🚀혁신가? 독재자? 2년동안 파헤친 일론머스크의 모든 것 | 월터아이작슨 (스티브잡스 전기) 작가

Elon had a very violent childhood. He was beaten up by bullies, he was socially awkward. Was that he would switch from one personality to another very quickly. You're probably one of the best interviewers I've had all week, so thank you. If I had to pick the most influential electrician in the U.S. in the past 20 years, I think I can pick two. Among the electricians who passed away in the past, I think I'll pick Ron Chernow's Hamilton, Alexander Hamilton. It won a lot of awards and was very popular. It was also produced as a Broadway musical. It's a book that changed the way Americans look at American history. But among the electricians who have recently passed away or live in the same era as us, I think there's Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs. It's not just a popular book all over the world. It's a book that's talked about and quoted a lot to this day. Elon Musk is at the center of a lot of controversy. In a way, he's covered by a lot of noise. I think he's in a very difficult position to see. First of all, from a business point of view, Some people say that he's a huge genius who has succeeded in an impossible business like SpaceX and Tesla. Some people say that his business is not overwhelmingly high compared to other companies in terms of profitability. And like a boring company, he's a huckster who's a very vain dream and raises corporate value. There's a lot of controversy about vision, right? Elon Musk is a pioneer who applies technology in the direction of saving mankind. On the other hand, some people put chips in their heads or see things like artificial intelligence. They say that technology is being led in the direction of giving too much power to one person. Walter Isaacson, through the noise, In order to draw the image of Elon Musk hidden in the veil, He lived in a trailer in Texas, where Elon Musk's SpaceX is located, and observed Elon Musk for two years. As a result, he wrote this Elon Musk book. I was able to connect Zoom calls through this difficult casting. I decided to ask him directly what he saw of Elon Musk. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk to your Korean readers. Thank you for having me. My personal opinion so far has been that he's the 21st century version of the 1950s and 1960s techno whiz who wanted to build perfect cities out of aluminum or plant scientifically. Guys like Buckmeister Fuller who wanted to airdrop aluminum houses out of airplanes and build American cities that way. Having spent two years with him in his day-to-day, what is your assessment, finally? I don't agree with your assessment of being one of the visionaries of the 1950s who believe in cities dropped from the sky. I think he's an executor, a person who can engineer. And when I watched him, what he really cares about is not just envisioning a product, but executing how it would be engineered and then how it would be built. He cares as much about the factory and the assembly line as he does about the design of the product. So I think he's somebody who's already achieved totally historic things. That said, you're right. He's polarizing. He's a jerk. And so that's what makes the book interesting. The qualities that make him so driven, that get him to be so successful. And it's not just about money. I mean, this is the most important things in the world he's already done. There is this two image of Elon Musk that people have a hard time putting together. Like when he's in public in front of the camera, he's one of the most jovial, friendly. The bad way of looking at it, I guess, is attention-seeking person in the world. And then among his employees or his business persona is that he doesn't care about people's feelings and he just thinks about the outcome. Having spent two years with him in his personality, how do these two elements coexist? That's a great question because one of the biggest surprises to me was that he would switch from one personality to another very quickly. And it would almost be as if there were multiple Elon Musk's. And as you say, I could be with him one afternoon and he would be funny. And he'd be looking at silly movies on his phone and laughing, you know, about the craziest things. And then he would be in engineering mode where he would be really focused, I mean, almost frightening, you know, quiet and focused on an engineering problem. And then at times he'd be inspiring, talking about going to Mars and how important that was for humanity. But as you also say, then he could go dark. Once every couple of days, there would be an hour or two where he suddenly got dark and angry and mean. It was, I don't know if you know the story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Of course. But it'd be like watching somebody transform from one person to another, but be in the same body. And when he was in the Mr. Hyde mode, he would just say things that were really, really tough on people. But then he would snap out of it and he would hardly remember the way he was when he was in Mr. Hyde mode. Wow. I had another question. I recently covered a book called Stolen Focus written by Johan Hari in my video. If you look at this book, there's a scene like this. It was a gathering of numerous UX technologists who were leading technology. One of the lecturers asked, Do you