Walter Isaacson: Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Einstein, Da Vinci & Ben Franklin | Lex Fridman Podcast #395

I 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 as an outsider, Leonardo da Vinci, or Elon Musk, in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father and getting off the train when he goes to anti-apartheid concert with his brother and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticking on their souls. This causes, you know, scars that last the rest of your life and the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred. It's, you know, how do you deal with it?

我希望通过我的书传达的意思是，这不是一个操作指南，而是关于我和你一同走过的人的故事。你可以看到爱因斯坦在德国以犹太人身份成长的过程，你可以看到詹妮弗·杜德纳是如何在外人眼中长大的，还有列奥纳多·达芬奇和埃隆·马斯克，他们在暴力冲突频发的南非成长，还有他们在参加反种族隔离音乐会时下火车看到一个头上插着刀的人，他们踩进了血泊中，这些经历给他们留下了创伤，这些创伤会伴随他们一生。问题不是如何避免受伤害，而是如何应对它。

The 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. I highly recommend people read his new book on Elon. I'm sure there will be short term controversy, but in 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 they are.

以下是与华特·艾萨克森的对话，他是有史以来最伟大的传记作家之一，曾经写过有关阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦、史蒂夫·乔布斯、列奥纳多·达·芬奇、詹妮弗·杜邓娜、本杰明·富兰克林、亨利·基辛格以及现在新的埃隆·马斯克传记的令人难以置信的书籍。我们在麦克风前后交谈了几个小时。我相信我们将会有更多的交谈。华特是一位非常特别的作家、思想家、观察家和人类。我极力推荐人们阅读他关于埃隆马斯克的新书。我相信短期内会引起争议，但在长远来看，它将激励数百万年轻人，尤其是那些童年困境重重、附近或内心中困难重重的人，去解决世界上最困难的问题，并为这些问题建立解决方案，无论它们看起来多么不可能。

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. There 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 ever 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 will work hard to improve. This is the Lex Friedman podcast that supported, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's Walter Isaacson.

在这次对话中，我和沃尔特讨论了他的所有书，并利用其中的个人故事来阐述在科学、技术、工程、艺术、政治和生活中追求伟大的更大原则。在新的埃隆书中有许多事情，我觉得最好的是等我再次直接同埃隆在这个播客上交谈时再谈，这将很快实现。或许在这里也值得提到的是，我的友谊，就像与埃隆一样，以及任何其他影响，比如金钱、机会、名声、权力，都不会让我牺牲自己的诚信，永远不会。我喜欢赞扬人们身上的优点，共情并理解，但我也喜欢在尊重和同情中指责他人的胡言乱语。如果我失败了，那是因为技能不足，而不是缺乏诚信，我会努力改进。这是支持的 Lex Friedman 播客，请在描述中查看我们的赞助商。亲爱的朋友们，现在请听沃尔特·艾萨克森的访谈。

What is the role of a difficult childhood in the lives of great men and women, great minds? Is that a requirement? Is it a catalyst? Or is it just a simple coincidence of fate? Well, 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 sense of his father. And 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 and maybe I would ever do.

伟人们、伟大思想家们的成长中，困苦的童年扮演着怎样的角色？它是一种必要条件吗？它起到了催化剂的作用吗？还是仅仅是命运的简单巧合？嗯，它并非必要条件。有些童年快乐的人走得很顺利。但很多追求目标的人之所以追求，是因为他们驾驭着童年的恶魔。甚至奥巴马在他的回忆录中都提到，我认为每个成功的人都想要达到或者超越父亲的期望，或逃离父亲的影响。对于埃隆来说，这尤为真实，因为他既有暴力和困难的童年，又有一个心理问题严重的父亲。这些恶魔在他的脑海中盘旋。通过驾驭它们，这部分解释了为什么他会去冒更多风险、做更刺激、更狂野的事情，可能是我永远无法做到的。

I'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? Yeah, well, Elon and Kimball would tell me that, for example, when Elon got bullied on the playground and one day was pushed down some concrete steps and had his face pummeled so badly that Kimball said I couldn't really recognize him and he was in a 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. That's probably one of the more traumatic events of Elon's life.

我写了埃隆谈论他的父亲，以及童年时期与他互动让他感到心理上的折磨。你可以描述一下你了解到的一些事情吗？是的，埃隆和金伯尔告诉我，例如，当埃隆在操场上被欺负，有一天被推倒了一些混凝土台阶，脸部被打得很严重，金伯尔说我几乎认不出他，他住在医院里差不多一个星期。但当他回家时，埃隆必须站在他父亲面前，受他责骂一个多小时，说他笨，并站在那个打他的人那边。那可能是埃隆生命中更令人创伤的事件之一。

Yes, and there's also VELD School, which is a sort of paramilitary camp that young South African boys got sent to. And at one point, he was scrawny, he has 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. But the second time he went, he'd gotten bigger. He had shot up to almost six feet and he'd learned a little bit of judo and he realized that if he was getting beaten up, he might hurt him but he would just punch the person in the nose as hard as possible.

是的，还有VELD学校，这是一种类似于军事训练营的地方，南非年轻男孩会被送去那里。有一段时间，他很瘦弱，非常不擅长理解社交和情感暗示。他提到自己有亚斯伯格综合征，所以在那样的营地里遭受了创伤。但第二次他去时，他长高了。他差不多长到六英尺高，并学了一点点柔道，他意识到如果被欺负，他可能会被伤害，所以他就会尽可能狠狠地打对方的鼻子。

So that sense of always punching back has also been ingrained in Elon. I spent a lot of time talking to Errol Musk, his father. Elon doesn't talk to Errol Musk anymore, his father, nor does Kimball, it's been years. And Errol doesn't even have Elon's email. So a lot of times, Errol will be sending me emails. And Errol had one of those Jekyll and Hyde personalities. He was a great mind of engineering and especially material science. I 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. And of course, May Musk says to me, his mother who divorced Errol early on, said, the danger for Elon is that he becomes his father.

因此，这种总是反击的意识也深深根植于伊隆心中。我花了很多时间与他的父亲埃罗尔·马斯克交谈。伊隆不再与他的父亲埃罗尔·马斯克交流，已经过去了好几年，金贝尔也是如此。而且埃罗尔甚至没有伊隆的电子邮件地址。所以很多时候，埃罗尔会给我发送电子邮件。埃罗尔有一种双重人格的特点。他是一个很有才华的工程师，尤其擅长材料科学。我知道他如何使用云母在南非建造一个野外营地，并且不会传导热量。但他也会进入这些黑暗时期，只会心理上虐待他人。当然，梅·马斯克对我说，她是伊隆的母亲，早期与埃罗尔离婚，她说，伊隆的危险就是变成他父亲的样子。

And 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 diapolo 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. And Grimes says, you know, 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, you know, here at Austin wanted dental 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. As you know that too, the huge snap out where suddenly he's showing you a Monty Python skit on his phone and he's joking about things.

而且，有时候，你和他在一起很多，莱克斯，你很了解他。他甚至会和你谈论那些恶魔，谈论他脑海中的恶魔之舞。我的意思是，他明白自己，他有自我意识。但你可能见过他那些恶魔占据他的时刻，他变得非常阴暗和沉默。Grimes说，你知道的，我能提前一两分钟感觉到恶魔模式即将发生。然后他会变得有点阴暗。我记得有一次在奥斯丁，他想和一群人一起去看牙医。你可以突然感觉到有什么触发了他，他将要变得阴暗。我在会议中见过这种情况，有人会说，我们无法以少于200美元的价格做成那个零件，或者不，那是错的。然后他会责骂他们。然后他突然恢复过来。正如你也知道的，他会突然从中脱离出来，然后用他的手机给你看一段蒙提·派森的滑稽表演，跟你开起了玩笑。

So I think coming out of the childhood, there were just many facets, maybe even many personalities, the engineering mode, the silly mode, the charismatic mode, the visionary mode, but also the demon in dark mode. A quote you cited about Elon really stood out to me. I forget who was from, but inside the man, he's still there as a child, the child standing in front of his dad. That was Tallulah, his second wife. And she's great. She's an English actress. They've been married twice actually. And Tallulah said that's just him from his childhood. He's a drama addict. Kimball says that as well. And I asked why. And Tallulah said, for him, love and family are kind of associated with those psychological torment. And in many ways, he'll channel.

我认为从童年时期开始，有很多不同的面貌，甚至可以说是多重人格，有工程师模式，傻瓜模式，有魅力的模式，有远见模式，但也有黑暗中的恶魔模式。你引用的一句关于埃隆的话让我印象深刻。我忘记是谁说的了，但在他的内心深处，他仍然是那个站在父亲面前的孩子。那是他的第二任妻子塔鲁拉说的。她是一位英国女演员，他们实际上结过两次婚。塔鲁拉说那就是他从小就这样。他是一个戏剧上瘾者。金博也这样说。我问为什么。塔鲁拉说，对他来说，爱和家庭与心理折磨有一种联系。在许多方面，他会将其转化为创作灵感。

I mean, Tallulah would be with him in 2008 when the company was going back, 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. And so she told me, deep inside the man, is this man child still standing in front of his father? To a degree is that true for many of us, do you think? I think it's true, but in many different ways.

我是说，当公司在2008年回归或任何其他时候，塔鲁拉都会和他在一起。而且他会压力大到会呕吐。然后他会引用他父亲说过的话，使用那些短语。他父亲曾对他说过的话。所以她告诉我，内心深处，这个男人还站在他父亲面前的小孩的身上。在某种程度上，对于我们很多人来说，这是真的吗？我认为这是真的，但以许多不同的方式。

I'll say something personal, which is I was blessed and perhaps it's a bit of a downside too. But 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. I get to write about Einstein or Steve Jobs or Leonardo da Vinci, who as you know, was totally torn by demons and had different difficult childhood situations, not even legitimized by his father.

我想谈论一些个人的事情，那就是我是幸运的，或许这也有一点不好的地方。但事实是，我有过最好的父亲，你能想象到的那种。而且我的母亲也是最善良的人，你想见到的那种。我在新奥尔良的一个神奇地方长大。我的父亲是一名工程师，电气工程师。他总是很善良。也许我没有那么积极或者疯狂。我不需要证明什么。所以我可以写一些关于埃隆·马斯克的事情。我可以写一些关于爱因斯坦、史蒂夫·乔布斯或者列奥纳多·达·芬奇的事情，你知道的，他完全被内心的恶魔所折磨，并且有着困难的童年环境，甚至没有得到父亲的认可。

So sometimes those of us who are lucky enough to have really gentle, sweet childhood, 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. And so I always respect those who are in the arena. I don't, you know- You don't see yourself as a man in the arena. I'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 either the drives or the addiction to risk.

有时候，我们中那些幸运地度过了非常温和、甜蜜的童年的人，可能成长时没有那么多心魔，但也没有那么多激情，可能最终会变得像博斯维尔（英国作家约翰逊的朋友和传记作者），而不是约翰逊博士本人。我们可能成为观察者，而不是实践者。因此，我总是尊重那些身处竞技场的人。我不认为我自己是竞技场中的人。我有一个温和、甜蜜的职业生涯，我有机会采访非常有趣的人。但我从来没有发射过一枚有可能飞向火星的火箭。我从来没有将我们带入电动车时代。我从来没有在工厂车间彻夜不眠。我既没有足够的动力，也没有对风险的痴迷。

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-down side here. But that's another reason that people like Elon Musk get stuff done and people like me write about the Elon Musk's.

我的意思是，埃隆迷恋风险。他迷恋冒险。而我，如果我看到一些有风险的事情，我会花一些时间计算，并权衡其积极和消极的一面。但这也是为什么像埃隆·马斯克这样的人能做成事情，而像我这样的人只能写关于埃隆·马斯克的事情的另一个原因。

One 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. I think all of us have demons, even those of us who grew up in a magical part of New Orleans with sweet parents. And we all have demons. And rule one in life is harness your demons. Know that you're ambitious or not ambitious or lazy or whatever. New know DaVinci knew he was a procrastinator, you know? How to harness it. Also know what you're good at. I'll take Musk as another example.

另外还有一点，无论是埃隆·马斯克还是达芬奇，考虑到他们都经历了艰难的童年，我不禁想知道他们是否有一些智慧，一些建议，可以给那些经历艰难童年的人。我认为我们所有人都有心魔，即使是在新奥尔良那样神奇地方长大、家庭幸福的人也不例外。我们都有心魔。而生活的第一条准则是驾驭你的心魔。知道自己是雄心勃勃、不雄心勃勃、懒惰或其他什么样的人。你知道达芬奇知道自己是个拖延症患者，你知道吗？要想知道如何驾驭它。同时，也要知道自己擅长什么。我可以拿马斯克再举一个例子。

I'm a little bit more like Kimball Musk than Elon. Maybe got over and down with the empathy gene. And what does that mean? Well, it means that I was okay when I ran Time Magazine. It was a group of 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. And Elon 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, you know, Elon just would fire people. We really rough on people. He didn't have the empathy for the people in front of him. And Elon said, 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 being over and down 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 over and down. Ben Franklin over and down with the desire to please people. The worst criticism of him from John Adams and others was that he was insinuating which kind of meant he was always trying to get people to like him. 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.

我更像金博尔·马斯克而不是伊隆·马斯克。可能是因为我对同理心的基因控制得更好。那意味着什么呢？这意味着当我管理《时代》杂志时我感觉很好。编辑部大约有150人，我认识他们所有人，我们过得非常愉快。当我去CNN时，我不太擅长管理和执行组织工作。我过于在意别人是否对我生气或不开心。而伊隆马斯克也这样评价约翰·麦克尼尔，比如他是特斯拉的总裁。这本书里有提到这个事情。我和约翰·麦克尼尔长时间交谈，他说，你知道，伊隆就是会解雇人，对人们非常粗鲁。他对面前的人没有同理心。而伊隆则说，是的，没错。而约翰·麦克尼尔不能解雇人。他更关心取悦面前的人，而不是整个企业或完成任务。过于追求取悦他人可能会让你成为一个不那么坚决的管理者。但这并不意味着只有过于追求取悦他人的人才能成为优秀的人。本·富兰克林也是一个追求取悦他人的人。约翰·亚当斯和其他人对他的最坏批评就是他总是试图让人们喜欢他。但后来证明这是一件好事。当他们在制宪会议上无法解决大州小州问题时，当他们解决不了《巴黎条约》等问题时，他能够将人们凝聚在一起，这就是他的超能力。

So to get back to the lessons you asked and you know, 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. You know, 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 stuff. It's a power. It's totally different from running an organization. It took me until three years of running CNN that I realized I'm not cut to be an executive in a really high intense situation.

所以回到你提到的课程，第一点是驾驭你的内心恶魔，第二点是了解你的优点和超能力。我的超能力绝对不是成为一个强硬的管理者。在经营CNN一段时间后，我说，好吧，我想我证明了我真的不喜欢这个，也不擅长这个。你知道吗，我还有其他才能吗？是的，我认为我有能力密切观察人们并以直接、但有趣的叙述方式进行写作。这是一种能力，完全不同于管理一个组织。我花了三年时间经营CNN，才意识到我不适合在高强度的环境中担任高管的角色。

Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situation. 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.

埃隆·马斯克天生适合在紧张的环境中担任高管。以至于当事情变得不再那么紧张时，当他们实际上制造足够多的汽车和火箭成功升空和着陆时，他会去想其他事情。这样他就能持续保持紧张感，拥有更大的动力。他对紧张感上瘾。这就是他的超能力，它比成为一个善于观察的人的超能力更加强大。

But I think also to build on that, it's not just addiction to like risk and drama. There's always a big mission above it. So I would say it's an empathy towards people in the big picture. It's an empathy towards humanity more than the empathy towards the three or four humans who might be sitting in the conference room with you. And that's a big deal. You see that in a lot of people. You see it. Bill Gates, 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.

但是我认为还要基于此基础上，这不仅仅是对风险和戏剧的痴迷。背后总是有一个重大的使命。所以我会说，这是对整体情况中的人们的同理心。这是对人类的同理心，而不仅仅是对与你一起坐在会议室里的三到四个人的同理心。这非常重要。你在很多人身上都能看到这一点。你能看到比尔·盖茨、拉里·萨默斯、埃隆·马斯克这些人对人类伟大目标的同理心。有时候他们可能对面前的人的情感一无所知，或者有时候会冷酷无情。

Musk as you said is driven by mission more than any person I've ever seen. And his own only mission is like cosmic missions, meaning he's got three really big missions. One is to make humans a space-faring 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. And third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values.

