Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…think I have the talent to observe people really closely, to write about it in a straight but I hope interesting narrative style.” That’s a power. It’s totally different from running an organization. It took me until three years of running CNN that I realized I’m not cut to be an executive in really high-intense situations. Elon Musk is cut to be an executive in highly intense situations, so much so that when things get less intense … when they actually are making enough cars and rockets are going up and landing … he thinks of something else, so he can surge and have more intensity. He’s addicted to intensity, and that’s his superpower, which is a lot greater than the superpower of being a good observer. I think also, to build on that, it’s not just addiction to risk and drama. There’s always a big mission above it. I would say it’s an empathy towards people in the big picture, humanity. 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, and you see that in a lot of people. You see it Bill Gates or Larry Summers, Elon Musk. They always have empathy for these great goals of humanity, and at times they can be clueless about the emotions of the people in front of them or callous sometimes. Musk, as you said, is driven by mission more than any person I’ve ever seen, and it’s not only mission, it’s like cosmic missions, meaning he’s got three really big missions. One is to make humans a spacefaring civilization, make us multi-planetary, or get us to Mars. Number two is to bring us into the era of sustainable energy, to bring us into the era of electric vehicles and solar roofs and battery packs. Third is to make sure that artificial intelligence is safe and is aligned with human values. Every now and then, I’d talk to him and we’d be talking about Starlink satellites or whatever, or he would be pushing the people in front of him at SpaceX and saying, “If you do this, we’ll never get to Mars in our lifetime,” and then he would give the lecture of how important it was for human consciousness to get to Mars in our lifetime. I’m thinking, “Okay, this is the pep talk of somebody trying to inspire a team, or maybe it’s the type of pontification you do on a podcast.” On the 20th time I watched him, I realized, “Okay, I believe it. He actually is driven by this.”…

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