He does need that existential crisis, that manic intensity, that we're all doomed unless

we do this.

However, there was some truth to it, most shorted stock in the history of the world and there

are a lot of people betting it was going to go under.

And so it drives him to be living in the factory floor saying we got to get to 5,000 a week

and firing anybody or going into demon mode with anybody says, there's just no way.

We only have two assembly lines, it's going to get to 3,000, maybe 3,500.

I'm Mary Long and that's Walter Isaacson.

He's a professor of history at Tulane University and a best-selling biographer of Steve Jobs,

Jennifer Doudna, and Benjamin Franklin.

His new book is Elon Musk.

That's what Isaacson and Ricky Mulvey talk about on today's show, to get a portrait

of the earth moving force behind Tesla and SpaceX.

They also talk about Elon's new artificial intelligence company and his love for risk,

including a story about a blindfolded knife-thrower at a birthday party.

You sat in on a lot of the wild conversations that Elon Musk had at SpaceX Tesla and sometimes

there's very pressing issues with getting a rocket off the ground, sometimes there's

an issue with maybe a car assembly line, but there's also room for these discussions

about the future of humanity, like what's the governance plan on the future of Mars?

What will people wear there?

Can you give us some color of what's going on in those discussions and at least maybe

the rough draft of the future plan for the government of Mars?

...