Walter IsaacsonI hope with my books I’m saying, “This isn’t a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside.” You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up or as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to an anti-apartheid concert with his brother and there’s a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood and it’s sticky on their soles. This causes scars that last the rest of your life. The question is not how do you avoid getting scarred, it’s how do you deal with it.我希望通过我的书表达这样一个意思：「这不是一本操作指南，而是一个你可以并肩同行的人。」你可以看到 Einstein 如何在德国以犹太人身份成长，可以看到 Jennifer Doudna 如何在夏威夷以局外人的身份成长，可以看到 Leonardo da Vinci，还有 Elon Musk——在那个充满暴力的南非，有一个心理上极具破坏力的父亲，他和弟弟去参加一场反种族隔离音乐会，下火车时看见一个男人头上插着一把刀，他们踩进血泊，血腥黏在了鞋底。这样的创伤会留下一生的疤痕。问题不是你如何避免受伤，而是你如何与这些伤痛共处。
Lex FridmanThe following is a conversation with Walter Isaacson, one of the greatest biography writers ever, having written incredible books on Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci, Jennifer Doudna, Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and now a new one on Elon Musk. We talked for hours, on and off the mic. I’m sure we’ll talk many more times. Walter is a truly special writer, thinker, observer, and human being.以下是与 Walter Isaacson 的对话，他是有史以来最杰出的传记作家之一，写过关于 Albert Einstein、Steve Jobs、Leonardo da Vinci、Jennifer Doudna、Benjamin Franklin、Henry Kissinger 的精彩著作，如今又出版了一本关于 Elon Musk 的新书。我们断断续续聊了好几个小时，在镜头前后都有。我相信以后还会有更多次交谈。Walter 是一位真正特别的作家、思想家、观察者，也是一个非凡的人。
Lex FridmanI highly recommend people read his new book on Elon. I’m sure there will be short-term controversy, but in the long term, I think it will inspire millions of young people, especially with difficult childhoods, with hardship in their surroundings or in their own minds, to take on the hardest problems in the world and to build solutions to those problems, no matter how impossible the odds. In this conversation, Walter and I cover all of his books, and use personal stories from them to speak to the bigger principles of striving for greatness in science, in tech, engineering, art, politics and life.我强烈推荐大家去读他关于 Elon 的新书。我知道短期内会有些争议，但从长远来看，我认为它将激励数百万年轻人——尤其是那些有着艰难童年、生活环境或内心世界充满艰辛的人——去挑战世界上最难的问题，去构建解决方案，无论胜算多么渺茫。在这次对话中，Walter 和我聊遍了他所有的书，并用书中的私人故事探讨了在科学、技术、工程、艺术、政治和生活中追求卓越的更深层原则。
Lex FridmanThere are many things in the new Elon book that I felt are best saved for when I speak to Elon directly again on this podcast, which will be soon enough. Perhaps it’s also good to mention here that my friendships, like with Elon, nor any other influence like money, access, fame, power, will never result in me sacrificing my integrity, ever. I do like to celebrate the good in people, to empathize and to understand, but I also like to call people out on their bullshit with respect and with compassion. If I fail, I fail due to a lack of skill, not a lack of integrity. I’ll work hard to improve. This is the Lex Fridman podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. Now, dear friends, here’s Walter Isaacson. What is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great men and women, great minds? Is it a requirement, is it a catalyst, or is it just a simple coincidence of fate?新的 Elon 传记中有很多内容，我觉得最好留到我直接再次与 Elon 在播客上对话时再谈，那一天不会太远了。或许这里也值得提一下：我与 Elon 等人的友谊，以及金钱、渠道、名气、权力等任何外部影响，都绝对不会让我牺牲自己的诚信，永远不会。我确实喜欢看到人们身上美好的一面，愿意去理解和共情，但我也会以尊重和同情的方式指出他们的问题。如果我失败，那是因为能力不足，而不是诚信有问题。我会努力提升。这里是 Lex Fridman 播客。想要支持节目，请查看描述栏中的赞助商信息。好了，亲爱的朋友们，有请 Walter Isaacson。艰难的童年在伟大男女和伟大心灵的人生中扮演什么角色？它是必要条件、催化剂，还是只是命运的一个偶然巧合？
Walter IsaacsonWell, it’s not a requirement. Some people with happy childhoods do quite well, but it certainly is true that a lot of really driven people are driven because they’re harnessing the demons of their childhood. Even Barack Obama’s sentence in his memoirs, which is, I think, “Every successful man is either trying to live up to the expectations of his father or live down the sins of his father.” For Elon it’s especially true, because he had both a violent and difficult childhood and a very psychologically problematic father. He’s got those demons dancing around in his head, and by harnessing them, it’s part of the reason that he does riskier, more adventurous, wilder things than maybe I would ever do.这并不是必要条件。有些人在幸福的童年中成长，也做得相当好。但确实，很多极度拼命的人之所以如此驱动，是因为他们在驾驭童年的心魔。就连 Barack Obama 在回忆录里也有一句话，大意是：「每一个成功的男人，要么是在努力活出父亲的期望，要么是在拼命洗刷父亲的罪孽。」对 Elon 来说尤其如此，因为他既经历了暴力而艰难的童年，又有一个心理上极度扭曲的父亲。那些心魔在他脑子里跳个不停，而正是驾驭这些心魔，让他做出的事情比我可能会做的更冒险、更大胆、更疯狂。
Lex FridmanYou’ve written that Elon talked about his father, and that at times it felt like mental torture, the interaction with him during his childhood. Can you describe some of the things you’ve learned?你写到 Elon 谈及他的父亲，说有时候和父亲的相处感觉像是一种精神折磨，那是他童年时的遭遇。你能描述一些你了解到的情况吗？
Walter IsaacsonYeah. Well, Elon and Kimbal would tell me that, for example, when Elon got bullied on the playground, and one day was pushed down some concrete steps and had his face pummeled so badly that Kimbal said, “I couldn’t really recognize him,” and he was in the hospital for almost a week, but when he came home, Elon had to stand in front of his father, and his father berated him for more than an hour, and said he was stupid and took the side of the person who had beaten him.是的。Elon 和 Kimbal 告诉我，比如说，Elon 在操场上被人欺凌，有一次被人推下混凝土台阶，脸被打得很惨，Kimbal 说「我几乎认不出他来」，他在医院待了将近一个星期。但他回家之后，Elon 必须站在父亲面前，被他训斥了一个多小时，父亲说他蠢，还站在打他的那个人那边。
Lex FridmanThat’s probably one of the more traumatic events of Elon’s life.那大概是 Elon 生命中最具创伤性的事件之一了。
Walter IsaacsonYes, and there’s also Veldskool, which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to, and at one point he was scrawny. He was very bad at picking up social cues and emotional cues, he talks about being Asperger’s, and so he gets traumatized at a camp like that. The second time he went, he’d gotten bigger. He had shot up to almost six feet and he learned a little bit of judo, and he realized that if he was getting beaten up, it might hurt him, but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible, so that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon.是的，还有 Veldskool，那是一种准军事训练营，南非男孩会被送去参加。当时他还是个瘦弱的孩子，非常不擅长解读社交和情绪信号，他自己说有 Asperger's（阿斯伯格综合症），所以在那种营地里受到了很大的创伤。第二次去的时候，他已经长高了，几乎有六英尺了，还学了一点柔道，他意识到如果有人打他，虽然会痛，但他只管用最大力气一拳打回去打在对方鼻子上。这种「一定要反击」的意识，也从此深深刻进了 Elon 的骨子里。
Walter IsaacsonI spent a lot of time talking to Errol Musk, his father. Elon doesn’t talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimbal. It’s been years, and Errol doesn’t even have Elon’s email, so a lot of times Errol will be sending me emails. Errol had one of those Jekyll-and-Hyde personalities. He was a great mind of engineering and especially material science. Knew how to build a wilderness camp in South Africa using mica and how it would not conduct the heat, but he also would go into these dark periods in which he would just be psychologically abusive.我花了很多时间与 Elon 的父亲 Errol Musk 交谈。Elon 如今已经不和父亲 Errol Musk 说话了，Kimbal 也不说。已经好多年了，Errol 甚至没有 Elon 的邮箱，所以很多时候他会给我发邮件。Errol 是那种 Jekyll 和 Hyde 式的性格——他有着极为出色的工程头脑，尤其在材料科学方面，懂得如何在南非用云母建造一座不导热的野外营地，但他同时也会陷入那种黑暗时期，变得极具心理破坏力。
Walter IsaacsonOf course, Maye Musk says to me … his mother, who divorced Errol early on … said, “The danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.” Every now and then … you’ve been with him so much, Lex, and you know him well … he’ll even talk to you about the demons, about Diablo dancing in his head. I mean, he gets it, he’s self-aware, but you’ve probably seen him at times where those demons take over and he goes really dark and really quiet. Grimes says, “I can tell a minute or two in advance when demon mode’s about to happen,” and he’ll go a bit dark. I was here at Austin once at dinner with a group, and you could tell suddenly something had triggered him and he was going to go dark. I’ve watched it in meetings, where somebody will say, “We can’t make that part for less than $200,” or, “No, that’s wrong,” and he’ll berate them, and then he snaps out of it. You know that too, the huge snap-out, where suddenly he’s showing you a Monty Python skit on his phone and he’s joking about things. I think coming out of the childhood, there were just many facets, maybe even many personalities … the engineering mode, the silly mode, the charismatic mode, the visionary mode … but also the demon in dark mode.当然，Maye Musk——他的母亲，很早就与 Errol 离婚了——对我说：「Elon 最大的危险，是他可能变成他父亲。」偶尔，你和他相处了这么多时间，Lex，你了解他，他甚至会和你聊那些心魔，聊脑子里的 Diablo 在跳舞。我是说，他懂的，他有自我意识，但你可能也见过他某些时刻那些心魔完全掌控了他，他变得非常黑暗、非常沉默。Grimes 说：「我能提前一两分钟感觉到恶魔模式要来了。」他会变得有点阴暗。我有一次在 Austin 和一群人吃晚饭，你能明显感觉到某件事触发了他，他要进入黑暗模式了。我也在会议上看到过这种情况，有人说这个零件做不到低于 $200 或者不，那是错的，他就会大发雷霆，然后突然又回过神来。你也知道那种急转直下，突然他就拿出手机给你看一段 Monty Python 小品，开着玩笑。我觉得从那个童年走出来，他身上有很多面向，甚至可以说有很多重人格：工程模式、逗逼模式、魅力模式、远见者模式，以及那个恶魔的黑暗模式。
Lex FridmanA quote you cited about Elon’s really stood out to me. I forget who it was from, but, “Inside the man, he’s still there as a child, the child standing in front of his dad.”你引用的那句关于 Elon 的话让我印象深刻。我忘了是谁说的，大意是：「在那个男人的内心深处，那个孩子仍然站在父亲面前。」
Walter IsaacsonThat was Talulah, his second wife, and she’s great. She’s an English actress. They’ve been married twice, actually. Tallulah said that’s just him from his childhood. He’s a drama addict. Kimbal says that as well. I asked why, and Tallulah said, “For him, love and family are associated with those psychological torments, and in many ways he’ll channel.” I mean, Tallulah would be with him in 2008 when the company was going bad or whatever it may have been or later, and he would be so stressed he would vomit, and then he would channel things that his father had said, use phrases his father had said to him. She told me, “Deep inside the man is this man-child, still standing in front of his father.”那是 Talulah 说的，他的第二任妻子，她非常了不起，是一位英国女演员。他们其实结了两次婚。Tallulah 说，他就是从童年起就这样了，他是个戏剧上瘾者。Kimbal 也这么说。我问为什么，Tallulah 说：「对他来说，爱和家庭是与那些心理折磨联系在一起的，在很多方面他会将这些引导到其他地方。」我是说，Tallulah 在 2008 年公司陷入困境的时候陪在他身边，他压力大到会呕吐，然后他会引用父亲说过的话，用父亲曾经对他说过的措辞。她告诉我：「在那个男人的内心深处，仍然有一个孩子，站在父亲面前。」
Lex FridmanTo what degree is that true for many of us, do you think?你觉得这对我们很多人来说是否都是真实的？
Walter IsaacsonI think it’s true, but in many different ways. I’ll say something personal, which is I was blessed … and perhaps it’s a bit of a downside too … with the fact that I had the greatest father you could ever imagine, and mother. They were the kindest people you’d ever want to meet. I grew up in a magical place in New Orleans. My dad was an engineer, an electrical engineer, and he was always kind. Perhaps I’m not quite as driven or as crazed. I don’t have to prove things, so I get to write about Elon Musk.我觉得是真实的，但以不同的方式呈现。我说一件私事：我很幸运——这也许也是某种局限——有一对你能想象到的最伟大的父母，他们是你能遇到的最善良的人。我在新奥尔良一个充满魔力的地方长大。我父亲是一名工程师，电气工程师，他始终非常温和。也许我不像 Elon 那样拼命，也不那么疯狂，我没什么需要证明的，所以我就去写关于 Elon Musk 的书了。
Walter IsaacsonI get to write about Einstein or Steve Jobs or Leonardo DaVinci, who as you know, was totally torn by demons and had different difficult childhood situations, not even legitimized by his father. Sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle, sweet childhoods, we grow up with fewer demons, but we grow up with fewer drives, and we end up maybe being Boswell and not being Dr. Johnson. We end up being the observer, not being the doer. I always respect those who are in the arena.我得以写 Einstein、Steve Jobs、Leonardo DaVinci——如你所知，他完全被心魔撕扯着，有着各种艰难的童年经历，甚至连父亲的认可都得不到。有时候，我们这些足够幸运、有着温柔美好童年的人，长大之后心魔更少，但驱动力也更少，最终可能变成 Boswell 而不是 Dr. Johnson——成为观察者，而不是行动者。我始终敬佩那些身处竞技场中的人。
Lex FridmanYou don’t see yourself as a man in the arena?你不觉得自己也是一个身处竞技场中的人吗？
Walter IsaacsonI’ve had a gentle, sweet career, and I’ve got to cover really interesting people, but I’ve never shot off a rocket that might someday get to Mars. I’ve never moved us into the era of electric vehicles. I’ve never stayed up all night on the factory floor. I don’t have quite those, either the drives or the addiction to risk. I mean, Elon’s addicted to risk. He’s addicted to adventure. Me, if I see something that’s risky, I spend some time calculating, “Okay, upside/downside here.” That’s another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done, and people like me write about the Elon Musks.我的职业生涯温和而顺遂，得以记录真正有趣的人物，但我从未发射过一枚有朝一日可能飞抵火星的火箭，从未推动我们进入电动汽车时代，也从未在工厂车间彻夜不眠。我没有那种驱动力，也没有对风险的痴迷。我是说，Elon 就是对风险上瘾，对冒险上瘾。而我，如果遇到有风险的事，会花时间仔细盘算：「好，这件事的上行收益和下行风险各是什么？」这也是 Elon Musk 这样的人能做成事的原因之一，而像我这样的人则去写关于 Elon Musk 的书。
Lex FridmanOne other aspect of this, given a difficult childhood, whether it’s Elon or DaVinci, I wonder if there’s some wisdom, some advice almost that you can draw, that you can give to people with difficult childhoods.还有一个方面，面对艰难的童年，无论是 Elon 还是 DaVinci，我想知道你是否能从中提炼出某种智慧，某种近乎建议的东西，可以给那些同样经历艰难童年的人。
Walter IsaacsonI think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents. We all have demons, and rule one in life is harness your demons. Know that you’re ambitious or not ambitious or you’re lazy or whatever. Leonardo da Vinci knew he was a procrastinator. I think it’s useful to know what’s eating at you, know how to harness it. Also, know what you’re good at. I’ll take Musk as another example.我觉得我们每个人都有心魔，即便是我这种在新奥尔良那个充满魔力的地方、有着温柔父母的人也不例外。我们都有心魔，而人生第一法则就是：驾驭你的心魔。了解自己是否有野心、是否懒惰，或者是什么在驱动你。Leonardo da Vinci 知道自己有拖延症。我觉得了解是什么在折磨自己、知道如何去驾驭它，是有益的。同时也要了解自己的长处。我再拿 Musk 举个例子。
Walter IsaacsonI’m a little bit more like Kimbal Musk than Elon. I maybe got overendowed with the empathy gene. What does that mean? Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine. It was a group about 150 people on the editorial floors, and I knew them all and we had a jolly time. When I went to CNN, I was not very good at being a manager or an executive of an organization. I cared a little bit too much that people didn’t get annoyed at me or mad at me.我在某种程度上更像 Kimbal Musk 而不是 Elon。我可能过于被共情基因眷顾了。这意味着什么？意味着我管理 Time Magazine 的时候还行——那是一个大约 150 人的编辑团队，我认识他们每一个人，大家相处得很愉快。但当我去 CNN 的时候，我并不擅长作为一个大型组织的管理者或高管，因为我太在意别人是否会不高兴或生我的气。
Walter IsaacsonElon said that about John McNeil, for example, who was president of Tesla. It’s in the book. I talked to John McNeil a long time, and he says, “Elon just would fire people, be really rough on people. He didn’t have the empathy for the people in front of him.” Elon says, “Yeah, that’s right, and John McNeil couldn’t fire people. He cared more about pleasing the people in front of him than pleasing the entire enterprise or getting things done.”Elon 对 Tesla 前总裁 John McNeil 就是这么评价的，书里有写。我和 John McNeil 聊了很长时间，他说：「Elon 会直接开除人，对人很强硬，他对眼前的人没什么共情。」Elon 说：「对，就是这样。John McNeil 就是不能开除人，他更在乎让眼前的人高兴，而不是让整个公司运转或把事做成。」
Walter IsaacsonBeing overendowed with a desire to please people can make you less tough of a manager, and that doesn’t mean there aren’t great people who are overendowed. Ben Franklin, overendowed with the desire to please people. The worst criticism of him from John Adams and others was that he was insinuating, which meant he was always trying to get people to like him, but that turned out to be a good thing. When they can’t figure out the big state/little state issue at the Constitutional Convention, when they can’t figure out the Treaty of Paris, whatever it is, he brings people together, and that is his superpower.太想让人满意这件事会让你变成一个不那么强硬的管理者，但这并不意味着过于共情的人就不能优秀。Ben Franklin 就极度渴望让人喜欢，John Adams 等人对他最大的批评是他太「圆滑」——他总是努力让所有人都喜欢他。但这反而成了他的优势。当宪法大会无法解决大州小州之争，当无法谈妥《巴黎条约》，每次都是他把各方凝聚在一起，这就是他的超能力。
Walter IsaacsonTo get back to the lessons, you asked, and the first was harness your demons, the second is to know your strengths and your superpower. My superpower is definitely not being a tough manager. After running CNN for a while, I said, “Okay, I think I’ve proven I don’t really enjoy this or know how to do this well. Do I have other talents? Yeah, I think I have the talent to observe people really closely, to write about it in a straight but I hope interesting narrative style.” That’s a power. It’s totally different from running an organization.回到你问的那些教训，第一条是驾驭你的心魔，第二条是了解你的优势和超能力。我的超能力绝对不是做强硬的管理者。在 CNN 做了一段时间后，我说：「好，我想我已经证明了自己既不擅长也不享受这份工作。我还有其他才能吗？有，我觉得我有能力非常仔细地观察人，并以直接但希望有趣的叙事风格把它写出来。」那是一种能力，和管理一个组织完全不同。
Walter IsaacsonIt took me until three years of running CNN that I realized I’m not cut to be an executive in really high-intense situations. Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situations, so much so that when things get less intense … when they actually are making enough cars and rockets are going up and landing … he thinks of something else, so he can surge and have more intensity. He’s addicted to intensity, and that’s his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer.我用了三年在 CNN 才意识到，我不适合在高度紧张的环境中担任高管。Elon Musk 天生就适合在高度紧张的环境中担任高管，以至于当事情不那么紧张的时候——当他们真的能造出足够多的车、火箭也能发射并回收的时候——他反而去想别的事，这样他就能再一次激增、制造更大的紧迫感。他对紧迫感上瘾，这是他的超能力，远比「善于观察」这种超能力要厉害得多。
Lex FridmanI think also, to build on that, it’s not just addiction to risk and drama. There’s always a big mission above it. I would say it’s an empathy towards people in the big picture, humanity.我想补充一点，这不仅仅是对风险和戏剧的上瘾。他背后始终有一个更宏大的使命。我会说，这是一种对宏观层面人类的共情。
Walter IsaacsonIt’s an empathy towards humanity more than the empathy towards the three or four humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you, and that’s a big deal, and you see that in a lot of people. You see it Bill Gates or Larry Summers, Elon Musk. They always have empathy for these great goals of humanity, and at times they can be clueless about the emotions of the people in front of them or callous sometimes.这是一种对整个人类的共情，而不是对坐在会议室里那三四个人的共情，这是一个很大的区别。你在很多人身上都能看到这一点，比如 Bill Gates、Larry Summers、Elon Musk。他们对人类宏大目标总是充满共情，但有时候对眼前人的情绪却浑然不觉，甚至有些冷漠。
