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I'm Megna Chakrabardi, and this is the Jackpot, where on-point news analyst, Jack Beattie,

helps us connect history, literature, and politics in a way that brings his unique clarity to the world we live in now. Hello there, Jack. Hello, Megna.

Okay, we're at episode 67 of the Jackpod. What's your headline? The child is father of the man.

Oh, interesting. Where did that come from? It comes from a wordsworth poem. My heart leaps up.

The poet writes, My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow

in the sky. So it was when my life began. So it is now. I am a man. The child is father of the man.

So he's, the poet is delighted that this continuity of joy and wonder from childhood

is still available to him as a man. That's one view of childhood and the continuities in adult

life. We're going to talk about another kind of continuity between the child and the man.

In the case of Elon Musk, the first sentence of Walter Isaacson's biography, Elon Musk begins.

As a kid growing up in South Africa, Elon Musk knew pain and learned how to survive it.

At 12, he was sent to something called a Veltschkool, a kind of, he called a sort of paramilitary Lord of the Flies camp, where kids fought over food and water.

Bullying was encouraged.

He got beaten up twice.

...