正如你所说，马斯克是我见过的所有人中最受使命驱动的人。而他自己的使命就像宇宙任务，意味着他有三个非常重要的使命。第一个是使人类成为一个能够航行太空的文明，使我们成为多星球居民，或者说把我们送上火星。第二个使命是让我们进入可持续能源时代，推动电动汽车、太阳能屋顶和电池组的普及。第三个使命是确保人工智能的安全，并使其与人类价值观保持一致。

And every now and then I'd talk to him and we'd be talking about startling satellites or whatever. Or he would be pushing the people in front of him in SpaceX and saying, if you do this, we'll never get to Mars in our lifetime. And then he would give the lecture how important it was for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime. And I'm thinking, okay, this is the pep talk of somebody trying to inspire a team, or maybe it's a type of pontification you're doing a podcast, but on like the 20th time I watched him, I was, okay, I believe it. He actually is driven by this. He's 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. And impatience, a frustration, and it's also just probably the most deeply ingrained thing in him is his mission.

偶尔我会和他聊天，我们会谈论让人吃惊的卫星或其他话题。或者他会推动在SpaceX前面的人，说如果你这么做，我们这一辈子都不会去火星了。然后他会讲述人类意识重要性的演讲，说我们这一辈子必须去火星。我想，好吧，这是某个人试图激励团队的鼓劲讲话，或者可能是一种吹牛的节目，但是在第二十次看到他时，我相信了。他真的被这个激励着，他因为这个小小的工程决策而感到沮丧和愤怒，意味着这个重要的使命将无法完成。这不是一场鼓励演讲，而是真实的沮丧和不耐烦，同时也是他内心最深处根深蒂固的使命。

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. And then he paused and said, but they are trying to save the world. And whether it's Starlink and 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.

他曾经和我开玩笑地说起小时候有多喜欢看漫画。他说，漫画书中的人物都在努力拯救世界，但是他们的内衣却穿在外面，看起来很荒谬。然后他停顿了一下，说道，但他们确实在试图拯救世界。无论是星链和乌克兰，还是星舰前往火星，或是努力打造一家全球性的新特斯拉，我觉得他对自己在助力人类重大事件中所扮演的角色有一种史诗般的意识。就像漫画书中的角色一样，有时候看起来很荒谬，但也有时候是真实的。

When 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 go out without a father, whether they go out with physical, emotional, mental abuse or demons of any kind, as he talked about. And it's really painful to read, but also really damn inspiring that if you sort of 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. That's an epic view of why we write biography, which is more epic than I had even thought of.

当我在读这本书的这部分时，我想到了所有那些在这个方式上挣扎的年轻人。我认为许多人以不同的方式受到困扰，无论是缺乏父爱，身体上的、情感上的、心理上的虐待，或者像他所说的那样有各种魔鬼。阅读起来真的很痛苦，但同时也非常鼓舞人心，如果你学会与这些魔鬼并肩前行，如果你能够不让痛苦打败自己，或者以某种方式加以引导，你就能在这个世界上取得成就，做出伟大的事情。这是一种史诗般的关于我们为什么要写传记的观点，比我之前想到的更加宏大。

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 misset. He's born illegitimate in the village of Venti, and he's gay, and he's left-handed, and he's distracted, and his father won't legitimize him. And then he wanders off to the town of Florence, and he becomes the greatest artist and engineer of the early Renaissance, of that part of the Renaissance.

所以我要说谢谢，因为从某种程度上来说，你试图传达的是，好吧，我是说，莱昂纳多，你谈论的是一个被误解的人。他在文蒂村出生，是非婚生子，是同性恋，是左撇子，不爱按部就班。他的父亲不承认他的合法身份。然后他漂泊到佛罗伦萨镇，并成为早期文艺复兴时期（或者说该时期的一部分）最伟大的艺术家和工程师。

I hope this book inspires. Jennifer Dowden of the gene editing pioneer who helps discover CRISPR, gene editing tool, which my book, The Code Breaker, she grew up feeling like a misfit, you know, in Hawaii, in a Polynesian village being the only white person, and also trying to live up to a father who pushed her. So if people can read the books, and I should have said about Jennifer Dowden, my point was that she was told by her school guidance counselor, no, girls don't do science. You know, science not for girls. You're not going to do math or science. And so it pushes her to say, all right, I'm going to do math and science. It's just to interrupt real quick, but Jennifer Dowden, you've written an amazing book about her, Nobel Prize winner, CRISPR developer, she's incredible, one of the great scientists in the 21st century. Right.

希望这本书能够鼓舞人心。詹妮弗·道登是CRISPR基因编辑工具的发现者之一，她在夏威夷的一个波利尼西亚村庄长大，是唯一的白人，一直觉得自己与众不同，而且还要努力达到一个推动她的父亲的标准。因此，如果人们能读到这本书，我应该还要说一点关于詹妮弗·道登的事情，我的观点是她曾被学校的指导老师告知：“不，女孩不搞科学。你不会学数学或科学的。”这促使她说：“好吧，我就学数学和科学。”抱歉打断一下，但詹妮弗·道登，你写了一本了不起的书，她是诺贝尔奖获得者，CRISPR开发者，她是21世纪伟大的科学家之一。

And I was thinking about when Jennifer Dowden was young, and she felt really, really out of place, like you and me and a lot of people when they fill in that way, they read books. They go into the curl-off with the book.

当我想到詹妮弗·道登年轻的时候，她感到非常格格不入，就像你我以及很多人在感到类似的时候一样，她会读书。她会沉浸在书中。

So her father drops a book on her bed called The Double Helix, the book by James Watson on the discovery of the structure of DNA by him and Rosalind Franklin and Francis Crick. And she realizes, oh my God, girls can become scientists. My school guides counselor is wrong.

于是她父亲给她在床上放了一本书，叫做《双螺旋结构》，这是詹姆斯·沃森关于他、罗莎琳·弗兰克林和弗朗西斯·克里克一起探索DNA结构的发现的书。她意识到，哦天哪，女孩也能成为科学家。我的学校导员给的建议是错误的。

So I think books, like she read this book, and even if it's a comic book, like Elon Musk read, books can sometimes inspire you. And every one of my books is about people who are totally innovative, who weren't just smart, because none of us are going to be able to match Einstein and 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 Steve Jobs would think different.

所以我认为书籍，就像她读的这本书，即使是漫画书，就像埃隆·马斯克读过的那样，有时候能给你灵感。而且我的每一本书都是关于那些完全具有创新精神的人，他们不仅仅聪明，因为我们中没有人能够与爱因斯坦和他的思维能力相匹敌。但我们可以像他那样充满好奇心，创造力，以及像史蒂夫·乔布斯那样独辟蹊径的思维方式。

And so I 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, Leonardo da Vinci or Elon Musk in really violent South Africa with a psychologically difficult father and getting off the train when he goes to anti-apartheid concert with his brother and there's a man with a knife sticking out of his head and they step into the pool of blood and it's sticking on their souls. This causes scars that last the rest of your life and the question is not how do you avoid getting scarred. It's how do you deal with it? Einstein too.

所以我希望通过我的书籍来表达，这不是一本操作指南，而是一个你可以与之共同成长的人。你可以看到爱因斯坦在德国以犹太人的身份成长，你可以看到詹妮弗·道纳成长为一个局外人，你可以看到列奥纳多·达·芬奇或埃隆·马斯克在暴力横行的南非生活，他们的父亲是一个心理压力巨大的人，当他们去参加反种族隔离演唱会时，他们发现一名男子头上插着一把刀，他们踩在血泊里。这些经历会给你留下终生的伤痕，问题不在于如何避免受伤痕的产生，而是如何应对它们。爱因斯坦也是如此。

One of my, it'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. And that's extremely inspiring.

在你的传记中，很难选择我最喜欢的一个，但是对于爱因斯坦，我真的是画面感十足。我不想称他为不合群的人，但他并没有按照传统成功的人生轨迹前进。这让我深感鼓舞。

I don't know exactly a question to ask, there's a million. Well, I'll talk about the misfit for a second, because we talked about Leonardo being that way. You know, 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.

我不确定具体要问什么问题，有太多了。嗯，我会简单谈谈那些不合群的人，因为我们之前谈到过莱昂纳多就是这样。你知道，爱因斯坦是犹太人，在德国的时候情况开始变得困难。他学会说话很慢，是个直观思维者。所以他总是追逐白日梦，想象着各种事情。

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. Now it's the second best school in Zurich and they were rejecting Einstein. I tried to find but couldn't the name of the admissions counselor at the Zurich Polytech. Like you rejected Einstein.

他第一次申请苏黎世联邦理工学院时，是因为他逃避德国的教育系统，因为它过于死记硬背。他被苏黎世联邦理工学院拒绝了。现在这所学校是苏黎世第二好的学校，他们居然拒绝了爱因斯坦。我试图找到苏黎世联邦理工学院的录取顾问的名字，但无功而返，就像你们拒绝了爱因斯坦一样。

And then he doesn't finish in the top half of his class and 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 it. He even tries about 14 different high schools, gymnasium to get a job and they won't take him. So he's a third class examiner in the Swiss patent office in 1905. Third class because they've rejected his doctoral dissertation.

然后，他没有在班级的前一半完成学业，有一次他完成了，他进入了研究生院，但他们不接受他的论文。因此，他无法找到工作。他不得不去教育局教书，甚至尝试了14所不同的高中和中学，但他们都不愿意聘用他。所以，他在1905年成为了瑞士专利局的三等考官。他成为三等考官是因为他的博士论文被拒收了。

And so he can't be second class or first class because he doesn't have a doctoral degree. And yet he's sitting there in the stool in the patent office in 1905 and writes three papers that totally transform science. And if you're thinking about being misunderstood or unappreciated in 1906, he's still a third class patenting in 1907. It takes until 1909 before people realize that this notion of the theory of relativity might be correct and it might up end all of Newtonian physics.

因此，他既不是二流也不是一流，因为他没有博士学位。然而，在1905年，他坐在专利局的凳子上写了三篇完全改变科学的论文。如果你在1906年考虑被误解或不被赏识，他在1907年仍然是三流专利人员。直到1909年，人们才意识到相对论的这个概念可能是正确的，并且可能颠覆牛顿物理学的全部。

How 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? Plus 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 your understanding Maxwell's equations in 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.

这个人是如何在同一年写下科学史上三篇最伟大的论文的？你从中得到了哪些洞见和智慧？另外，他还有一份正式工作作为一名专利审查员。除了这三篇论文外，还有一个附录，因为一旦你理解了量子理论和相对论，并理解了麦克斯韦方程和光速，他添加了一小段内容。这是物理学中最著名的方程式——E等于MC的平方。所以这是一个相当不错的一年。

It partly starts because he's a visual thinker and I think it was helpful that he was at the patent office rather than being the acolyte of some professor at the academy where he was supposed to follow the rules. And so the patent office doing devices to synchronize clocks because the Swiss have just gone on standard time zones and Swiss people as you know tend to be rather Swiss. They care if it strikes the hour in Basel. It should do the same and burn if the exact answer.

部分原因是因为他是一个视觉思维者，我认为他在专利局工作而不是在学院里成为某位教授的追随者对他很有帮助，因为他本应遵守规则。所以他在专利局从事同步时钟设备的工作，因为瑞士刚刚开始采用标准时区，你知道的，瑞士人往往非常瑞士。他们在巴塞尔打响整点的时候很在意，其他地方也应该一样，要确保时间准确。

So you have to send a light signal between two distant clocks and he's visualizing what sort of 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. And he said he's making my palm sweat that I was so worried.

所以，你必须在两个遥远的时钟之间发送一个光信号，他正在想象一下沿着光束行驶时会是什么样子。他说，如果你追上它，如果你以接近光速的速度行驶，它看起来会是静止的，但麦克斯韦方程不允许这种情况发生。他说，我担心的事情让我心里发慌。

And so he finally figures out because he's looking at these devices to synchronize clocks that if you're traveling really really fast what's looked synchronous to you or synchronized to you is different than for somebody traveling really fast in the other direction and he makes a mental leap that time that the speed of light is always constant but time is relative depending on your state of motion.

因此，他最终弄清楚了这样一个事实：当他观察用于同步时钟的设备时，如果你以非常快速度行进，对你来说看起来是同步的东西，对于以相反方向快速行进的人来说是不同步的。他在思维上获得了一个突破，即光的速度始终是恒定的，但时间是相对的，取决于你的运动状态。

So it was that type of out of the box thinking those leaps that made 1905 his miracle year likewise 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 and then when he comes back from Russia where he tried to buy a little rocket ship so he could send a experimental greenhouse to Mars and they were poking fun of them and actually sped on them at one point in a drunken lunch.

因此，正是那种突破常规的思维方式和飞跃带来了他1905年的神奇年份，马斯克也是如此。我的意思是，在通用汽车和福特之后，所有人都放弃了电动汽车，只是说我知道我们将如何找到一条改变整个世界轨迹的道路，进入电动汽车时代。然后，他从俄罗斯回来，在那里他试图购买一艘小火箭，以便能将一座实验性的温室送到火星上，但他们嘲笑他，并在一个酒醉的午餐上加速冷嘲热讽了他。

This is very fortuitous because on the ride back home on the plane on the you know Delta Airlines flight he's like doing the calculations of how much materials, how much metal, how much fuel, how much wood it really costs and so he's visualizing things that other people would just say is impossible. It's what Steve Jobs' 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.

这非常幸运，因为在回家的飞机上，他利用时间计算了需要多少材料、金属、燃料、木材等的真实成本，他能够将其他人认为不可能的事物形象化。这就是史蒂夫·乔布斯的朋友们所称的现实扭曲力场，它让人们发疯，但也促使他们做出自己以为无法做到的事情。

You 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. So is there parallels you see between Elon, Steve Jobs, Einstein, DaVinci specifically in how they think? I 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 and certainly Einstein had a collier. He would repeat things. He was slow in learning to talk. So I think visualizing helps a lot and 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.

你提到了视觉思维，我在想你是否看到过这些人的思维方式中的不同风格和类型之间的相似之处。那么，在埃隆·马斯克、史蒂夫·乔布斯、爱因斯坦和达·芬奇等人的思考方式中，你是否看到了一些相似之处？我认为他们或许都是视觉思维者，因为他们的童年都有一些轻微的缺陷，比如达芬奇是左撇子，有一点点的诵读障碍，而爱因斯坦则有一次颈部受伤，导致他重复说话，学说话比较慢。所以我认为，形象思维对他们很有帮助。就马斯克而言，当我与他一起走在工厂生产线上或参与产品开发时，我经常看到他在观察比如“星际飞船助推器”的“猛禽”引擎下的热护盾时，他会问为什么它必须是这样的，我们能否把它修整成这样，或者甚至去掉它的一部分。

And he can visualize the material science isn't 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 and he's looking at the machines that are bolting something to the chassis and he insists that Drew Bagley, not Drew, but Lars Marvie one of his great lieutenants come and they have to summon him and he says why are there six bolts here and Lars and others explain well for the crash tasks or anything else the pressure would be in this way so you have to and they were blah blah blah blah and he said no if you visualize it you'll see if there's a crash it would 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 in the engineer but turns out to be right.

并且他能够直观地看到，在我的书中，材料科学不仅仅是一些小的轶事；但在某个时刻，他站在特斯拉生产线上，他们正在努力在2018年每周生产5000辆汽车。这是一个生死存亡的情况，他看着那些将某物螺栓到底盘的机器，并坚持让德鲁·巴格利（不是德鲁，而是他伟大的副官之一拉斯·马维）过来。他们不得不召唤拉斯，他问为什么这里有六个螺栓，拉斯和其他人解释说，为了防止碰撞或其他压力从这个角度传递，你必须使用六个螺栓，并且他们说了一堆话，他说不，如果你直观地看，你会发现如果发生碰撞，力会向这个方向和那个方向传递，只需要四个螺栓即可。现在听起来很冒险，他们让工程师测试了一下，结果证明他是对的。

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. That sounds pretty mundane but for me if you say what makes him special there's a mission-driven thing I 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 and 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 outsource so much manufacturing.