Walter IsaacsonMusk, as you said, is driven by mission more than any person I’ve ever seen, and it’s not only mission, it’s like cosmic missions, meaning he’s got three really big missions. One is to make humans a spacefaring civilization, make us multi-planetary, or get us to Mars. Number two is to bring us into the era of sustainable energy, to bring us into the era of electric vehicles and solar roofs and battery packs. Third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values.Musk，正如你所说，是我见过的最被使命驱动的人，而且不只是普通意义上的使命，而是宇宙级别的使命。他有三个非常宏大的使命：一是让人类成为能在太空中生存的文明，让我们成为多星球物种，或者到达火星；二是带领我们进入可持续能源时代，推动电动汽车、太阳能屋顶和电池储能的普及；三是确保人工智能是安全的，并与人类价值观保持一致。
Walter IsaacsonEvery now and then, I’d talk to him and we’d be talking about Starlink satellites or whatever, or he would be pushing the people in front of him at SpaceX and saying, “If you do this, we’ll never get to Mars in our lifetime,” and then he would give the lecture of how important it was for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime. I’m thinking, “Okay, this is the pep talk of somebody trying to inspire a team, or maybe it’s the type of pontification you do on a podcast.” On the 20th time I watched him, I realized, “Okay, I believe it. He actually is driven by this.”我时不时会和他交谈，我们聊到 Starlink 卫星或什么的，或者他在 SpaceX 的会议上逼着眼前的人，说：「如果你们这么做，我们这辈子永远到不了火星。」然后他会发表一番演讲，讲述在我们有生之年让人类意识到到达火星有多重要。我当时心想：「这是有人在给团队打气，或者是那种在播客上会说的高谈阔论吧。」但在第二十次看到他这样说的时候，我意识到：「好，我相信了，他是真的被这个目标驱动着的。」
Lex FridmanHe is frustrated and angry that, because of this particular minor engineering decision, the big mission is not going to be accomplished? It’s not a pep talk, it’s a literal frustration?他是真的对一个具体的小工程决策感到沮丧和愤怒，因为这会影响宏大使命的实现？这不是在打鸡血，而是一种真实的挫败感？
Walter IsaacsonAn impatience, a frustration, and it’s also just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission. He joked at one point to me about how much he loved reading comics as a kid, and he said, “All the people in the comic books, they’re trying to save the world, but they’re wearing their underpants on the outside and they look ridiculous.” Then he paused and said, “But they are trying to save the world.” Whether it’s Starlink in Ukraine or Starship going to Mars or trying to get a global new Tesla, I think he’s got this epic sense of the role he’s going to play in helping humanity on big things, and like the characters in the comic books, it’s sometimes ridiculous, but it also is sometimes true.是一种不耐烦，一种沮丧，而且那大概也是他骨子里最根深蒂固的东西——他的使命。他曾跟我开玩笑说他小时候有多喜欢读漫画，然后说：「漫画里所有那些角色都在努力拯救世界，但他们把内裤穿在外面，看起来很滑稽。」然后他停顿了一下说：「但他们确实在努力拯救世界。」无论是 Starlink 在乌克兰，还是 Starship 飞向火星，还是在全球推广新 Tesla，我觉得他有一种史诗般的使命感，觉得自己要在人类宏大命题上扮演重要角色。就像漫画里的那些角色，有时候荒诞，但有时候也是真的。
Lex FridmanWhen I was reading this part of the book, I was thinking of all the young people who are struggling in this way, and I think a lot of people are in different ways, whether they grow up without a father, whether they grow up with physical, emotional, mental abuse or demons of any kind, as you talked about. It’s really painful to read, but also really damn inspiring.我在读这本书的这部分时，一直在想那些正在挣扎的年轻人，我觉得很多人都在以不同方式挣扎，无论是没有父亲陪伴长大，还是经历过身体、情感或心理方面的创伤，或者像你说的那样有各种心魔。读起来真的很痛，但也真的非常激励人。
Walter IsaacsonThanks.谢谢。
Lex FridmanThat if you walk side by side with those demons, if you don’t let that pain break you or somehow channel it, if you can put it this way, that you can achieve. You can do great things in this world.如果你能与那些心魔并肩而行，不让那些痛苦把你击垮，或者能以某种方式将它们引导出去，那么你是可以做到的，可以在这个世界上成就大事的。
Walter IsaacsonWell, that’s an epic view of why we write biography, which is more epic than I had even thought of, so I say thank you, because in some ways what you’re trying to do is say, “Okay, I mean, Leonardo, you talk about being a misfit. He’s born illegitimate in the village of Vinci, and he’s gay and he’s left-handed and he’s distracted, and his father won’t legitimize him. Then he wanders off to the town of Florence, and he becomes the greatest artist and engineer of that part of the Renaissance.那是一种关于传记写作意义的宏大视角，比我自己想象的还要宏大，所以我要感谢你，因为你试图说的某种程度上是：Leonardo，你说他是个格格不入的人。他出生在 Vinci 小村庄，私生子，同性恋，左撇子，容易分心，父亲不认他。然后他流浪到 Florence，成了文艺复兴那个时期最伟大的艺术家和工程师。
Walter IsaacsonI hope this book inspires. Jennifer Doudna, the gene editing pioneer who helps discover CRISPR, the gene editing tool, which in my book, The Code Breaker, she grew up feeling like a misfit in Hawaii in a Polynesian village, being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her. If people can read the books … and I should have said about Jennifer Doudna, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, “No, girls don’t do science. Science is not for girls. You’re not going to do math or science.” It pushes her to say, “All right, I’m going to do math and science.”我希望这本书能带来激励。Jennifer Doudna，基因编辑先驱，帮助发现了 CRISPR 基因编辑工具，在我的书《The Code Breaker》中，她在夏威夷的一个波利尼西亚村庄长大，作为那里唯一的白人感觉格格不入，同时还要努力满足父亲的期望。如果人们能读这些书，关于 Jennifer Doudna 我还应该补充一点，她被学校的升学辅导老师告知：「不，女孩子不学科学，科学不适合女生，你不会去学数学或科学的。」这反而激励她说：「好，我偏要去学数学和科学。」
Lex FridmanJust to interrupt real quick, but Jennifer Doudna, you’ve written an amazing book about her. A Nobel Prize winner, CRISPR developer, just incredible. One of the great scientists in the 21st century,容我插一句，Jennifer Doudna，你为她写了一本精彩的书。诺贝尔奖得主，CRISPR 的开发者，真的了不起，是 21 世纪最伟大的科学家之一。
Walter IsaacsonRight, and I’m talking about when Jennifer Doudna was young and she felt really, really out of place, like you and me and a lot of people when they’re feeling that way, they read books. They curl up with a book. Her father drops a book on her bed called The Double Helix, the book by James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA by him and Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick, and she realizes, “Oh, my God, girls can become scientists. My school guidance counselor is wrong.”对，我说的是当 Jennifer Doudna 年轻时，她感到非常、非常格格不入，就像你和我，还有很多人在那种状态下会做的事一样——读书。她蜷缩着捧着一本书。她父亲在她床上放了一本叫《The Double Helix》的书，那是 James Watson 写的关于他与 Rosalind Franklin 和 Francis Crick 共同发现 DNA 结构的书，她突然意识到：「天哪，女孩也可以成为科学家。我的升学辅导老师是错的。」
Walter IsaacsonI think books … like she read this book, and even if it’s a comic book like Elon Musk read … books can sometimes inspire you. Every one of my books is about people who were totally innovative, who weren’t just smart, because none of us are going to be able to match Einstein in mental processing power, but we can be as curious as he was and creative and think out of the box the way he did, or as Steve Jobs put it, think different.我觉得书——就像她读的这本，甚至像 Elon Musk 读的漫画书——有时候能给你带来启发。我所有的书里写的人都是真正具有创造力的人，他们不只是聪明，因为我们谁也无法在脑力处理上匹敌 Einstein，但我们可以像他一样充满好奇心，像他一样有创造力，像他一样跳出框框去思考，或者像 Steve Jobs 说的，think different（不同凡想）。
Walter IsaacsonI hope with my books I’m saying, “This isn’t a how-to guide, but this is somebody you can walk alongside.” You can see Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. You can see Jennifer Doudna growing up or as an outsider, or Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father, and getting off the train when he goes to an anti-apartheid concert with his brother and there’s a man with a knife sticking out of his head, and they step into the pool of blood and it’s sticky on their soles. This causes scars that last the rest of your life. The question is not how do you avoid getting scarred, it’s how do you deal with it.我希望通过我的书传递这样一个信息：「这不是一本操作指南，而是一个你可以并肩同行的人。」你可以看到 Einstein 如何在德国以犹太人身份成长，可以看到 Jennifer Doudna 如何以局外人身份成长，可以看到 Leonardo da Vinci，还有 Elon Musk——在那个充满暴力的南非，有一个心理上极具破坏力的父亲，他和弟弟去参加一场反种族隔离音乐会，下火车时看见一个男人头上插着一把刀，他们踩进血泊，血腥黏在了鞋底。这样的创伤会留下一生的疤痕。问题不是你如何避免受伤，而是你如何与这些伤痛共处。
Lex FridmanIt’s hard to pick my favorite of your biographies, but Einstein, I mean, you really paint a picture of another … I don’t want to call him a misfit … but a person who doesn’t necessarily have a standard trajectory through life of success.很难说最喜欢你哪本传记，但 Einstein 那本，你真的画出了另一个……我不想叫他格格不入的人，但他确实不是一个走着标准成功轨迹的人。
Walter IsaacsonAbsolutely.完全正确。
Lex FridmanThat’s extremely inspiring. I don’t know exactly what question to ask. There’s a million.这极其鼓舞人心。我不太确定该问什么问题，可以问的太多了。
Walter IsaacsonI’ll talk about the misfit for a second, because we talked about Leonardo being that way. Einstein’s Jewish in Germany, at a time when it starts getting difficult. He’s slow in learning how to talk and he’s a visual thinker, so he’s always daydreaming and imagining things. The first time he applies to the Zurich Polytech … because he runs away from the German education system because it’s too much learning by rote … he gets rejected by the Zurich Polytech.我来聊聊这种「格格不入」，因为我们已经谈到 Leonardo 是这样的人。Einstein 是德国的犹太人，在那个时代开始变得艰难。他说话学得很慢，是一个视觉思维者，总在做白日梦和想象事物。他第一次申请 Zurich Polytech——因为他逃离了德国那种死记硬背的教育体系——结果被 Zurich Polytech 拒绝了。
Walter IsaacsonNow, it’s the second-best school in Zurich, and they’re rejecting Einstein. I tried to find, but couldn’t, the name of the admissions counselor at the Zurich Polytech, like, “You rejected Einstein?” Then he doesn’t finish in the top half of his class. Once he does and he goes to graduate school, they don’t accept his dissertation, so he can’t get a job. He’s not teaching. He even tries about 14 different high schools at Gymnasium to get a job, and they won’t take him.这可是 Zurich 第二好的学校，他们拒绝了 Einstein。我试图找出那个 Zurich Polytech 招生辅导员的名字，但没找到，真想问他：「你拒绝了 Einstein？」后来他毕业了但成绩不在班级前半段，进了研究生院，论文又没被接受，所以找不到工作，也没法教书。他甚至试着向大约 14 所不同的中学申请工作，都没人要他。
Walter IsaacsonHe’s a third-class examiner in the Swiss patent office in 1905, third class because they’ve rejected his doctoral dissertation, so he can’t be second class or first class. He doesn’t have a doctoral degree, and yet he’s sitting there on the stool in the patent office in 1905, and writes three papers that totally transform science. If you’re thinking about being misunderstood or unappreciated, in 1906, he’s still a third-class patent examiner. In 1907, he still is. It takes until 1909 before people realize that this notion of the Theory of Relativity might be correct and it might upend all of Newtonian physics.1905 年，他是瑞士专利局的一名三级审查员——因为他的博士论文被拒，所以只能是三级，连二级都不够。他没有博士学位，然而他坐在专利局的凳子上，在 1905 年写出了三篇彻底改变科学的论文。如果你曾经觉得自己被误解或得不到赏识，想想 1906 年他还是三级专利审查员，1907 年也是。直到 1909 年，人们才开始意识到这个相对论或许是正确的，或许会颠覆整个牛顿物理学。
Lex FridmanHow is it possible for three of the greatest papers in the history of science to be written in one year by this one person? Is there some insights, wisdoms you draw?一个人怎么可能在一年内写出科学史上最伟大的三篇论文？你从中得出了什么洞见和智慧？
Walter IsaacsonPlus he had a day job as a patent examiner, and there’s really three papers but there’s also an addendum, because once you figure out quantum theory and then you figure out relativity, and you’re understanding Maxwell’s equations and the speed of light, he does a little addendum. That’s the most famous equation in all of physics, which is E equals MC squared, so it’s a pretty good year.而且他白天还有专利审查员的本职工作。严格来说是三篇论文加一个附录，因为当你搞清楚量子理论，又搞清楚相对论，在理解 Maxwell 方程组和光速的过程中，他又写了一个小附录。那是物理学中最著名的方程式，也就是 E 等于 MC 平方，所以那真是相当不错的一年。
Walter IsaacsonIt partly starts because he’s a visual thinker, and I think it was helpful that he was at the patent office, rather than being the acolyte of some professor at the academy where he was supposed to follow the rules. At the patent office, they’re doing devices to synchronize clocks, because the Swiss have just gone on Standard times zones, and Swiss people, as you know, tend to be rather Swiss. They care, if it strikes the hour in Basel, it should do the same in Bern at the exact incident.这一切的起点，部分在于他是一个视觉思维者。而且我觉得在专利局工作对他来说反而有帮助，而不是做某位教授的门生、在学术体制内按规则行事。在专利局，他们在处理时钟同步设备，因为瑞士刚刚采用了标准时区，而瑞士人，如你所知，是相当讲究的，他们很在意：如果 Basel 整点报时，Bern 也应该在完全相同的瞬间报时。
Walter IsaacsonYou have to send a light signal between two distant clocks, and he’s visualizing what’s it look like to ride alongside a light beam. He says, “Well, if you catch up with it, if you go almost as fast, it’ll look stationary,” but Maxwell’s equations don’t allow for that. He said, “It was making my palms sweat that I was so worried.” He finally figures out, because he’s looking at these devices to synchronize clocks, that if you’re traveling really, really fast, what looks synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction. He makes a mental leap that the speed of light’s always constant, but time is relative depending on your state of motion. It was that type of out-of-the-box thinking, those leaps, that made 1905 his miracle year.你必须在两个相距很远的时钟之间发送光信号，而他在想象骑着光束会是什么感觉。他说：「如果你追上它，如果你的速度接近光速，它看起来就是静止的。」但 Maxwell 方程组不允许这种情况。他说：「这个矛盾让我手心冒汗，我太焦虑了。」最终他想通了，因为他一直在看这些同步时钟的装置，他意识到如果你以非常非常快的速度移动，对你来说看起来同步的事情，对于一个以非常快的速度朝相反方向运动的人来说，是不同步的。他做出了一个飞跃：光速始终是恒定的，但时间是相对的，取决于你的运动状态。正是这种跳出框框的思考，那些飞跃，使得 1905 年成为他的奇迹年。
Walter IsaacsonLikewise with Musk. I mean, after General Motors and Ford, everybody gives up on electric vehicles. To just say, “I know how we’re going to have a path to change the entire trajectory of the world into the era of electric vehicles.” Then when he comes back from Russia, where he tried to buy a little rocket ship so he could send a experimental greenhouse to Mars, and they were poking fun of him and actually spit on him at one point in a drunken lunch.Musk 也一样。在 General Motors 和 Ford 之后，所有人都放弃了电动汽车。他竟然说：「我知道一条路，能让整个世界的轨迹转向电动汽车时代。」然后当他从俄罗斯回来，那次他试图买一艘小火箭把一个实验性温室送上火星，结果他们嘲弄他，甚至在一次醉酒午餐中向他吐口水。
Walter IsaacsonThis is very fortuitous, because on the ride back home on the plane, on the Delta Airlines flight, he’s doing the calculations of how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel. How much would it really cost? He’s visualizing things that other people would just say is impossible. It’s what Steve Jobs’s friends called the reality distortion field, and it drove people crazy. It drove them mad, but it also drove them to do things they didn’t think they would be able to do.这反而是一件很有意义的事，因为在回程的飞机上，在那班 Delta Airlines 航班上，他开始计算需要多少材料、多少金属、多少燃料，实际成本会是多少。他在想象别人认为根本不可能的事情。这就是 Steve Jobs 的朋友们所说的「现实扭曲力场」，会把人逼疯，但也驱使他们做到了他们以为自己不可能做到的事。
Lex FridmanYou said visual thinking. I wonder if you’ve seen parallels of the different styles and kinds of thinking that operate the minds of these people. Is there parallels you see between Elon, Steve Jobs, Einstein, DaVinci, specifically in how they think?你提到了视觉思维。我想知道你是否看到了这些人不同思维方式之间的某些共同点？在 Elon、Steve Jobs、Einstein、DaVinci 的思维方式上，你看到了哪些相似之处？
Walter IsaacsonI think they were all visual thinkers, perhaps coming from slight handicaps as children, meaning Leonardo was left-handed and a little bit dyslexic, I think. Certainly Einstein had echolalia. He would repeat things. He was slow in learning to talk. I think visualizing helps a lot. With Musk, I see it all the time when I’m walking the factory lines with him or in product development, where he’ll look at, say, the heat shield under the Raptor engine of a Starship booster, and he’ll say, “Why does it have to be this way? Couldn’t we trim it this way or make it … or even get rid of this part of it?” He can visualize the material science.我觉得他们都是视觉思维者，这也许来自他们儿时某种轻微的障碍——Leonardo 是左撇子，我觉得还有一点阅读障碍。Einstein 肯定有仿语症，会重复话语，学说话很慢。我觉得视觉化思维帮助很大。在 Musk 身上，我时常能看到这一点，无论是跟着他走生产线，还是在产品开发中——他会看着，比如，Starship 助推器 Raptor 发动机下方的隔热层，然后说：「为什么必须是这样？我们能不能这样裁一下，或者做成那样，甚至把这部分去掉？」他能在脑子里看见材料科学。
Walter IsaacsonThere’s small anecdotes in my book, but at one point he’s on the Tesla line and they’re trying to get 5,000 cars a week in 2018. It’s a life-or-death situation. He’s looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis, and he insists that Drew … not Drew, that Lars Moravy, one of his great lieutenants, come, and they have to summon him, and he says, “Why are there six bolts here?我书里有一些小细节，有一次他在 Tesla 的生产线上，那是 2018 年，他们在努力做到每周 5,000 辆车，那是生死攸关的时刻。他看着将零件固定到底盘上的机器，坚持要叫来……不是 Drew，是 Lars Moravy，他最得力的副手之一，他们把 Lars 叫来，他说：「这里为什么有六个螺栓？」
Walter IsaacsonLars and others explained, “Well, for the crash test or anything else, the pressure would be in this way, so you have to,” and they were blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. He said, “No. If you visualize it, you’ll see if there’s a crash, the force would go this way and that way, and it could be done with four bolts.” Now, that sounds risky, and they go test it and they engineer it, but it turns out to be right. I know that seems minor, but I could give you 500 of those, where in any given day he’s visualizing the physics of an engineering or manufacturing problem.Lars 和其他人解释说：「嗯，考虑到碰撞测试或其他情况，压力会从这个方向来，所以必须……」他们巴拉巴拉说了一堆。他说：「不对。如果你视觉化一下，会看出如果发生碰撞，力是这样那样传导的，四个螺栓就够了。」这听起来很冒险，他们去测试和工程验证，但结果证明他是对的。我知道这听起来无关紧要，但我能给你举 500 个这样的例子——在任何给定的一天，他都在用视觉化的方式看待某个工程或制造问题的物理原理。
Walter IsaacsonThat sounds pretty mundane, but for me, if you say what makes him special, there’s the mission-driven thing. I’d give you a lot of reasons, but one of the reasons is he cares not just about the design of the product, but visualizing the manufacturing of the product, the machine that makes the machine, and that’s what we failed to do in America for the past 40 years. We outsourced so much manufacturing. I don’t think you can be a good innovator if you don’t know how to make the stuff you’re designing. That’s why Musk puts his designers’ desks right next to the assembly lines in the factories, so that they have to visualize what they drew as it becomes the physical object.这听起来可能很平常，但对我来说，如果你问他有什么特别之处，除了使命驱动之外，我会给你很多理由，其中一个就是他不只关心产品的设计，还关心制造这个产品的过程，关心「制造机器的机器」，而这恰恰是美国过去 40 年没做好的事情。我们外包了太多制造业。我认为，如果你不知道如何制造你设计的东西，你就不可能成为一个真正的创新者。这就是为什么 Musk 把设计师的办公桌放在工厂装配线旁边，让他们必须亲眼看到自己画在图纸上的东西如何变成实物。
Lex FridmanUnderstanding everything, from the physics all the way up to the software? It’s like end to end.理解从物理层面一直到软件层面的一切？就像是端到端。
