Walter Isaacson: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Lesson learned. Well, it’s interesting because the projects are 100+ 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. We did through a two-hour meeting about what would the governance structure be on Mars? What would people wear? How would the robots work and would there be democracy or should there be a different form of governance? I’m sitting there saying, ” What are they doing? What are they talking about? They’re trying to build rocket ships and everything else. They are worrying about the governance structure of Mars?” Likewise, whenever he’s in a tense moment, like there’s a rocket’s about to be launched, he’ll start asking people about something in the way future, like the new elite engine or something. “If we’re going to build that, do we have enough materials ready to order?” Or, I don’t know, he’ll just ask questions. Like when he’s building robo taxi, the global car, the $25,000 inexpensive global car, that’s not a total passion. He was talked into doing that. His passion is robotaxis, but his passion is how are we going to make this factory to do a million cars a year? So even the robotaxi is a longer range vision. He’s been touting it since 2016, but there are no robotaxis. Waymo may be doing a little experiment on it, but there’s not cars being manufactured without steering wheels that are going to take over the highways yet. So he’s always looking way into the future is my point. I just hope that there’s a lot of da Vincis and Steve Jobs and Einsteins and Elon Musks that carry the flame forward.…

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