want to live in the world you design? But surprisingly, not a single one of the technologists said, I don't want to live in the world I'm creating right now. In fact, the technology we've developed doesn't seem to be improving human happiness. You can interpret it that way. That scene had a big impact. Elon Musk is one of the people who are changing the world the fastest. The world he dreams of. A world where cars drive themselves and we don't touch the steering wheel. A world with chips in our heads. In this world, does Elon Musk want to live there himself? And if you want to live in that world, I was wondering why you wanted to live in that world. Elon Musk, I would say, he loves his Tesla. And he loves the futuristic design. He might not like the handle that pops out on the Tesla, but now Mercedes and other great car companies are doing the same. But then you can just buy a different model Tesla and get your own handle. But it's nice of you to say for yourself, Oh, I like having a clutch or something. But if you're thinking about the future of the world, you're going to want to say the future should look like the future. And that should be a future of electric vehicles. What about his involvement with Neuralink or generative AI? Is that the kind of world that he wants to live in? Or is that the kind of world that you'd want to live in? So let's do Neuralink. Neuralink is, as you know, a chip that gets implanted into your skull. And with little wires, it can pick up your brain signals. One thing for the distant future is if you want to connect to your machine, how do you usually communicate with your computer? Keyboard, 200 characters per minute you can input. What if you could transmit what you wanted to your computer at a million bits per second? That would keep you closely tied to your computer and make sure your computer followed your will and desires, not vice versa. But one of the really slow things that make it seem we don't live in the future is what I would call the low bandwidth of the amount of bits that can move between us and our computers. We're still using our... It's getting worse. I used to use all 10 fingers. Now I use my two thumbs to communicate with my devices. And that's a really slow, bad way to do it. Do I want to live in the future where I can think, can you please call up Zoom? Can you please open the car door? And my iPhone knows what I'm thinking and it transmits that. Yeah, I'd love to live in that future rather than one in which I have to use my thumbs. And what about in the meantime? I'm watching people who are paralyzed. Some of my friends, I'm getting older, they're getting Parkinson's disease or Lou Gehrig's disease. They can't use their fingers and their hands and their legs. They can't walk. If they could have a chip and they could walk and run and play tennis. So I think Neuralink will be very, very important. I read your Steve Jobs book. And I've also read a long time ago your book, The Innovators. And I see sort of a common thread between the innovators that you describe. Usually the drive to innovate come from darkness in the soul or some wonder from the past. And from what I understand, I'm really excited to dig more into the book, is that Elon Musk opened up a lot about his childhood to you during the two years that you spent with him. What are some of the wounds you think that's driving him? I think that in order to be a good innovator, you have to have a disruptive passion. Then you asked me about, what about Elon's disruptive passion? How much does it come from childhood? Well, a lot. Because Elon had a very violent childhood. He was beaten up by bullies. He was socially awkward. And at one point, the bullies on the playground at school, one of them smashed his face so bad he had to go to the hospital. But the scars from that were minor compared to the scars that came when he went home from the hospital. And his father, who had that same dark and light personality, made Elon stand in front of him for an hour and a half and berated him. Told him it was his fault. Told him he was stupid. When he had been beaten. Yeah, and so Elon had these dark demons from his childhood, these psychological problems from his childhood, that are still there today. And sometimes he's able to harness those demons to become a drive that gets him to places that you and I probably aren't going to get to. But also there are times when those demons run wild and he gets very depressed or he gets manic and he gets mean. And so the story is about a complex human character with a lot of demons that are both deviling him and driving him. And what's also interesting is that you said that a lot of great innovators have disruptive personality. In technological sphere, disruption is usually a good word. Disruptive technology or disruptive innovation. But in normal language, disruption is not a good word. Having worked on other innovators as well, how do innovators reconcile themselves with the fact that they are in fact doing good for human beings in general maybe, but they're also a disruptive presence in a lot of people's lives? This is one of the most important questions in the world today. And you're right that the word disruption cuts both ways. And so you can look at all the disruption that has happened over history through technology. And sometimes people resist