Walter IsaacsonWell, having an end-to-end control is important. Certainly with Steve Jobs. I’m looking at my iPhone here. It’s a big deal. That hardware only works with Apple software, and for a while the iTunes store only worked. He has an end-to-end that makes it like a Zen garden in Kyoto. Very carefully curated, but a thing of beauty. For Musk when he first was at Tesla …掌握端到端的控制权非常重要。Steve Jobs 绝对是这样。我手里看着我的 iPhone，这很有意思。那个硬件只能配合 Apple 软件，一段时间内 iTunes Store 也只在这个体系内运转。他构建了一个端到端的闭环，像京都的禅意庭院，精心打磨，但美不胜收。Musk 在最初加入 Tesla 时……
Walter IsaacsonFor Musk when he first was at Tesla and before he was the CEO, when he was just the executive chairman and basically the finance person, person funding it, they were outsourcing everything. They were making the batteries in Japan and the battery pack would be at some barbecue shop in Thailand and got sent to the Lotus factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise chassis and then… That was a nightmare. You did not have end to end control of the manufacturing process. So he goes to the other extreme. He gets a factory in Fremont from Toyota and he wants to do everything in-house. The software in-house, the painting in-house, the battery. He makes his own batteries. And I think that end-to-end control is part of his personality, but it’s also what allows Tesla to be innovative.Musk 在最初加入 Tesla 还不是 CEO 的时候，只是执行董事长兼财务支持者，那时候他们把一切都外包出去了。电池在日本制造，电池组在泰国某个烧烤店里组装，然后运到英国的 Lotus 工厂，装进 Lotus Elise 的底盘……那简直是一场噩梦。你对整个制造过程根本没有端到端的控制权。后来他走向了另一个极端，从 Toyota 那里拿下了 Fremont 的工厂，要把一切都内部化。软件内部做，喷漆内部做，电池也是——他们自己造电池。我觉得这种端到端的控制既是他的性格使然，也是 Tesla 能够持续创新的原因所在。
Lex FridmanYeah, I got to see and understand in detail one example of that, which is the development of the brain of the car in autopilot going from Mobile Eye to in-house building the autopilot system to basically getting rid of all sensors that are not rich in data to make it AI friendly, saying that we can do it all with vision. And like you said, removing some of the bolts. So sometimes it’s small things, but sometimes it’s really big things like getting rid of radar.对，我就亲眼见证并深入了解过其中一个例子，就是汽车大脑的开发——autopilot 从 Mobile Eye 到自研，再到基本去掉所有非视觉传感器，以便让 AI 更友好，他说我们可以纯靠视觉实现。就像你说的去掉螺栓，有时候是小事，但有时候是非常大的事，比如去掉雷达。
Walter IsaacsonWell, vision only, getting rid of radar is huge and everybody’s against it. They’re still fighting it a bit. They’re still trying to do it next generation some form of radar. But it gets back to the first principles. We’re talking about visualizing. Well, he starts with the first principles. And the first principles are physics involve things like, well, humans drive with only visual input. They don’t have radar, they don’t have LiDAR, they don’t have sonar, and so there is no reason in the laws of physics that make it so that vision only won’t be successful in creating self-driving. Now, that becomes an article of faith to him and he gets a lot of pushback. And he’s by the way, not been that successful in meeting his deadlines of getting self-driving, he’s way too optimistic. But it was at first principles of get rid of unnecessary things.纯视觉方案，去掉雷达，这是个大动作，所有人都反对。他们现在还在争，下一代还打算做某种形式的雷达。但这回到了第一性原理，我们谈到了视觉化。他从第一性原理出发，而这些原理涉及物理学，比如：人类开车只靠视觉输入，没有雷达，没有 LiDAR，没有声呐，所以物理定律中没有任何东西证明纯视觉不能用于自动驾驶。这对他来说成了一种信仰，他受到了很多质疑。顺带说一句，他在实现自动驾驶的时间表上一直过于乐观，没能按时兑现，但出发点是第一性原理——去掉不必要的东西。
Walter IsaacsonNow you would think, LiDAR, why not use it? Why not use a crutch? It’s like, yeah, we can do things vision only, but when I look at the stars at night I’ll use a telescope too. Well, you could use LiDAR, but you can’t do millions of cars that way at scale. At a certain point you have to make it not only a good product but a product that goes to scale. And you can’t make it based on maps like Google Maps because it’ll never be able to then drive from New Orleans to Slidell where I want to go when it’s too hot in New Orleans.现在你可能会想，LiDAR 为什么不用？为什么不用个辅助工具？就好比我们可以纯靠视觉看星星，但有望远镜何乐而不用。确实，你可以用 LiDAR，但你无法以那种方式规模化生产数百万辆车。到了某个节点，你需要的不只是一个好产品，而是一个能规模化的产品。你也不能依赖像 Google Maps 那样的地图，因为那样你就永远无法让车从 New Orleans 开到 Slidell，那是我在新奥尔良太热的时候想去的地方，地图根本没法覆盖那条路。
Walter IsaacsonTake for example, full self drive. He has been obsessed with what he calls the robotaxi. We’re going to build the next generation car without a steering wheel, without pedals because it’s going to be full self-drive. You just summon it, you won’t need to drive it. Well over and over again, all these people I’ve told you about, Lars Moravy and Drew Baglino and others, they’re saying, okay, fine, that sounds really good, but it ain’t happened yet. We need to build a $25,000 mass market global car that’s just normal with a steering wheel. And yeah, he finally turned around a few months ago and said, let’s do it.再比如全自动驾驶 FSD。他一直痴迷于他所说的 Robotaxi——我们要造下一代没有方向盘、没有踏板的汽车，因为它将实现全自动驾驶，你只需要召唤它，不需要自己开。但一次又一次，我说的那些人，Lars Moravy、Drew Baglino 和其他人，都在说：好，听起来不错，但目前根本还没实现。我们需要造一辆 $25,000 的平价全球车，就是一辆普通的有方向盘的正常车。直到几个月前，他终于转变过来说，好，那就做吧。
Walter IsaacsonAnd then he starts focusing on how’s the assembly line going to work? How are we going to do it and make it the same platform for Robotaxi, so you’re going to have the same assembly line. Likewise for full self-drive, they were doing it by coding hundreds of thousands of lines of code that would say things like, if you see a red light stop, if there’s a blinking light, if there two yellow lines do this. If there’s a bike lane, do this, if there’s a crosswalk, do that.然后他开始专注于：装配线怎么安排？怎么让它和 Robotaxi 共用同一套平台，用同一条装配线？同样，在全自动驾驶方面，之前他们的做法是编写几十万行代码，什么「看到红灯停车」、「有闪烁信号灯这么做」、「有两条黄线这么做」、「有自行车道这么做」、「有人行横道那么做」。
Walter IsaacsonWell, that’s really hard to do. Now he’s doing it through artificial intelligence and machine learning only. FSD 12 will be based on the billion or so frames from Tesla each week of Tesla drivers and saying, what happened when a human was in this situation? What did the human do? And let’s only pick the best humans, the five star drivers, the Uber drivers, as Elon says. And so that’s him changing his mind and going to first principles but saying, all right, I’m even going to change full self-driving so there’s not rules based, it becomes AI based, just like ChatGPT doesn’t try to answer your question, who are the five best popes or something by study. ChatGPT does it by having ingested billions of pieces of writing that people have done. This will be AI, but real world done by ingesting video.这种方法真的很难做好。现在他完全转向人工智能和机器学习。FSD 12 将基于 Tesla 每周从特斯拉车主那里采集的大约十亿帧数据，去问：当一个人类驾驶员遇到这种情况时，他是怎么做的？让我们只选最好的驾驶员，五星级驾驶员，就像 Elon 说的，Uber 司机那样的水平。所以这是他改变思路，回归第一性原理，但说「好，我连全自动驾驶的逻辑都要改，不再是规则式的，改成 AI 驱动的」——就像 ChatGPT 回答「五位最好的教皇是谁」之类的问题时，不是靠研究，而是靠摄取了数十亿篇人类写作后得出答案。这将是 AI，但是现实世界的 AI，靠摄取视频数据来驱动。
Lex FridmanSometimes it feels like he and others that are building things in this world successfully are basically confidently exploring a dark room with a very confident ambitious vision of what that room actually looks like. They’re just walking straight into the darkness. There’s no painful toys or legos on the ground. I’m just going to walk. I know exactly how far the wall is, and then very quickly willing to adjust as they run into, they step on the Lego and their body is filled with a lot of pain. What I mean by that is there’s this kind of evolution that seems to happen where you discover really good ideas along the way that allow you to pivot.有时候我觉得，他和其他成功建造事物的人，基本上就是在自信地摸黑探索一个房间，同时对那个房间长什么样有着极其笃定的雄心愿景。他们就是径直走进黑暗，脚下没有玩具积木，我就往前走，我知道距离墙有多远——然后非常快地做出调整，当他们踩到积木，全身充满疼痛感。我的意思是，似乎有一种进化在发生，你在路上发现了真正好的想法，让你得以在关键时刻转向。
Lex FridmanTo me since a few years ago when you could see with Andrei Karpathy, the software 2.0 evolution of autopilot, it became obvious to me that this is not about the car. This is about Optimus, the robot. This is like if we look back a hundred years from now, the car will be remembered as a cool car, nice transportation, but the autopilot won’t be the thing that controls the car. It’ll be the thing that allows embodied AI systems to understand the world, so broadly. And so that kind of approach. And you kind of stumble into it, will Tesla be a car company? Will it be an AI company? Will it be a robotics company? Will it be a home robotics company? Will it be an energy company? And then you kind of slowly discover this as you confidently push forward with a vision. So it’s interesting to watch that kind of evolution as long as it’s backed by this confidence.对我来说，从几年前就能看到，随着 Andrei Karpathy 主导的 autopilot software 2.0 演化，这显然不只是关于汽车，这是关于 Optimus 机器人的，这是未来一百年后回望时，汽车会被记住是一辆不错的车、不错的交通工具，但 autopilot 不会被记住为控制汽车的技术，而是让具身 AI 系统理解世界的技术，是非常广泛意义上的理解。所以这种方式，你慢慢摸索：Tesla 会是一家汽车公司？AI 公司？机器人公司？家用机器人公司？能源公司？然后你在带着自信推进愿景的过程中慢慢发现这些答案。看着这种演化是非常有意思的，只要背后有这种自信在支撑。
Walter IsaacsonThere are a couple of things that are required for that. One is being adventurous. One doesn’t enter a dark room without a flashlight and a map unless you’re a risk-taker, unless you’re adventurous. The second is to have iterative brain cycles where you can process information and do a feedback loop and make it work. The third, and this is what we failed to do a lot in the United States and perhaps around the world, is when you take risks, you have to realize you’re going to blow things up. First three rockets, the Falcon Rockets that Musk does, they blow up. Even Starship, three and a half minutes, but then it blows up the first time. So I think Boeing and NASA and others have become unwilling to enter your dark room without knowing exactly where the exit is and the lighted path to the exit.这需要几个前提条件。第一是勇于冒险，一个人不会在没有手电筒和地图的情况下走进黑暗房间，除非他是一个愿意冒险、勇于探索的人。第二是要有迭代的思维循环，能够处理信息、做出反馈循环并让它运转起来。第三点是我们在美国，乃至全世界很多地方都没做好的：当你冒险的时候，你必须意识到事情会爆炸。Musk 前三枚 Falcon 火箭都炸了。Starship 第一次也是飞了三分半钟然后爆炸了。所以我觉得 Boeing、NASA 以及其他机构已经变得不敢进入那个黑暗房间，除非事先知道出口在哪、通往出口的路是亮着的。
Walter IsaacsonAnd the people who created America, whenever they came over, whether the Mayflower, refugees from the Nazis, they took a lot of risks to get here. And now I think we have more referees than we have risk-takers, more lawyers and regulators and others saying, you can’t do that, that’s too risky than people willing to innovate, and you need both. I think you’re also right on 50, a hundred years from now, what Musk will be most remembered for besides space travel is real world AI. Not just Optimus the robot, but Optimus the robot and the self-driving car. They’re pretty much the same. They’re using GPU clusters or dojo chips or whatever it may be to process real world data. We all got, and you did on your podcast, quite excited about large language model, generative predictive text AI. That’s fine, especially if you want to chit-chat with your chatbot. But the holy grail is artificial general intelligence and the tough part of that is real world AI and that’s where Optimus, the robot or full self-drive are I think far ahead of anybody else.建立美国的那些人，无论是乘五月花号来的，还是逃离纳粹的难民，他们冒了巨大的风险来到这里。而现在我觉得我们有更多的裁判员而不是冒险家，有更多的律师、监管者、各种人在说「你不能这么做，太危险了」，而不是愿意创新的人。两者都需要。我觉得你说得也对，50 年、100 年后，除了太空探索，Musk 被最多人记住的将是真实世界的 AI。不只是 Optimus 机器人，而是 Optimus 机器人加上自动驾驶汽车，它们本质上是同一件事——都在用 GPU 集群或 Dojo 芯片来处理真实世界的数据。我们所有人，包括你在播客上，都对大型语言模型、生成式预测文本 AI 感到非常兴奋，这很好，特别是如果你想和聊天机器人闲聊的话。但真正的圣杯是通用人工智能，而其中最难的部分是真实世界的 AI，这正是 Optimus 机器人和全自动驾驶所处的赛道，我认为它们远远领先于任何其他人。
Lex FridmanWell, I like how you said chitchat. I would say for one of the greatest writers ever, it’s funny you spoke about language and the mastery of languages as merely chitchat. People have fallen in love over some words. People have gone to wars over some words. I think words have a lot of power. It’s actually an interesting question where the wisdom of the world, the wisdom of humanity is in the words or is it in visuals, is it in the physical? I don’t really-好吧，你说「闲聊」这个词让我觉得有趣，作为有史以来最伟大的作家之一，你居然把语言和对语言的掌握说成只是「闲聊」。人们曾经为了几个字陷入爱河，也曾为了几个字走向战争。我觉得文字有着巨大的力量。这其实是一个有趣的问题：人类的智慧是存在于文字中，还是存在于图像中，存在于物质世界中？我不太……
Walter IsaacsonIt’s in mathematics.在数学中。
Lex FridmanMaybe it all boils down to math and in the end, this kind of discussion about real world AI versus language is all the same. Maybe. I’ve gotten a chance to hang out quite a bit in the Metaverse with Mr. Mark Zuckerberg recently, and boy is the realism in there. The thing that’s coming up in the future is incredible. I got scanned in Pittsburgh for 10 hours into the Metaverse and there’s a virtual version of me and I got to hang out with that virtual version.也许归根结底是数学，关于真实世界 AI 与语言的讨论，归根结底也许是同一回事。也许吧。我最近有机会在 Metaverse 里和 Mark Zuckerberg 一起待了相当长时间，里面的真实感……未来将要出现的东西令人叹为观止。我在 Pittsburgh 被扫描了 10 个小时，进入了 Metaverse，有了一个我的虚拟版本，我和那个虚拟版本相处了一段时间。
Walter IsaacsonDo you like yourself?你喜欢自己吗？
Lex FridmanWell, I never like myself. But it was easier to like that other guy, that was interesting.嗯，我从来不喜欢自己。但更容易喜欢那个另一个家伙，这挺有意思的。
Walter IsaacsonDid he like you?他喜欢你吗？
Lex FridmanHe didn’t seem to care much.他好像不太在乎。
Walter IsaacsonThat’s the lack of the empathy.那就是缺乏共情了。
Lex FridmanBut it made me start to question even more than before, well, how important is this physical reality? Because I got to see myself and other people in that metaverse, the details of the face, all the things that you think maybe if you look at yourself in the mirror are imperfections, all this kind of stuff of stuff. When I was looking at myself and at others, all those things are beautiful and it was real and it was intense and it was scary because you’re like, well, are you allowed to murder people in the metaverse? What are you allowed to do? Because you can replicate a lot of those things and you start to question what are the fundamental things that make life worth living here as we know as humans.但这让我比以前更深刻地思考，物理现实到底有多重要？因为我看到了自己和其他人在那个 Metaverse 里的样子，脸部的细节，所有那些你平时对着镜子觉得是缺陷的地方，以及各种各样的东西。当我看着自己和别人的时候，所有那些东西都是美丽的，那感觉很真实，很强烈，也很令人恐惧——因为你会想，在 Metaverse 里可以杀人吗？你被允许做什么？因为你可以复制很多东西，然后你开始质疑：作为人类，什么是让我们的生活值得活下去的根本？
Walter IsaacsonHave you talked to Elon about his views of we’re living in a simulation maybe and how you would figure out if that’s true?你有没有和 Elon 聊过他关于我们生活在模拟中的观点，以及如何判断这是否是真的？
Lex FridmanYes, there’s a constant lighthearted but also a serious sense that this is all a bit of a game.有的，他有一种持续的、半开玩笑但又认真的感觉——觉得这一切有点像一场游戏。
Walter IsaacsonOne of my theories on Elon, a minor theory, is that he read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy once too often. And as you know, there’s a scene in there that says that there’s a theory about the universe that if anybody ever discovers the secrets of meanings of the universe, it will be replaced by an even more complex universe. And then the next line Douglas Adams writes is, and there’s another theory that this has already happened, so I’m not trying to get my head around that, but I know that Elon Musk tries to.关于 Elon 我有一个次要理论：他把《银河系漫游指南》读了太多遍了。如你所知，书里有一幕说，有一个理论认为，如果宇宙中有人发现了宇宙意义的秘密，它就会立刻被一个更复杂的宇宙所取代。然后 Douglas Adams 写道：还有另一个理论认为，这件事已经发生了。我不打算在这里深究这件事，但我知道 Elon Musk 在努力搞明白这个问题。
Lex FridmanWell, there’s a humor to that.这里面有种幽默感。
Walter IsaacsonThere’s an enormous humor to Hitchhiker’s Guide. I really think that helped Musk out of the darkest of his periods to have sort of the sense of fun of figuring out what life is all about.《银河系漫游指南》里有一种无与伦比的幽默。我真的觉得，带着这种对搞清楚生命意义的趣味感，帮助 Musk 走出了他最黑暗的时期。
Lex FridmanI wonder if as a small aside we could say just having gotten to know Elon very well, the silliness, the willingness to engage in the absurdity of it all and have fun. What is that? Is that just a cork of personality or is that a fundamental aspect of a human who’s running six plus companies?我想稍微跑个题，基于对 Elon 的了解，那种傻乎乎的劲儿，那种愿意拥抱一切荒诞并从中找乐子的态度，是什么？那只是他个人性格的一个特质，还是一个同时运营六家以上公司的人在性格上的一个根本方面？
Walter IsaacsonWell, it’s a release valve just like video games and Polytopia and Elden Ring are release valves for him. And he does have an explosive sense of humor as you know. And the weird thing is when he makes the abrupt transition from dark demon mode and you’re in a conference room and he has really become upset about something and not only there dark vibes, but there’s dark words emanating and he’s saying, your resignation will be accepted if you… et cetera. And then something pops and he pulls out his phone and pulls up a Bonnie Python’s skit like the School of Silly Walks or whichever John Cleese it was. And he starts laughing again and things break. So it’s almost as if he has different modes, the emulation of human mode, the engineering mode, the darkened demon mode, and certainly there is the silly and giddy mode.这是一个减压阀，就像电子游戏、Polytopia 和 Elden Ring 对他来说都是减压阀一样。他有一种爆发性的幽默感，如你所知。奇怪的是，当他完成那种急转弯，从黑暗的恶魔模式回来——他在会议室里已经对某件事真的非常生气，不只是黑暗的气氛，还有黑暗的话语，他在说「如果你……我接受你的辞职」之类的话——然后某个东西砰的一声断开了，他掏出手机拉出一段 Monty Python 小品，比如「愚蠢的走路风格」或者某个 John Cleese 的视频，他开始大笑，紧张的气氛就散了。所以他就像有不同的模式：模拟人类模式、工程模式、黑暗恶魔模式，以及那个傻乎乎、嘻嘻哈哈的模式。
Lex FridmanYeah, you’ve actually opened the Elon book with the quotes from Elon and from Steve Jobs. So Elon’s quote is to anyone I’ve offended, I just want to say, this is on SNL, I just want to say I reinvented electric cars and I’m sending people to Mars on a rocket ship. Did you also think I was going to be a chill normal dude? And then the quote from Steve Jobs of course is the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do. So what do you think is the role of the old madness and genius? What do you think the role of crazy in this?对，你实际上用了 Elon 和 Steve Jobs 的两段引言开头写这本 Elon 传记。Elon 的引言来自 SNL，他说：「对于所有被我冒犯过的人，我只想说，我重新发明了电动汽车，我用火箭把人送上火星，你以为我会是一个冷静正常的家伙吗？」Steve Jobs 的引言当然是：那些疯狂到以为自己能改变世界的人，才是真正改变世界的人。所以你觉得疯狂与天才之间是什么关系？你认为「疯」在其中扮演什么角色？