我知道这看起来微不足道，但是我可以给你举出500个类似的例子，在任何一天里，他都在将工程或制造问题的物理原理形象化。听起来很普通，但对我来说，如果你问他有何特别之处，我可以给你很多理由，其中之一就是他不仅关心产品的设计，还关心产品的制造过程和用于生产产品的机器，而这正是过去40年来美国所失败的地方，我们外包了太多的制造业。

I don't think you can be a good innovator if you don't know how to make this stuff you're designing and that's why Musk puts his designer's desk right next to the assembly lines and the factories so that they have to visualize what they drew as it becomes the physical object. So understanding everything from the physics all the way up to the software so like end to end.

我认为如果你不知道如何制造你正在设计的东西，你就不可能成为一个好的创新者，这就是为什么马斯克会将设计师的办公桌放在装配线和工厂旁边，这样他们就不得不在它变成物理物体之前，将他们所画的东西形象化。所以要从物理学一直到软件，全方位地了解一切，就好像从头到尾的过程。

Well 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 it only works you know so he has an end to end that makes it like a Zen garden in Kyoto very carefully curated but a thing of beauty.

拥有端到端的控制对于史蒂夫·乔布斯来说非常重要，我正在看着我的iPhone，硬件只能与苹果软件完美搭配，而且一段时间内iTunes商店也只能与苹果设备兼容，你懂的。所以他形成了端到端的控制，就像京都的禅意花园，经过精心策划，美轮美奂。

For Musk, when he first was at Tesla and before he was the CEO, when he was just the executive chairman and basically the finance person funding it, they were outsourcing everything. They were making the batteries in Japan and the battery pack would be its own barbecue shop in Thailand, and that was sent to the Lotus factory in England to be put into a Lotus Elise Chatsi. And then that was a nightmare. You did not have end to end control of the manufacturing process.

在特斯拉的初期，马斯克不过是执行主席和资金提供人，还不是首席执行官，当时他把所有事情都外包了出去。他们把电池在日本制造，电池组在泰国的一个烧烤店制造，然后将其运送到英格兰的莲花工厂，安装到莲花Elise Chatsi车型中。然而，这个过程真的是一场噩梦。他们无法完全控制整个制造过程。

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, you know, the battery he makes its own batteries. And I think that end to end control is part of his personality. I mean, there's a but it also allows Tesla to be innovative.

于是，他走向了另一个极端，他从丰田那里得到了在弗里蒙特的一家工厂，他想要所有事情都内部解决。软件内部解决，喷漆内部解决，甚至电池也是自己生产的。我认为，这种始终确保内部控制的办事方式是他个性的一部分。也就是说，这种方式让特斯拉能够保持创新。

Yeah, 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 Mobileye 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. Sort of saying that we can do it all with vision and like you said, removing some of the bolts.

是的，我有机会详细了解和理解一个例子，这就是车辆自动驾驶系统的大脑发展历程，从Mobileye开发到自主建造自动驾驶系统，最后摒弃了那些信息不丰富的传感器，使其更加适合人工智能。可以说，我们可以完全依靠视觉来实现这一切，就像你说的，去掉一些不必要的部件。

So sometimes it's small things but sometimes it's really big things, like getting rid of radar. Well, vision only getting rid of radar is huge and everybody's against everybody and still fighting it a bit. They're still trying to do a next generation, some form of radar.

有时候，它是一些小事情，但有时候是一些非常重要的事情，比如去除雷达。仅仅依靠视觉而不使用雷达这一点非常重要，所有人都争执不休，还有一些人在继续抗拒。他们仍然在尝试着开发下一代的某种形式的雷达。

But it gets back to the first principles we're talking about visualizing we start with the first principles, and the first principles of physics involve things like, well humans drive with only visual input, they don't have a 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, but now 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 is that first principles of get rid of unnecessary things. Now you would think LiDAR, why not use it, like why not use across, it's like yeah we can do things vision only but when I look at the stars at night I use a telescope too.

但它回到了我们讨论的可视化的基本原理，我们从第一原则开始，物理学的第一原理涉及到只使用视觉输入进行驾驶，没有雷达、没有激光雷达、没有声纳，所以在物理规律中没有理由认为仅凭视觉就不能成功实现自动驾驶。现在他把这个理念当作信仰，遭到了很多质疑，而且他也没有能按时实现自动驾驶，他过于乐观了。但这就是首要原则，摒弃不必要的东西。现在你可能会问，为什么不使用激光雷达，为什么不使用各种传感器，就像在夜晚观察星星时我也会使用望远镜一样。

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 will never be able to, you know, then drive from New Orleans to Slidell where I want to go when it's too hot New Orleans.

嗯，你可以使用激光雷达（LiDAR），但无法实现大规模的数百万辆汽车的需求。在某个时刻，你不仅需要打造出一个优秀的产品，还需要将其扩大规模。而以谷歌地图为基础的产品则不能胜任此任务，因为如果在炎热的新奥尔良，我想去位于斯利德尔的地方，谷歌地图无法提供到达的路径信息。

Take for example full self-drive, he has been obsessed with what he calls the robo taxi, 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, you know Lars Marvie and Drew Baglino and others, this thing okay fine that sounds really good but you know it ain't happened yet.

以全自动驾驶为例，他对他所称为“机器人出租车”的事物非常痴迷。我们将建造下一代车辆，它不带方向盘也没有踏板，因为它将实现全自动驾驶，你只需召唤它，无需亲自驾驶。虽然我已经告诉过你许多次，你知道的，像拉斯·马维和德鲁·巴格里诺等人，这听起来很不错，但现在还没有实现。

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 and 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 robo taxi so you can have the same assembly on likewise for full self-drive.

我们需要建造一辆售价为25,000美元的大众化全球汽车，它仅仅是普通的，配备一个方向盘。几个月前，他最终改变了主意，说让我们去做吧，然后他开始关注生产线的运作方式，我们如何来完成它，并使它成为无人出租车的通用平台，这样你可以使用相同的装配线来进行完全自动驾驶。

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 there's a bike lane do this if there's a crosswalk do that. 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 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 chat GPT doesn't try to answer your question who are the five best popes or something by study chat GPT 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.

他们通过编写数十万行代码来实现这一点，这些代码将描述诸如如果看到红灯就停下来，如果有闪烁的灯光，如果有两条黄色线就这样做，如果有自行车道就这样做，如果有人行横道就那样做等等的情况。这真的很难做到。现在他通过人工智能和机器学习来实现这一点，只有全自动驾驶12（FSD 12）将基于特斯拉每周约数十亿帧的数据，这些数据是来自特斯拉驾驶员的，通过分析这种情况下人类会怎么做，人类在这种情况下会做什么。他选择只挑选最好的人类，就像埃隆所说的五星级的优步司机一样。这是他改变主意并回归到第一原则的做法，但他说好，我甚至要改变全自动驾驶，不再基于规则，而是基于人工智能，就像聊天机器人GPT不会尝试回答“谁是最好的五位教皇”之类的问题，而是通过吸收亿万人们撰写的文本来回答问题。这将是基于人工智能，但是通过吸收视频完成的。

Sometimes it feels like he and others they're 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. 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, they run into they step on the Lego and their body is filled with a lot of pain.

有时候感觉他和其他成功在这个世界上建造事物的人就像是自信地探索一个黑暗的房间，而且对于这个房间的样子有着非常有野心的愿景。就像他们只是直接走进黑暗中，地上没有痛苦的玩具或积木。我只是会走路，我清楚墙离我有多远，然后他们非常快速地调整方向，踩到了积木，身体充满了剧痛。

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 like to me since you know since a few years ago when you could see with Andre 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 will be the thing that allows embodied AI systems to understand the world so broadly it's that kind of approach and you kind of stumble into it will Tesla be a a car company would be an AI company would be a robotics company would be a home robotics company would be an energy company and then you kind of slowly discover this is you confidently like push forward with a vision that's interesting to watch that kind of evolution as long as it's backed by this confidence.

我的意思是，这种演变似乎是一种发生的现象，你在实践中发现了一些很好的想法，使你能够转变方向。对我来说，在几年前，当你能够看到卡帕西的软件2.0演进的自动驾驶时，我就明白了，这不仅仅是关于汽车，而是关于机器人的。如果我们回顾一百年后，汽车将被记为一辆酷车、很好的交通工具，但自动驾驶不仅仅是控制汽车的东西，它将是让具有体验能力的人工智能系统广泛理解世界的东西。就是这种方法，你会不断碰撞并领悟到它。特斯拉是一家汽车公司，还是一家人工智能公司，还是一家机器人公司，还是一家家庭机器人公司，还是一家能源公司，然后你慢慢地发现，只要有这种信心支持，你就可以自信地向前推进自己的愿景。

There are a couple of things that are required for that one is being adventurous. One doesn't enter a dark room without a flashlight in 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 you know first three rockets that the Falcon rocket that must 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 and the people who created America whenever they came over you know whether the Mayflower is 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.

有几个必要的条件，其中一个是要有冒险精神。除非你是一个喜欢冒险的人，否则你不会在没有手电筒和地图的情况下进入黑暗房间。第二个条件是拥有循环的思维模式，能够处理信息、进行反馈，并使之有效。第三个条件，这是我们在美国和世界其他地方经常失败的地方，就是在冒险时，你必须意识到你会遇到挫折，就像猎鹰火箭的前三次发射都失败了，星舰也在三分钟后爆炸了。所以我认为波音、NASA和其他人变得不愿意在没有确切知道出口和通往出口的明亮路径的情况下进入黑暗房间。而那些创造美国的人，无论是乘坐五月花号的船来到这里的人，还是纳粹难民，他们都冒了很大的风险才来到这里。现在，我认为我们比风险者更多的是裁判，比创新者更多的是律师、监管机构等说“你不能那样做，那太危险了”，而我们需要的是既有创新者又有裁判。

I think you're also right on 50 100 years from now what Musk will be most remembered for besides space travel is real world AI not just Optimus the robot but optimist the robot and the self-driving car they're they're pretty much the same they're using you know 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 you know generative predictive text AI let's find especially if you want to chat with your chat bot but the Holy Grail is artificial general intelligence and the tough part of that is real world AI and that's where optimist the robot or full self-drive or I think far ahead of anybody else.

我认为在未来50至100年里，除了太空旅行之外，人们将会最记得马斯克的是他在现实世界中的人工智能，不仅仅是Optimus机器人，而是机器人的乐观主义以及自动驾驶汽车。它们在很大程度上是相同的，它们都使用GPU集群或者道场芯片等来处理我们获得的现实世界数据。你在播客中对大型语言模型、生成式预测文本AI表现出了极大的兴奋，尤其是想要和聊天机器人聊天时。但真正的圣杯是人工通用智能，其中最困难的部分是真实世界的人工智能，而在这方面，乐观主义机器人或全自动驾驶汽车比其他人都更领先。

Well I like how you said chitchat I would say for for one of the greatest writers ever it's funny that you spoke about language and the mastery of language is as merely chitchat you know 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 words or is it in visual in visuals in the physical I don't really it's in mathematics it might maybe it all boils down to math in the end this kind of discussion about a real world AI versus languages all. the same maybe

喔，我喜欢你说的闲聊。对于一个伟大的写作者来说，你这样谈论语言和语言的掌握只是闲聊，这有点有趣。你知道人们因为某些词语而坠入爱河，某些词语也能引发战争。我认为词语有很大的力量。实际上，智慧所在是语言中还是视觉中，并不是一个很容易回答的问题。也许它们都可以归结为数学。这样关于真实世界AI和语言之间的讨论最终可能都一样。

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 then you like 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 like a virtual version of me and I got to hang out with that virtual word version do you like yourself well I never like myself but it was easier to like that other guy that was interesting I was I like you he didn't seem to care much actually lack of empathy but that was you know it made me start to question even more than before like well how important is this physical reality because I got to see you know myself and other people in that metaverse like the details of the face the like all the all the things that you think maybe if you look yourself in the mirror imperfections all this kind of stuff when I was looking at myself and others all those things are beautiful and it was like 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 because like are you allowed to because what are you allowed to do because you can replicate a lot of those things and it's you start to question what are the fundamental things that make life worth living here as we know it's humans

最近，我有机会与马克·扎克伯格先生一起在元宇宙里玩得相当多，哇，那里的真实感令人惊叹。我在匹兹堡花了10个小时进行元宇宙扫描，然后出现了一个虚拟版本的我，我还能与那个虚拟版本的自己一起玩耍。你喜欢自己吗？嗯，我从来不喜欢自己，但是喜欢那个虚拟版本的自己却更容易，他很有意思。我喜欢你，他似乎不太在乎，实际上缺乏同理心，但这让我开始更加质疑物理现实的重要性。因为我能看到自己和其他人在元宇宙中的细节，脸部的各种细微之处，也许在镜子里看到的自己的瑕疵等等，当我看着自己和其他人时，这些都是美丽的，它们是真实而强烈的，让人感到害怕。你会问自己，在元宇宙中能否杀人，因为你能复制很多事物，这让你开始质疑什么是使我们的生命在这个世界上有价值的基本因素，作为人类我们所知的。

have you talked to Elon about his views of we're living in a simulation maybe and how you would figure out if that's true yes there's a constant light-hearted but also a serious sense that this is all a bit of a game one 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 there's another theory that this has already happened yeah so I'm gonna try get my head around that but I know that Elon must try to do that well there there's a humor to that this an enormous humor to Hitchhiker's Guide now really think that helped Mosk out of the darkest of his periods to have sort of the sense of fun of figuring out what life is all about

你和埃隆谈过我们是否生活在模拟中的观点，以及你如何确定这是否正确吗？是的，总是有一种轻松愉快而又严肃的感觉，好像这一切都是一个游戏。我对埃隆有一个小理论，就是他读《银河系漫游指南》读得太多了，就像你知道的，书中有一段说，有一个关于宇宙的理论，如果有人发现了宇宙的秘密和意义，它将被一个更复杂的宇宙所取代，然后道格拉斯·亚当斯接着写道，还有一个理论，认为这已经发生了，是的，所以我要试着理解这个，但我知道埃隆一定试过。这里面有一种幽默感，《银河系漫游指南》的幽默真的帮助马斯克走出了最黑暗的时期，让他有一种乐趣去弄清楚人生的意义。

I wonder if this is a small aside we could say just having gone to know Elon very well because the silliness the willingness to engage in the absurdity of it all and have fun what is that what is that is that just a quark of personality or is that a fundamental aspect of a human who's running six plus companies well it's a relief valve just like video games and polytopia and Elden Ringo 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 the conference room and he has really become upset about something and not only their dark vibes but there's dark words emanating and he's saying your resignation will be accepted if you don't you know etc and then something pops and he pulls out his phone and pulls up a Bonnie Python's get you know 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 dark and demon mode and certainly there is the silly and giddy mode

我在想，这是不是一个小细节，我们可以说是因为完全了解了埃隆，所以才这样开玩笑的呢？他的幽默、参与荒谬行为的意愿以及享受其中的乐趣，是性格的一种奇怪的特质呢？还是一个同时经营六家以上公司的人的基本特点？这其实是一种释放阀，就像电子游戏、Polytopia和Elden Ring一样，对他来说是一种缓解压力的方式。你也知道，他有一种爆笑的幽默感。奇怪的是，当他突然从黑暗的嗜血模式转变过来时，你在会议室里感受到的不仅仅是黑暗的气氛，还有黑暗的话语。他会说，“如果你不……，你的辞职将被接受。”然后，突然有什么事情发生，他拿出手机，播放蒙提·派森的《有趣的步态》或者其他约翰·克里斯的段子，然后他又开始笑了，事情也就解决了。所以，他似乎有不同的模式：仿真人类模式、工程模式、黑暗嗜血模式，当然还有愚蠢和欢乐模式。

yeah 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 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 they're all crazy in this

是的，你实际上打开了一本有关埃隆和史蒂夫·乔布斯的名言的书，所以埃隆的名言是关于我冒犯了任何人，在《周六夜现场》上，我只想说和大家分享，我重新发明了电动汽车，并且我正在用火箭将人们送往火星。你以为我也是个轻松正常的家伙吗？另外史蒂夫·乔布斯的名言是：那些足够疯狂以为他们可以改变世界的人才是真正改变世界的人。你认为疯狂和天才的作用是什么？你认为他们都疯了吗？

well 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 you know give me a story tell me in an account tell me where he's crazy and you know the almost final example AI but him shooting off starship for the first time and between an aborted countdown in the suit off he goes to Miami to an ad sales conference and meets Linda Yacareno for the first time makes her the CEO I mean there's a very impulsiveness to him then he flies back they launched starship and you realize that there's a drive in their 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 a.m. you want to say quit being so crazy but then you realize there's a wonderful line of Shakespeare and 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 craziness it'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 I wonder sometimes it saddens me that we live in a society that doesn't celebrate even the darker aspects of crazy in acknowledging that it all comes in one package it's the man in the universe is the critic and the man in the universe is a regulator and to make it more prosaic

首先，让我们都承认马斯克有时候确实很疯狂。我是指让我们通过讲故事的方式来理解他的这种疯狂，而不是通过言辞高妙的说教来评判他。给我一个故事，告诉我一个例子，告诉我他在哪里疯狂过，你知道，比如最后一个例子是关于人工智能的，他第一次发射星舰时，倒计时失败后，他穿着宇航服去迈阿密参加一个广告销售会议，第一次见到琳达·亚卡莲诺，然后任命她为首席执行官。我是说，他就是这样冲动的人。然后他飞回来，他们发射了星舰，你意识到他们内心有一种驱动力和恶魔，以及疯狂。有时候你希望抑制他的这些因素，比如让他不要在凌晨3点发推特，让他别那么疯狂。但是后来你意识到，正如莎士比亚在《度量衡》的最后说的那样，即使是最好的人也是由缺点塑造出来的。所以你接受了马斯克的这些缺点，其中包括一种可爱的疯狂，但也包括一种真正疯狂。还有他的驱动力和恶魔模式。我不知道能不能剔除其中一部分，而整体还保持完整。有时候我感到悲伤的是，我们生活在一个不赞美甚至无视疯狂的黑暗面的社会，却认识到这一切都是一整套的。在这个宇宙中，人是评判者，也是调节者。更实际地说，

Well, let me ask about not just the crazy but the cruelty. So in you've written when reporting, as Steve Jobs was 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?

