nasty at times and he can also be giddy and funny and inspiring, but the weirdness is, he would shift moods almost on a dime and you could see it. I remember once walking at the launch pad down in south texas where theyre doing the biggest moveable object ever made by humans, which is starship, and it was a particular late friday night and there were a couple of people working on the pad. And all of a sudden i see his face, his girlfriend Claire Boucher known as grimes, you could see his face and she says demon mode, and started berating andy crabbes working the site. Where are people, we need dozens of people. Its a friday night and we dont have any launches scheduled. And he got so mad and he said i want to surge. And by the next day there were 200 people flying in from Cape Canaveral and they worked around the clock to start the rocket. And the next statement is his father, discuss. His father when elon was young, he was scrawny, he was socially awkward and he got beaten up all the time, especially they would send him off to these wilderness camps and the kids would beat him up for the food and finally he said i learned to punch people in the nose which you still see today, even though they beat me up at least theyd think twice. Once he got pushed down the steps of the school, its not like sidwell, this is in south africa. They pushed him down the concrete steps, they pummelled his face in the hospital for four or five days and his brother says you couldnt recognize him. When he gets home he has to stand in front of his father for an hour and a half and his father berates him, hes stupid, weak, and never amount to anything and takes the side of the kid who beat him up. Those scars from childhood are dancing in his head still. He goes really silent when the subject of his father comes up and eventually starts talking in a monotone about the pain he still feels. His worst relationship with his father, he has an unusually close relationship with kimbell, the brother you mentioned. He has a close relationship with kimbell, im the one who got the empathy gene in the family. Its true. And this is somewhat complex to talk about, but out of this book, one of the things that surprised me is that because musk doesnt have that what youd call incoming receptors for Human Emotions or outgoing, he doesnt have the antenna, he calls himself aspergers which is a broad name. Hes a callus person who can be very intense with you, but has that lack of receptors of emotions. Which kimbell is the opposite, kimbell is hugging and things and theyre almost joined at the hip although they fight really badly and when they first started their First Company together, they once fought on the floor until kimbell had his ear bitten off and had to get stitches. And people were appalled and they said dont worry about it theyre brothers. And elon musk, almost goes into production hell and we talked about in a tailspin. He even talks to people about whether hes bipolar, all the problems he talks about he may have and kimbell sells the stuff and gives up his business and takes his money out of his bank account to keep tez tesla afloat and okay, i need money for my Restaurant Business and at first elon says its not going to work and kimbell didnt talk for six months. And he said i didnt want to lose my brother. He only gave him five million, not 10 million. Whats five million between brothers. The first pages are about his childhood and then walter turns to spacex and tesla. So well take these in order, theyre too much fun. Musk starts building rockets. How come . You know, he had made a lot of money on his first two companies and he said, i dont like to try to enjoy my money. I dont i put my chips back on the table. I want to do Something Big and hes driving on the long island expressway with a friend and he said, man, we went to the moon 50 years ago, lets say, and where are we going next, why dont we go to mars . He looks on the website for nasa and theres no plans to go back to the moon. Hes appalled. Were a nation hes an immigrated here. These are people that take risks and he decides a mission to mars. The many reasons, one is this incredibly elevated reason somebody who i think read too much scifi comic books as a lonely child in the corner of the bookstore, which is that if were not a multiplanetary species, eventually something will happen and the light of human consciousness will be lost and we dont know if theres any other consciousness in the universe. We have to do it. I used to think that was the type of pep talks youd give to teams or the podcast or something, but he would intone is over and over again the importance of being a space faring species and he believed it. And he thought adventure. And we have to have adventure back. Theres nothing grander than travelling to other planets and he was able to build at first he was going to try to buy a rocket from russia or something and a funny of couple scenes in the books and he goes to russia and theyre spitting on him and stuff and on the the back, first principles, how much does the material in a rocket cost, how much does the fuel cost . And we can get it 90 cheaper if we do it this way and decides to build his own rockets and they start eventually, they have three of them blow up, first attempts, but eventually he has now sent more mass into orbit than every other country and every other company combined. So hes saving human consciousness was the rational for spacex. Whats the reason for tesla . He has three great goals coming out of the bookstore, not as well lit as politics and prose, and the scifi section. He had three Great Missions in life especially in college he focuses on. One, making us a spacefaring civilization and two is sustainable energy, basically batteries, solar roofs, power packs and of course, electric vehicles. At this time in the early 2000s ford, General Motors, everybodys gotten out of the electric vehicle, theyre crushing the chevy bolt because they want to get rid of it and hes saying no, weve got to do it and the third one we can get to later, he reads a robot series and says we have to have safe Artificial Intelligence otherwise our robots will return upon us, these are not things i worried in growing up in new orleans, not causing my palms to sweat. The book is, among other things, something of an Industrial Engineering handbook and you think it sounds dull. Its anything but. He reengineers how we build rockets, but more significantly perhaps, he reengineers how we build cars. In america, we got out of the habit of manufacturing our own stuff. We outsourced it all over and see what its done to our politics. When he first was creating tesla with Martin Eberhardt and others, tarponing, the original ones had the batteries made in japan, shipped to thailand for some sort of barbecue pit factory and shipped to england and lotus chassis and then to france and shipped to the u. S. , then its a mess. If you cant manufacture what you decide, you cant innovate. Your designers have to be next to the assembly line, so he spend more time walking the factory floor and figuring out the assembly line, so he brings it all inhouse and he at that point, i think, 70 of the intellectual property of Car Companies had been outsourced and now hes got it so it a car most made in america, most made in his own factory. The emotional high point of this engineering handbook, which is really one of my favorite parts of the book, comes when musk is up against it and he has he makes a promise, witnessing ly wittingly or unwittingly to produce 5,000 cars a week. How does he do it . Theres a short seller, and people betting against tesla stock. The only way to survive he did the calculations you had to get to 5,000 cars a week. The short sellers had drones flying over the factory, counting what the two Assembly Lines could do. They had inside information. They were going nuts. The most shorted stock in history. And they figured out correctly that those two Assembly Lines could not do 5,000 cars a week. And it would take a year to build another factory and hes a military history addict and he remembers in world war ii that they used to build fighter jets in the parking lots in Southern California because they had to do it so fast. So he looks at the parking lot ap he says, within a week i want a tent. That would be three times the size of this room, and we are going to build a Third Assembly line. And of course, this is not exactly legal. Hes always breaking rules and regulations, but there was a small thing in the law in california you could put up a temporary tent to do auto repair, it was like for a muffler shop. He said, they can fine us later. They build this huge tent, they dont have the ability to do an assembly line, but they take an old Conveyor Belt and put it on a slope and theyre able to hit 5,000 cars a week and tesla becomes the most valuable car company in the world. And the slope because the Conveyor Belt wouldnt otherwise work. Yeah, to move the cars down and it was when he just lived on the factory floor that whole time and really, really went bonkers. I mean, theres a phrase kimball uses and some of his friends use, open loop warning. Which means youre not getting feedback. Youre like an unguided missile. And and hear criticism. You cant hear criticism, cant hear nothing, hes in a trance. So theyre doing open loop warning and people think hes bad now on twitter and other things, he tweets at that british cave diver is a pedophile. That im taking tesla private and saudi is funding and the lawsuits, it was a hell year for him. I have to say as a reader, i felt like 25 hell years sometimes. Especially in that period and beginning of 2019, he wants he forces them to do an Autonomous Vehicle to drive its own and thinks thats the next big thing. Lets talk about recklessness, personal recklessness. And you use a phrase personalities, thats good, its plural. Like his father, jekyll and hyde character, a dark mode and almost not remember when he came back to being sweet dr. Jekyll. Musk goes through quick personality changes and its he even talks about multiple personalities. You can call it a disorder, but it is who he is. And there will be times when hes just laughing like crazy and showing monty python skits, silly walks and figuring out how to translate those into optimus the robot and so its engineered that way and then inspirational if we dont work all night, humanity wont get to mars. And then he goes to mr. Hyde and darkness hits. How many times if you dont do this today. Well never be a multiplanetary species if you dont work all night. And go to so many people, andy crabbes, the guy he reamed out on the launch pad in south texas. Lucas hughes, who didnt quite know the cost of every material of a component, and some of them leave, some stay and a couple, milancovak, leaves a gentler place and comes back a choice between burned out and bored and i decided to be burned out on a mission with elon. And