Walter IsaacsonWell, first of all, let’s both stipulate that Musk is crazy at times, I mean. And then let’s figure out, and I try to do it through storytelling, not through highfalutin preaching, where that craziness works. Give me a story, tell me an anecdote, tell me where he is crazy. And the almost final example, AI, but him shooting off Starship for the first time and between an aborted countdown in the shoot off he goes to Miami to an ad sales conference and meets Linda Yaccarino for the first time, makes her the CEO. I mean there’s a very impulsiveness to him. Then he flies back, they launch Starship.首先，我们都来承认一点，Musk 有时候确实很疯。然后我们来通过讲故事而不是空洞说教来搞清楚，这种疯狂在哪里起作用。给我讲个故事，给我讲个案例，告诉我他在哪里是疯的。最近的例子，AI 先不说，他第一次发射 Starship，在一次中止发射倒计时和正式发射之间，他飞去 Miami 参加一个广告销售会议，第一次见到 Linda Yaccarino，当场任命她为 CEO。他真的是非常冲动。然后他飞回来，发射 Starship。
Walter IsaacsonAnd you realize that there’s a drive and there’re demons and there’s also craziness and you sometimes want to pull those out. You want to take away his phone so he doesn’t tweet at 3:00 AM. You want to say quit being so crazy. But then you realize there’s a wonderful line of Shakespeare in measure for measure at the very end. He says, even the best are molded out of faults. And so you take the faults of Musk, for example, which includes a craziness that can be endearing but also a craziness that’s just like effing crazy as well as this drive and demon mode. I don’t know that you can take that strand out of the fabric and the fabric remains whole.你意识到，有驱动力、有心魔，还有疯狂，你有时候真想把它们剥离出来。你想把他的手机抢走，不让他凌晨 3 点发推，你想说「别这么疯了」。但随后你会想到 Shakespeare 在《量刑》结尾那句话：「即使是最好的人也是由过错塑造的。」所以把 Musk 的缺点拿出来看，包括那种有时令人觉得可爱、但有时又真的他妈的疯的疯劲，以及这种驱动力和恶魔模式，我不知道你能不能把这根线从织物中抽出来，而织物还保持完整。
Lex FridmanI wonder sometimes it saddens me that we live in a society that doesn’t celebrate even the darker aspects of crazy and acknowledging that it all comes in one package. It’s the man in the arena versus the critic.我有时候会感到悲哀，我们生活在一个不会去庆祝疯狂的阴暗面、不承认这一切都是一个整体的社会。竞技场上的人对比旁观批评者。
Walter IsaacsonAnd the man in the arena versus the regulator to make it more prosaic.竞技场上的人对比监管者，说得更俗气一点。
Lex FridmanWell, let me ask about not just the crazy but the cruelty. So you’ve written when reporting as Steve Jobs, Woz told you that the big question to ask was did he have to be so mean, so rough and cruel, so drama addicted, what is this answer for Steve Jobs? Did he have to be so cruel?那我来问问，不只是疯狂，还有残忍。你在写 Steve Jobs 的时候提到，Woz 告诉你一个大问题：「他有必要那么刻薄、那么粗鲁和残忍，那么上瘾于戏剧吗？」对于 Steve Jobs，你怎么回答这个问题——他有必要那么残忍吗？
Walter IsaacsonFor Jobs, I asked Woz at the end of my reporting because that’s what he said at the beginning. We’re doing the launch of I think the iPad 2, it may have been. Steve is emaciated because he’s been sick. And so I say to Woz, what’s the answer to your question? And he said, well, if I had been running Apple, I would’ve been nicer to everybody. Everybody got stock options. We’ve been like a family. And then I don’t know if you know Woz, he was like a teddy bear. He paused, he smiled and he said, but if I had been running Apple, I don’t think we would’ve done the Macintosh or the iPhone. So yeah, you have to sometimes be rough. And Jobs said the same thing that Musk said to me, which is he said, people like you love wearing velvet gloves. Now, I don’t know that I’ve worn velvet gloves often. But you like people to like you, like to sweet talk things, your sugarcoat things.关于 Jobs，我在采访结束时问了 Woz，因为那是他一开始提出的问题。我们在发布一个活动，我想是 iPad 2 的发布会。Steve 已经因为生病而骨瘦如柴。我对 Woz 说，你的那个问题现在有答案了吗？他说，嗯，如果是我在管 Apple，我会对所有人更好一些，每个人都有股票期权，我们会像一个大家庭。然后我不知道你认不认识 Woz，他就像个大毛绒熊，他停顿了一下，笑着说，但如果是我在管 Apple，我不认为我们会做出 Macintosh 或 iPhone。所以，是的，有时候你必须强硬。Jobs 跟我说过同样的话，和 Musk 对我说的如出一辙：他说，像你这样的人喜欢戴着丝绒手套。我不知道我有没有经常戴丝绒手套。但你喜欢让人喜欢你，喜欢好好说话，把事情包上糖衣。
Walter IsaacsonHe says, I’m just a working class kid and I don’t have that luxury. If something sucks, I got to tell people it sucks or I got a team of B players. Well, Musk is that way as well. And it gets back to what I said earlier, which is yeah, I probably would wear velvet gloves if I could find them at my haberdasher, and I do try to sugarcoat things. But when I was running CNN, it needed to be reshaped, it needed to be broken, it needed to have certain things blown up, and I didn’t do it. So bad on me, but it made me realize, okay, I’ll just write about the people who can do it.他说：我只是个工薪阶层出身的孩子，我没有那个奢侈。如果某件事很烂，我就得告诉他们它很烂，否则我就只有一支 B 级球队。Musk 也是这样。这也回到了我之前说的，是的，如果能找到，我大概会戴上丝绒手套，我确实倾向于把事情包上糖衣。但当我管 CNN 的时候，它需要被重塑，需要被打破，需要有些东西被炸掉，而我没做到。这是我的失职，但这也让我明白，好吧，我就去写关于能做到这些事的人的书。
Lex FridmanWell, that thing of saying, I think probably both of them, but Elon certainly saying things like that is the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.有一件事，我觉得他们两个都这样，Elon 肯定是这样，就是说出「这是我听过最蠢的话」这样的话。
Walter IsaacsonBy the way I’ve heard Jeff Bezos say that, I’ve heard Bill Gates say that, I’ve heard Steve Jobs say it. I’ve heard Steve Jobs say it about a smoothie. They were making it a whole food or something. I mean people, they used the word stupid really often. And you know who else used it? Errol Musk. He kept baking Elon stand in front of him and saying, that’s the stupidest thing, you’re the stupidest person, you’ll never amount to anything. I don’t know as John McNeil, the president of Tesla said, do you have to be that way? Probably not. There are a lot of successful people who are much kinder, but it’s sometimes necessary to be much more brutal and honest, brutally honest, I would say, than people like who win Boss of the Year trophies.顺便说一句，我听过 Jeff Bezos 这么说，听过 Bill Gates 这么说，听过 Steve Jobs 这么说。Steve Jobs 甚至对着一杯冰沙这么说，那是在某个全食超市还是什么地方。我是说，这些人真的很频繁地用「蠢」这个词。你知道还有谁这么用吗？Errol Musk。他不停地让 Elon 站在他面前，说「这是最蠢的事」、「你是最蠢的人」、「你永远不会有出息」。我不知道就像 Tesla 前总裁 John McNeil 说的，你有必要那样吗？可能不必要。有很多成功的人要善良得多，但有时候，比那些赢得「年度最佳老板」奖杯的人更直接、更诚实，是必要的。
Lex FridmanWell, as you said, this kind of idea did also send a signal, this idea of Steve Jobs of a-players, it did send a signal to everybody. It was a kind of encouragement to the people that are all in.正如你所说，这种理念也传递了一个信号，Steve Jobs 的 A 级球员理念，确实向所有人发出了信号，是对那些全身心投入的人的一种激励。
Walter IsaacsonRight, and that happened at Twitter when we went to Twitter headquarters the day before the takeover, he was having Andrew and James, his two young cousins and other people from the autopilot team going over lines of code and Musk himself sat there with a laptop on the second floor of the building looking at the lines of code that had been written by Twitter engineers and they decided they were going to fire 85% of them because they had to be all in. And this notion of psychological safety and mental days off and working remotely. He said either… And then it came up, actually one of his, I think it was one of the cousins or maybe Ross Nordine came up with the idea of let’s not be so rough and just fire all these people. Let’s ask them, do you really want to be all in because this is going to be hardcore, it’s going to be intense, you get to choose. But by midnight tonight, we want you to check the box. I’m hardcore all in. I’ll be there in person. I’ll work as much. Or that’s not for me. I’ve got a family, I’ve got work balance. And you got different type of people that way in different stages of their life. I was a little bit more hardcore and all in when I was in my twenties than when I was in my fifties.对，这在 Twitter 的时候也发生了。我们在收购前一天去了 Twitter 总部，他的两个年轻堂弟 Andrew 和 James，以及来自 autopilot 团队的其他人，在逐行审查代码，Musk 自己坐在那栋楼二楼，拿着笔记本电脑看 Twitter 工程师写的代码，他们决定要开掉其中 85%，因为他们必须是全心投入的。关于心理安全感、精神健康假期、远程工作这些概念，他要么说……后来实际上，我觉得是他某个堂弟，或者也许是 Ross Nordine 提出了这个想法：我们别那么粗暴，不要直接开掉这些人，而是问他们，你真的愿意全心投入吗？因为这将是硬核的、高强度的，你可以自己选择。在今晚午夜之前，我们要你勾选「我是硬核的，我全力投入，我会到场办公，我会拼命工作」，或者「这不适合我，我有家庭，我需要工作生活平衡」。这样就能把不同类型的人区分开来。在人生的不同阶段，每个人的状态也不同，我二十多岁的时候比五十多岁的时候更愿意拼命投入。
Lex FridmanAnd you write about this, this really nice idea actually that there’s two camps and you find out… I wonder how true this is, it rings true. That you can just ask people, which camp are you in? Are you the kind of person that prizes themselves that enjoy staying up till 2:00 AM programming or whatever, or do you see the value of work-life balance, all this kind of stuff? And it’s interesting, I mean people probably divide themselves in different stages of life and you could just ask them and it makes sense for certain companies at certain stages of their development to be like, we only want hardcore people.你也在书里写到了这一点，这个想法其实挺有意思——你会发现，我不知道这有多准确，但感觉很真实：你可以直接问人们，你在哪个阵营？你是那种以熬夜到凌晨 2 点写代码为荣、乐在其中的人，还是那种重视工作与生活平衡的人？人们可能在人生的不同阶段会给出不同的答案，而且对处于特定发展阶段的某些公司来说，只想要硬核的人，这是完全合理的。
Walter IsaacsonOr teams, it doesn’t even have to be a whole company. And you’re right, it goes back to what I was saying about rule. The first secret is sort of know thyself. Obviously it comes from Plato and everything comes from Plato and Socrates, but and decide in this stage of my life, do I want to be a hackathon all in all night and change the world or do I want to bring wisdom and stability but also have balance? I think it’s good to have different companies with different styles. The problem was Twitter was at almost one extreme with yoga studios and mental health days off and enshrining psychological safety as one of the mantras that people should never feel psychologically threatened. And I remember the bitter laugh he unleashed when he kept hearing that word. He said, no, I like the words hardcore. I like intensity. I like a intense sense of urgency as our operating principle. Well, yeah, there’re people that way as well. So know who you are and know what type of team you want to build.或者团队，甚至不必是整个公司。你说得对，这回到了我之前说的那条规则：第一个秘诀其实是「认识你自己」。显然这出自柏拉图，一切都出自柏拉图和苏格拉底，然后你要决定，在我人生的这个阶段，我是想参加马拉松式的黑客松、彻夜不眠地改变世界，还是想带来智慧和稳定，同时保持平衡？我认为拥有风格各异的公司是好事。问题在于 Twitter 当时几乎走到了一个极端——瑜伽室、精神健康假期，把心理安全感当成核心准则，人们绝对不能感到心理上受到威胁。我记得他听到「心理安全感」这个词时发出的那声苦笑。他说，不，我喜欢「硬核」这个词，我喜欢高强度，我把高度紧迫感作为我们的运营原则。嗯，这样的人也是有的。所以，认清自己，认清你想建立什么样的团队。
Lex FridmanVersus psychological safety and too many birds everywhere.与心理安全感和到处飞翔的小鸟相对的。
Walter IsaacsonOh yeah. A lot of times Musk did things and I go, what the hell? Among them was changing the name Twitter and getting rid of the birds? Man, it’s a lot invested in that brand. But when I watched him, he thought, okay, these sweet little chirpy birds tweeting away in the name Twitter. It’s not hardcore, it’s not intense. And so for better and for worse, I think he’s taking acts into the hardcore realm with people who post hardcore things with people with hardcore views. It’s not a polite play pen for the blue checked anointed elite. And I thought, okay, this is going to be bad. The whole thing’s going to fall apart. Well, it has had problems, but the hardcore intensity of it’s also meant that there’s new things happening there. So it’s very Elon Musk to not like the sweetness of birds chirping and tweeting and saying, I want something more hardcore.对，Musk 做的很多事让我都在想，这到底是在干什么？其中之一就是把名字从 Twitter 改了，把鸟的 logo 去掉？天啊，那个品牌里有多少积累。但当我看着他，他在想，好，那些甜蜜的小鸟在 Twitter 的名字里唧唧喳喳，不够硬核，不够有力度。所以不管好坏，我觉得他在把这个平台推向硬核的领域，让发硬核内容的人、持硬核观点的人在这里发言，它不再是一个有蓝标认证精英的礼貌游乐场。我当时觉得，哦，这要坏事了，整件事要崩了。结果确实出了问题，但这种硬核的力度也带来了一些新的东西在发生。所以这非常 Elon Musk 风格——不喜欢那些小鸟叽叽喳喳的甜蜜感，要做更硬核的东西。
Lex FridmanAs you’ve written in referring to the previous Twitter CEO, Elon said Twitter needs a fire breathing dragon. I think this is a good opportunity to maybe go through some of the memorable moments of the Twitter saga as you’ve written about extensively in your book from the early days of considering the acquisition to how it went through to the details of like you mentioned, the engineering teams.正如你在书中写的，Elon 提到前任 Twitter CEO 时说，Twitter 需要一条喷火龙。我觉得这是一个很好的机会，来梳理一下你在书中大量记录的 Twitter 并购传奇，从最初考虑收购，到后来的进展，再到你提到的与工程团队相关的细节。
Walter IsaacsonWell, at the beginning of 2022, he was riding high, but as we say, he’s a drama addict, he doesn’t like to coast. And Tesla sold a million vehicles, I think 33 boosters, Falcon Nines have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months, and he was the richest person on earth and Times person of the year. And yet he’d said, I still want to put all my chips back on the table. I want to keep taking risks. I don’t want to savor things. He had sold all of his houses. So he starts secretly buying shares of Twitter. January, February, March. Becomes public at a certain point he has to declare it. And we were here in Austin at Gigafactory on the mezzanine and he was trying to figure out, well, where do I go from here? And at that time, this is early April, they were going to offer him a board seat and he was going to do a standstill agreement and stop at 10% or something.事情的起点是 2022 年初，他当时意气风发，但正如我们所说，他是个戏剧上瘾者，不喜欢惰性滑行。Tesla 卖出了 100 万辆车，我想过去几个月有 33 枚 Falcon 9 助推器发射并安全着陆，他是地球上最富有的人，也是《Time》杂志的年度人物。然而他说，我还是想把所有筹码推回桌上，我要继续冒险，我不想享受现在的成果。他把所有房子都卖了。于是他开始悄悄买入 Twitter 股票，一月、二月、三月，到了某个节点他不得不公开披露。我们那时候在 Austin 的 Gigafactory 夹层，他在想下一步怎么走。那是四月初，他们正要给他提供一个董事会席位，他也打算签一份协议，持股不超过 10%。
Walter IsaacsonI remember we were standing around, it was Luke Nozik, whom you know well, Ken Howery, some of his friends on that mezzanine here. And all afternoon and then late into the evening at dinner is like, should we do this? And I didn’t say anything, I’m just the observer, but everybody else is saying, excuse me, why do you want to own Twitter? And Griffin, his son joined at dinner and May for some reason was in town. And everybody says, no, we don’t use Twitter. Why would you do that? And May said, well, I use Twitter.我记得我们站在那里，有 Luke Nozik，你肯定认识，还有 Ken Howery 和他的一些朋友在那个夹层上。整个下午，到晚上吃晚饭，大家一直在问：我们要这么做吗？我只是一个旁观者，没有发言，但所有人都在问，「打扰一下，你为什么要拥有 Twitter？」他的儿子 Griffin 也在晚饭时加入了，Maye 不知为何也在城里。所有人都说，不，我们又不用 Twitter，你为什么要这样做？Maye 说，嗯，我用 Twitter 啊。
Walter IsaacsonAnd it is almost like, okay, the demographics are people my age or May’s age. And so it looked like he wasn’t going to pursue it. They offered him a board seat and then he went off to Hawaii to Larry Ellison’s house, which he sometimes uses. He was meeting a friend, Angela Bassett, an actress, and instead of enjoying three days of vacation, he just became supercharged and started firing off text messages, including the fire breathing dragon one, I think he used that phrase a few times that Parag wasn’t the person who was going to take Twitter to a new level.这几乎就像是说，好吧，这个平台的用户是像我或 Maye 这个年龄段的人。所以看起来他并不打算继续追这件事了。他们给他提供了一个董事会席位，然后他去了 Larry Ellison 在夏威夷的房子，那是他有时会借住的地方，他是去见一个朋友 Angela Bassett，一位女演员，但在三天假期里，他非但没有放松，反而完全充电，开始疯狂发短信，其中就包括那句喷火龙，我觉得他用了那个词好几次，说 Parag 不是那个能把 Twitter 带上新台阶的人。
Walter IsaacsonAnd then by the time he gets to Vancouver where Grimes meets him, they stay up all night playing Elden Ring. He was doing a Ted Talk. And then at 5:30 he finishes playing the Elden Ring and sends out that I’ve made an offer. Even when he comes back, people are trying to intervene and say, excuse me, why are you doing it? And so it was a rocky period between late April and October when the deal closes. And people ask me all the time, well, did he want to get out of the deal? I said, which Elon are you talking about at what time of day? Because there’ll be times in the morning when he’d say, oh, the Delaware court’s going to force me to do it, it’s horrible. Talk to his lawyers. You can win this case. Get me out of it.然后他去了 Vancouver，Grimes 在那里与他会面，他们通宵玩 Elden Ring。他去做了一个 TED 演讲，然后在 5 点 30 分玩完 Elden Ring 之后，他发出了那条「我已经提出了收购要约」的信息。即便回来之后，也有人在试图干预，问他为什么要这么做。所以从四月下旬到十月交易完成，这是一段相当动荡的时期。人们经常问我，他有没有想过退出？我说，你在说哪一天几点的哪个 Elon？因为可能早上他会说，哦，特拉华州的法院要强制我执行，太糟糕了，跟律师说，你们能不能赢这场官司，帮我退出。
Walter IsaacsonHe met here in Austin with three or four investment bankers, Blair Efron at Center View, Bob Steele at Perella Weinberg, and they offered him options, do you want to get out? Do you want to stay in? Do you want to reduce the price? And I think he was mercurial. There were times he would text me or say to me, this is going to be great. It’s going to be the accelerant to do x.com the way we thought about 20 years ago. And so it’s not until they finally tell them at the beginning of October, right when Optimus the robot is being unveiled in California actually, that the lawyer is saying, you’re not going to probably win this case, better go through with the deal. And by then he’s not only made his peace with it, he’s kind of happy with it at times.他在 Austin 与三四位投行人士会面，包括 Center View 的 Blair Efron、Perella Weinberg 的 Bob Steele，他们给他提供了各种选择：你想退出吗？你想留下来吗？你想压价吗？我觉得他是反复无常的。有时候他会发短信给我或当面对我说，这会很棒的，它将成为加速器，按照我们二十年前在 x.com 设想的那样来做。直到十月初，就在 Optimus 机器人在加州正式亮相的时候，他的律师告诉他，你赢不了这场官司，最好按照协议执行。到那时候，他不只是接受了这件事，在某些时刻，他甚至有点高兴了。
Walter IsaacsonEventually the deal is going to close on, I think a Friday morning, I have it in the book, and we’re there on Thursday and he’s wandering around looking at the Stay Woke t-shirts and psychological safety lingo they’re all using. And he and his lawyers and bankers hatched a plan to do a flash close. And the reason for that was if they closed the deal after the markets had closed for the day and he could send a letter to Parag and to others firing them, quote, for cause, and this’ll be something the courts will have to figure out, then he could save 200 million or so. And it was both the money, but for him, a matter, I won’t say of principle, but of, Hey, they misled me about the numbers. I got forced into doing it, so I’m going to try this jujitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them.交易最终在——我书里有具体日期——我想是某个周五上午完成。周四我们还在那里，他在到处转，看着那些「Stay Woke」T 恤和他们到处贴的「心理安全感」标语。他和律师、银行家们密谋了一个「闪电交割」计划。原因是，如果能在股市收市后完成交割，然后以「有正当理由」的名义解雇 Parag 等人——这最终是法院需要裁定的问题——那他就能省下大约 2 亿美元左右。这既是钱的问题，但对他来说也是一种态度，我不说是原则，而是：嘿，他们误导了我关于数据的信息，他们强迫我执行这个交易，所以我要用这个柔术动作，从他们那里拿回一些钱。