好的，让我谈谈不光是疯狂还有残忍。在你所写的报道中，正如史蒂夫·乔布斯被告知的那样，你提出了一个重要问题，就是他是否必须如此刻薄、粗暴和残忍，是否对戏剧有如此强烈的依赖。对于史蒂夫·乔布斯来说，他有必要如此残忍吗？

For Jobs, I asked was at the end of my reporting because that's what he asked said at the beginning. We're doing the launch of I think the iPad to it may have been Steve is emaciated because you know he's been sick and so I say to was what's the answer to your question and he said well if I had been running Apple I would have been nicer to everybody got stock up and we've been like a family and then I don't know if you know was we like a teddy bear he paused he smiled and he said but if I had been running Apple I don't think we would have done the Macintosh or the iPhone so yeah you have to sometimes be rough and job said the same thing that must said to me which is he said people like you love wearing velvet gloves you know I don't know that I've worn velvet gloves often but you like people to like you you like to sweet talk things you sugarcoat things he 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 a certain things blown up and I didn't do it you know so bad on me but it made me realize okay I'll just write about the people can do it well

在采访乔布斯时，我问他最后一个问题，因为这是他在开始时提到的。我们正在进行iPad的发布活动，我认为这可能是由于史蒂夫的瘦削，因为你知道他一直生病，所以我问他，“你的问题的答案是什么？”他说，“如果我一直在管理苹果，我会对每个人都更友善，我们就像一个大家庭，但如果我管理苹果，我不认为我们会做Macintosh或iPhone，所以有时候你必须要粗暴。”乔布斯说的和我之前听到的夸夸其谈的话差不多，他说“像你这样的人喜欢戴天鹅绒手套，你喜欢讨人喜欢，你喜欢掩饰事实。”他说“我只是一个普通工人的孩子，我没有那种奢侈。如果某样东西糟糕，我必须告诉人们它糟糕，或者我必须找到一支由乙级员工组成的团队。”马斯克也是这样，这导致了我前面说的，如果我能在我的装饰店找到天鹅绒手套，我可能会戴上，我确实试图为事情掩饰，但是当我负责CNN时，它需要重塑，它需要被打破，它需要一些东西爆炸，但是我没有做到，我对此感到抱歉，但这让我意识到可以写一些关于那些能够做到的人的东西。

that thing of saying I think probably both of them but you'll certainly saying things like that is the stupidest thing I've ever heard by 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 people they use the word stupid really often and you know who else used it a role mask he kept baking you won't stand in front of him and saying that's a stupidest saying you're the stupidest person you'll never amount to anything I don't know you 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 are when boss of the year trophies

这件事说起来，我觉得可能是他们俩，但你肯定会说类似“这是我听过的最蠢的事”，顺便说一句，我听过杰夫·贝索斯说过，我听过比尔·盖茨说过，我听过史蒂夫·乔布斯说过，我听过史蒂夫·乔布斯说过一个他们正在制作的冰沙的事情，是关于Whole Foods的什么人们经常使用“蠢”这个词，还记得谁还用过吗？罗尔·马斯克就常用这个词，在他面前你会站着说“这是最蠢的话，你是最蠢的人，你永远不会有所作为。”我不知道，你知道埃隆·马斯克特斯拉的总裁说过：“你一定要这样吗？”可能不需要，有很多成功人士要温和得多，但有时候更无情和诚实地对待人们，我会这么说，不像那些只在老板当年的奖杯上看到的人们。

well as you said this kind of idea did also send a signal this idea of Steve Jobs of eight players it did send a signal to everybody it was a kind of encouragement to the people that are all in right and that happened to Twitter when we went to Twitter headquarters the day before the takeover he was having Andrew and James as to young cousins and other people from the autopilot going over lines of code and musk himself set 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 gonna 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 nor Dean came up with the idea of let's not be so rough and just fire all these people let's ask him do you really want to be all in because this is gonna be hardcore it's gonna be intent 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 you know is my or that's not for me I've got a family I got work balance and you got different type of people that way and different stages of their life I was a little bit more hardcore and all in when I was in my 20s and when I was you know in my 50s yeah you write about this it's a really nice idea actually that there's two camps and you find out I don't I want to help true this is it rings true you can just ask people which camp are you in are you the kind of person that prize themselves and enjoy staying up to 2 a.m. programming or whatever or do you see the value of clinical you know about life work life balance all this kind of stuff and it's interesting I mean you like you could people probably divide themselves in different stages of life you can just ask them and it makes sense for certain companies in certain stages of their development to be like we all are teams it doesn't even have to be a whole company and you're right goes back to what I was saying about rule the first secret is sort of know thyself obviously comes from Plato and everything comes from Plato and Socrates but and decide on this stage of my life am I 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 in training psychological safety as one of the managers that people should never feel psychologically threatened and

就像你说的，这种想法确实也传递了一个信号，史蒂夫·乔布斯关于八人制的想法对每个人都有鼓励的作用。当我们去推特总部前一天，他和安德鲁、詹姆斯还有其他汽车驾驶员工开始审查代码，而马斯克自己则坐在楼的二层，用笔记本电脑查看推特工程师编写的代码行。他们决定要解雇其中85%的人，因为他们必须全身心投入。而心理安全和心理假期以及远程工作这种概念，他表示无法接受。然后，实际上他的其中一个堂兄弟或者也许是罗斯·诺迪恩提出了一个想法，即不要这么粗暴地解雇所有人，我们应该问问他们，你们真的想全身心投入吗？因为这将是非常困难的，这将是一项需要专注的工作。你可以做出选择，但到今晚十二点之前，我们希望你能勾选“我全力以赴”，我会亲自去工作。或者说“这并不适合我，因为我有家庭，我需要平衡工作和生活”，不同的人有不同的方式，处在生命中不同的阶段。当我二十几岁的时候，我更加全力以赴，更加投入，当我五十多岁的时候，也是如此。是的，你写得很好，这是一个非常好的想法，分成两个阵营，你可以找出来，我想帮忙一下，这个观点是正确的，你可以问人们他们属于哪个阵营，他们是那种为了编程而熬夜到凌晨2点的人，还是那种注重生活、工作平衡价值的人，这是很有趣的，我是说你可以把人们分成不同的生命阶段，只需问他们就可以了，对于某些公司在发展的不同阶段，这样做是有道理的，我们都是团队，甚至可以不用整个公司，而且你说得对，这回到了我之前说的秘诀一第一秘密，就是了解自己，显然这是源自柏拉图，一切都源自柏拉图和苏格拉底，但在我生命的这个阶段，我要决定自己是想成为一个无休止的挑战黑客，通宵改变世界，还是想带来智慧和稳定且平衡的生活。我认为不同风格的公司都是好的，问题是推特几乎达到了一个极端，有瑜伽工作室，有心理假期，有培训心理安全的管理者，人们不应该感到心理威胁。

he a member of the bitter laugh he unleashed when he kept hearing that word he said no I like the words or hardcore I like intensity I like a intense sense of urgency as our operating principle well yeah that people that way as well and so know who you are and know what type of team you want to build versus psychological safety and too many birds everywhere oh yeah a lot of times musk did things I go what the hell yeah the bottom them was changing the name Twitter and getting rid of the birds hey 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 playpen for the blue checked anointed elite and I thought okay this is gonna be bad the whole thing's gonna fall apart well it has had problems but the hardcore intensity of it it's also meant that there's new things happening there so it's very Elon Musk to not like this sweetness of birds chirping and tweeting and saying I want something more hardcore as you've written in referring to the the previous Twitter CEO Elon said Twitter needs a fire breathing dragon

他是个苦笑的成员，每次他听到那个词时他都会发出苦笑。他说：“不，我喜欢那些词或者激情四溢的东西，我喜欢强烈的紧迫感作为我们的运作原则。”是的，有些人也是这样，所以要知道你是谁，知道你想要建立什么样的团队，相对而言，心理安全比太多的鸟儿更重要，没错，Musk有很多次做事情，我都说这是什么鬼。最后他是改变了Twitter的名字，将鸟儿赶走了。嘿，伙计，投资大量时间在这个品牌上可不容易。但当我看着他的时候，他在想：“好吧，这些甜蜜的鸟儿在推特上叽叽喳喳，但这不够强烈。”所以不管好坏，我觉得他正在把它变得更激进，让那些发布激进言论的人进入这个领域，这不是给那些拥有蓝色认证的精英们的优雅游乐场。我当时觉得：“嗯，这肯定不妙，整个事情都会崩溃。”虽然确实出现了问题，但激进的强烈程度也意味着有新的事情出现。这非常符合埃隆·马斯克不喜欢鸟儿歌唱和鸣叫的甜美，他希望有更激烈的东西，正如你在提到之前的推特CEO时写的那样，埃隆说推特需要一条喷火的巨龙。

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 went through to the details of like you mentioned the engineering teams well at the beginning of 2022.

我认为这是一个很好的机会，可以回顾一下你在书中详细写过的有关 Twitter 故事的一些令人难忘的时刻。从考虑收购的早期阶段，到深入了解你提到的工程团队的细节，直到 2022 年初为止，都可以进行回顾。

He was riding high but as we say he's a drama addict he doesn't like to coast and you know Tesla told a million vehicles I think 33 boosters you know Falcon 9s have been shot up and landed safely in the past few months and he was a richest person on earth and times person of the year and yet he said you know I'm still want to put all my chips back on the table.

他曾处于巅峰，但我们说他是一位戏剧迷，他不喜欢安逸生活。你可能知道，特斯拉已经售出了一百万辆汽车，我想有33个助推器，你也知道过去几个月里，9号隼号火箭成功发射并安全着陆。他曾是全球最富有的人，也是《时代》杂志的年度人物，然而他表示，你知道，我仍然想要把所有的筹码都压在赌桌上。

I want to keep taking rest. I don't want to savor things. He told 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 where I go from here.

我想继续休息。我不想品味事物。他把他所有的房子都卖掉了，然后秘密购买了Twitter的股票。一月、二月、三月变得公开。在某个时刻，他不得不宣布这一切，而我们当时在奥斯汀的Gigafactory上层楼，他试图弄清楚接下来该去哪里。

And at that time, this early April, they were gonna offer him a board seat and he was gonna do a standstill agreement and stop at 10 percent or something. Now remember, you know, we were standing around. It was Luke Nozick, whom you know well, Ken Halleree, 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.

那个时候，就是今年四月初，他们打算给他提供一个董事会席位，然后签署一份停止协议，持股比例控制在10%左右。你要记住，我们都站在那里。就是卢克·诺兹克，你很熟悉的，肯·哈勒瑞，以及他的一些朋友在这个夹层上，整个下午一直到晚上吃晚餐的时候大家都在说，我们应该这样做吗？我没说什么，只是一个旁观者，但其他人都在问，不好意思，为什么你想拥有Twitter和Griffin？

His son joined at dinner and May for some reason was in town and like everybody says no we don't use Twitter why would you do that. And May said well I use Twitter and it's almost like okay the demographics are people my age or may say 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 you know he used that phrase a few times that parody wasn't the person who was going to take Twitter to a new level.

他的儿子在晚餐时加入了进来，而梅（May）出于某种原因现在在城里。就像大家都说的，我们不用Twitter，你为什么要这样做呢？梅说，我用Twitter，而且基本上看起来好像在我的年龄段使用的人的数量比较多。所以似乎他并不打算追求这个机会，但他们给了他一个董事会席位，然后他去了拉里·埃里森（Larry Ellison）的夏威夷住宅，他有时候会去那里。他打算见一位名叫安吉拉·巴塞特（Angela Bassett）的朋友，她是一位女演员，但他没有好好享受三天的假期，反而充满了激情，开始发送短信，其中包括一条叫做“喷火龙”的信息。我认为他好像多次使用了这个说法，明显这个人不是能够将Twitter带到一个新水平的那个人。

And then by the time he gets a 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 closed and people asked me all the time well did he want to get out of the deal I said what's your honor you're talking about at what time of day because there'll be times in the morning when he'd say oh the Delaware court's gonna force me to do it.

然后，当他到达温哥华并与Grimes见面时，他们整晚都在玩《Elden Ring》，他当时正在进行TED演讲，然后在5点30分他完成了玩《Elden Ring》并发送出去了我已经提出了一个报价。即使他回来了，人们仍然试图干预并问道请问你为什么这样做，所以从4月底到10月份，交易关闭期间都是一段坎坷的时期，人们一直问我，他是否想退出交易，我说你是在什么时候说的，因为早上的时候他会说特拉华州法院会强迫我这样做。

It's horrible, talk to his lawyers, you can win this case, get me out of it. He met here in Austin with three or four investment bankers Blair, Efron at Centerview, Bob Steele at Perella Weinberg, and they offered him options. Do you want to get out, do you want to stay in, do you want to reduce the price? And I think is he was me a curiel there were times he would text me or say to me this is gonna be great, it's gonna be the accelerant to do X dot com the way we thought about 20 years ago.

太可怕了，和他的律师交谈一下，你能赢得这个案件，帮我摆脱它。他在奥斯汀遇见了三四名投资银行家——布莱尔、埃弗隆、中心视野的鲍勃·斯蒂尔，他们给了他一些选项。你想退出，还是留下来，要不要降低价格？我觉得，他对我说过一些话，他会给我发短信，或者对我说，这会很棒，它将成为我们二十年前所设想的X互联网公司的催化剂。

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 say you're not gonna 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 time. Eventually the deal is gonna close on a 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 state woke t-shirts and psychological safety lingo they're all using and he and his lawyers and bankers had to 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 Parela again to others firing them quote for cause and there'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 gonna I'm gonna try this jujitsu maneuver and be able to get some money out of them then 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.

所以直到10月初，当加州正在揭晓机器人Optimus的时候，律师才告诉他们，说你们可能赢不了这个案子，最好继续执行交易。到那时，他不仅已经接受了这个结果，而且他还有点高兴。最终，交易将在我记得是一个星期五上午结束，我们在星期四就到了那里，他四处闲逛，看着那些有关国家觉醒的T恤和心理安全术语，他和他的律师和银行家们计划进行一个快速交易。原因是如果他们在当天收盘之后才结束交易，他就可以写封信给佩雷拉和其他人，解雇他们，理由是“由于原因”，法庭将不得不解决这个问题，这样他就可以节省大约2亿美元。对他来说，不仅仅是钱的问题，而是，可以说是一种原则问题，或者说是他们在数字方面误导了我，我被迫这么做，所以我要用柔术般的策略试图从他们那里拿到一些钱。然后他接管后的情景有点狂野，他试图在三轮中决定如何将员工减少到原来的15%。

On Christmas Eve after he'd been in a meeting where they told him we can't get rid of that Sacramento server farm because it's need of a redundancy, 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 a plane around they land in Sacramento and he pulls him out himself. So it was a manic period we should also say that.