it. Now you can go way back to in England when the new technology in France and England is weaving looms that make beautiful fabrics by having looms that weave it and even steam powered things. And this puts weavers out of work. It's disruptive. But we get sometimes nostalgic for the metronome that goes tick, tick, tick in an analog fashion. And so I do think we have to see what is just us being too nostalgic for things like that we don't need. And what are the true values that we have to protect? So I will get to the most disruptive thing, which is journalism and the spread of information has been disrupted. This is both good and bad. When I was first in journalism, if you wanted to spread information, you had to work under editors or people who supervised you. Now it's different. Now there are people like yourself. Is that good or bad? I would say good 80% of the time. We need people like yourself who can be disruptive and say, I'm gonna spread the word in a new way. But I also know that it's disruptive in some ways that aren't so good. You're obviously popular because you spread information that's reliable, good, interesting, and thoughtful. But you probably have gone on either YouTube or Facebook or WeChat and seen people spreading things and they're popular because they're spreading things that are totally false or dangerous or get people enraged. So that's the biggest disruption. The big disruption is on the free flow of information. And we can argue, is it 80% good or 90% good, this disruption? But we have to guard against that 10 or 20% where the disruption is not only something that makes us feel nostalgic for the old fashioned paper that we got to open up, but is actually disruptive because it's harmful to democracy, harmful to society. The final question I have is that a lot of people who are going to be reading your book on Elon Musk and a lot of people who read your book on Steve Jobs are aspiring college students or people who are just starting out in the business world. What would you tell them is the common thing that unites the innovators, great disruptors, great leaders, great business builders that you've researched in your lifetime? Number one is they're all a bit different. So know yourself, know who you are. Jennifer Doudna is one of the nicest people ever and creates a lab around her of friendly people and she's always nice to them. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, they are hardcore all in. You'll read by Elon Musk, he says being collegial is a danger because you don't question other people. You try to be too nice to them. So rule one is there's no rule one. You have to be who you are. Number two is that no matter who you are, a nice person like Jennifer Doudna or a driven person like Elon Musk or Steve Jobs is you have to have passion for what you do. You have to really care, not about making money, but about making something that'll change the world and then the money will follow. Elon Musk didn't do what he did because he thought it would make him the richest person in the world. So you have to just believe in your vision. And then finally, I think it's important to be like Leonardo da Vinci, Ben Franklin, Steve Jobs and be interested in everything. Don't just stay narrowly focused on I'm gonna be a good coder or I'm gonna be a good hardware engineer. Someday AI will replace all the coders, but you gotta be as somebody who's interested in everything and sees how things fit together. So read a lot of biographies, I think would be my advice. That's a great advice. So if somebody reads the innovators, Elon Musk and Steve Jobs, maybe they can take a- And the Code Breaker, read about a nice woman. And the Code Breaker. I haven't read it. It's a nice woman. I'll go get it right now. And the Code Breaker, and then they might arrive at the insight that you've spent last few decades dedicating your life to. There'll be a great shortcut to arriving at the insights that you've arrived in a much harder way. So thank you very much. Thank you. I'll subscribe to your YouTube channel. You're real good. You're probably one of the best interviewers I've had all week. So thank you. Wow, thank you. That's a compliment. I look forward to meeting you in person. When I talk to a lot of people about Elon Musk, there are a lot of times when the debate is heated. I thought about the reason for that. The evaluation of Elon Musk is not based on knowing the person. I think it's more related to the opinion of a person who talks about technological development. People who think that technology is changing too fast is a threat to humanity will generally give a negative evaluation of Elon Musk. On the other hand, if humanity wants to get through the many problems we're facing right now, we need to introduce the science and technology we have to a lot of people. I think people who think like this look at Elon Musk positively. And if you look at this interview, you can see that Walter Isaacson sees Elon Musk from that perspective. Anyway, there's no change in the fact that Elon Musk is changing our world a lot. With this book, I thought we could find out how we're going to design the world of the future through a debate on what we think about Elon Musk. That's it for today's research life. I'll see you next time with a more interesting history and culture story. Goodbye.