Walter IsaacsonThen when he takes over, it’s kind of a wild scene, him trying to decide in three different rounds how to get the staff down to 15% of what it was him deciding on Christmas Eve after he’d been at a meeting where they told him, we can’t get rid of that Sacramento server farm because it’s needed for redundancy. And he says, no, it’s not. And he’s flying here to Austin and young James says, why don’t we just do it ourselves? He turns the plane around, they land in Sacramento and he pulls them out himself. So it was a manic period.然后他接手之后，场面非常混乱，他分三轮决定如何把员工削减到原来的 15%，圣诞节前夕他参加了一个会议，有人告诉他，不能关掉 Sacramento 那个服务器农场，因为它是冗余备份所必需的。他说，不，不是的。他正要飞回 Austin，年轻的 James 说，为什么我们不自己去做？他把飞机调头，他们降落在 Sacramento，他亲自去拔那些插头。所以那是一段非常癫狂的时期。
Lex FridmanWe should also say that underneath of that, there was a running desire to, or a consideration to perhaps start a new company to build a social media company from scratch.我们也应该提到，在那个过程下面，一直有一种持续的愿望，或者一种考量，或许干脆从头开始建一家新公司来做一个社交媒体平台。
Walter IsaacsonWell, Kimball wanted to do that, and Kimball here at a wonderful restaurant in Austin at lunch is like, Hey, why are you buying Twitter? Let’s start one from scratch and do it on the blockchain. Now, it took them a while and you can argue it one way or the other.对，Kimbal 就想这么做，他在 Austin 一家很棒的餐厅吃午饭时说，嘿，你为什么要买 Twitter？我们从零开始，在区块链上建一个。这花了他们一段时间，而且你可以从不同角度来看这个问题。
Walter IsaacsonNow, it took him a while and you can argue it one way or the other, to come to the conclusion that the blockchain was not fast enough in responsive time enough to be able to handle a billion tweets in a day or so. He gets mad when they keep trying to get them to talk to Sam Bankman-Fried, who’s trying to say, “I’ll invest, but we have to do it on the blockchain.” Kimball is still in favor of starting a new one and doing it on blockchain-based. In retrospect, I think starting a new media company would’ve been better. He wouldn’t have had the baggage or the legacy that he’s breaking now in breaking the way Twitter had been. But it’s hard to have hundreds of millions of true users, not just trolls, and start from scratch as others have found. There’s Mastodon and Blue Sky and Threads. Threads even had a base, so it would’ve been hard.他花了一段时间，你可以从两个方向来论证，最终得出结论：区块链的响应时间不够快，无法处理每天大约 10 亿条推文。每次有人不停地向他提起 Sam Bankman-Fried，说「我可以投资，但必须在区块链上做」，他就烦透了。Kimbal 仍然支持从头开始做一个基于区块链的新平台。回头来看，我认为从头创建一个新的社交媒体公司会更好，他就不必背负 Twitter 那些历史遗留问题。但要拥有数以亿计的真实用户，而不只是水军，然后还要从零开始，就像其他人发现的那样，这很难。现在有 Mastodon、Blue Sky 和 Threads，Threads 甚至有既有用户基础，从头来做也是很难的。
Lex FridmanYeah, and to do that in the way he did requires another part that you write about with the Three Musketeers and the whole engineering, the firing and the bringing in the engineers to try to go hardcore, so there’s a lot of interesting questions to ask there. But high level, can you just comment about that part of the saga, which is, bringing in the engineers and seeing what can we do here?对，要那样做，需要另一个部分，就是你书中写到的「三个火枪手」和那整套工程思路——开除人、引入工程师、推行硬核文化，这里面有很多有趣的问题可以问。但从宏观层面来说，你能不能概括一下那一段传奇，也就是引入工程师，然后看看我们到底能做什么？
Walter IsaacsonRight. He brought in the engineers and figured that the amount of people doing Tesla full self-driving autopilot and all the software there was about 1/10 of what was doing software for Twitter. He said, “This can’t be the case,” and he fired 85% in three different rounds. The first was just firing people because they looked at the coding, and they had a team of people from Tesla’s autopilot team grading the codes of all that was written in the past year or so. Then he fired people who didn’t seem to be totally all in or loyal, and then another round of layoffs.对。他把工程师带进来，发现 Tesla 全自动驾驶 autopilot 和所有软件加起来的人数，大概是 Twitter 软件团队的十分之一。他说：「这不可能。」然后他分三轮开掉了 85% 的人。第一轮就是直接看代码，他从 Tesla autopilot 团队里拉了一批人来评估过去一年左右所有代码的质量。然后他开掉了那些看起来不够全力投入或不够忠诚的人，再之后又来了一轮裁员。
Walter IsaacsonSo at each step of the way, almost everybody said, “That’s enough, it’s going to destroy things,” from Alex Sparrow, his lawyer, to Jared Birchall, it’s like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa.” Even Andrew and James, the young cousins who are tasked with making a list and figuring out who’s good or bad, say, “We’ve done enough, we’re going to be in real trouble.” They were partly right. There was degradation of the service some, but not as much as half the services I use half the time. I wake up each morning and hit the app and okay, still there.在每一步，几乎所有人都说，「够了，再这样下去要把公司毁了」，从他的律师 Alex Sparrow 到 Jared Birchall，都是「哇哦哦哦」地叫停。就连负责拉黑名单、判断谁好谁坏的年轻堂弟 Andrew 和 James 也说，「我们已经做得够多了，再这样下去我们真的要出大问题了。」他们有部分是对的，服务确实有所降级，但没有降到我平时用的一半服务的一半水平。每天早上我打开这个 app，好，还在。
Lex FridmanWhat do you think? Was that too much?你怎么看？他裁得太多了吗？
Walter IsaacsonI think that he has an algorithm that we mentioned earlier that begins with question every requirement, but it’s up to is delete, delete, delete, delete every part there. Then a corollary to that is if you don’t end up adding back 20% of what you deleted, then you didn’t delete enough in the first round ’cause you were too timid. Well, so you asked me did he overdo it? He probably overdid it by 20%, which is his formula, and they’re probably trying to hire people now to keep things going.我认为他有一套我们之前提过的算法，第一步是质疑每一个要求，最终走向删掉、删掉、删掉、删掉、删掉每一个部分。然后这套逻辑有一个推论：如果你最后没有把删掉的东西加回来 20%，那说明你第一轮删得不够，因为你当时太保守了。那你问我他是否过头了？他大概过头了 20%，这也是他自己的公式，他们现在大概正在想办法招人来维持运转。
Lex FridmanBut it sends a strong signal to people that are hired back or the people that are still there, the APIs, yeah-但这给那些被重新招回来的人，或者还留在那里的人，以及 API 方面，发出了一个强烈的信号……
Walter IsaacsonYeah, and what Steve Jobs and many other great leaders felt, and certainly Bezos, and certainly in the early days of Microsoft, Bill Gates, it was hardcore only A players.对，而 Steve Jobs 和很多其他伟大的领导者也是这种感觉，Bezos 肯定是，Microsoft 早期的 Bill Gates 也是——只要 A 级球员，只要硬核的。
Lex FridmanSo how much of Elon’s success would you say, Elon’s and Steve Jobs’ success is the hiring and managing of great teams?那你会说，Elon 和 Steve Jobs 的成功，有多大程度是来自于招募和管理优秀团队？
Walter IsaacsonWhen I asked Steve Jobs at one point, “What was the best product you ever created?” I thought he’d say maybe the Macintosh or maybe the iPhone. He said, “No, those products are hard. The best thing I ever created was the team that made those products, and that’s the hard part is creating a team,” and he did, from Jony Ive to Tim Cook and Eddie Cue and Phil Schiller. Elon has done a good job bringing in people, Gywnne Shotwell, obviously, Linda Yaccarino. She can navigate through the current crises, certainly stellar people at SpaceX like Mark Juncosa, and then at Tesla, like Drew Baglino and Lars Moravy and Tom Zhu and many others.有一次我问 Steve Jobs：「你创造过最好的产品是什么？」我以为他会说 Macintosh 或者 iPhone。他说：「不，那些产品很难做。我创造的最好的东西是造出那些产品的团队，打造那个团队才是最难的。」他确实做到了，从 Jony Ive 到 Tim Cook、Eddie Cue 和 Phil Schiller。Elon 也在引进人才方面做得不错，Gwynne Shotwell 当然是，Linda Yaccarino 能驾驭当前的各种危机，SpaceX 里也有 Mark Juncosa 这样的出色人物，Tesla 里有 Drew Baglino、Lars Moravy、Tom Zhu 以及很多其他人。
Walter IsaacsonHe’s not as much of a team collaborator as say, Benjamin Franklin, who by the way, that’s the best team ever created, which is the founders. You had to have really smart people like Jefferson and Madison and really passionate people like John Adams and his cousin, Samuel, and really a guy of high rectitude like Washington. But you also needed a Ben Franklin who could bring everybody together and forge a team out of them and make them compromise with each other. Musk is a magnet for awesome talent.但他不像 Benjamin Franklin 那样善于团队协作。说到最好的团队，那是史上最好的团队——美国开国元勋们。你得有像 Jefferson 和 Madison 那样真正聪明的人，像 John Adams 和他表兄 Samuel 那样充满激情的人，像 Washington 那样高风亮节的人，但你也需要像 Ben Franklin 那样能把所有人凝聚在一起、让他们相互妥协的人。Musk 是吸引顶尖人才的磁石。
Lex FridmanMagnet, interesting. But there’s the priorities of hiring based on excellence, trustworthiness and drive. These are things you’ve described throughout the book. There’s a pretty concrete and rigorous set of ideas based on which the hiring is done.磁石，有意思。但还有一点，是你在书中描述的那种以卓越、可信赖和驱动力为基础的招聘优先级，有一套相当具体而严格的判断标准。
Walter IsaacsonOh, yeah. He has a very good spidey intuitive sense, just looking at people, not looking at them, but studying them, who could be good. One of his ways of operating is what he calls a skip-level meeting. Let’s take a very specific thing, like the Raptor engine, which is powering the Starship, and it wasn’t going well. It looked like a spaghetti bush, and it was going to be hard to manufacture, and he got rid of the people who were in charge of that team. I remember that he spent a couple of months doing what he calls skip-level, which means instead of meeting with his direct reports on the Raptor team, he would meet with the people one level below them. So he would skip a level and meet with them. I just asked them what they’re doing and I drill them with questions and he said, “This is how I figure out who’s going to emerge.” He said it was particularly difficult. I was sitting in those meetings ’cause people were wearing masks.对，他有一种非常敏锐的直觉，只需观察一个人，不只是看外表，而是仔细研究，就能判断谁有潜力。他有一种运作方式叫「越级会议」。举一个具体的例子，比如 Raptor 发动机，那是 Starship 的动力来源，当时进展不顺，看起来像一堆意大利面，制造起来非常困难，他把负责那个团队的人换掉了。我记得他花了几个月时间做他所说的「越级会议」，就是不直接和 Raptor 团队的直属下属开会，而是与他们下面一级的人开会，跳过一级。我只是问他们在做什么，然后用问题轰炸他们，他说：「这是我识别谁会脱颖而出的方式。」他说那段时间特别困难，我坐在那些会议里，因为大家都戴着口罩。
Walter IsaacsonIt was during the height of COVID, and he said it made it a little bit harder for him because he has to get the input. But I watched as a young kid, dreadlocks, named Jacob McKenzie, he’s in the book, is sitting there. He’s a bit like you, engineering mindset, speaks in a bit of a monotone. Musk would ask a question and he would give an answer, and the answer would be very straightforward. He didn’t get rattled, he was like this. Musk said one day called him up at 3:00 AM, well, I won’t say 3:00 AM, but after midnight said, “You still around?” Jake said, “Yeah, I’m still at work.” He said, “Okay, I’m going to make you in charge of the team building Raptor,” and that was like a big surprise. But Jacob McKenzie has now gotten a version of Raptor and where they’re building them at least one a week and they’re pretty awesome. That’s where his talent, Musk’s talent, for finding the right person and promoting them, that’s where it is.那是在 COVID 最严重的时候，他说这让他有点难，因为他需要获取对方的信息。但我看着一个年轻人，戴着脏辫，叫 Jacob McKenzie，书里有他，有点像你，工程思维，说话有点单调。Musk 会问一个问题，他就给出一个回答，回答非常直接，他不会被问倒，就是这样。有一天 Musk 在深夜——不说是凌晨 3 点，但肯定是过了午夜——打电话给他，说「你还在？」Jake 说「对，我还在公司。」他说，「好，我要让你来负责 Raptor 的研发团队。」这是个大惊喜。但 Jacob McKenzie 现在已经做出了一个新版本的 Raptor，他们正在以至少每周一台的速度制造，相当了不起。这就是 Musk 发现对的人并提拔他们的才能所在。
Lex FridmanPromoting it in a way where it’s like, “Here’s the ball. Here, catch,” and you run with it. I’ve interacted with quite a few folks from even just the Model X all throughout where people on paper don’t seem like they would be able to run the thing, and they run it extremely successfully.提拔的方式就是「球在这里，接着」，然后你拿着它跑。我和相当多来自 Model X 乃至更广泛范围的人打过交道，那些人在纸面上看起来根本不像能主导这件事的人，但他们做得非常成功。
Walter IsaacsonHe does it wrong sometimes. He’s had a horrible track record with the solar roof division, wonderful guy named Brian Dow. I really liked him. When they were doing the battery factory surge in Nevada, Musk got rid of two or three people in. There’s Brian Dow can do, can do, can stays up all night, and he gets promoted and runs it. So finally Musk goes through two or three people running the solar roof division, finally calls up Brian Dow. I was sitting in Musk’s house in Boca Chica, that little tiny two bedroom he has, and he offers Brian Dow the job of running solar roof.他有时候也会判断失误。他在太阳能屋顶部门的表现就很糟糕，有一个很好的人叫 Brian Dow，我真的挺喜欢他的。他们在 Nevada 电池工厂全力冲刺的时候，Musk 换掉了两三个人。有个 Brian Dow，能干能干，通宵达旦，不断被提拔，最终被提拔上来。然后 Musk 在太阳能屋顶部门换了两三个负责人，最终打电话给 Brian Dow。我当时就坐在 Musk 在 Boca Chica 的那栋小房子里，那是他的一套小两居室，他当场提出让 Brian Dow 来负责太阳能屋顶部门。
Walter IsaacsonBrian there, “Okay, can do, can do.” Two or three times, Musk insisted that they install a solar roof in one of those houses in Boca Chica. This is this tiny village at the south end of Texas. Late at night, I’d have to climb up to the top of the roof on these ladders and stand on this peaked roof as Musk is there saying, “Why do we need four screws to put in this single leg?” Brian was just sweating and doing everything, but then after a couple of months it wasn’t going well and boom! Musk just fired him. So I always try to learn what is it that makes those who stay thrive?Brian 在那里，「没问题，没问题。」Musk 坚持要在 Boca Chica 的其中一栋房子上安装一个太阳能屋顶，那是德克萨斯州最南端的一个小村子。深夜我得爬梯子爬到屋顶上，站在那个有坡度的屋顶上，Musk 就站在那儿说，「为什么要用四个螺丝来固定这一根腿？」Brian 就在那里满头大汗，拼命配合，但几个月后事情没有进展，砰！Musk 就把他开掉了。所以我一直在想，那些留下来并且做得好的人，到底有什么不同？
Lex FridmanWhat’s the lesson there? What do you think?这里的教训是什么？你怎么看？
Walter IsaacsonWell, I think it’s self-knowledge, like an Andy Krebs or others. They say, “I am hardcore. I really want to get a rocket to Mars, and that’s more important than anything else.” One of the people, I think it’s Tim Zaman. I hope when he hears this, I’m getting the right person, who took time, was working for Tesla Autopilot. It was just so intense, he took some time off and then went to another company. He said, “I was burned out at Tesla, but then I was bored at the next place. So I called,” I think it was, “Ashok at Tesla, said, ‘Can I come back?'” He said, ” Sure.” He said, “I learned about myself I’d rather be burned out than bored.”我觉得是自我认知，就像 Andy Krebs 或其他人一样。他们说，「我就是要拼命的，我真的想把火箭送上火星，这比任何事情都重要。」有一个人，我想是 Tim Zaman，希望他听到这里的时候我没有说错，他在 Tesla Autopilot 工作，太高强度了，他请了假，去了另一家公司。他说，「我在 Tesla 累到精疲力竭，但在下一家公司我又无聊透了。于是我打电话给，我想是，Tesla 的 Ashok，问能回来吗？」对方说，「当然可以。」他说，「我了解了自己：我宁可被累垮，也不要无聊。」
Lex FridmanThat’s a good line. Well, can you just linger on one of the three that seem interesting to you in terms of excellence, trustworthiness, and drive? Which one do you think is the most important and the hardest to get at? The trustworthiness is an interesting one. Are you ride or die kind of thing?这话说得好。好，在卓越、可信赖和驱动力这三点里，你能不能多聊聊其中一个你觉得最有意思的？你认为哪个最重要，最难判断？可信赖这个很有意思——那种不离不弃的感觉？
Walter IsaacsonYeah, I think that especially when it came to taking over Twitter, he thought half the people there were disloyal, and he was wrong. About 2/3 were disloyal, not just half. It was how do we weeded out those? He did something and made the Firing Squad, I call it, or the Musketeers I think is my nickname for them, which is the young cousins and two or three other people, he made them look at the Slack messages everybody at Twitter had posted, and they went through hundreds of Slack messages. So if anybody posted on the internal slack, ” That jerk Elon Musk is going to take over and I’m afraid that he’s a maniac or something,” they would be on the list because they want all-in loyal. They did not look at private Slack messages.对，我觉得在接管 Twitter 的时候，他认为那里有一半的人不忠诚，其实他估错了，三分之二不忠诚，不只是一半。怎么把这些人筛出去？他做了一件事，成立了我叫做「行刑队」的小组，或者书里我叫他们「火枪手」，就是那些年轻堂弟和另外两三个人，让他们去看 Twitter 所有员工发过的 Slack 消息，他们翻看了数百条 Slack 消息。所以如果有人在公司内部 Slack 上发过「那个混蛋 Elon Musk 要来接管了，我害怕他是个疯子」之类的话，这个人就会上名单，因为他们要的是全力效忠的人。他们没有看私人 Slack 消息。
Walter IsaacsonI guess people who are posting on a corporate Slack board should be aware that your company can look at them. But that’s more than I would’ve done or most people would’ve done, and so that was to figure out who’s deeply committed and loyal. I think that was mainly the case at Twitter. He doesn’t sitting around at SpaceX saying, “Who’s loyal to me? At other places, it’s excellence, but that’s pretty well a given. Everybody is like a Mark Juncosa just whip smart. Its, “Are you hardcore and all in?” Especially if you’re going to have to move to this spit of a town in the south tip of Texas called Boca Chica, you got to be all in.我想，在公司 Slack 上发内容的人应该意识到，公司是可以查看的。但这比我或大多数人会做的更进一步，这是为了找出谁是真心投入且忠诚的人。我觉得这主要是针对 Twitter 的情况。他不会坐在 SpaceX 里问「谁对我忠诚？」在其他地方，看的是卓越，但这几乎是不言而喻的，每个人，比如 Mark Juncosa，都是超级聪明的。重要的是「你是否硬核、全力以赴？」尤其是如果你要搬到德克萨斯州最南端一个叫 Boca Chica 的小角落，你就必须是全力以赴的。
Lex FridmanYeah, and that’s the drive, the last piece. So you, in terms of collaborating, one of the great teams of all time, Ben Franklin, I like that. I thought it was The Beatles, but Ben Franklin is pretty good.对，那就是驱动力，最后一块。说到协作，史上最好的团队之一是 Ben Franklin，我挺认同这一点。我本来以为是 The Beatles，但 Ben Franklin 这个答案也很不错。
Walter IsaacsonOh, no, no, no.哦，不不不。
Lex FridmanI’m sorry.对不起。
Walter IsaacsonYeah.对。
Lex FridmanSorry to offend you so [inaudible 01:16:48]抱歉冒犯到你了……[听不清 01:16:48]
Walter IsaacsonRead the Constitution and read Abbey Road, look at Abbey Road, they’re both good, but they’re in a different league.去读一读宪法，再看看《Abbey Road》，两者都很好，但不在同一个层次上。
Lex FridmanYeah, a different league. Okay. So one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management. Is there’s something you could say about Ben Franklin and about Steve Jobs? I think interesting with Elon is that he, as you write, runs six companies, seven, it depends how you count with Starlink ’cause its own thing. I don’t know. What can you say about these people in terms of time management?对，是不同的层次。好。Ben Franklin 让我想到的很多事情之一，就是非常了不起的时间管理能力。你能不能说说 Ben Franklin 和 Steve Jobs 在时间管理上有什么值得说的？我觉得 Elon 很有意思的一点是，正如你书中写的，他同时运营六家公司，七家，要看你怎么算，因为 Starlink 本身也是一个独立的存在，说不准。关于这些人在时间管理上你有什么可说的？
Walter IsaacsonWell, Musk is in a league of his own in the way he does it. First of all, Steve Jobs had to run Pixar and Apple for a while, but Musk every couple of hours is switching his mindset from how to implant the Neuralink chip and what will the robot that implants it in the brain look like and how fast can we make it move? Then the heat shield on the Raptor or switching to human imitation, machine learning, full self-drive. On the night that the Twitter board agreed to the deal, this is huge around the world. I’m sure you remember like, “Musk buys Twitter.” It wasn’t when the deal closed, it was when Twitter accepted his offer. I thought, “Okay,” but then he went to Boca Chica, to South Texas and spent time fixating on, if I remember correctly, a valve in the Raptor engine that had a methane leak issue and what were the possible ways to fix it. All the engineers in that room, I assume, or thinking about, “This guy just bought Twitter, should we say something?”Musk 在这方面独树一帜。首先，Steve Jobs 有一段时间要同时运营 Pixar 和 Apple，但 Musk 每隔几个小时就要在完全不同的思维模式之间切换：怎么植入 Neuralink 芯片、给大脑做手术的机器人长什么样、它能不能更快一点？然后是 Raptor 上的隔热层，或者切换到人类行为模拟、机器学习、全自动驾驶。在 Twitter 董事会同意收购的那天晚上，这在全世界都是大新闻，你肯定记得那条「Musk 买下 Twitter」的头条。不是在交易完成的时候，而是在 Twitter 接受他的报价的时候。我以为，好，但他随后去了 Boca Chica，在南德克萨斯，花时间专注于——如果我没记错的话——Raptor 发动机上一个有甲烷泄漏问题的阀门，以及有哪些可能的解决方案。房间里所有工程师，我猜，都在心想，「这家伙刚买了 Twitter，我们要不要说点什么？」