在圣诞夜的会议上，有人告诉他我们不能取消那个萨克拉门托的服务器群，因为它是冗余备份所需，但他说不是这样，并决定飞往奥斯汀，约翰也建议我们自己动手，于是他改变了飞机的航向，他们降落在萨克拉门托，他亲自把服务器关掉。所以，那段时间非常忙碌。

Underneath that there was a running desire to or consideration perhaps start a new companies to build a social media company from scratch. Well Kimball wanted to do that and Kimball here at a wonderful restaurant in Austin launches like hey why you buying Twitter but start one from scratch and do it on the blockchain.

在此之下，存在着一种持续的欲望或考虑，可能是为了开始一个全新的公司，从零开始构建一个社交媒体公司。Well Kimball想要这样做，而Kimball在奥斯汀的一家美妙的餐厅里发起了这样的想法，就像嘿，为什么要购买Twitter，不如从零开始，在区块链上构建一个新的社交媒体平台。

Now 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 response of time enough to be able to handle a billion tweets you know in a day or so.

现在，他花了一些时间，你可以说这个问题也可以说这个问题，他得出的结论是，区块链的响应时间不够快，无法处理每天十亿条推文。

He gets mad when they keep trying to get him to talk to Sam Bankman free to try to say I'll invest but we have to do it on the blockchain.

当他们不停地试图让他与Sam Bankman说话，而Sam Bankman希望免费试用，他会变得很生气。他想说：“我会投资，但我们必须在区块链上进行。”

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 have been battery 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 millions and millions and millions of true users not just trolls and start from scratch as others have found there's a master don and blue sky and threads and not any threads even had a base so it would have been hard yeah 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 sort of go hardcore so there's a lot of interesting sort of questions to ask there but the high level can you just comment about that part of the saga which is bringing in the engineers and seeing like what can we do here right he brought in the engineers and figured that the amount of people doing Tesla full self-driving autopilot and all the software there was about one tenth of what was doing software for Twitter and he said this can't be the case and he fired 85 percent 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 ever of all that was written in the past year or so then he fired people you know who didn't seem to be totally all in or loyal and then another round of layoffs so at each step of the way almost everybody said that's enough it's going to destroy things yeah from Alex Barra his lawyer to Jared Burtrell he's like whoa whoa whoa you know and even Andrew and James the young cousins who are tasked with making a list and figuring out who's good or bad say we've done enough we're going to be in real trouble and they were partly bright I mean there was degradation of the service some but not as much as half the services I use half the time you know and I wake up each morning and hit the app and okay still there what do you think was that too much I think that he has an algorithm that we mentioned earlier that begins with question every requirement but it's up to his delete delete delete delete every part and then a corollary to that is if you don't end up adding back 20% of what you deleted then you didn't delete enough in the first round because you were too timid 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 but it sends a strong signal to people that are hired back or the people that are still there the API yeah in which 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 so how much of Elon's success would you say Elon's and Steve Jobs's success is the hiring and managing of great teams when I asked Steve Jobs at one point what was the best product you ever created I thought he'd say maybe the Macintosh or maybe the iPhone 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 you know from Johnny I have to Tim Cook and Eddie Q and Phil Schiller Elon has done a good job bringing in people when shot well obviously Linda Yacareno she's you know can navigate through the current crises certainly stellar people at SpaceX like Marc Gencosa and then at Tesla like Drew Baglino and Lars Marvie and Tom Jue and many others he's not as much of a team collaborator as a Benjamin Franklin who by the way that's the best team ever created which is the founders and you had to have really smart people like Jefferson and Madison and really passionate people like John Adams and his cousin Samuel and really a guy of high-reacted to like Washington but you also needed.

金博尔回顾起来仍然支持开创一个基于区块链的新媒体公司，我认为开创一个新的媒体公司会更好，不会有那些包袱或者传统，他现在正在打破Twitter的方式，但是要从零开始拥有数百万真正的用户，而不仅仅是喷子，是困难的。正如其他人发现的，要想做到这一点需要大量的努力，比如掌握技术、掌握蓝天计划和线索，而且即使掌握了线索，也没有基础，所以这一切都很难。他的做法需要实施另外一个你所谈到的方面，即三位战士的工程和开除工程师的整个过程，以尝试达到彻底改变的目标，在这个过程中有很多有趣的问题。但是在整个情节中，你能不能简单地评论一下这一部分，即引入工程师，看看我们能在这里做些什么。他引入了工程师，并发现做特斯拉全自动驾驶和所有软件的人数大约是为Twitter编写软件人数的十分之一，他说这是不可能的，并在三轮中裁掉了85%的员工。首先，他裁员是因为他们看了看代码，并由特斯拉的自动驾驶团队的一组人来对过去一年或这样编写的所有代码进行评分，然后他解雇了那些似乎不是完全忠诚或忠实的人，然后进行了另一轮裁员。在每一步中，几乎每个人都说“够了”，这会毁掉一切，从亚历克斯·巴拉（他的律师）到贾瑞德·伯特尔（他的首席执行官），以及连任务是制定名单并找出谁是好人谁是坏人的年轻表弟安德鲁和詹姆斯，他们说我们已经做得够了，我们会遇到真正的麻烦，他们部分是明智的，服务质量确实有所下降，但并非像我的一半服务一半时间那样严重，每天早上我醒来并打开应用程序，一切还在。你认为这样做是否过火了？我认为他有一个我们之前提到过的算法，即先质疑每一个要求，然后删除删除删除每一部分，然后一个补充是如果你最后没有添加回删除的20%，那么你一开始删除得太少了，因为你太胆怯了。所以你问我他是否过分了，他可能超过了20%，这是他的原则，他们现在可能正在努力雇佣人员以保持工作的运行，但这向被重新雇佣的人或仍在那里的人发出了强有力的信号。在这方面，史蒂夫·乔布斯和其他伟大的领导者以及贝佐斯、以及微软的早期比尔·盖茨都有这种感觉，他们的核心团队只招募顶尖的优秀员工。当我曾经问史蒂夫·乔布斯，他最棒的产品是什么时，我以为他会说可能是Macintosh或者iPhone，但他说不，那些产品很难，我创造的最好东西是制造这些产品的团队，这才是困难的部分，创造一个团队，他已经做到了，从乔纳森·艾维和蒂姆·库克、埃迪·库以及菲尔·席勒等人，埃隆·马斯克在带进去的人员中表现得很好，显然琳达·雅卡雷诺也能够应对当前的危机，SpaceX的杰克马克·桑克索和特斯拉的德鲁·巴格里诺、拉斯·马维和汤姆·休等等杰出的人才，他不像本杰明·富兰克林那样擅长团队合作，顺便说一下，那是有史以来最好的团队，即创始人，你需要像杰斐逊和麦迪逊这样聪明的人，像约翰·亚当斯和他的表弟塞缪尔一样充满激情的人，以及像华盛顿这样表现高素质的人，但你也需要...（此处省略）

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 magnet interesting but there's the there's like the priorities of hiring of based on excellence trustworthiness and drive these are things you described throughout the book I mean there's a pretty concrete and rigorous set of ideas based on which the hiring is done oh yeah and he has a very good spidey intuitive sense just looking at people who could I mean not looking at them but studying them who could be good one of his ways of operating is what he calls a skip level meeting.

一个能够将每个人团结起来，将他们组成一个团队并使他们相互妥协的本·富兰克林，马斯克是一个迷人的人才磁铁，但在雇佣方面有一些优先考虑，例如卓越能力、值得信赖度和动力，这些是你在书中描述的特点。我指的是，有一个相当具体严谨的一套想法作为基础的招聘方式。哦对了，他还有一个非常敏锐的直觉感，通过观察和研究人们能够判断出谁可能是好人才。他的一种工作方式是他称之为“跳级会议”。

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 and I'll remember that he spent a couple of months doing what he calls skip level which means instead of meeting with his direct reports on the Raptor team he would meet with the people one level below them and so he would skip a level and meet with them and he said this is and I just ask him 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 because people were wearing masks it was during the height of COVID and he said he made it a little bit harder for him because he has to get the input but I watched his young kid dreadlocks named Jacob McKenzie he's in the book he's sitting there and he's a bit like you engineering mindset.

让我们以像推动星际飞船的猛禽引擎这样非常具体的事情为例。起初它进展得并不顺利，看起来像一团乱麻，制造起来也会很困难。他解雇了那个团队负责人，我记得他花了几个月时间进行了所谓的"跳级"。所谓"跳级"是指他与Raptor团队的直接下属会晤，而不是与直接汇报给他的团队成员会面，他会直接与他们的下一级职员会面，也就是跳过了一个层级。他说这样他可以了解他们在做什么，并且用问题来进一步刺激他们。他说这是他找出谁会脱颖而出的方法。因为正值COVID疫情高峰期，人们都戴着口罩，所以对他来说参加这些会议变得有点困难，因为他需要获取大家的意见。但我看到了他那个年轻的小伙子，名叫Jacob McKenzie，他的形象和你有些相似，是个工程思维的人，他就坐在那里。

Speaks in a bit of a monotone must would ask a question and he would give an answer and the answer would be very straightforward and he didn't you know get rattled he was like and must said one day called him up at three at well I won't say three a.m. but after midnight said you still around Jake said yeah I'm still at work and 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 with that building him at least one a week and they're pretty awesome and that's where his talent must talent for finding the right person and promoting them that's where it is and promoting it in a way where it's like here's the ball here catch yeah yeah and you run with it

话语之中带点单调，他问一个问题，他会给出一个非常直接的答案，并且他不会受到干扰，就像有一天之前马斯特打电话给他，是在三点以后，嗯，我不会说是凌晨三点，但肯定超过了午夜，问他你还在吗？杰克说是的，我还在工作，然后他说好，我决定让你负责建造猛禽团队，这真是个大惊喜，但是雅各布·麦肯齐现在已经掌握了猛禽的制作，并且至少每周可以完成一个，它们非常棒，这就是马斯特擅长找到合适的人并提拔他们的才能所在，而且他是以一种类似的方式提拔，就像是，这是球，接住，对，接住了就跑。

I have I've interacted with quite a few folks from even just the Model X the the all throughout where people you know on paper don't seem like they would be able to run the thing and they run it extremely successfully and he 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 and when they were doing the battery factory surge in Nevada Musk got rid of two or three people and there's Brian Dow can do can do can do stays all night and he gets promoted and runs it and so finally goes must. go 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 and you know Brian there okay can do can do and two or three times Musk insisted that they put install a solar roof in one of those houses in Boca Chica this is this tiny village at the south end of Texas and late at night I mean I'd have to climb up to the top of the roof on these ladders and stand on this peaked roof as Musk is there saying why do we need four screws to put in this single leg and and Brian was just sweating and doing everything but then after a couple of months it wasn't going well and boom uh Musk just fired him

我曾经与很多人互动过，甚至仅仅是Model X上的人。这些人在纸面上看起来不像能够成功经营这个项目的人，但他们却非常成功地进行了经营，有时候也会出错。其中一个名叫布赖恩·道（Brian Dow）的人在太阳能屋顶部门做得非常好，我真的很喜欢他。当他们在内华达州进行电池工厂扩建时，马斯克解雇了两三个人，而布赖恩·道则是个可以一直干下去的人，并最终得到了提拔并负责相关工作。最后，经过两三次更换领导，马斯克终于找到了布赖恩·道。当时我正在马斯克在博卡奇卡的小小两居室的房子里，他提出让布赖恩·道来负责太阳能屋顶项目。你知道，布赖恩他还可以、还可以。马斯克坚持要在博卡奇卡的其中一座房子上安装太阳能屋顶，这是德克萨斯州南端的一个小小村庄，晚上很晚了，我必须爬上梯子，站在屋顶上，而马斯克就在那里说：“我们为什么需要四颗螺丝钉来安装这个支腿呢？”布赖恩汗流浃背，竭尽全力，但几个月后情况并不顺利，马斯克突然解雇了他。

so I always try to learn what is it that makes those who stay thrive what's the lesson there what do you think well 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 I think it's Tim Zayman I hope when he hears this I'm getting him the right person who you know took time I was working for Tesla autopilot and it was just so intense he took some time off and 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 it said can I come back he said sure he said I learned about myself I'd rather be burned out than bored that's a good line

所以我总是努力学习那些能够继续繁荣发展的人是如何做到的，其中有什么教训呢，你认为呢？嗯，我认为这是自我认知，就像安迪·克雷布斯（Andy Krebs）或其他人说的那样，他们说我是一个非常狠心的人，我真的想把一枚火箭送上火星，这比任何其他事情都更重要。我认为其中一位是蒂姆·泽曼（Tim Zayman），希望他听到这个时能确保我指的是正确的人，他曾经为特斯拉的自动驾驶系统工作，那是如此激烈，他休息了一段时间，然后去了另一家公司，他说在特斯拉工作时他感到筋疲力尽，但在下一家公司他感到无聊，于是他给阿肖克打了个电话，问他能不能回去，阿肖克说可以。他说我对自己有了更多的了解，我宁愿筋疲力尽也不愿无聊，这是一个好的经验。

what can you just linger on one of the three that seem interesting to you in terms of excellence trustworthiness and drive which one of the things is the most important and the hardest to get at the trustworthy this is an interesting one like are you right or die kind of thing yeah I think that especially when it came to taking over Twitter he thought half the people there were disloyal and he was wrong about two thirds were disloyal not just half and it was how do we weed out those and he did something and made the firing squad I call it or the musketeers I think I is my nickname for them which is you know the young cousins and two or three other people he made them look at the slack messages these people had post everybody at Twitter had posted and they went through hundreds of slack messages so if anybody posted on the internal slack you know that jerky lawn 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 and I 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 have done or most people would have 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 sit 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 marching cosa just whip smart it's all your hardcore and all-in especially if you have to move to this spit of a town in the south tip of Texas called Boca Chica you know you got to be all-in yeah and that's the drive the last piece

你可以只关注在卓越、可信度和动力方面中那三个中有趣的之一吗？其中哪一个是最重要和最难获得的呢？可信度是一个有趣的问题，就像是你是否是付出生命的那种人。是的，特别是当他接管Twitter时，他认为大约一半的人是不忠诚的，但他错了，实际上有三分之二的人是不忠诚的，而不仅仅一半。于是他想要筛选出这些人，他采取了一些措施，我称之为行刑队或火枪手，这是我给他们取的外号，其中包括了一些年轻的侄子和其他两三个人，他们被要求查看这些人在Twitter内部的slack消息。他们阅读了数百条slack消息，所以如果有人在内部的slack上发帖说，你知道那个傻逼埃隆·马斯克将接管控制权，我害怕，他是个疯子之类的话，那些人就会列入名单，因为他们要寻找全力以赴、忠诚的人。他们没有查看私人的slack消息，我想那些在公司的slack群组上发帖的人应该意识到，你的公司可以查看它们，但这已经超乎我所能想到和大多数人所能想到的。所以这样做是为了确定谁是深深投入和忠诚的人，我认为这主要是适用于Twitter。他不会坐在SpaceX那里说谁对我忠诚，在其他地方一般会以卓越为重点，但这几乎是理所当然的，每个人都像火箭一样智商聪明，都非常全情投入，特别是如果你不得不搬到德克萨斯州南端的一个叫做博卡奇卡的小镇，你知道你必须全情投入。这就是动力，最后的部分。

so you in terms of collaborating one of the great teams of all time and I like that I thought it was the Beatles but Bang Frank is pretty good oh no no no I'm sorry yeah sorry to have any so read the Constitution and read Abbey Road looking Abbey Road they're both good but they're there differently yeah differently okay

就你来说，在与史上一支伟大的团队合作方面，我挺喜欢的。我原以为是披头士乐队，但班克·弗兰克也挺不错的。哦不，不，不，我很抱歉，我是说真的，抱歉有一点。所以读宪法和阅读艾比路（即披头士专辑）看艾比路，它们都不错，但有不同之处，就是有不同之处，是的。

so one of the many things that comes to mind with Ben Franklin is incredible time management is there something you could say about Ben Franklin and about Steve Jobs I think interesting with Elon is that he as you write run six companies seven when he depends how you can't startling because it's own thing I don't know what can you say about these people in terms of time management well musk is an illegal his own in the way he does it first of all yeah Steve Jobs had to run Pixar in apple for a while but musk every couple of hours is switching his mindset from how to implant the neural link chip and what will the robot that implants it in the brain look like and how fast can we make it move and then the heat shield on the Raptor or switching to human imitation machine learning full self drive 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 wouldn't win the deal close it was when the Twitter accepted his offer and 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 and all the engineers in that room I assume are thinking about this guy just bought Twitter should we say something yeah and he's like and then he goes with Kimball to a roadside joint in Brownsville and just sits in the front and listens to music when nobody noticing really him being there