the jekyll and hyde, you cant read the book his mind is shaped by Science Fiction novels and lots and lots of gaming. And video gaming. And he is a total addict and stayed up all night when eldon ring. Anybody old enough to know what eldon ring is . Theres a fan. Eldon ring has come out and hes gone to hawaii with natasha basset, australian actress and then he meets grimes in vancouver in the middle of an Emotional Turmoil and eldon ring comes out and he stays up all night playing eldon ring until 5 30 and right after that he sends out a message, i made an offer. And that was when he announced he was going to go hostile on twitter. So video games, he learns a lot from polotopia, including as kimbell says, empathy is not your friend. You and i dont believe that, but its like empathy can hurt you. Allies arent for keeping. Exactly. Theres weird pathology he picked up. He did not pick up one of the key lessons which i call front minimization. You dont have to fight everybody at once. Of course, theres a name for that. Even more personally, he told you that he was a fool for love. What did he mean . You know, he associates love, his brother says, and so does amber herd, for those of you remember the johnny depp trial, is a person who is somewhat dramatic, and they went out for about a year and they broke up right at 2018, right when his father, errol, was having a child with errols person hed raised as a stepdaughter. So this is an Emotional Turmoil. The breakup with amber. His father, fathering a child with someone he thought was his stepsister and the 20 production hell. And almost everybody hes married or gone out with is there for the drama, justine, his first wife, they just would fight. Theyd go to bookstore, keep giving politics prose a shoutout, but theyd go and have huge fights. Amber said hes a fool for love, and he associates drama with love. If things are calm and the only really calm relationship he had was with this wonderful person Tallulah Riley who he married twice, but she was just a calming influence and he would say, you know, and kimbell would say, it would have been great because but instead, including crimes, a really great, fun person, she can be dramatic. As much as he wants to populate other planets, hes done a pretty good job of populating this one. Yeah, he actually but its a weird everything is missiondriven and you think, okay, thats whacky, okay its whacky and earnest. He believes that the declining birth date is a harm to human consciousness. And how many of us wake up wondering. And this is why hes always telling his friends, youve got to have more children. He pays i wont get into too much, but for the ivf treatments are friends and relatives because he wants everybody to have children. Talk to us a little about elons shift from i find myself calling him elon, a bad habit. Being an obama supporter to a trump backer. Was that mere convenience . No, the political shift in the past two years has obviously been pretty sharp. As i say, there are many elons, there will be time talking in the afternoon afternoon pretty sedate. Hell say we need a party of the center, we need more moderates. We should support independents in the country. Late at night hes pushing those buttons not so much conservative, but what you would call sort of the populist right viewpoint that we see in europe, we see here. It starts about three years ago. First of all, with covid and covid lockdowns and the restrictions, and he believed that the lockdowns were too onerous and it was so he pushed back on that. Secondly, he got attacked by a lot of democrats from California Assembly women to Elizabeth Warren and at one point then, he had because of some stock options, he exercised, Elizabeth Warren said billionaires, hes a billionaire avoiding taxes and he had paid more taxes than anybody in history had ever paid to any government partly because he had exercised a stock option and he just bristled as if hes on the playground and wants to punch people in the nose and then thirdly in the most delicate part of it is, his eldest surviving child. He had a child that died in infancy. Was named after his favorite character in xman comics, xavier. About age 16 she transitions to being jenna. And texting people in the family, hey, transitioning, im now a girl, im named jenna, but dont tell my dad. Oh. Yeah, okay. He gets his head around that and everybody in the family says, okay, because he loves his children so much, but she becomes very left wing economically and hates all rich people, billionaires, goes to court to change her name and then make sure that she has as she puts it in the filing, nothing whatsoever to do with him ever again. This causes him such pain and he has to lash out a bit, and he believes that at crossroads where she went to school, some of you may know, los angeles, that the woke mind virus and the progressiveness there made her hate capitalism and hate her father. And so all of these things are jangling together and the fact that he loves twitter. Hes addicted to twitter. Hes doing really dumb tweets at night about pedophile cave divers and he has this money in his pocket, he exercised the option. What product do i like . I like twitter so he starts buying it cassie started talking about it, and people close to him. Whenever he went dark, it brought him back to the playground, the playground where he was beaten up and now he had the chance to own the worlds playground. You move faster than my questions do, its