Walter IsaacsonThen he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music with nobody noticing really him being there. One of his strengths and sort of weaknesses in a way is in a given day, he’ll focus serially, sequentially, on many different things. He will worry about uploading video on to X.com or the payment system and then immediately switch over to some issue with the FAA giving a permit for Starship or with how to deal with Starlink and the CIA. When he’s focused on any of these things, you cannot distract him.然后他和 Kimbal 去了 Brownsville 一家路边小馆，坐在前排，听着音乐，几乎没人注意到他在那里。他有一个优势，也算是某种弱点——在任何一天，他会把注意力串联地、按顺序地集中在很多不同的事情上。他会担心 X.com 的视频上传或支付系统，然后立刻切换到 FAA 给 Starship 批许可的问题，或者 Starlink 和 CIA 之间的协调问题。当他专注于任何一件事的时候，你根本无法分心他。
Walter IsaacsonIt’s not like he’s also thinking about, “I’m dealing with Starlink, but I’ve got to also worry about the Tesla decision on the new $25,000 car.” Now, he’ll in between these sessions, process information, then let off steam. For better or worse, he lets off steam by either playing a friend in Polyopia or fire off some tweets, which is often not a healthy thing, but it’s a release for him. I once said he was a great multitasker and that was a mistake, people corrected me. He’s a serial tasker, which means focuses intensely on a task for an hour, almost has a, what do they call it at restaurants where they give you a-这不是说他在想 Starlink 的时候，同时还在担心 Tesla 新款 $25,000 汽车的决策。他会在不同的专注时段之间，处理信息，然后释放压力。不管好坏，他释放压力的方式要么是和朋友在 Polytopia 打一局，要么是发一些推文，后者往往不是什么健康行为，但对他来说是一个出口。我曾经说他是个出色的多任务处理者，这是个错误，有人纠正了我。他是个串行任务者，意思是他对一项任务高强度专注大约一个小时，然后几乎有一种，怎么说，就是餐厅里那种……
Lex FridmanPallet cleanser.口腔清洁剂。
Walter Isaacson… pallet cleanser? He does some pallet cleanser with Polytopia and then focuses on the next task.……口腔清洁剂？他用 Polytopia 做口腔清洁剂，然后专注到下一项任务。
Lex FridmanIs there some wisdom about time management that you can draw from that?从这里你能提炼出什么关于时间管理的智慧吗？
Walter IsaacsonThere’s some things that these people do and you say, “Okay, I can be that way. I can be more curious. I can question every rule and regulation.” I just don’t think anybody should try to emulate Musk’s time management style because it takes a certain set of teams who know how to deal with everything else other than the thing he’s focusing on and a certain mind that can shift just like his moods can shift. You and I go through transitions, and also if I’m thinking about what I’m going to say on this podcast, I’m also thinking about the email my daughter just sent about a house that she’s looking, and I’m multitasking. He doesn’t actually do that. He single tasks sequentially with a focus that’s hardcore.这些人做的某些事，你会说，好，我可以做到，我可以更有好奇心，我可以质疑每一条规定和规则。但我真心不认为任何人应该去模仿 Musk 的时间管理方式，因为这需要一套知道如何处理除他当下专注之事以外一切事务的团队，以及一种能够像他的情绪一样快速切换的心智。你和我处于过渡状态的时候，我如果在想等一下在这个播客上要说什么，同时也在想我女儿刚发来的关于她在看的一所房子的邮件，我在多任务处理。他实际上不这样，他是单任务串行的，专注程度是硬核的。
Lex FridmanI don’t know. I think there’s wisdom to draw from that to first of all, he frankly, makes me feel that way, that there’s a lot of hours in the day. There’s a lot of minutes in the day. There’s no excuse not to get a lot done, and that requires just an extreme focus, an extreme focus and an urgency.不知道，我觉得这里有智慧可以汲取。首先，坦白说，他让我觉得，一天里有很多小时，每一分钟都有很多分钟，没有理由不完成很多事情，这需要的是极度的专注和极度的紧迫感。
Walter IsaacsonI think the fierce urgency that drives him is important, and it’s sometimes genned up, like I say, the fierce urgency of getting to Mars. On a Friday night at the launchpad in Boca Chica at 10:00 PM there are only a few people working ’cause it’s a Friday night, they’re not supposed to launch for another eight months, and he orders a surge. He says, “I want 200 people here by tomorrow working on this pad. We have to have a fierce sense of urgency or we will never get to Mars.”我觉得驱动他的那种强烈的紧迫感很重要，有时候是被调动出来的，就像我说的，对「必须到达火星」的强烈紧迫感。某个周五晚上十点，他在 Boca Chica 的发射台，只有几个人在工作，因为是周五晚上，而且按计划还有八个月才发射，他下令全力冲刺。他说，「我要明天有 200 个人在这个发射台上工作，我们必须有一种强烈的紧迫感，否则我们永远到不了火星。」
Lex FridmanThat sense of urgency is also a vibrancy that’s really taking on life fully. To me, that’s the lesson is even the mundane can be full of this just richness, and you just have to really take it in intensely. So like the switching enables that kind of intensity ’cause most of us can’t hold that intensity in any one task for prolonged period of time. Maybe that’s also a lesson.那种紧迫感也是一种活力，是真正全力投入地活着的状态。对我来说，这就是教训：即使是平凡的事情也可以充满这种丰富感，你只需要以极度的强度去体验它。所以这种切换使得那种强度成为可能，因为我们大多数人无法在任何一项任务上长时间保持那种强度。也许这也是一个启示。
Walter IsaacsonRight. I guess it goes back to also know who you are, meaning-对。我想这也回到了了解你自己这一点，也就是说……
Lex FridmanKnow who you are.了解你自己。
Walter Isaacson… there are people who can focus intensely, and there are people who can see patterns across many things. Look, Leonardo da Vinci, he was not all that focused. He was easily distracted.……有些人能高强度专注，有些人能看到跨领域的规律。看，Leonardo da Vinci 并不是那么专注的人，他很容易分心。
Lex FridmanProcrastinated.他会拖延。
Walter IsaacsonIt’s why he has more unfinished paintings than finished paintings in his canon. But his ability to see patterns across nature and to, in some ways, process procrastinate, be distracted, that helped him some. But Musk is not that way, and every few months there’s a new surge. You don’t know where it’ll be, but you’ll be on solar roofs and all of a sudden, we’ll have a surge and there has to be 100 solar roofs built, or this has to be done by tomorrow or make a Starship dome by dawn and surge and do it. There are people who are built that way. It is inspiring, but also let’s appreciate that there are people who can be really good but also can savor the success, savor the moment, savor the quiet sometimes. Musk’s big failing is he can’t savor the moment or success, and that’s the flip side of hardcore intensity这就是为什么他的画作中未完成的比已完成的还要多。但他看出自然界各种规律的能力，以及某种程度上的「处理式拖延」、容易分心，对他有所帮助。但 Musk 不是那样的，每隔几个月就有一次新的全力冲刺。你不知道会是在哪里，但你会看到在太阳能屋顶上，突然一声令下，要建 100 个太阳能屋顶，或者这件事必须明天完成，或者在黎明前做出一个 Starship 穹顶来，全力冲刺，干吧。有些人天生就是这种人，这确实激励人心，但我们也要欣赏那些能做得很好、但也能品味成功、品味当下、品味那份安静的人。Musk 最大的缺陷是他无法品味当下或成功，而这是极度硬核强度的另一面。
Lex FridmanIn Innovators, another book of yours that I love, you write about individuals and about groups. So one of the questions the book addresses is, is it individuals or is it groups that turn the tides of history?在你的另一本我很喜欢的书《Innovators》里，你写到了个人和群体。这本书讨论的一个问题是，到底是个人还是群体在推动历史的转折？
Walter IsaacsonWhen Henry Kissinger was on the shuttle missions for the Middle East piece, this is the first book I ever wrote, he said, “When I was a professor at Harvard, I thought that history was determined by great forces and groups of people. But when I see it up close, I see what a difference an individual can make.” He’s talking about Sadat and Golda Meir or probably talking about himself too, or at least in his mind. We biographers have this dirty secret that we know. We distort history a bit by making the narrative too driven by an individual, but sometimes it is driven by an individual. Musk is a case like that. Sometimes, as I did with The Innovators, there’s teams and people who build on each other and Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce then getting Andy Grove and doing the microchip, which then comes out and Wozniak and Jobs find it at some electronic store and they decide to build the Apple. So sometimes they are flows of forces and groups of people.Henry Kissinger 在为中东和平进行穿梭外交的时候——这是我写的第一本书——他说：「我在哈佛当教授的时候，我以为历史是由伟大的力量和群体的人决定的，但当我亲眼看见的时候，我发现一个个体能带来多大的不同。」他说的是 Sadat 和 Golda Meir，也许也在说他自己，至少在他心里。我们这些传记作者有一个肮脏的秘密：我们通过让叙事过于被单一个体驱动，稍微扭曲了历史。但有时候历史确实是被一个个体驱动的，Musk 就是这样的例子。有时候，就像我在《Innovators》里写的，有团队，有人在彼此的基础上构建，Gordon Moore 和 Bob Noyce 然后引进 Andy Grove，做出微芯片，然后 Wozniak 和 Jobs 在某个电子元件店发现它，决定建造 Apple。所以有时候是历史力量和群体共同推动的。
Walter IsaacsonI guess I err a little bit on the side of looking at what a Steve Jobs and Elon Musk and Albert Einstein can do. I also try to figure out if they hadn’t been around, would the forces of history and the groups of people have done it without them? That’s a good historical question, as somebody who loves history. You think about special relativity, one of the 1905 papers. Even after he writes it, it’s four years before people truly get what he’s saying, which is, “It’s not just how you observe time is relative, it’s time itself is relative.” On the general theory, which he does a decade later, I’m not sure we would gotten that yet. What about moving us into the era of an iPhone and which it’s so beautiful that you can’t live without 1,000 songs in your pocket, email and the internet in your pocket and a phone? There are a lot of brain-dead people from Panasonic to Motorola who didn’t get that, and it may have been a while.我想我稍微偏向于去看一个 Steve Jobs、一个 Elon Musk、一个 Albert Einstein 能做到什么。我也试图弄清楚，如果他们不在，历史的力量和人群是否也能在没有他们的情况下做到。这是一个好的历史学问题，对于热爱历史的人来说。想想 1905 年那篇关于狭义相对论的论文。即便他写出来了，也花了四年时间人们才真正明白他在说什么，也就是「不只是你观察时间的方式是相对的，时间本身是相对的」。关于他十年后提出的广义相对论，我不确定没有他我们到现在是否能搞出来。那 iPhone 呢？那么美，让你离不开它——口袋里装着 1000 首歌，口袋里有电子邮件和互联网还有电话。有很多来自 Panasonic 到 Motorola 的迟钝的人根本没看到这一点，也许还要等很久。
Walter IsaacsonI certainly think it’s true of the era of electric vehicles. Jim and Ford, all the great people there, they crushed the Bolt, and I mean that literally. They ended up smashing them because they decided to discontinue it. Likewise, nobody was sending up rockets. Our space shuttle was about to be grounded 12 years ago. So Musk does things, and there’ll be people who say and read the book… Well, if they read the book, they’ll see the full story, but they’ll say, “It wasn’t Musk who did Tesla, it was Martin Eberherd or Marc Tarpenning.” No, no. There were people who had helped create the shells of companies and other things, and they were all deserved to be called co-founders. But the guy who actually gets us to a million electric vehicles a year is Elon Musk, and without him, I don’t think we… Look, if anybody five years from now buys a car that’s gasoline powered, we’ll think, “That’s quaint. That’s odd.” Suddenly, we’ve changed. We’re not going to do it. 90% of that is Elon Musk.在电动汽车时代这件事上，我确实这么认为。GM 和 Ford，里面有很多优秀的人，他们消灭了 Bolt，我这里是字面意思，他们决定停产，真的把那些车压碎了。同样，那时候没人在发射火箭，我们的航天飞机十二年前已经即将停运。所以 Musk 做到了这些事，会有人说，读了这本书的人也会看到完整的故事，但他们会说，「不是 Musk 做了 Tesla，是 Martin Eberhard 或 Marc Tarpenning。」不不，那些人帮助建立了公司的雏形和其他东西，他们都有资格被称为联合创始人，但让我们真正实现每年 100 万辆电动汽车的那个人是 Elon Musk。没有他，我不认为我们会……看，如果五年后还有人买燃油车，我们会觉得，哦，真古朴，真奇怪。我们已经改变了，我们不会再那样了，90% 的功劳都是 Elon Musk 的。
Lex FridmanWe’re all mortal. When and how do you think Elon will retire from the insanely productive schedule he’s on now?我们都是凡人。你觉得 Elon 会在什么时候、以什么方式从他现在这种疯狂高产的状态中退休？
Walter IsaacsonI would think that he would hate to retire. I think that he can’t live without the pressure, the drama, the all-in feeling. It’s never been anything that seemed to have crossed his mind. He’s never said, “Maybe I love Larry Ellison’s house on the beach in Hawaii. Maybe I should spend time in doing.” Instead, he says things like, “I learned early on that vacations will kill you.” He goes on vacation at one point, and they oust him from PayPal. Then he goes to Africa at one point, he gets malaria. He says, “I’ve learned vacations kill you.”我觉得他会非常讨厌退休这件事。我认为他离不开那种压力、那种戏剧感、那种全力以赴的感觉。这件事从来没有进入过他的脑子。他从来没有说过「也许我喜欢 Larry Ellison 在夏威夷海滩上的豪宅，也许我该花时间去享受一下」。他说的反而是「我很早就明白了，度假会要你的命」。有一次他去度假，结果被赶出了 PayPal。后来有一次他去非洲，染上了疟疾。他说：「我已经学到了，度假会要你的命。」
Lex FridmanLesson learned. Well, it’s interesting because the projects are 100+ year projects, many of these.教训深刻。有意思的是，他做的很多项目都是跨越 100 年以上的大工程。
Walter IsaacsonOne of the weird things is watching him think incredibly long term. One of the meetings every week early on when I was watching him was Mars colonizer. We did through a two-hour meeting about what would the governance structure be on Mars? What would people wear? How would the robots work and would there be democracy or should there be a different form of governance? I’m sitting there saying, ” What are they doing? What are they talking about? They’re trying to build rocket ships and everything else. They are worrying about the governance structure of Mars?” Likewise, whenever he’s in a tense moment, like there’s a rocket’s about to be launched, he’ll start asking people about something in the way future, like the new elite engine or something.有一件很奇特的事，就是看着他以极其长远的眼光思考问题。我刚开始跟着他的时候，每周都有一个例行会议叫「火星殖民」。我们曾经开了一场两小时的会，讨论火星上的治理结构应该是什么样的？人们穿什么？机器人怎么运作？是民主制还是应该采用别的治理形式？我坐在那里心想：「他们在干什么？在谈什么？他们还在努力造火箭和各种东西呢，怎么就开始操心火星的治理结构了？」同样地，每当他处于紧张时刻，比如火箭即将发射，他就会开始问大家一些遥远未来的问题，比如新一代发动机之类的事情。
Walter Isaacson“If we’re going to build that, do we have enough materials ready to order?” Or, I don’t know, he’ll just ask questions. Like when he’s building robo taxi, the global car, the $25,000 inexpensive global car, that’s not a total passion. He was talked into doing that. His passion is robotaxis, but his passion is how are we going to make this factory to do a million cars a year? So even the robotaxi is a longer range vision. He’s been touting it since 2016, but there are no robotaxis. Waymo may be doing a little experiment on it, but there’s not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways yet. So he’s always looking way into the future is my point.「如果我们要造那个，手头的材料订购量够吗？」诸如此类，他就会随口问一些问题。比如他在造 robotaxi 的时候，也就是那款面向全球的廉价车、那辆 $25,000 的平价全球车，那并不是他真正燃起热情的东西，那是被别人说服才做的。他真正的热情在于 robotaxi，但他最大的激情是：我们怎样才能让这座工厂一年生产一百万辆车？所以就连 robotaxi 也是一个更长远的愿景。他从 2016 年就开始吹这个，但 robotaxi 还没成真。Waymo 也许在做一些小规模试验，但目前还没有量产的无方向盘汽车要接管公路。所以我的意思是，他目光永远望向很远的未来。
Lex FridmanI just hope that there’s a lot of da Vincis and Steve Jobs and Einsteins and Elon Musks that carry the flame forward.我只是希望，会有更多的 da Vinci、Steve Jobs、Einstein 和 Elon Musk 这样的人，继续把这把火炬传递下去。
Walter IsaacsonThat’s one of the reasons you write books about these people is so that if you’re a young woman in a school where you’re not being told to do science and you read The Code Breaker about Jennifer Doudna, you say, “Okay, I can be that.” When you say, “Oh, maybe I’ll be a regulator,” or you say, “Oh, no, maybe I’ll be the person who pushes the boundaries, who pushes the lines, who pushes as Steve Jobs said, the human race.”这也是你写这些人物传记的原因之一——如果有一个女孩在一所没人鼓励她学理科的学校，读了关于 Jennifer Doudna 的《The Code Breaker》，她就会想：「好，我也可以成为那样的人。」然后她不会去想「也许我去当个监管者算了」，而是会想：「不，也许我要成为那个推动边界的人、突破极限的人、就像 Steve Jobs 说的那样推动人类前进的人。」
Lex FridmanWell, let me ask you about your mind, your genius, your process?那让我问问你自己——你的思维方式、你的天赋、你的工作流程是怎样的？
Walter IsaacsonI’ll give you two out of three.三选二，我给你说两个。
Lex FridmanAll right. Take me through your process of writing a biography, the full of it. Not just writing a biography, but understanding deeply, which your books have done for the human story and the bigger ideas underlying the human story. So you’ve written biographies both of individuals, which are hardly individuals, it’s a really big complex picture and biographies of ideas that involve individuals.好吧。带我走一遍你写传记的完整过程。不只是写传记本身，而是深度理解——你的书对人类故事以及人类故事背后那些更宏观的观念都做到了这一点。你写的传记，写的既是个人，而那些个人又绝不只是个人，是非常复杂宏大的图景；你也写过以个人为线索串联起来的观念传记。
Walter IsaacsonWell, step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works. What causes Einstein to make that leap, for Elon Musk to say stainless steel while he’s looking at a carbon fiber rocket? Or how do you make the mental leap? Because I write about smart people, smart people are a dime a dozen. They don’t usually amount to much. You have to be creative, imaginative, to think different, as Jobs would say. So what makes people creative? What makes them take imaginative leaps? That’s the key question you got to ask. You also ask the questions like you’ve asked earlier, which is, what demons are dangling in their head, and how do they harness them into drives? So you look at all that, and you try to observe really carefully the person.对我来说，第一步是试图弄清楚一个人的思维是怎么运作的。是什么让 Einstein 做出了那个飞跃？是什么让 Elon Musk 在看着一枚碳纤维火箭的时候，突然说出「不锈钢」？人是怎么完成这种思维跳跃的？因为我写的都是聪明人，而聪明人多的是，通常也成不了什么大事。你必须有创造力、有想象力，要「think different」，就像 Jobs 说的那样。那么是什么让人变得有创造力？是什么让他们迸发出充满想象力的飞跃？这是你必须追问的核心问题。你也要问之前你问过的那类问题——他们脑子里悬着什么心魔，他们又是怎么把这些心魔转化为驱动力的？把这些都看完，你才能真正仔细地观察一个人。
Walter IsaacsonOne of the more mundane things I do is a lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions and preach or whatever. As this mentor said two people types come out, preachers, storytellers, to be a storyteller. I try, whenever I’m trying to convey a thought, there’s six magic words that I almost should have written on a card pinned above my desk, which is, “Let me tell you a story.” So if somebody says, “How does Elon Musk figure out good talent?” As you did, I think, “Well, let me tell you the story. I’ll tell you the story of Jake McKenzie,” or this is not something I invented.还有一件比较日常的事——很多作家喜欢表达自己的观点、发表高论之类的。有位导师说，写作者分两种：布道者和讲故事的人，要做讲故事的人。每当我想表达一个想法，我几乎应该把这六个神奇的字贴在桌子上方：「让我给你讲个故事。」所以如果有人问「Elon Musk 是怎么鉴别人才的？」，就像你问的那样，我就会想：「那让我给你讲个故事，我给你讲 Jake McKenzie 的故事。」这不是我发明的。