对于本·富兰克林，我想到的其中一件事就是他非凡的时间管理能力。关于本·富兰克林和史蒂夫·乔布斯，你可以说点什么呢？我认为埃隆非常有意思，因为正如你所写的，他管理着六家公司，有时候甚至是七家。这个让人震惊，因为每个公司都有自己的事情。关于这些人的时间管理方面，你能说些什么呢？马斯克的做法确实独特，他经营自己的方式。首先，史蒂夫·乔布斯一度同时经营着Pixar和苹果，但马斯克每隔几个小时就会切换思维方式，考虑如何植入神经连接芯片，该芯片的植入装置会是什么样子，我们能让它移动多快，然后再思考融合引擎的热屏蔽板，或者切换到人工智能机器学习全自动驾驶方面。就在Twitter董事会同意这笔交易的那天晚上，这在全球范围内轰动一时，我相信你应该还记得，像马斯克买下Twitter之类的消息会引起轩然大波。不过当交易达成的时候，我心想，好吧，然后他去了南德克萨斯州的博卡奇卡，在那里花时间专注于解决Raptor引擎中一个甲烷泄漏问题的阀门，以及修复它的可能方法，这时候所有的工程师应该都在想，这家伙刚刚买下了Twitter，我们应该说点什么吗？然后他和金伯尔一起去了布朗斯维尔的一家路边小店，悄无声息地坐在最前面听音乐，没人注意到他在那儿。

one of the things that's one of his strengths and sort of weaknesses in a way is in a given day he'll focus serially sequentially on many different things 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 and when he's focused on any of these things you cannot distract him it's not like he's also thinking about 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 lend let off steam and for better or worse he lets off steam by either playing a friend in Polytopia or fire off some tweets which is often not a healthy thing but it's a release for him and he doesn't 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 pallet cleanser yeah he does some pallet cleanser with Polytopia and then focuses on the next task

他的一个长处，但也是一种弱点，是在一天中他会连续地、顺序地专注于许多不同的事情。他会担心将视频上传到X.com或支付系统，然后立即转而关注FAA为Starship发放许可证或如何处理与Starlink和CIA的问题。当他专注于其中任何一件事时，你无法分散他的注意力，他不会同时考虑处理Starlink的问题以及如何应对特斯拉新款价值25000美元的汽车的决定。在这些任务之间，他会处理信息，宣泄一些情绪，无论是通过与朋友玩Polytopia还是发推文。虽然这常常不是一种健康的行为，但对他来说，这是一种宣泄。我曾经说过他是一个出色的多任务处理者，这是一个错误，人们纠正了我，他是一个串行任务处理者，这意味着他会专注地花费一个小时处理一个任务，类似于餐厅里给你提供的口感净化器，然后专注于下一个任务。

I mean is there some wisdom about time management that you can draw from that there are 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 to try to emulate musk time management style because it takes a certain set of teams you 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 gonna say on this podcast I'm also thinking about the email my daughter just sent about a house that she's looking you know and I'm I'm multitasking he doesn't actually do that he singled tasks sequentially with a focus that's hardcore I don't know

我的意思是，关于时间管理有没有一些智慧可以从中汲取？这些人做了一些事情，你会说，好吧，我也可以这样做，我可以更加好奇，质疑每一个规则和法规。我只是认为没有人会试图效仿马斯克的时间管理风格，因为这需要一定的团队和处理除了他专注的事情之外的其他一切事物的能力，以及一种可以像他的情绪一样转变的思维方式。你和我都会经历转变，如果我正在思考我在这个播客上要说什么，我也在思考我女儿刚刚发来的关于她正在寻找的房子的邮件。我在进行多任务处理，而他实际上并不这样做，他是以一种专注的方式顺序地进行单一任务。我不知道...

I think there's wisdom to draw from that to like first of all he makes me 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 like there's no excuse not to get a lot done and then requires just an extreme focus and extreme focus and like an urgency I think the fierce urgency that drives him is important and it's sometimes ginned up like I say the fierce urgency of getting to Mars and on a Friday night at the launch pad in Boca Chica at 10 p.m. there are only a few people working because it's a Friday night they're not supposed to launch for another eight months when Eddie 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 that sense of urgency you know is also a vibrancy that's like really taking on life fully

我认为我们可以从中获得智慧，首先，他的做法让我觉得有很多时间可以利用，一天有很多小时，一天有很多分钟，就好像没有任何借口不能完成很多事情，而且需要极度专注和紧迫感。我认为他所展现出的强烈紧迫感很重要，有时会被刻意放大，就像我说的，到了星期五晚上在博卡契卡的发射场，只有很少的人在工作，因为那是星期五晚上，他们距离下次发射还有八个月。但是当埃迪下令要增兵时，他会说我希望明天有200个人在这个发射场工作，我们必须急切地感到紧迫，否则我们永远无法到达火星。这种紧迫感也是一种活力，让你全情投入生活。

I mean that to me this the lesson is like even the mundane can be full of this just richness and like you just have to really take it in intensely so like the switching enables that kind of intensity because most of us can't hold it in testing anyone tasks for a prolonged period of time maybe that's also a lesson right and I guess he goes back to also know who you are meaning 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 focus he was easily distracted for questions it's why he has more unfinished paintings and finished paintings in his canon yeah but his ability to see patterns across nature and to in some ways process procrastinate be distracted that helped him some but musk is a not that way

这个意思是，对我来说，这个教训就像是说即使是平凡的事物也可以充满丰富性，而你需要真正专注地去体会这种丰富性。所以，这种转换能带来这种强度，因为我们大多数人无法持续很长时间地专注于某项任务，也许这也是一个教训，对吧？我猜这也与了解自己有关，我的意思是有些人可以非常专注，而有些人则可以在许多事物中看到模式，就像达·芬奇一样。他并不是个非常专注的人，容易分心，这也是他的画作中未完成的多过完成的原因，但他能够看到自然界中的模式，并以某种方式进行推理、拖延和分心，这对他有所帮助。然而，马斯克并不是那样的人。

and they're every few months as a new surge you know no word will be but you'll be on solo roofs and all of a sudden we'll have a surge and there has to be you know hundreds of solo roofs built or this has to be done by tomorrow or make a starship dome by dawn and surge and do it and there are people who are built that way it is inspiring but also let's appreciate you know that there are people who can be really good but also can savor the success savor the moment savor the quiet sometimes must big failing is he can't savor the moment or success and that's the flip side of hardcore intensity in innovators

他们是每隔几个月就会突然出现的新浪潮，你知道，没有一个字能形容，但你会找到一片独特的天空，突然间我们就会迎来一个新浪潮，必须建造数百个独特的天空或在明天之前建造一座星际船圆顶，应对这场浪潮，有人就是以此为目标，这种精神是鼓舞人心的，但也让我们欣赏到，有些人可以非常出色，同时也能享受成功的滋味，享受当下的喜悦，享受宁静的时刻，有时候最大的失败就是不能享受当下的喜悦或成功，这是创新者强烈意愿的另一面。

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? When Henry Kissinger was on the shuttle missions for the Middle East peace, it 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 the dot and Golda Mayer here, probably talking about himself too or at least in his mind.

我很喜欢你的另一本书，你在书中谈论了个体和群体。所以这本书探讨了一个问题：是个体还是群体改变了历史的潮流？当亨利·基辛格(Henry Kissinger)参与中东和平的航天飞机任务时，这是我写的第一本书，他说道。我在哈佛大学当教授时，曾认为历史是由伟大力量和人群所决定的。但当我近距离观察时，我才意识到个体能够产生多么重大的影响。他在这里谈到了“点”和戈尔达·梅尔(Golda Mayer)，可能也在谈论他自己，至少在他的内心中是这样的理解。

And um, 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. And sometimes, as I did with the innovators, there's teams and people built on each other. And Gordon Moore and Bob Noise 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. And so sometimes there flows of forces and groups of people. I guess I air a little bit on the side of looking at what a Steve Jobs, an Elon Musk, and Albert Einstein can do, and 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 uh you know somebody loves history and you think about special relativity one of the 1905 papers.

嗯，我们这些传记作家有一个肮脏的秘密，我们知道我们通过使叙述过于个人化来扭曲历史。但有时，确实是由个人推动的，马斯克就是这样的例子。有时候，就像我在《创新者》中那样，团队和个人相互建立。戈登·摩尔和鲍勃·诺伊斯然后找到安迪·格罗夫进行了微芯片的开发，然后乌兹尼亚克和乔布斯在某个电子商店找到它，决定制造苹果公司。所以有时候是力量的流动和人群的作用。我想我有点偏向于看看史蒂夫·乔布斯、埃隆·马斯克和阿尔伯特·爱因斯坦能做些什么，同时尝试弄清楚如果没有他们，历史的力量和人群是否能在没有他们的情况下完成，这是一个好的历史问题，对于一个热爱历史的人，你可能会想到特殊相对论的其中一篇1905年的论文。

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. And on the general theory, which he does a decade later, I'm not sure we would have gotten that yet. How about moving us into the era of an iPhone and which it's so beautiful that you can't live without a thousand songs in your pocket, email, and the internet in your pocket and a phone. There are a lot of brain dead people, from Panasonic to Motorola, who didn't get that, and it may have been a while.

即使他写下这个观点，人们真正理解它也要过上四年。这个观点不仅仅是指时间的观察是相对的，更是指时间本身是相对的。而对于他晚十年提出的普遍理论，我不确定我们是否已经理解。现在我们进入了iPhone时代，这款手机如此美丽，让你无法离开口袋中的千首歌曲、电子邮件以及互联网。还有很多人无法理解这一点，从松下到摩托罗拉，或许需要一段时间。

I certainly think it's true of the era of electric vehicles. Jim and Ford, all the great people there, they crossed the boat, 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. And so Musk does things and now be people who say and read the book, if they read the book, they'll see the full story, but they say it wasn't Musk who did Tesla, it was Martin Abihard or Mark Tarponie. No, you know there were people who had helped create you know 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 is from now buys a car that's gasoline powered, we'll think that's quaint, you know that's odd. I mean suddenly we've changed, we're not going to do it 90% of that is Elon Musk we're all mortal.

我确实认为这适用于电动汽车时代。吉姆和福特，以及那里所有伟大的人们，他们搭上了船，我指的是字面意义上，他们最终摧毁了他们，因为他们决定停产。同样，没有人在发射火箭，我们的航天飞机在12年前就将停飞。所以马斯克做了一些事情，现在有人说并且读了那本书，如果他们读了那本书，他们会看到全部故事，但他们说特斯拉不是马斯克创办的，而是由马丁·阿比哈德或马克·塔尔波尼做的。不，你知道有人帮助创办了公司和其他事物的架构，他们都应该被称为共同创始人。但真正让我们每年生产一百万辆电动汽车的人是埃隆·马斯克，没有他，我认为如果任何人五年后买的汽车都是用汽油驱动的，我们会觉得那很古怪，很奇怪。我是说我们突然变了，我们不会再这么做了，其中90%归功于埃隆·马斯克，我们都是凡人。

When and how do you think Elon will retire from the insanely productive schedule he's on now? I would think that he would hate to retire. I think that he can't live without the pressure, the drama, the all and feeling. Um, 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, I mean maybe I should spend time in doing instead. He says things like I learned early on that vacations will kill you. He gets malaria when he goes on one, big, I mean. He goes on vacation at one point and they oust him from PayPal, and then he goes to Africa one more, he gets malaria, says I've learned vacations kill you, lesson learned.

你认为埃隆将在何时以及如何结束他目前超级高效的工作日程？我认为他会讨厌退休。我认为他无法生活没有压力、戏剧感和极致的情感。嗯，似乎他从未考虑过这个问题。他从未说过“也许我会喜欢像拉里·埃里森在夏威夷海滩上的房子，我应该花时间做一些其他的事情。”他会说“我很早就学到了度假会害死你。”他去度假时得了疟疾，很严重，我是指。他有一次度假时被推出了PayPal，然后他又去非洲一次，又得了疟疾，他说“我已经学到了度假害死你，我明白了这个道理。”

Well, it's interesting because the projects are hundred plus year projects, many of these. One 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. And 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, where are they talking about they're trying to build rocket ships and everything else, they are worrying about the governance structure of Mars.

这真是有趣，因为这些项目是百年计划的很多。其中一个奇怪的事情是观察他考虑非常长期的问题。我在早期观察他的时候，有一次每周开的会议是关于火星殖民者的。我们进行了一个长达两个小时的会议，讨论火星的治理结构会是怎样的，人们会穿什么衣服，机器人会如何工作，是否应该有民主，还是需要其他形式的治理。我在那里坐着想，他们在做什么，他们在谈论他们试图建造火箭和其他的事情，他们还在担心火星的治理结构。

And likewise, whenever he's in a tense moment like there's a rocket about to be launched, he'll start asking people or something the way future like the new uh leet engine or something. If we're gonna 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 robot taxi the global car, the twenty-five thousand dollar inexpensive global car, that's not a total passion, he was talked into doing that. His passion is robo taxis, but his passion is how are we gonna make this factory could do a million cars a year. So even the robo taxi. is a longer range vision I mean he's been touting it since 2016 but you know we're not I don't know robo taxis I mean there's waymo maybe doing a little experiment 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.

同样地，每当他处于紧张的时刻，比如有火箭即将发射，他会开始询问人们或者类似于新型尖端引擎的未来之路。如果我们要建造它，我们是否准备好足够的材料进行订购，或者我不知道，他会提出问题。就像他正在打造全球汽车的机器人出租车，那辆价值25000美元的廉价全球汽车，并不是完全怀着激情而去做那件事。他的热情是机器人出租车，但他的热情是我们如何让这个工厂每年能生产100万辆汽车。所以即使是机器人出租车，也是一个长远的愿景，我是说自2016年起他一直在宣传它，但是你知道，我们并没有，我不知道机器人出租车，我是说可能有waymo做了一些小实验，但还没有没有方向盘的汽车正在占领高速公路，所以他总是在展望未来。

I just hope that there's a lot of da Vinci's and Steve Jobs's and Einstein's and Elon Musk's that carry the the flame forward that's one of the reason 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 Doudn you say okay I can be that and 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 let me ask you about your mind your genius your process.

我只是希望世界上能有更多像达·芬奇、史蒂夫·乔布斯、爱因斯坦和埃隆·马斯克这样的人，他们能够传承创新的火种。这也是为什么我写关于这些人的书的原因之一，因为假如你是一个年轻的女生，在学校里并没有人告诉你去从事科学，但你读了《密码破译者》这本关于詹妮弗·道德的书，你会说，好的，我也可以成为那样的人。当你想到要成为一个规范制定者时，或者你想到要成为一个挑战边界、推动进步的人时，你会想起史蒂夫·乔布斯所说的推动人类前进的人。现在，我想问问你有关你的思维、天赋和创作过程的问题。

I'll give you two out of three all right take me through your process of writing a biography I mean the full of it and I'm not just writing a biography but understanding deeply which your books have done for the human story and like 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 well step one for me is trying to figure out how the mind works what causes Einstein to make that leap real on musk to say stainless steel while he's looking at a carbon fiber rock rocket or how do you make the mental leap because I write about smart people smart people are dying a dozen they don't usually amount too much you have to be creative imaginative to think different as jobs would say

好的，我会给你两个中的两个，好吧，带我来了解一下你写传记的过程，我的意思是完整地理解它，并且不仅仅是写一本传记，而是深入理解你的书所呈现的人类故事和潜在的更大理念。你已经写过关于个人的传记，这些个人其实并不只是个体，而是一个非常庞大而复杂的画面，还有关于涉及个人的理念的传记。对我来说，第一步是试图弄清楚思维是如何工作的，是什么让爱因斯坦产生那种突飞猛进的想法，马斯克在看着碳纤维火箭的时候会说出不锈钢，或者如何进行思维跳跃，因为我写的是聪明人才，聪明人才并不少见，但他们通常不会有太大的成就，你必须具备创造力和想象力，以不同的方式思考，就像乔布斯所说的那样。

And so what makes people creative? What makes them take imaginative leaps? That's the key question you've got to ask. You also ask the questions like you've asked earlier, which is what demons are jangling in their head and how do they harness them into drives? So you look at all that and you try to observe really carefully.