great. At this point i was going to bring it back to twitter. And things are going well, companies are firing on all cylinders. No cylinders, theyre electric, theyre flying on all engines. Electric motors. Editor to the end. Editor to the end. Yet, he makes this jump. What is the temptation for him . Why is twitter such a shiny object . One of the things about that moment you talked about, and it was when i was hanging around with him, following him and stuff. And he had just become times person. Year. Become the richest person on the planet. Tez la had made a million cars that year. And it had become the most valuable car company after this hell protection thing. He had launched that previously 33 rockets into orbit and landed them upright so he could reuse the rocket, something still no company not nasa, not boeing. Or country. Or country, or russia or china can do. Im thinking this is great for the book. And he says i was not made for the call, i sail into the storms, ive got to put my chips back on the table and every Single Person close to him said the times hes most uncomfortable, when hes unnerved is when everything is going well and the times that else most energized is when all hell is breaking loose on all sorts of fronts and tallulah would say, id go at night he would stay up, when things were going really bad and the stress and id have to hold his head as he vomited and he would channel phrases that his father had once said to him. But then during the day he was energized back in the fight. And so, in that period, say early 2022, when things are going well, he cant leave well enough alone. And yet, the events of that period are this is a difficult portion of the book to read and in part because you realize he cannot engineer a platform thats made of Human Emotion and opinion. Thats unengineerable. Hes such a good science engineer, he can look at the valve of a Raptor Engine and stainless steel for the cyber truck. But he didnt have a feel for the Human Emotion, doesnt have the antenna or the receptors and asking him, hey, what are you thinking . Twitter they have not improved the product, you cant do video, you cant do payments platform. Its an engineering problem and thinking as im writing the book. Its not an engineering product. Its an advertising medium that gathers people with Human Emotions, and if it doesnt work. And the other reason he wanted to buy twitter to get back to that. He he had done his Second Company x. Com. Huge success, allowed you to do payments to other people and form an Association Network to do it and morphed into paypal and then they get rid of him even though he was the founder of one of the companies and they change the name from x. Com to paypal, a Payment System which we all use, but its not the everything app and he told me when i was asking him why are you doing twitter . Its my chance to show and use twitter as a booster rocket what we should have done 20 years ago on x. Com. Pick a time 2020, november march. Hes peaked in a lot of ways or appears to be peak and now covering a really different story. So in april is when giga factory opens, meaning the big factory in texas. Hes there at giga factory, tesla, the largest factory in the world making tesla. 100 other great things have happened, starship has finally been staffed and that april is when hes been buying twitter stock and he decides to go rogue. They want him on the board and were standing were sitting on the mezzanine watching the factory about to be opened and the factory about to be opened kimball is saying to him, ken, antonio, why are you doing twitter . And hes deciding that he needs control of twitter, even though this whole factory is going and that night we went to a place called the pershing in austin, his son griffin is there. Another of his sons, a delightful kid named saxon who is autistic, you know, but very wise and his mother may is there, grimes is there, kimball. Theyre all saying, dont buy twitter. We dont get it, why would you want this . And asking his kids, dad, we dont use twitter and saxon says why doesnt the future look like the future and hes saying. The only person there is may his mother, which should have been a demographic signal, but that is when from there is when he flies to hawaii and i said to larry elliss house in vancouver and this guy suddenly is on this rush. And i tried to write the book from that point on, when you read the book you say, man, its kind of long. Its really short and in bursts, like three or four page chapters because how do i capture the freneticness of april through the present, launching the rockets, taking over twitter, whatever, every day hes doing five or six things. When the twitter board accepts his offer, which he made an offer, he goes down to boca chicha this tiny spit of a town in south texas and decides that night that theyre going to figure out why theres a methane leak and for two hours everybody in the room is like you just bought twitter, this is like the biggest deal or accepted your offer. Everybody in the world is talking about this and all he knows is focus on the methane leak. Were you there . I was there for the trip down there, yes. I was not there in vancouver. Talk to us about the ukraine star link story. Whats the lesson of that . And what is the lesson for the United States . You know, the lesson is that when russia invades ukraine, ukraine has the command and control, they have to communicate with their troops. The russians are able to hack