Walter IsaacsonThis is way the good Lord does it in the Bible, has the best opening lead sentence ever, “In the beginning,” comma, and then it’s stories. Secondly, to pick up on that lead sentence, “In the beginning,” make it chronological. Everybody in the 40th year of their life has grown from the 39th year and the 38th year, and so you want to show how people evolve and grow. I had the greatest of all nonfiction narrative editors, Alice Mayhew at Simon Schuster, who among other things, created All the President’s Men with Woodward and Bernstein. But she had a note she’d put in the margins of my books, that was a tickta, and it meant, “All things in good time. Keep it chronological. If it’s good enough for the Bible, it’s good enough for you.”这是上帝在《圣经》里的做法——《圣经》有史上最棒的开篇句，「In the beginning，」逗号，然后就是一个个故事。其次，呼应那个开篇句「In the beginning」——按时间顺序来。一个人在人生第 40 年，是从第 39 年、第 38 年一路成长过来的，所以你要展示人是如何演变、如何成长的。我最伟大的非虚构叙事编辑是 Simon Schuster 的 Alice Mayhew，她的成就之一是和 Woodward、Bernstein 一起打造了《All the President's Men》。她会在我书稿的页边空白处写一个标注——「tickta」，意思是「一切顺时而来，保持时间顺序。《圣经》都这么写，你也该如此。」
Lex FridmanInteresting. To me, that’s a small note, but to you it’s extremely important.有意思。在我看来这只是个小小的注释，但对你来说却极其重要。
Walter IsaacsonBecause it’s the framework for how you structure things, but also how you understand things, which is if you keep it a chronological narrative, then you’re showing how a person has grown from one experience you’ve talked about to the next one. That moral growth, creative growth, risk-taking, growth, wisdom, that’s the essences of creativity, but you can’t do it… There’s a term buildings woman, which is a book that carries a narrative and tells how people learn something. I’m a big believer in narrative. If you-因为它是你构建和理解事物的框架——如果你坚持按时间顺序叙事，你就是在展示一个人如何从你写到的这段经历成长到下一段经历。那种道德的成长、创造力的成长、冒险精神的成长、智慧的积累，这些才是创造力的本质。但你没办法……有个说法叫「Bildungsroman」，就是那种承载叙事、讲述人物如何习得某种东西的书。我非常相信叙事的力量。如果你……
Walter IsaacsonPeople learn something. I’m a big believer in narrative. If you are an academic, you sometimes, not today, but in like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were two things you thought were bad. One was having a great person theory of history in which you decided to do biography. I had a great professor when I was in college. Her name was Doris Kerns. She later married Dick Goodwin and when she was going for tenure at the university, wrote a biography of Lyndon Johnson & the American Dream, and they denied her tenure because it was beneath the dignity of the academy to write history through one person.人们从中习得某种东西。我非常相信叙事的力量。如果你是学院派，有时候——不是现在，而是大概二三十年前——你会觉得有两件事是坏的。一是「伟人史观」，也就是决定去写传记。我大学时有一位出色的教授，叫 Doris Kerns，后来她嫁给了 Dick Goodwin，当她在大学申请终身教职时，写了一本关于 Lyndon Johnson 与美国梦的传记，结果被拒绝授予终身教职，因为学院认为通过一个人来写历史，有失学术尊严。
Walter IsaacsonThat’s great. It opened up the field of biography to us non-academics, starting with David McCullough, Bob Caro, but maybe John Meacham and myself are in a new generation, and certainly there’s a generation coming after us. But the second thing besides telling it through people, which is the academy tended to disdain what they called imposing a narrative in which you made it storytelling because that meant you were leaving things out and making it into a narrative. Well, that’s how we form our views of the world.这反而好，它给我们这些非学院派人士打开了传记这个领域，从 David McCullough、Bob Caro 开始，然后也许 John Meacham 和我属于新一代，当然我们之后还有更年轻的一代在成长。但除了「用人来讲故事」这一点之外——学术界倾向于鄙视的第二件事，是他们所谓的「强加叙事」，也就是把内容做成故事化，因为这意味着你会略去一些东西，把它变成一个叙事。可问题是，这正是我们构建世界观的方式。
Lex FridmanWell, let me ask you this question. In terms of gathering and understanding, how much of it is one observing and how much of it is interviews?那我问你这个问题：在收集素材和深度理解方面，观察占多少，采访又占多少？
Walter IsaacsonYeah, and obviously depends on the subject. With a Ben Franklin, it’s all based on archives and every, of course, we have 40 volumes of letters he wrote. That was the good old days when every day you’d write 20 letters. The Musk book is based much more on observation than almost any of my books, because he opened up in a way that was breathtaking to me. Even when he would be sitting blank polytopia or seething at other people, he’d have me just sitting there watching. I spent a lot of time with Jennifer Doudner at her side. I went to her lab and edited a human gene and with a pipette and a test tube.这当然取决于对象。写 Ben Franklin 的话，一切都依赖档案，我们有他写的 40 卷书信，那是好日子，那时候每天能写 20 封信。而 Musk 的书更多依赖观察，比我几乎所有的书都要多，因为他向我敞开自己的方式令我叹为观止。就算他在那里玩 Polytopia 发呆，或者对人发怒，他也会让我就坐在旁边看着。我和 Jennifer Doudna 也相处了很多时间，我去了她的实验室，亲手用移液管和试管编辑了一段人类基因。
Walter IsaacsonBut I would say I spent 30 hours with her. I can count a hundred hours or more just observing Musk. And I’m not sure that any biographer, perhaps since Boswell took on Dr. Johnson has ever had quite as much up close meaning five feet away at all times access and because of that I’ll go back to what I said a moment ago. I try to get out of the way of the story. It’s not about me, it’s not about… I try to just say, “Okay, here’s what happened. Here’s this story. Here’s what happened the night he came in to Twitter for the first time,” and let you form your own judgment.但我大概和她相处了 30 个小时。而观察 Musk，我数下来有一百多个小时，甚至更多，而且基本都是五英尺以内的近距离接触。我不确定有没有哪位传记作者——也许自从 Boswell 跟随 Dr. Johnson 以来——曾经有过如此近距离的访问权。正因为如此，我回到刚才说的那一点：我尽量让自己退出故事。不是关于我，不是……我只是说：「好，发生了什么，就是这个故事。他第一次走进 Twitter 大楼那晚发生了什么」，然后让你自己去形成判断。
Lex FridmanWhat about the interviews? You’ve had a lot of conversations. You give acknowledgement to the people you’ve done interviews with. Well, one, I have to ask as an aspiring interviewer myself, how?那采访呢？你做过很多对话，致谢页里有很多你采访过的人。作为一个自己也在努力学习做访谈的人，我不得不问……怎么做到的？
Walter IsaacsonPeople love to talk. People just love, you know that. And I’ve had 140, maybe 150 people, they’re all listed in the back. One of the little things that people won’t notice, but I’ll say it now, is all of them are on the record. Getting them to talk is easy. They all want to talk about Musk, but then at a certain point say, I don’t put anonymous quotes in my book, I cite things. I say if you’re tough enough and you’ve gone through this, and a lot of times it takes two or three calls back, somebody will tell me a story say, oh, no, no, no, I don’t [inaudible 01:40:11]. But I think it’s important to know where everything came from. And with Musk it’s, I had that from the very beginning because I was a Time Magazine reporter. I’d worked reporter for the Times Picayune or New Orleans.人就是喜欢说话，你也知道。我大概采访了 140 到 150 个人，都列在书后。有一件细节可能没人注意，我现在说出来：他们全都是具名的。让他们开口很容易，大家都想聊 Musk，但到某个节点我会说，我书里不写匿名引述，我都会注明出处。如果说你已经经历了这些，我会说我不写匿名的——很多时候要打两三个电话回访，有人会告诉我一个故事然后说，哦不不不，我不……但我觉得注明出处很重要。关于 Musk，这个习惯从一开始就有，因为我是 Time Magazine 的记者出身，我在 Times Picayune——新奥尔良的报纸——工作过。
Walter IsaacsonFirst day on the job, I had to go cover a murder. And I phoned in the story from a payphone and my editor, the city editor, said, “Well, did you talk to the family?” I went, “No, Billy, I mean the family, the daughter just got…” He said, go knock on the door. I knocked on the door. An hour later, they were still talking. They were bringing out her yearbooks. Lesson one, I learned people want to talk if you’re willing to just listen, and whether it be Henry Kissinger, you just push the button and say Kissinger, and people tell you the stories all the way through Elon Musk, everybody talked, everybody in his family, everybody he fired, everybody. I think it’s important to listen to people. And the other thing I learned as a reporter, back when I was covering politics in New Hampshire in the early campaigns, I learned from two or three great reporters, a guy named David Broder and Tim Russert, the late NBC guy.上班第一天，我就被派去报道一起谋杀案。我从公用电话打回去汇报，我的编辑——城市版编辑——问：「你跟家属谈过吗？」我说：「Billy，那个家庭，他们女儿刚刚……」他说，去敲门。我去敲了门，一小时后他们还在说，把她的毕业纪念册都拿出来给我看了。第一课：我学到人们是愿意开口的，只要你肯倾听。无论是 Henry Kissinger，你只要按下按钮说「Kissinger」，人们就会从头说到尾，一直说到 Elon Musk，他身边所有人都开口了——他的家人、被他开除的人，所有人。我认为倾听很重要。还有一点我做记者时学到的，当年在新罕布什尔州跑早期政治竞选时，我从两三位出色的记者身上学到——一位叫 David Broder，一位是已故 NBC 主播 Tim Russert。
Walter IsaacsonThey do what was called door knocking. You just walk in a neighborhood, knock on a door and asked people about the election. But they said here’s the secret. Don’t ask any leading questions. Don’t have any premise. Just say, “Hey, I’m trying to figure out this election. What’s going on? What do you think?” And then stay silent. With Musk a third secret, you know this well, he’ll go silent at times, sometimes a minute, two minutes, four minutes. Don’t try to fill the silences. If you’re a listener, you got to learn, okay, he’s not said anything for four minutes. I can outlast him.他们做一种叫「敲门」的采访法，就是走进一个街区，挨家敲门，问人们对选举的看法。但他们说，诀窍在这里：不要问任何带引导性的问题，不要预设任何前提，就说：「我想弄清楚这次选举是怎么回事，你怎么看？」然后保持沉默。对 Musk 还有第三个秘诀——你很清楚——他有时会沉默，一分钟、两分钟、四分钟都有。别试图填补那段沉默。作为倾听者，你要学会：好，他已经四分钟没说话了，我能撑得比他更久。
Lex FridmanIt’s tough, as humans it’s very tough. Respecting the silence is really, really difficult. Speaking of demons, when there’s silence, all the demons show up in my head.这真的很难，作为人类，这非常非常难。尊重沉默太难了。说到心魔，沉默一来，我脑子里的心魔全冒出来了。
Walter IsaacsonOh dear.天哪。
Lex FridmanThe fear I think is if I don’t say anything is boring, and if I say something, it’s going to be stupid. And that the basic engine that just keeps running, not on the podcast, well on the podcast, but also in human interaction. And so I think there’s that nervous energy when interacting with people.我想那种恐惧是——如果我什么都不说，会很无聊；如果我开口说，又可能说出蠢话。这个基本引擎一直在转，不只是在播客上，在日常的人际互动中也是。所以我觉得和人打交道的时候就有这种紧张的能量。
Walter IsaacsonYou can never go wrong by staying silent if there’s nothing you have to say. Not something I’ve mastered, but I do when I’m a reporter, try to master that, which is don’t ask complex questions, don’t interject and when somebody hasn’t fully answered the question, don’t say, well, let me, you know I haven’t fully… You just stay silent. And then they’ll keep talking.如果你没什么要说的，保持沉默永远不会出错。这不是我已经做到的事，但我做记者的时候会努力做到，也就是：不问复杂的问题，不去插嘴，当对方还没充分回答问题时，不要说「好，让我……」，就保持沉默，他们就会继续说下去。
Lex FridmanJust give them a chance to keep talking, even if they’ve kind of finished, you still.就是给他们继续说的机会，哪怕他们好像已经说完了，你也继续等着。
Walter IsaacsonYeah. Sometimes if they haven’t given you enough, instead of following up, I’ll just nod and keep waiting.对。有时候如果他们说得不够充分，我不会追问，我就点点头，继续等。
Lex FridmanYou’re making it sound simple. Is there a secret to getting people to open up more?你说得听起来很简单。让人打开心扉有什么秘诀吗？
Walter IsaacsonI’m somewhat lucky because I started off working for a daily newspaper and people back then they wanted to talk to the newspaper reporter.我算是有些运气，因为我一开始是给日报工作的，那时候大家都想跟报纸记者说话。
Lex FridmanBut you also have a way about you. I feel like you have a cowboy in a saloon. You just kind of want to talk. Like there’s a draw to, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s developed or you’re born with it, but it feels like I want to tell you a story of some sort.但你本身也有一种气质。我感觉你就像一个走进沙龙的牛仔，让人就是想跟你聊。我不知道是什么，不知道是后天培养的还是天生就有，但就是让我有种想给你讲个故事的冲动。
Walter IsaacsonGood, tell me a story. A couple things. I did learn to be more quiet. I’m sure I know when I was younger or even I’ll see videos of me at news things where I’m always trying to interject a question and so you learn to be quieter sometimes. I haven’t mastered it. I haven’t learned it enough. You learn to be naturally curious. Many reporters today when they ask a question or either trying to play gotcha or trying to get a news scoop or trying to gig something that can make a lead. And if you actually are curious and you really want to know the answer to a question, then people can tell that you asked it because you want the answer, not because you’re playing a game with them.好，那给我讲个故事。有几点。我确实学会了更安静。我年轻的时候——甚至现在有时候看自己在新闻节目上的视频——我总是急着插问题，所以你会学着有时候安静下来。我还没完全做到，还不够。还有就是要学会真正的好奇心。现在很多记者问问题，要么是想抓把柄，要么是想挖独家，要么是想炒出一条头条。如果你真的好奇，真的想知道一个问题的答案，对方能感觉到你问这个是因为你想要答案，而不是在和他们玩什么游戏。
Lex FridmanI’m sure some of them off the record, some of them on the record, you had maybe just some incredible conversations. I was going to say some of the greatest conversations ever, but who knows? Some of the best conversations ever are probably somewhere in South America between two drunk people that we never get to hear. So I don’t know, but is there advice you can give from what you’ve learned to somebody like me on how to have good conversation, especially when it’s recorded?我相信其中有些是不公开的，有些是公开的，你肯定有过一些极其精彩的对话。我本来想说「史上最伟大的对话」，但谁知道呢？也许史上最好的对话就发生在南美洲某个地方，两个喝醉的人之间，我们永远都听不到。所以我不知道，但不管怎样，你能给像我这样的人一些建议吗——从你的经验来看，如何进行好的对话，特别是在有录音的情况下？
Walter IsaacsonWell, to be actually curious. Every question you’ve asked me is because I think you actually want to know the answer, and you’ve done your homework to be open and not to have an agenda. We all suffer from there being too many agendas in the world today.首先，要真的好奇。你问我的每一个问题，我感觉你都是真的想知道答案，而且你做了功课——做到开放，不带议程。我们都苦于这个世界上议程太多。
Lex FridmanYeah. So that’s just genuine curiosity. But there’s something when you talk about just one-on-one interaction, whether it’s Elon or Steve Jobs or there’s something beautiful about that person’s mind, and it feels like it’s possible to reveal that, to discover that together efficiently and that’s kind of the goal of a conversation.对。所以说到底就是真诚的好奇心。但还有一个层面——当你谈到一对一的互动，无论是和 Elon 还是 Steve Jobs，那个人的思维里有某种美的东西，感觉是可以被揭示出来的，可以一起去发现的，而且是高效地发现，这大概就是对话的目的所在。
Walter IsaacsonWell, look, you are amongst the top podcasters and interviewers in the world today. You have an earnestness to you. Ben Franklin is the person who taught me by reading him the most about on conversation. He wrote a wonderful essay on that. It includes on silence, but it includes trying to ask sincere questions rather than get a point across. It’s somewhat Socratic, but whenever he wondered or wanted to start a Fireman’s Corps in Philadelphia, he would go to his group that he called the Leather Apron Club, and they would pose a question, why don’t we have it? What would it take? What would be good? And then the second part is to make sure that you listen. And if somebody has even just the germ of an idea, give them credit for it. As Joe said, the real problem is this. And I do think that if I’m in situations and I just mean even at dinner or something, I’m with somebody, I’m usually curious and the conversation will proceed with questions.你是当今世界顶尖的播客主和访谈者之一。你身上有一种真诚感。在关于如何对话这个问题上，教会我最多的是 Ben Franklin——通过读他的文章。他写过一篇很精彩的关于对话的文章，里面谈到沉默，也谈到要提出真诚的问题，而不是急于表达观点。这有点像苏格拉底式的方法，每当他想推动什么事——比如在 Philadelphia 建立一支消防队——他就去找他那个叫「皮围裙俱乐部」的小圈子，大家提出一个问题：我们为什么没有？需要什么条件？有什么好处？第二步是确保你在倾听。如果别人哪怕只有一个念头的雏形，也要给他们应有的肯定。就像 Joe 说的，真正的问题在这里。我确实觉得，哪怕只是在饭桌上和人聊天，只要我在场，我通常是带着好奇心的，对话就会顺着问题自然展开。
Walter IsaacsonAnd I guess it’s also because I’m pretty interested in what anybody’s doing, whoever I happen to be with. And so that’s a talent you have, which is, you’re pretty genuine in your interests. There are people like Benjamin Franklin, like the, I’ll say Charlie Rose, even though he’s in disfavor who are interested in huge number of subjects, and I think that helps as well to be interested in basketball and opera and physics and metaphysics. That was a Ben Franklin. That was a Leonardo trick, which is they wanted to know everything you could possibly know about every subject knowable.我想也是因为我对任何人正在做的事都挺感兴趣，无论我碰巧和谁在一起。所以这也是你的才能——你的兴趣是真实的。有些人，像 Benjamin Franklin，像——我举个争议人物——Charlie Rose，哪怕他如今声名狼藉，他们对极其广泛的话题都充满兴趣。我觉得这也很有帮助——对篮球、歌剧、物理、形而上学都感兴趣。Ben Franklin 就是这样，Leonardo 也是这样——他们想把所有可知的学问都掌握在手。
Lex FridmanBut there’s a different aspect of this, which is that I would love to hear how you’ve solved it or if you’ve faced it, that you’re certainly disarming. See, I’m like peppering you with compliments here, trying to get you to open-但这里还有另一个维度，我很想听你是怎么解决的，或者你有没有遇到过——你这个人确实让人放松警惕。看，我现在是在不停地夸你，想让你……
Walter IsaacsonThat’s a very disarming method.这是个非常解除戒备的方法。
Lex FridmanYeah. I’ve recently talked to Benjamin Netanyahu, we’ll talk again. We unfortunately, because of scheduling and complexities only had one hour, which is very difficult, very difficult with the charismatic politician.是啊。我最近采访了 Benjamin Netanyahu，之后还会再谈。可惜由于日程安排和各种复杂情况，我们只有一个小时，面对这么一位魅力十足的政治家，一个小时真的很难、非常难。
Walter IsaacsonHe’s the prime minister.他是总理嘛。
Lex FridmanI understand this, but he’s also a charismatic talker, which is very difficult to break through in one hour. But there, people have built up walls, whether it’s because of demons or because of they’re politicians, and so they have agendas and narratives and so on. And so to break through those, I wonder if there’s some advice, some wisdom you’ve learned on how to wear down through water or whatever method the walls that we’ve built up as individuals.我当然知道，但他同时也是个极具魅力的演讲者，一个小时根本难以突破。有些人筑起了高墙，可能是因为内心的阴暗面，也可能是因为他们是政客，有自己的议程和叙事。要突破这些壁垒，我想请教一下，你在这方面积累了什么经验或智慧，用什么方式——像水滴石穿，或者其他方法——磨穿我们每个人内心筑起的那堵墙？
Walter IsaacsonYou call it disarming, which I don’t know that I am, but disarming basically means you’re taking down their shields also. And you know when people have a shield and you try to give them comfort. I had zero of that problem with Elon Musk. It was disarming to me, which is I kept waiting to say, okay, he’s not going to, they’ve got a shell or he won’t do that. But he was almost crazily open and did not seem to want to be spinning or hiding or faking things. And I’ve been lucky. Doudna was that way. Steve Jobs was that way. But you have to put in time too. In other words, you can’t say, okay, there’s a one-hour interview and I’m going to break down every wall. It’s like on your fifth visit.你说"解除戒备"——我不确定我算不算，但解除戒备基本上意味着让对方放下盾牌。当一个人竖起盾牌，你想给他们安全感，其实很难。但和 Elon Musk 打交道，我完全没遇到这个问题。反而是他让我卸下了防备——我一直在等，等他什么时候会开始遮掩，会有所保留，会伪装什么。但他几乎是疯狂地坦诚，完全不像是在刻意塑造形象、藏着掖着或伪装什么。我算幸运。Doudna 也是这样，Steve Jobs 也是这样。但你也得投入时间——换句话说，你不能说，好，一个小时的采访，我要把所有的墙都推倒。这得到第五次见面时才行。