那么，是什么让人具有创造力？是什么让他们进行想象的飞跃？这是你必须要问的关键问题。你还要像之前所问的那样，探究他们头脑中存在着哪些魔鬼，以及他们如何将这些魔鬼转化为推动力？所以你要认真观察所有这些，并试图深入了解。

The person of one of the more mundane things I do is a lot of writers try to give you a lot of their opinions and preach, whatever. As I said, this mentor said two people types come out: preachers and storytellers. To be a storyteller, um, I try whenever I'm trying to convey a thought there are six magic words that I almost always 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 tell you the story of Jake McKenzie. Or this is not something I invented, I mean this is the good lord does it in the Bible. I mean it has the best openings, lead sentence ever. You know, in the beginning comma and then it's stories.

我做的一些比较平凡的事情之一是很多作者试图给你们很多观点和说教，随便吧。正如我所说，这位导师说有两种人会出现：说教者和讲故事的人。为了成为一个讲故事的人，在我试图传达一个思想时，我几乎总是在一张卡片上写着六个神奇的词挂在我桌子上，那就是让我给你讲个故事。所以如果有人问埃隆·马斯克如何找到好的人才，就像你一样，我想，好吧，让我给你讲个故事。我会给你讲杰克·麦肯齐的故事。或者这不是我发明的东西，我的意思是上帝在《圣经》中也是这么做的。这里有最好的开篇句。你知道，在开始的时候，然后就是故事。

And 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 Burnsey.

其次，针对开始的引子，把它按照时间顺序进行编排。每个人在他们生命的第40年都会从第39年和第38年中成长和进步。因此，你想展示人们如何演化和成长。我有幸拥有最出色的非虚构叙述编辑者，西蒙舒斯特出版社的爱丽丝·梅休，她与伍德沃德和伯恩斯坦一起创作了《总统的男人们》。

But she had a note she'd put in the margins of my books that was a tic-tah 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. Interesting to me, like that's a small note, but it's extremely important because it's a 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 and that moral growth, creative growth, risk-taking growth, wisdom, that's the essence of creativity.

但她在我的书页边写了一张便条，上面写着"tic-tah"，意思是一切事情都要顺其自然，按时间顺序进行。如果能用在《圣经》上，那对你来说也是足够好的。我觉得很有趣，因为这只是一张小小的便条，可是它非常重要，因为它是你构建事物结构和理解事物的框架。如果你以一种时间顺序叙述的方式来阐述，你就能展示一个人从你所讲述的第一次经历到下一个经历的成长过程，这种道德成长、创造力成长、冒险成长、智慧成长，正是创造力的本质所在。

But you can't do it, you know there's a term buildings roman, which is a book that carries a narrative and tells how people learn something. I'm a big believer in narrative. If you're an academic, you sometimes, not today but in like 20 years ago, 30 years ago, there were two things you thought were bad. One was having a great person theory of history in which you decided to do a biography not of a great person but of a great profession. When I was in college, her name was Darce Kearns Goodwin. And when she was going for tenure at the university for the biography of Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, they denied her tenure because it was beneath the dignity of the academy to write history through one person. That's great, it opened up the field of biography to us non-academic starting with David McCullough, Bob Caro, but maybe John Meacham and myself or in a new generation and certainly there's a generation coming after us.

但你知道你做不到，有一个术语叫做"成长小说"，就是一本通过叙述来讲述人们如何学习的书。我非常相信叙述。如果你是一个学者，有时候（不是今天，而是20年前或30年前），你会认为有两件事是不好的。一是对于历史有着杰出人物理论，你会决定写的不是一个伟大的人物的传记，而是一个伟大的职业的传记。当我上大学的时候，她的名字是达西·科恩斯·古德温。她因为写关于林登·约翰逊和美国梦的传记而争取终身教职，但他们否决了她的终身教职申请，因为用一个人物来叙述历史是违背学术尊严的。这非常好，它为我们这些非学术界的人拓宽了传记领域，开始是由大卫·麦考洛、鲍勃·卡罗，然后可能是约翰·密契姆和我自己，或者一个新的一代，当然还有接替我们后代的一代。

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.

除了通过人们的故事来传达信息这一点外，（“它”指代的）学界往往有一种轻视的态度，他们称这为“强加一个叙事”，也就是将其转化为故事。因为这样做意味着你会遗漏一些内容并将其编织成一个叙事，尽管如此，正是这种方式让我们形成了对世界的观点。

Well, 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? Yeah, and obviously it depends on the subject. I mean, with Benjamin 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.

嗯，让我用收集和理解的角度来问你这个问题，其中有多少是通过观察，有多少是通过面试得来的？是啊，显然这取决于研究的主题。我的意思是，对于本杰明·富兰克林，一切都是基于档案资料的，当然，我们有他写的40卷信件。那是好旧的日子，每天都会写20封信。

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. You know, even when you'd be sitting play-pretend or seeing with other people, you know, he'd have me just sitting there watching. I mean, I spent a lot of time with Jennifer Doudna at her lab and edited a human gene and, you know, with a pipette in the test tube. But I would say I spent 30 hours with her. I can't count, you know, a few hundred hours and more just observing Musk.

《马斯克传》这本书比我之前任何一本书都更多地基于观察，因为他以一种令我惊叹的方式展开了自己。你知道的，即使在你和其他人一起玩假装或观察的时候，你知道的，他会让我坐在那里观察。我的意思是，我在詹妮弗·道德纳的实验室里花了很多时间，编辑了一个人类基因，你知道的，用移液管和试管。但我会说我和她在一起花了30个小时。而我却无法计算，你知道的，观察马斯克的时间至少有几百个小时。

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." I try to just say, "Okay, here's what happened. Here's this story. Here's what happened the night he came into Twitter for the first time." And let you form your own judgment.

我不确定除了Boswell给Dr. Johnson写传记时，是否有其他传记作家能像我一样近距离接触到如此多的资料，就像时刻在五英尺之内。正因为如此，我会回到刚才说的话。我试图将自己撇在一边，让故事成为重点，这不是关于我，也不是关于我自己。我只是试图简单地叙述：“好的，这就是发生的事情，这是一个故事。这是他第一次进入Twitter的那个晚上发生的事情。”然后让你自己来评判。

What about the interviews? You've had a lot of conversations. You give acknowledgments of the people you've done interviews with. Well, one, I have to ask as an aspiring interviewer myself, how people love to talk. People just love, you know, that. And I've had 140, maybe 150 people. They're all listening back.

对于面试如何？你进行了很多次交谈。你感谢了和你面试过的人。嗯，作为一个渴望成为面试官的人，我必须问一下，人们喜欢说话。人们就是喜欢那个。我已经面试了140，也许是150个人。他们都在回顾录音。

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 enjoy it but I think it's important to know where everything came from and with muskets you know I had that from the very beginning because I was a time magazine reporter I'd worked reporter for the times picky on New Orleans I first day on the job I had to go cover a murder and I phoned in the story from a payphone in my editor day you know the city editor said well did you talk to the family I went no Billy I mean the family you know the daughter just got he said go knock on the door I knocked on the door and hour later they were still talking they were bringing out her yearbook 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 mean I think it's important to listen to people.

有一件小事，人们可能注意不到，但我现在要说的是，所有人都有记载，让他们说话很容易，他们都想谈论马斯克，但是到了某个点上，他们会说，我不会在我的书里引用匿名评论，我引用的是我自己说的话，如果你足够坚韧，并且经历过这一切，有时候需要两三次的回电话，有人会告诉我一个故事，然后说哦不不不，我不喜欢，但是我觉得知道一切的来龙去脉很重要。对于马斯克，你知道，我一开始就了解到了，因为我是时代杂志的记者，我曾经做过报社的记者，在新奥尔良，我上班的第一天，我必须去报道一起谋杀案，我在一个公用电话亭里打电话给编辑，你知道，城市编辑说，你跟家属交谈了吗？我说没有，比利，我是说家属，你知道，那个女儿刚刚被谋杀了，他说，去敲门吧，然后一个小时后，他们还在交谈，他们拿出她的年鉴，第一课我学到了，人们愿意说话，如果你愿意倾听，无论是亨利·基辛格，你只需要按下按钮说基辛格，人们会告诉你各种故事，一直到埃隆·马斯克，每个人都说话，他的家人每个人，他解雇的每个人，我的意思是，倾听人们的声音是很重要的。

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 they do what was called door knocking he just walking in the neighborhood knock on the door and ask 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 silence us if you're a listener you got to learn okay he's not saying anything for four minutes I can outlast him it's tough it's as humans it's very tough respecting the silences really really difficult I've speaking of demons when their silence all the demons show up in my head oh yeah the fear I think is if I if I don't say anything is boring and if I say something is going to be stupid and that 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 you 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 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 just stay silent and then they'll keep talking just give them a chance to keep talking even if they've kind of finished you're still sometimes they haven't given you enough instead of following up I'll just nod and keep away you're making it sound simple is there a secret to getting people to open up more I'm somewhat lucky because you know I started off working for a daily newspaper and people back then they want to talk to the newspaper reporter but you also have a way about you like I feel like you have like a cowboy and a saloon like you just kind of want to talk like there's a drought I don't know I don't know what it is maybe it's I don't know if it's developed or you're born with it but there's a it feels like I want to tell you a story it's some sort good story.

当我还是在新罕布什尔州早期竞选活动时的政治记者时，我从大约两三位优秀的记者那里学到了另一件事。他们叫大卫·布罗德和已故的NBC记者蒂姆·拉塞特。他们所做的就是所谓的敲门报道，就是在附近敲门，询问人们对选举的看法。但他们说了一个秘诀，不要提任何引导性问题，也不要有任何假设。只是简单地说，嘿，我正在研究这次选举，你觉得怎么样？然后保持沉默。这是第三个秘诀，你也很了解，有时他会保持沉默，有时一两分钟，有时四分钟。如果你是一个听众，你必须学会，好吧，他四分钟都没说话，我可以干过他。这很难，作为人类，尊重沉默是非常困难的。说到心魔，当他们沉默时，我脑子里就会出现所有的心魔，是的，我觉得如果我不说话就会变得无趣，而如果我说话就会变得愚蠢。这是一个基本的思维模式，一直在运转，不仅仅是在播客中，在人类互动中也是如此。所以我觉得与人交往时有一种紧张的能量，如果没有什么可说的，保持沉默是永远不会错的。这不是我掌握的东西，但我在做记者时会尽量掌握这个技巧，不问复杂的问题，不插嘴，在别人没有完全回答问题时，不说：“让我来，我还没完全...”只是保持沉默，然后他们会继续说下去，给他们一个继续说话的机会，即使他们有时已经说完了，有时他们还没有给你足够的回答，我也不追问，只是点头并保持离开，你使它听起来很简单，有什么能让人更愿意敞开心扉的秘诀吗？我有些幸运，因为我起初是为一份日报工作，那个时候人们愿意与报纸记者交谈。但是你也有一种方法，像是一个牛仔在酒馆里，你似乎只是想聊天，就像是有干旱一样。我不知道是什么原因，也不知道是天生还是后天培养的，但是感觉你让我想给你讲个故事，一些好听的故事。

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 you know it news things where I'm always trying to interject a question and so you learn to be quiet or 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 you know 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.

有几件事情我确实学会了变得更加安静。我肯定当我年轻或者当我看到关于我自己的视频时，你知道的，新闻什么的，我总是试图插入一个问题，所以你会学会保持安静，或者有时我还没有完全掌握它，还没有学得够好，你会学会自然地保持好奇心。如今很多记者在提问时，要么试图捕捉住对方，要么试图获取一个独家新闻或者试图抓住一个可以成为头条的东西，但是如果你真正好奇并且想要知道问题的答案，人们能够感受到你的提问是因为你想要答案，而不是和他们玩游戏。

I'm sure some of them off the record some of them on the record you had maybe you know just some incredible conversations. I was gonna 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 I don't know but is there a device you can give from what you've learned to somebody like me and how to have good conversation especially once recorded well do we actually curious I mean every question you've asked me is because I think you actually want to know the answer and you've done your homework to be open and not to have an agenda. I mean we all suffer from there being too many agendas in the world today yeah so that is 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.

我相信其中一些是私下讨论的，另一些是公开讨论的，你可能参与了一些令人难以置信的对话。我本想说这些是有史以来最伟大的对话，但谁知道最好的对话可能发生在南美洲的两个喝醉了的人之间，我们永远不会听到，所以我不知道。但是，你能不能给像我这样的人一些经验，告诉我如何进行良好的对话，特别是一旦录制好了。实际上，我很好奇，因为感觉你问我的每个问题都是因为你真的想知道答案，而且你已经做了功课，保持开放而没有任何目的性。我是说，我们都受到当今世界上有太多目标的困扰，对吧？所以这只是真诚的好奇心，但是当谈到一对一的交流时，无论是埃隆·马斯克还是史蒂夫·乔布斯，那个人的思维方式都很美妙，而且感觉有可能一起高效地揭示和发现这个思维方式，这是对话的目标。

Well I mean look you're amongst the top podcasters and interviewers you know in the world today you have an earnestness to you Ben Franklin is the person who taught me I mean 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 I mean it's somewhat socratic but whenever he wondered I wanted to like start a fireman's core 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 like as Joe said you know the real problem is this and I do think that if I'm in situations and I just mean even a dinner or something I'm with somebody I'm usually. curious and I'll the conversation will proceed you know with with questions and I guess it's also because I'm pretty interested in what anybody's doing whoever happened to be with and so that's a talent you have which is you're pretty genuine in your interests.

嗯，我的意思是你是当今世界上最顶级的播客人和采访员之一，你有一种真诚的特质。本·富兰克林是教会我最多关于对话的人，通过阅读他的作品，尤其是他写的一篇关于对话的精彩论文，其中包括沉默，但更重要的是试图问出真诚的问题，而不是强调自己的观点。这有点苏格拉底式的方法，但无论富兰克林何时想要在费城开创一个消防员团队，他都会去他称之为皮囊团(L氉herApron Club)的小组那里，他们会提出一个问题：为什么我们还没有这样一个团队，需要什么条件，什么是好的。然后，第二部分是确保你倾听，如果有人只是有一个想法的种子，也要给予他们应有的赞赏，就像乔说的那样，你知道真正的问题是什么，我认为如果我在某些情况下，甚至是晚餐之类的时候，我都会很好奇，对于我正在和谁在一起都会感兴趣，所以这也是你的天赋之一，你对事物真的很有兴趣。

There are people like Benjamin Franklin like the I'll say Charlie Rose even though he's in disfavor who are interested in a huge number of subjects and I think that helps as well to be interested in basketball and opera and physics and metaphysics that was a Ben Franklin that was a Leonardo trick which is they wanted to know everything you could possibly know about every subject no other but there's a different aspect of this which is that I would love to hear how you've solved it or if you faced it that you're certainly disarming see I'm like peppering you with compliments here trying to get you very disarming method yeah.

有人像本杰明·富兰克林一样喜欢大量的事物，比如我想说查理·罗斯，尽管他受到不喜欢的待遇。他们对很多主题都很感兴趣，我认为这也有助于对篮球、歌剧、物理学和形而上学感兴趣。这是本·富兰克林的方式，也是列奥纳多的手法，他们想要了解每个主题可能了解的一切。但这也有一个不同的方面，也就是我很想听听你是如何解决这个问题的，或者如果你遇到了这个问题，你的解决办法是什么。你确实很让人放心，我在这里一直夸你，试图采取一种让你感到无威胁的方法。

I've recently talked to Benjamin Netanyahu we'll talk again we're unfortunate because of scheduling and complexities only had one hour which is very difficult very difficult with the charismatic politician I 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 where there's because of demons or because of their 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 how to sort of wear down through water or whatever whatever method the walls that we've built up as individuals.