viastat the commercial satellite. Hack the military, all the satellites go down except star link which is elon musk. That night. Providing internet. Providing internet and also communications between the troops and they would have been crushed. So the link federov, the vice minister sending him Text Messages saying were going to get we need star link and his comic book super hero almost kicks in. All night three or four night, all the Text Messages, hes sending hundreds and then thousands of free star link dishes and services, which basically as federov says, the vice minister saves ukraine, and then what happens is a few months later, im actually been with him for a week, and then my Old High School Football Game in the bleachers, because its arch mannings game and hes about to go to the university of texas and Jonathan Martin so we all go and the phone keeps ringing and its elon and he says, theyre using star link to launch a sneak attack on the russian fleet in crimea. And your first question is . Well, i go okay. He says its going to cause world war iii what do you mean. I know russian doctrine. What are you doing . Were not going to allow, were and i wrote that he turned it off that night and later i had to correct it, which it had been geo fenced and they were asking him to turn it on, and they didnt know it was turned off. They were using it to launch this attack and so, secretly, it had been geo fenced and you see all the messages that night, not only in crimea, but in the donbas, because hes deciding to provide it, but turn it off so they cant do offensive things. You see, federov saying, its not offensive. My family lives in that village, its his high pitched night in which he ends up not allowing star link to be used for this sneak attack and the subs wash ashore. Now, this causes of course, my book comes out, this how could he not enable it . Why didnt he let them do it . And i do say, you know, at one point, have you talked to general mark milliey, talking as a sometimes we talked as a joke, why should you have so much power and he says, yes, hes been talking to them. And it resolves itself rather well, i think, which is he ends up deciding to give up and to sell control over certain number of star link satellites and services and even make a military version of it called star shield, that he is now selling outright to the u. S. Government and its intelligence agencies. So, u. S. Officials get to decide how the star link is enabled to be used by the ukraine, ukrainians. Star link and twitter, the questions, is it good for this much power to be in the hands of no, no, its not and thats why i think its good he finally says we are going to give up this power. I must say the only time and i dont know the exact sequence of when did mark milley know when it was enabled or not, the only times he would kick me out of the room and the only questions he wouldnt answer is when its classified information and he was having a classified conversation and i would have to go. And so thats still to be determined that thing and, but theres a larger question should he have so much power . No, probably not. But there should be somebody else who can get american communication satellites into orbit. Do you know our main u. S. Intelligence satellites, boeing cant get them up, nasa cant get them to high earth orbit, only super heavy falcon rockets can. Likewise the only person who is making star link work, and when they tried to do coast to coast easy charging networks, it didnt really work and now General Motors and ford, hes opened up his own charging networks instead of the sort of public ones. One more and then some questions from the audience. As the book went on, i sensed that you were getting more and more impatient with him or at least his selfcontrol. Did i imagine that . I found it really difficult, and i tried to convey it in the book in very vivid terms, now, i dont preach, i dont say here is what you think. Im going to leave it to you what to think, but by the end, hes doing amazing things. Hes getting starship launched, hes starting an Artificial Intelligence companies, doing full selfdriving through Machine Learning with billions of friends, but hes also somewhat unhinged and uncontrolled, and saying things, especially posting things on x or twitter. And its something that is so impulsive and so immature in a way. One of his friends, antonio grazy said we were travelling and i just had to try to stop him from doing these tweets and i took his phone and put it in the hotel safe and punched in a code and left. And at 3 00 in the morning musk calls Hotel Security to get his phone out. I tried not to be judgmental, criticized for not being judgmental. But you can read the book and see boom, boom, boom, all the things this happened and make a judgment, but clearly, the unhinged postings, i think, are self when i asked him he says, yeah, if i have one regret, i keep shooting myself in the foot. I should buy kevlar boots because i keep shooting myself and stabbing myself and the followup is why do you keep doing it . But he says, this is who i am. And this is the largest theme. Book. Im sorry, with that, which is would a musk thats controlled, with a musk with an impulse control button, would a musk that you could say, okay, temper this, would a tempered musk be as successful as a musk unbound . And we have that here in washington. You can call it the richard holebrook phenomenon, whatever it may be, people are really strong and