Lex FridmanYes. Well, actually, there’s one of the things that my situation, you learn, fifth visit is very nice, but sometimes you don’t get a fifth visit. Sometimes it’s just the first date. And I think what it boils down to, and we said disarming, but there’s something about this person that you trust. I think a lot of it just boils down to trust in some deep human way. I think with many other people I’ve spoken with, sometimes the trust happens after the interview, which is really sad because it’s like, oh man.是啊。其实，在我的处境里，有时候你根本没有第五次机会，有时候就只有这一次。我觉得归根结底，就像我们说的"解除戒备"，但核心其实是信任——一种很深的人与人之间的信任。我和很多人聊过，有时候信任是在采访结束之后才建立起来的，这真的很遗憾，因为那时候你会想，哎，早点就好了。
Walter IsaacsonI’ve never been in your situation where I have a show. I usually have-我从来不在你这种情况下——我有一档节目。我通常有——
Lex FridmanSecond-第二次——
Walter Isaacson… mini cracks at the wheel. Yes, I’m not a first date person.……多次机会慢慢推进。是的，我不是一次定终身的那种人。
Lex FridmanYeah, Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know.对，对，对。嗯，你懂的。
Walter IsaacsonBut then I’m lucky. I say lucky, but I’m in print.但我也算幸运。我说幸运，但我是写文字的人。
Lex FridmanI understand.我理解。
Walter IsaacsonPrint is a couple thousand year old medium, but there are those of us who love it.文字是一种有几千年历史的媒介，但我们这些人就是热爱它。
Lex FridmanWell, the nature of the podcast medium is that I’m a one night stand kind of girl. Let me ask you about objectivity. You followed Elon and you follow Steve, like you’ve, I don’t even know if you would say your friend. You have to be careful with words like that, because there’s an intimacy and how do you remain objective. Do you want to remain objective while telling a deeply human story?嘛，播客这种媒介的特性就是——我是那种一夜情式的姑娘。让我问你关于客观性的问题。你深度跟进了 Elon，也跟进了 Steve，我甚至不知道你会不会说自己是他们的朋友。用这个词要小心，因为其中有一种亲密感。你怎么保持客观性？在讲述一个深度人性故事的同时，你想保持客观吗？
Walter IsaacsonYeah, I want to be honest, which I think is akin to being objective. I try to keep in mind who am I writing for? I’m not writing for Elon Musk, as I say, I haven’t sent him the book. I don’t know if he, don’t think he’s read it yet. I’ve got one person I’m writing for, the open-minded reader. And if I can put in a story and say, well, that will piss off the subject, or that will really make the subject happy, that’s irrelevant, or I try to make that a minor consideration. It’s, will the reader have a better understanding because I’ve put this story in the book?我想做到诚实，我认为这跟客观是相通的。我时刻提醒自己：我在为谁写作？我不是为 Elon Musk 写的，就像我说的，书写好后我没有发给他，我也不知道他有没有读过。我只有一个读者对象：思想开放的读者。如果我放进一个故事，心里想的是"这会惹怒传主"，或者"这会让传主非常开心"，那与我无关，或者说我尽量让这只是个次要考量。我真正问自己的是：这个故事放进书里，读者会不会对这个人有更深的理解？
Lex FridmanI’m a bit of a romantic. So to me, even your Einstein book had lessons on romance and relationships.我是个有点浪漫主义的人。对我来说，就连你写的 Einstein 那本书里，都有关于爱情和关系的启示。
Walter IsaacsonOoh, dear.哦，天哪。
Lex FridmanSo how important are romantic relationships to the success of great men, great women, great minds?那么，浪漫关系对伟大男性、伟大女性、伟大头脑的成功，究竟有多重要？
Walter IsaacsonWell, sometimes people who affect the course of humanity have better relationships with humanity than they do with the humans sitting around them. Einstein had two interesting relationships with wives. Mileva, his first wife was a sounding board and helped with the mathematics of the special relativity paper in particular. But he didn’t treat her well. He made her sign a letter that she wouldn’t interrupt him. She wouldn’t… And finally, when she wanted a divorce, he couldn’t afford it because he was still a patent clerk. And so he offered her a deal, which is I think totally amazing. He said, one of these days one of those papers from 1905 is going to win the Nobel Prize. If we get a divorce, I’ll give you the money.有时候，那些改变人类历史进程的人，和"人类"这个整体的关系，比和身边那几个具体的人的关系要好得多。Einstein 有过两段很有意思的婚姻。他的第一任妻子 Mileva 是他的思想搭档，尤其在狭义相对论那篇论文的数学推导上提供了帮助。但他对她并不好，他让她签了一份协议，规定她不能打扰他……最后，当她想要离婚时，他根本付不起赡养费，因为当时他还只是个专利局的职员。于是他提出了一个我至今觉得相当厉害的交换条件，他说：总有一天，1905 年的某篇论文会得诺贝尔奖，如果我们离婚，我把那笔奖金给你。
Walter IsaacsonThat was a lot of money back then, like a million dollars now or something. And she’s smart, she’s a scientist. She consults with a few other scientists, and after a week or so, she takes the bet. It’s not until what, 1919, that he wins his Nobel Prize and she gets all the money. She buys three apartment buildings in Zurich. With his second wife, Elsa, it was more a partnership of convenience. It was not a romantic love, but he knew, and that’s sometimes what people need in life is just a partner. Somebody who’s going to handle the stuff you’re not going to handle. So I guess if you look at my books, they’re not great inspiring guides to personal relationships.那在当时是一大笔钱，相当于现在的一百万美元左右。她很聪明，是个科学家，她咨询了几位其他科学家，过了一两周后，决定接受这个赌注。直到1919年，Einstein 获得诺贝尔奖，她拿到了全部奖金，然后在苏黎世买了三栋公寓楼。第二任妻子 Elsa 则更像是一种利益上的搭档关系，没有浪漫的爱情，但他很清楚——有时候人生中你需要的就是一个伴侣，一个愿意替你处理你不想处理那些事的人。所以如果你看我写的这些书，它们并不是什么关于个人关系的励志指南。
Lex FridmanLet me ask you about actually the process of writing itself. When you’ve observed, when you’ve listened, when you’ve collected all the information, what’s maybe even just the silly mundane question of what do you eat for breakfast before you start writing? When do you write?让我问问你写作本身的过程。当你观察过、倾听过、收集完所有信息之后，哪怕是个听起来很蠢的日常问题——你开始写作前吃什么早餐？你什么时候写作？
Walter IsaacsonFirst of all, breakfast is not my favorite meal. And those people who tell you that you have to start with a hardy breakfast, I look askance.首先，早餐不是我最喜欢的一餐。那些告诉你必须吃顿丰盛早餐才能开始的人，我是持怀疑态度的。
Lex FridmanYes.是的。
Walter IsaacsonAnd morning is not my favorite day part so I write at night and because I love narrative, it’s easy to structure a book, which is I can make a outline that if I printed it out or notes would be a hundred pages, but everything’s in order. In other words, if there’s a burning man and he’s coming back from grimes and then there’s a solar roof thing, and then there’s something, I put it all in order day by day as an outline. And that disciplines me when I’m starting to write to follow the mantra from Alice Mayhew, my first editor, which is all things in good time.而且早晨也不是我最喜欢的时段，所以我在晚上写作。因为我热爱叙事，书的结构其实很好搭建——我会做一个大纲，如果打印出来可能有一百页，但一切都是按顺序排列的。换句话说，如果有个 Burning Man 的场景，他从 Grimes 那边回来，然后有个太阳能屋顶的事，再有什么别的，我把这些都按日期顺序排进大纲。这让我在开始写作时能遵循我的第一位编辑 Alice Mayhew 给我的信条：一切事情都要到该到的时候才说。
Walter IsaacsonDon’t get ahead of the story, don’t have to flash back. And then after you get it so that it’s all chronological and those things, then you have to do some clustering. You have to say, okay, we’re going to do the decision to do Starship or to build a factory in Texas or to whatever. And then you sometimes have the organizational problem of, yeah, and that gets us all the way up to here. Do I keep that in that chapter or do I wait until later when it’s better chronologically? But those are easy.不要超前，不要闪回。等你把所有内容都按时间顺序排好之后，还需要做一些聚类——你得说，好，我们要写决定做 Starship、或者在德克萨斯建厂、或者某件事的那一段。然后有时候会碰到结构上的问题：这个内容已经写到这里了，我是把它放在这章，还是等到时间顺序上更合适的地方再写？但这些都还算容易处理。
Lex FridmanWell, what about the actual process of telling the story?那讲故事本身的过程呢？
Walter IsaacsonWell, that’s the mantra I mentioned earlier, which is whenever I get pause or I don’t know how to say something, I just say, let me tell you a story. And then I find the actual anecdote, the story, the tale that encompasses what I’m trying to convey. And then I don’t say what I’m trying to convey. I don’t have a transition sentence that says Elon sometimes changes his mind so often he couldn’t remember whether he had changed his mind. You don’t need transition sentences. You just say, all right, here’s the point I need to make next and so you start with a sentence that says, one day in January in the factory in Texas comma.就是我之前提到的那个信条——每当我卡壳、不知道怎么表达的时候，我就对自己说：让我来讲一个故事。然后我去找能涵盖我想传达内容的那个具体轶事、那个故事、那个情节。然后我不直接说我想传达什么，不写"Elon 有时候改变主意频繁到他自己都记不清有没有改过"这种过渡句。你根本不需要过渡句。你就说：好，下一步我要说明这个要点，然后你用一句话开头，比如"德克萨斯工厂，一月的某天，"接着往下写。
Lex FridmanWell, one of the things I’d love to ask you is for advice for young people. To me, first advice would be to read biographies in the sense because they help you understand of all the different ways you can live a life well lived. But from having written biographies, having studied so many great men and women, what advice could you give to people of how to live this life?有一件事我很想请你聊聊——对年轻人的建议。对我来说，第一条建议就是读传记，因为传记能让你看到人生可以有多少种精彩的活法。但从你写传记、研究那么多伟大男性和女性的经历来看，你能给人们什么关于如何活好这一生的建议？
Walter IsaacsonWell, I keep going back to the classics and Plato and Aristotle and Socrates, and I guess it’s Plato’s maxim but he may be quoting Socrates that the unexamined life is not worth living. And it gets back to the know thyself and other things, which is you don’t have to figure out what is the big meaning of it all, but you have to figure out why you’re doing what you’re doing and that requires something that I did not have enough of when I was young, which is self-awareness and examining every motive, everything I do.我一直回到古典文本，柏拉图、亚里士多德、苏格拉底，我想那是柏拉图的格言，但他可能是在引用苏格拉底：未经审视的人生不值得过。这又回到"认识你自己"那些主题——你不一定要搞清楚生命的终极意义，但你必须搞清楚你为什么在做你正在做的事。这需要一种我年轻时严重欠缺的东西，那就是自我觉察，以及对自己每一个动机、每一个行为的审视。
Lex FridmanWhere does the examination lead you? Is it to a shift in life trajectory?这种审视会把你引向哪里？是人生轨迹的转变吗？
Walter IsaacsonIt’s not for me sort of, all right, I’ve now decided having been a journalist, I’ll run a think tank or I’ll run a network or I’ll write a bio. It is actually something that’s more useful on an hourly basis. Why am I about to say that to somebody or why am I going to do this particular act? What’s my true motive here? And also in the broader sense to learn as I did after a couple of years at CNN, my examination of my life is that I’m not great at running complex organizations. I’m not great as a manager. Given the choice I’d rather somebody else have to manage me than me have to manage people.对我来说并不是那种很宏观的转变，比如"好，我当过记者，现在我决定去主持智库，或者主持一个电视网，或者写传记。"它更多是在每小时的层面上发挥作用：我为什么要对某人说这句话？我为什么要做这个特定的举动？我真正的动机是什么？广义上说，这种审视也让我明白——在 CNN 待了几年后，我审视自己的人生，发现我并不擅长管理复杂的组织，我不是个好的管理者。如果可以选，我宁愿被别人管，也不愿意去管别人。
Walter IsaacsonBut it took me a while to figure that out. And I was probably too ambitious when I was young and at Time Magazine, that was when I was green and well, that was when I was in my salad days and green in judgment, and it was like chasing the next level at Time Incorporated whatever it might be. And then one day I caught the brass ring and I became an editor and then the top editor. And after a while I realized that wasn’t really totally what I’m suited to be, especially when I got put in charge of CNN. All young people are almost by definition in their salad days and green in judgment. But you learn what’s motivating you and then you learn to ask, but is that really what I want? Should I be careful of what I’m wishing for?但我花了很长时间才想清楚这一点。年轻时我大概太有野心了，在《时代》杂志的那段日子，是我最青涩的时候，用莎士比亚的话说，是我"青春懵懂、判断力不成熟"的时候，就是一门心思追着 Time Incorporated 的下一个台阶往上爬。直到有一天我抓住了那个黄铜圆环，成为了编辑，然后是总编。过了一段时间，我意识到这并不完全是我适合做的事，尤其是当我被任命执掌 CNN 之后。几乎所有年轻人，按定义来说都处于青涩莽撞的阶段。但你会慢慢搞清楚是什么在驱动你，然后学会问自己：但这真的是我想要的吗？我需要小心我许下的愿望吗？
Lex FridmanOne of the big examinations you can do is the fact that you and everybody dies one day. How much you Walter Isaacson think about death? Are you afraid of it?人生最大的审视之一，就是面对这个事实：你和所有人总有一天会死去。你，Walter Isaacson，有多少时间在想死亡？你害怕它吗？
Walter IsaacsonNo, and I don’t think about it a lot, but I do think about Steve Jobs as, let me tell you a story, which is the wonderful Steve Jobs story of I think after he was diagnosed, but before it was public. And he gave both a Stanford talk, but other things in which he said, the fact that we are going to die gives you focus and gives you meaning. If you’re going to live… And Elon Musk has said that to me, which is a lot of the tech bros out in the Silicon Valley that looking for ways to live forever, I can think Musk says of nothing worse. We read the myth of Sisyphus and we know how bad it is to be condemned to eternal life. So there was in Ancient Greece, the person who walked behind the king and said, memento mori, remember you’re going to die. And it kept people from losing it a bit.不，我不害怕，也不会经常想它。但我确实会想到 Steve Jobs——让我来讲个故事——就是那个精彩的 Steve Jobs 的故事，我想是在他被确诊之后、消息公开之前。他做了斯坦福那次演讲，也说了很多其他话，其中提到：死亡的必然性给你带来专注，给你赋予意义。如果你永远不死……Elon Musk 也跟我说过类似的话，他说硅谷那帮科技男整天在寻找长生不老的方法，而 Musk 觉得没什么比这更糟糕的了。我们读过《西西弗斯的神话》，都知道被判处永恒生命是多么可怕的事。古希腊时候有个人专门跟在国王身后，对他说："memento mori"——记住，你终将一死。这让人保持清醒，不至于飘了。
Lex FridmanDo you think about legacy?你想过遗产吗？
Walter IsaacsonThe lucky thing about being a biographer is that you know what your legacy is. There’s going to be a shelf and it’ll be of interesting people and you’ll have inspired a 17 year old biology student somewhere to be the next great biochemist or somebody to start a company like Elon Musk. And what I think more about, I won’t say giving back, that’s such a trite thing. I moved back to New Orleans for a reason. First of all, the hurricane hit and after Katrina I was asked to be vice chair of the Recovery Authority and I realized everything I’ve got going for me, it all comes from this beautiful gem of a troubled city. The wonderful high school I went to, the wonderful streets where I learned to ride a bike and it’s got challenges. I’m never going to solve challenges at the grand global level, but I can go back home and say, part of my legacy is going to be, I tried to pay it back to my hometown even by teaching at Tulane, which I don’t do as a favor.写传记的人有个幸运之处，就是你知道自己的遗产是什么。将来会有那么一排书架，上面摆着有趣的人物，而你的书可能会激励某个17岁的生物学生成为下一个伟大的生化学家，或者某个人去创办像 Elon Musk 那样的公司。我更多想的——我不说"回馈社会"，那太陈腐了。我搬回新奥尔良是有原因的。首先是飓风袭击，Katrina 之后我被邀请担任灾后重建局副主席，我意识到我拥有的一切，都源于这座美丽而多难的城市——我就读过的那所好高中、我学会骑自行车的那些街道……它面临着重重挑战。我没办法在宏观全球层面解决那些挑战，但我可以回到家乡说：我遗产的一部分，就是努力回报我的家乡，哪怕只是在 Tulane 教书——那不是我在施恩。
Walter IsaacsonI enjoy the hell out of it, but it’s like, all right, I’m part of a community. And I think we lose that in America because people who are lonely are lonely because they’re not part of a community. But I’ve got all my high school kids, they’re friends, they’re all still in New Orleans. I’ve got my family, but I also have Tulane, institutions in New Orleans that have been there forever. And if I can get involved in helping the school system in New Orleans, of helping the youth empowerment programs, of helping the innovation center at Tulane, I was even on the City Planning Commission, which worries about zoning ordinances for short- term rentals. Go figure.我享受那一切，但这是一种"我是社区一份子"的感觉。我觉得美国有很多人失去了这种感觉——孤独的人之所以孤独，是因为他们不属于任何社群。但我有我高中的那帮朋友，他们还是朋友，都还留在新奥尔良。我有家人，还有 Tulane，有那些在新奥尔良存在了很久的机构。如果我能参与改善新奥尔良的学校系统、支持青年赋能项目、帮助 Tulane 的创新中心——我甚至在城市规划委员会任职，处理短租条例的区划问题，谁想得到呢。
Walter IsaacsonBut it was like no, immerse myself in my community because my community was just so awesomely good at allowing me to become who I became and has trouble year by year, hurricane by hurricane, making sure that each new generation can be creative and it’s a city of creativity from jazz to the food, to the architecture. So when I think of, I won’t say legacy, but what am I going to do to pay it forward, which is a lower level way of saying legacy, I pay it forward by going back to the place where I began and trying to know it for the first time. That was a ripoff of a T.S. Eliot line. I don’t want you to think I thought of that one.但那就是全身心投入我的社区，因为这个社区太了不起了，它让我成为了今天的我，却年复一年、飓风一场接一场地在艰难坚持，努力确保每一代新人都能拥有创造力。这是一座充满创造力的城市，从爵士乐到美食，到建筑。所以当我想到——我不说遗产，而是说"我要怎么传递下去"，这是比遗产更低调的说法——我的方式就是回到我出发的地方，试着第一次真正认识它。那是偷用了 T.S. Eliot 的一句话，我不想让你以为那是我自己想出来的。
Lex FridmanAlways cite your sources. I appreciate it.要注明出处，我欣赏这一点。
Walter IsaacsonT.S. Eliot, if you ever need to figure it out, the four quartets, it’s that part at the end which is, “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place where we started and know it for the first time. Through the unknown but half remembered gate.” It’s just beautiful. And that’s been an inspiration of what do you do in, I guess if it’s a Shakespeare play, you’d call it act five. Well, you go back to the place where you came and-T.S. Eliot，如果你想查出处，是《四个四重奏》，结尾那一段——"我们不会停止探索，而我们所有探索的终点，将是回到我们出发之处，并且第一次认识它。穿过那未知却半已记起的门。"那句话太美了。那也一直是我的灵感所在——用莎士比亚剧本的话说，如果现在是第五幕，你该怎么做？嗯，你回到你来的地方——
Lex FridmanSee for yourself.亲眼见证它。
Walter Isaacson… so you don’t sit there worrying about legacy, but you’ll sit there saying, how do I make sure that somebody else can have a magical trajectory starting in New Orleans?……所以你不是坐在那里担忧遗产，而是问自己：我怎么做，才能让别人也拥有那段从新奥尔良出发的神奇人生轨迹？
Lex FridmanWell, to me, you’re one of the greatest storytellers of all time. I’ve been a huge fan.在我看来，你是有史以来最伟大的故事讲述者之一。我一直是你的超级粉丝。
Walter IsaacsonThat’s definitely not true, but it’s so sweet of you. You see, you can be-那肯定不是真的，但你真是太好了。你看，你可以——
Lex FridmanBrutally interrupting. From, I think probably Ben Franklin so far, I don’t know how many years, 15 years, Einstein, all the way through today has just been a huge fan of yours, and you’re one of the people that I thought surely would not lower themselves to appear and have a conversation with me, and it’s just a giant gift to me.粗暴地打断一下。从 Ben Franklin 到现在，大概15年了吧，Einstein，一直到今天，我一直都是你的铁杆粉丝。你是我以为绝对不会屈尊来和我聊天的那种人，所以这对我来说真的是一份大礼。
Walter IsaacsonHey I flew into Austin for this because I am a big fan and especially a big fan because you take people seriously and you care.嘿，我专程飞到 Austin 来，就是因为我是你的超级粉丝，尤其欣赏你认真对待每一个人、真心在乎他们的态度。
Lex FridmanThank you a thousand times. Thank you for respecting me and for inspiring just millions of people with your stories. Again, an incredible storyteller, incredible human, and thank you for talking today.谢谢你一千遍。谢谢你看得起我，用你的故事激励了无数人。你真的是一个了不起的故事讲述者、了不起的人，感谢你今天来聊天。
Walter IsaacsonThank you, Lex.谢谢你，Lex。
Lex FridmanThanks for listening to this conversation with Walter Isaacson. To support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description. And now let me leave you with one of my favorite quotes from Carl Young. “People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Thank you for listening and hope to see you next time.感谢大家收听这场与 Walter Isaacson 的对话。如果你想支持这档播客，请查看节目简介中的赞助商信息。现在让我用 Carl Jung 的一句我最喜欢的话来结尾："人们会不惜一切代价，无论多么荒唐，只为逃避直面自己的灵魂。人不是靠想象光明的形象而得到启迪的，而是通过让黑暗变得有意识。"感谢你的收听，希望下次再见。