最近我与本杰明·内塔尼亚胡进行了交谈，我们将再次交谈。由于时间安排和复杂性不幸地只有一个小时，这非常困难，与这位有魅力的政治家进行交谈非常具有挑战性。我理解这一点，但他同时也是一个口才非常好的人，这在短短一个小时内很难有所突破。但是人们已经在某种程度上建立了壁垒，无论是因为内心的恶魔还是因为他们的政治家，他们有自己的议程和叙事方式等等。为了突破这些壁垒，我想知道是否有一些建议或智慧，以一些方式来破除我们个体所建立的壁垒，比如渗透如水般或者其他任何方法。

I mean you call it disarming which I don't know that I am but disarming basically means you're taking down their shields also and you know when people have a shield and you try to give them comfort I had zero of that problem with Elon Musk I mean it was like disarming to me which is I kept waiting to say okay he's not going to or he's 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 down to 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 gonna break down every wall it's like on your fifth visit yes well actually that's one of the things in my situation you learn fifth visit is very nice but sometimes you don't get a fifth visit sometimes it's just the first day 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 with with many other people I've spoken with sometimes the trust happens like after the interview which is really sad because it's like man I've never been in your situation where I have a show I usually have me second back to the real I am not a first date person yeah yeah well you know but then I'm lucky I mean I'm in I say lucky but I'm in print you know I print is a couple thousand year old medium but there those of us who love it well the nature of the podcast medium is that I'm a one one nice Dan kind of girl

我的意思是你们称之为“缓和”，我不知道自己是否缓和，但“缓和”基本上意味着你正在摧毁他们的防御措施。你知道，当人们拥有防御措施时，你试图给他们安慰时会遇到困难。对于埃隆·马斯克，我根本没有这个问题，我一直在等他说：“好吧，他不会这样做，他有壳，他不会这样做。”但他非常开放，似乎并不想掩饰或伪装事实。我非常幸运，乔布斯也是这样。但你也需要花时间，换句话说，你不能说：“好吧，这是一个小时的采访，我要打破所有的墙壁。”你需要第五次访问。是的，事实上，在我的情况下，第五次访问是很好的，但有时你可能没有第五次访问，有时仅仅是第一天。我认为最重要的是，我们说“缓和”，但对于这个人来说，有一种值得信任的感觉。我认为这在某种程度上只是一种信任，以一种深层次的人性方式。我觉得与其他许多人的谈话中，有时候信任是在采访之后建立起来的，这真的很可悲，因为就像是在第一次约会之后建立起来的信任。我从来没有处在你的位置上，拥有一个节目，通常上台的人是我的真实自我，我不是一个第一次约会的人。是的，是的，你知道，但我很幸运。我说我很幸运，但我是书面媒体，印刷是一个几千年历史的媒介，但我们这些喜欢它的人，对于播客媒体的特质而言，我是一个人们会喜欢的达恩类型的姑娘。

let me ask you about objectivity you follow it Elon you follow it like you're I mean I don't know if you would say your front you have to be careful with words like that but here there's an intimacy and how do you remain objective do you want to remain objective while telling a deeply human story yeah I mean I want to be honest which I think is akin to being objective I try to keep in mind who is 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 I 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

让我问你关于客观性的事情，你遵循它，埃隆你像你是的遵循它。我是说，我不知道你会不会说你是你必须小心使用这样的词。但在这里，有一种亲近感，你如何在讲述一个深入人心的故事的同时保持客观？是的，我的意思是我想要诚实，我认为这与客观性相似。我试着记住我写给谁，我不是写给埃隆·马斯克，我没有把书寄给他，我不知道他是否读过。我写给那些有开放心态的读者，如果我能在故事中加入一些内容，我会想：这会让这个主题生气或者这会让这个主题非常高兴，这是无关紧要的或者我试着让这个问题成为一个小问题。重要的是读者通过我把这个故事放入书中会更好地理解。

I'm a bit of a romantic so to me even your Einstein book had lessons on romance and relationships over here so how important are romantic relationships to the success of great men great women great minds well sometimes people who affect the course of humanity have better relationships with humanity than they do with the humans sitting around him

我有点浪漫，所以对我来说，即使是你的爱因斯坦的书籍在这方面也有关于浪漫和关系的教训，所以浪漫关系对于伟大的男性、女性和思想家的成功有多重要呢？有时候，那些改变人类进程的人与人类有比与周围的人更好的关系。

Einstein had two interesting relationships with wives his you know you know Malave his first wife was a sounding board and help with the mathematics of the special relativity paper in particular but he didn't treat her well I mean he made her like sign a ladder that she went in a ruff him she wasn't you know 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 you know I'll give you the money that was a lot of money back then like a million dollars now 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 is that until what 1919 that he wins his Nobel Prize and she gets all the money she buys three apartment buildings in Zurich

爱因斯坦和两个妻子有着有趣的关系，你知道的，你知道的，马拉维是他的第一任妻子，她是他的理论相对论论文的一个墙壁和数学帮手，但他对她不好，我是说，他让她在信上签字，表示她同意对他粗暴对待她，她并不是这种人，最后当她想要离婚时，他负担不起，因为他还是一名专利办事员，所以他向她提出了一个我认为非常了不起的交易，他说 从1905年的那些论文中总有一天会获得诺贝尔奖，如果我们离婚，我会给你那笔钱，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，是一位科学家，她咨询了其他几位科学家之后，不到一周她就接受了这个赌约，直到1919年他获得诺贝尔奖，她得到了所有的钱，她用这笔钱买了苏黎世的三栋公寓楼。

with his second wife Elsa it was more a partnership of convenience it was not a romantic love but he knew and that sometimes what people need in life is just a partner I mean 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

与他的第二任妻子艾尔莎，他们更像是一种便利的伙伴关系，而不是浪漫的爱情。他明白有时候人们生活中需要一个伴侣，我的意思是，一个能够处理你无法处理的事情的人。所以，如果你看看我的书，它们并不是关于个人关系的伟大鼓舞指南。

let 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 first of all breakfast is not my favorite meal and those people who tell you that you have to start with a hearty breakfast I look askings yes and morning is not my favorite day parts are right at night and because I love narrative it's easy to structure a book which I can make a outline that if I printed it out or notes would be a hundred pages but everything's in order

让我问你一下关于写作过程本身的事情，当你观察、倾听和收集所有信息时，甚至只是一些愚蠢的平凡问题，比如你在开始写作前吃些什么早餐，你什么时候开始写作？首先，早餐不是我最喜欢的一餐，那些告诉你必须要吃丰盛早餐开始写作的人，我都会问问他们为什么。早晨也不是我最喜欢的时间段，我更喜欢晚上，因为我喜欢叙事，所以很容易对书进行结构安排，我可以做一个大纲，如果我把它打印出来或者做成笔记的话可能会有一百页，但是所有的内容都是有序的。

in other words if we serve if there's a burning man in these coming back from Grimes and then there's a solo 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 don't get ahead of the story don't have to flashback and then after you get it so that it's all chronological you know things then you have to do some clustering you know you have to say okay we're going to 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 this that. chapter or do I wait until later when it's better chronologically but those are easy

换句话说，如果我们服从于来自Grimes的内心燃烧的男人，然后是一个独奏的屋顶，然后还有一些我按照日程一天一天地整理出来的东西，这样让我在开始写作时遵循爱丽丝·梅休的座右铭，也就是所有事情都在适当的时机进行，不要超前，不要回溯，然后在除了按照时间顺序排列之外，你知道，之后你必须做一些聚类，你知道你必须说好，我们要决定建造宇宙飞船还是在德克萨斯州建厂或者其他什么，然后有时你会遇到组织上的问题，是把这一章放在这里还是等到后面在合适的时间排列，但这些问题都很容易解决。

well what about the actual process of telling the story well that's the mantra I mentioned earlier which is whenever I get pause or I don't know how to say something I just say let me tell you a story 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 you know Elon sometimes changes mine so often he couldn't remember whether he changes mind you know you don't need transition sentences you just say alright here's the point I need to make next and so you start with a sentence that says you know one day in January in the factory in Texas comma

好的，关于讲故事的实际过程怎么样呢？这就是我之前提到的口头禅。每当我遇到停顿或者不知道怎么表达时，我会说让我给你讲一个故事，然后找到一个真实的轶事、故事或传说，来包含我想传达的内容。然后我不会说我要传达什么，也不需要过渡句，比如说你知道，埃隆有时候想法经常变，他连自己是否改变主意都记不清。你不需要过渡句，只需说好，下一点我要提出的是...然后你就可以以一句话开始，比如说，你知道一月份在德克萨斯工厂的某一天，

well 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 in the.

嗯，其中我想要问你的一件事就是给年轻人的建议。对我来说，第一个建议是阅读传记，因为它们可以帮助你理解生活的多种可能，以过上充实美好的人生。

world of a life well lived from having written biographies having studied so many great men and women what advice could you give to people of how to live this this life well 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 which is you don't have to figure out what is the big meaning of it all what would 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 where does the examination lead you is it to shift in life trajectory I mean it's not for me sort of alright 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 like why am I about to say that to somebody or why am I going to do this particular act which my true motive here and also in the broader sense to learn as I did after a couple years at CNN I 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 but 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 oh well that was when I was in my salad days in green and judgment and it was like chasing the next level at time and corporate it 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

通过撰写传记和研究众多伟大的男女之人，我对过上精彩生活的方法有了一些认识。我总是回到古典作品上，如柏拉图、亚里士多德和苏格拉底。我想这是柏拉图的格言，或许他在引用苏格拉底的话：未经反思的生活没有意义。这与了解自己息息相关，你不必弄清楚生命的大义，而是要弄清楚你为什么做你正在做的事情。这需要自我意识和审视，而我年轻时缺乏这方面的能力。审视每个动机、每个行为，这种审视会引导你走向何方？它会改变你的生活轨迹吗？对我来说，这不仅仅是做一个决定，比如，作为一名记者，我将经营一个智库、运营一个网络或者写传记。实际上，这对每小时的生活更有用，比如，我为什么要对某个人说这个话，或者为什么要做这个特定的行为，我真正的动机是什么？在更广泛的意义上，我也学到了一些东西，比如，在CNN工作了几年后，我审视了我的生活，发现我不擅长经营复杂的组织，对于管理人员来说，我也不是个出色的经理。如果可以选择，我宁愿由别人来管理我，而不是我来管理别人。但我花了一些时间才弄清楚这一点，当我年轻时，我可能过于雄心勃勃，在《时代》杂志的时候，那是我年幼的时候，充满冲动和判断力，我一直在追逐下一个层次，无论是在《时代》还是在公司中。终于有一天，我得到了机会，成为了编辑，接着成为了最高编辑，之后我意识到这并不完全适合我，特别是当我被任命负责CNN之后。

I mean all young people are almost by definition in their salad days in green and judgment but you learn what's motivating you and then you learn to ask is that really what I want should I be careful of what I'm wishing for one of the big examinations you can do is the fact that you and everybody dies one day how much you alter Isaac's think about death are you afraid of it? No and I don't think about it a lot but I do think about Steve Jobs's let me tell your story you know 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 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 forever and think Musk says of nothing worse we read the myth of Sisyphus and we know how bad it is to be condemned eternal life so there was an ancient Greece the person who walked behind the king and said Memento Morrie remember you're going to die and it kept people losing it a bit using about legacy

我是说，从定义上来看，所有年轻人几乎都处在他们的青春年华，充满青涩和判断力，但你会了解是什么在驱使着你，然后你会学会询问自己，这真的是我想要的吗，我应该小心我在渴望什么。其中一个重要的考验是你和每个人都会有一天死亡，你对死亡的想法有多大改变了你的行为方式？你害怕吗？我不害怕，我也不经常去想，但我确实思考史蒂夫·乔布斯的故事，让我给你讲讲这个美妙的故事。你知道，在他被诊断出患病但尚未公开之后，他做了一次斯坦福演讲和其他一些演讲，他说我们会死亡这个事实给了我们聚焦和意义，如果我们要活着。埃隆·马斯克也对我说过类似的话，硅谷的许多科技公司寻找永生的方法，但马斯克说没什么比永生更糟糕的了，我们读过西西弗斯神话，我们知道被判处永生有多糟糕。在古希腊有这样一个人，他跟在国王身后，提醒他"记住你将要死去"，这让人们对遗产产生了一些困惑。

the lucky thing about being a biographer is that you kind of know what your legacy is there's going to be a shelf and it'll be of interesting people and you will have inspired a 17 year old biology student somewhere to be you know 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 by share 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 you know 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 it to lane which I don't do as a favor I mean I enjoy the hell out of it but it's like all right I'm part of a community

做一名传记作者最幸运的事情是，你基本上知道自己的传世之作将会是一本有关有趣人物的书，你将会激励某个17岁的生物学学生成为下一个伟大的生物化学家，或者是启发某个像埃隆·马斯克一样创办公司的人。更重要的是，我思考的是，我不会说是回报，这么说太陈词滥调，我回到新奥尔良是有原因的，首先是因为那里遭受了飓风，卡特里娜飓风之后，我被要求担任灾后恢复管理机构的合作伙伴。我意识到我所拥有的一切都来自这座美丽而饱受困扰的城市，还有我就读过的美妙高中、我学会骑自行车的美好街道。它面临着挑战，我永远无法解决全球层面上的挑战，但我可以回到家乡，说我所留下的一部分遗产是我尽力回馈我的家乡，即使是通过在图兰大学教书，这不是我帮忙，我很享受这个过程，但这是表明我是社区的一部分。

And I think we lose that in America because people who are lonely or lonely because they're not part of a community but I've got all my high school kids friends are all still in New Orleans I've got my family but I also have two lane 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 you know go figure but 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.

我认为在美国，这一点我们失去了，因为那些孤独的人或因为不属于某个社群而感到孤独，但我还是有我的高中同学和新奥尔良的家人 我也有新奥尔良的两所历史悠久的高校，我可以参与到新奥尔良的学校系统改革、青年赋权项目以及两兰大学的创新中心中来，我甚至还在城市规划委员会任职，负责短期出租住宅的分区规章，说起来不可思议吧，但我喜欢地深入参与我的社区，因为我的社区非常出色地帮助我成为现在的我，并在每一次飓风和逐年的挑战中努力确保新一代人能够发挥创造力，这是一个充满创造力的城市，无论是爵士乐、美食还是建筑。

So when I think of I want to 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 rip off of a TSLA line I don't want you to think I thought of that one always state your sources I appreciate it TSLA if you ever need to figure it out the four quartets if that part of the and which is we shall not see some exploration in the end of all of our exploring will be to return to the place where we started and know it for the first time the unknown but half a member 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 call it act five well you go back to the place where you came and see if they 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.

所以当我想到我想要说的遗产时，我要做些什么来回馈社会，这其实是一种低级的遗产，我通过回到我起始的地方，努力去重新认识它来回馈社会。这个想法其实是来源于TSLA的一句话，我不想让你误以为是我自己想出来的，所以表明出处我会很感激的，如果有需要找出这个来源的话，那是TSLA。如果要找源头的话，就读一下那部叫做《四个四重奏》的作品，其中有这样一个部分，我们将会看到一些探索，并最终回到起点，重新认识它，即便它是未知的，但我仍然会记住其中的美丽，这一点一直给我灵感，让我想到了在这种情况下你会怎么做，我猜如果是莎士比亚的剧本，你会称之为第五幕，你会回到你的起点，看看他们是否坐在那儿担心自己的遗产，而是坐在那儿思考如何确保其他人也能从新奥尔良开始一个神奇的轨迹。

Well to me you're one of the greatest storytellers of all time I've been a huge fan definitely not true but it's so sweet of you see you can be rudely interrupting it's just the I think probably Ben Franklin so far I don't know how many years 15 years Einstein all the way through today I 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 I flew in to Austin for this because I am a big fan and especially a big fan because you take people seriously and you care. Thank you a thousand times thank you for expecting me and for inspiring just millions of people with your stories again an incredible story telling an incredible human and thank you for talking today thank you Lex thanks 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 Jung 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.

对我来说，你是有史以来最伟大的讲故事者之一。我一直是你的忠实粉丝。虽然这可能不是事实，但你说的真是太动人了。你看，你可以很无礼地打断，但对我来说，你可能是最棒的故事讲述者，我不知道有多少年了，至少有15年了，从爱因斯坦开始一直到今天，我一直是你的超级粉丝。我本以为你肯定不会降低身份和我对话的，但这对我来说是一份巨大的恩赐。我为了这个飞到奥斯汀，因为我是你的忠实粉丝，尤其是因为你认真对待人们，你关心他们。非常非常感谢你。感谢你接受我，并用你的故事激发了数百万人。你是一个了不起的故事讲述者，也是一个了不起的人。感谢你今天的交谈。谢谢，Lex。感谢您收听与Walter Isaacson的对话。如果您喜欢这个播客，请查看描述中的赞助商。现在，让我用Carl Jung的一句我最喜欢的名言结束：“为了避免面对自己的灵魂，人们会做任何荒谬的事情。人不是通过想象光明的形象而变得启迪，而是通过使黑暗意识到。”感谢您收听，希望下次再见。