driven and drive people nuts, can you pull out the dark strands and say, would a musk unbound still be getting the rockets into orbit . And the answer is, no, you dont have to be a jerk or an ahole or whatever, but you have to look at every individual, light and dark, as a tightly woven fabric and by understanding them, that doesnt mean you sympathize, that doesnt mean you excuse, but its really helpful to understand these people. One of the questions, do you think hes a force for good in the end . Does he believe in democracy worth fighting for . He talked about a democracy a lot. Hes a force for good in many ways. You have to remember that the entire electric Vehicle Movement ground to a halt, you know, like 2000. Nobody was going that way. More than any other person on this planet, he has done, if you care about climate, if you care about the environment, to make solar roofs, power pack batteries, and then teslas. Hes now made five million teslas, in the last six months, hes done a million. By order of magnitude, more than all other american Car Companies that are not going. So hes a force for good for go eth for getting us into the age not burning carbon and secondly a force for good getting us into space again. We hadnt gone we hadnt sent astronauts into orbit since the Space Shuttle 12 years ago decommissioned. Thats a force for good. Then the democracy question, no, i dont think hes handling twitter well. And i think all social media, facebook, twitter, x, whatever, undermines democracy, i mean, can. It can be a force for good, but the moment hes opened the apiture for more free speech, but amplifying hate speech which sometimes happens on twitter or amplifying misinformation, thats a big danger to democracy. Im sorry, im going on too long. A couple of questions here about just how would you describe the basic, most important difference between jobs and musk . I think each deserves a separate biography because there are three great innovators in our time, more, gates and bezos, but jobs brought us Friendly Computers and smart phones and a thousand in our pocket and everything else. Theres jennifer dowdner my last book, figured out how to make a tool to edit our genes, which means you can design your babies, thats a big deal. And thirdly, musk, somebody up there changing the way we live. Jobs and musk both had an absolute passion. I think jobs m a more spiritual feel both beauty and the design of product and a definite deep spiritual feel for connecting with Human Emotions. He said, we know how to make peoples hearts sing. I dont think elon has that feel for Human Emotions. What would you like to write a big biography about next . Who would i like to write about next . What female. Id say were off the record, but its cspan here. Its a for instance. Im telling someone im chewing on. Dont tell editor at simon schuster. Secret is safe with you. One person real transformation of science, the beginning of the 20th century, that hasnt gotten her due. And shes a person who figured out that basically chemistry and physics are the same. Its all about electrons going around in an atom. Its all about radiation, and what is radiation, its all about figuring out the periodic chart and how do you fill it in for that reason, and nobody has written a scientific authortative biography of marie curie, an awesome personal life. Friends with einstein. Her husband, pierre curie, helps her in the lab, but makes sure she wins the nobel prize. The only person who win two, one in chemistry, one in physics. He gets weakened by radiation and killed by a street car and she starts having an affair with one of his students and when she wins a second nobel prize, its a huge scandal. They tell her not to come to accept and she goes and accepts and she says, she doesnt say this to the nobel, if i had been a man you wouldnt have said that. Go right to the screen play. Dont bother with the oh, i may write about somebody else. What has writing this book taught you as a historian . Its given me this greater appreciation for the shakespeare line at the end of measure for measure, which is even the best are molded out of faults. And in our day and age of snap judgments and cable shout shows and people on talk radio, everybodys either a hero or a villain. But shakespeare teaches us that were a tab tapestry, to use the metaphor of threads. Were bad in this day and age and elon musk is the litmus test, so many people either revere him or cant stand them. Somebody out there was telling me, i have a tesla and love my tesla, but embarrassed because its elon musk. We have to be able once again not only understand nuances, but that sometimes a darkness in somebody is something you can really decry, but you have to understand and maybe not admire, but have to understand that people or more complex. That its not the cartoon heroes and villains that our cable tv age has turned people into. Walter isaacson, ladies and gentlemen, please join me in thanking him for coming. Well, thank you. That was fast. [applause] weekends on cspan2 are an intellectual feast. Every saturday American History tv documents americas story. And on sundays, book tv brings you the latest in nonfiction books and authors. Funding for cspan2 comes from these Television Companies and more, including charter communication. Charter is proud to be recognized as one of the best internet providers and were just getting started. Moving 100,000 miles of new infrastructure to reach those who need it most