Walter Isaacson: preference

Transcript context

…What about the interviews? You’ve had a lot of conversations. You give acknowledgement to the people you’ve done interviews with. Well, one, I have to ask as an aspiring interviewer myself, how? People love to talk. People just love, you know that. And I’ve had 140, maybe 150 people, they’re all listed in the back. One of the little things that people won’t notice, but I’ll say it now, is all of them are on the record. Getting them to talk is easy. They all want to talk about Musk, but then at a certain point say, I don’t put anonymous quotes in my book, I cite things. I say if you’re tough enough and you’ve gone through this, and a lot of times it takes two or three calls back, somebody will tell me a story say, oh, no, no, no, I don’t [inaudible 01:40:11]. But I think it’s important to know where everything came from. And with Musk it’s, I had that from the very beginning because I was a Time Magazine reporter. I’d worked reporter for the Times Picayune or New Orleans. First day on the job, I had to go cover a murder. And I phoned in the story from a payphone and my editor, the city editor, said, “Well, did you talk to the family?” I went, “No, Billy, I mean the family, the daughter just got…” He said, go knock on the door. I knocked on the door. An hour later, they were still talking. They were bringing out her yearbooks. Lesson one, I learned people want to talk if you’re willing to just listen, and whether it be Henry Kissinger, you just push the button and say Kissinger, and people tell you the stories all the way through Elon Musk, everybody talked, everybody in his family, everybody he fired, everybody. I think it’s important to listen to people. And the other thing I learned as a reporter, back when I was covering politics in New Hampshire in the early campaigns, I learned from two or three great reporters, a guy named David Broder and Tim Russert, the late NBC guy. They do what was called door knocking. You just walk in a neighborhood, knock on a door and asked people about the election. But they said here’s the secret. Don’t ask any leading questions. Don’t have any premise. Just say, “Hey, I’m trying to figure out this election. What’s going on? What do you think?” And then stay silent. With Musk a third secret, you know this well, he’ll go silent at times, sometimes a minute, two minutes, four minutes. Don’t try to fill the silences. If you’re a listener, you got to learn, okay, he’s not said anything for four minutes. I can outlast him. It’s tough, as humans it’s very tough. Respecting the silence is really, really difficult. Speaking of demons, when there’s silence, all the demons show up in my head.…

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