Walter Isaacson, author of the Steve Jobs and Elon Musk biographies, is turning his lens on AI.
Isaacson is launching a new podcast, The Builders with Walter Isaacson, in which he sits down with Open AI co-founder Elon Musk, Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, “Godmother of AI” Fei-Fei Li, Anthropic co-founders Dario and Daniela Amodei, Palantir CEO Alex Karp, Oculus VR creator Palmer Luckey and more.
“AI is the most transformative technology we’ve had maybe since the advent of electricity, 130 years ago, and it’s happening so fast that I wanted to get to have a deep dive with the people who are creating it and do it in a more timely manner than a book,” Isaacson told The Hollywood Reporter. “I also wanted to hear from them directly, especially since I think there’s both enormous opportunities and dangers, and I particularly wanted to push back on autonomous agents getting out of control and why are we building them if we’re not sure we’ll be able to control them.”
Podcast company Kaleidoscope is launching the show, which is produced in partnership in Ramp and distributed by iHeartPodcasts. The show launches Oct. 20 with the Musk episode, and continues twice weekly into January, with Isaacson continuing to tape more interviews throughout the fall.
Isaacson is known for his best-selling biographies of Steve Jobs, as well as the Leonardo DaVinci and, the 2023 release of Elon Musk, which also drew some criticism from some who claimed he did not fully interrogate Musk’s darker side. Isaacson also launched a subsequent podcast, On Musk, with Kaleidoscope.
Isaacson, who notes that he will continue writing biographies in addition to making future podcasts, spoke with THR about his current take on Musk, how these founders are intertwined with their technology and how they feel about the rise of AI.
You have a long history with Elon Musk. How did it feel returning to speak with him about this?
Ever since he was a kid, Musk has internalized a lot of the Isaac Asimov novels he read and worried about robots or AI turning against us and harming humanity, and that’s why he started OpenAI, which was supposed to be an open-source nonprofit guided by certain principles, and that’s why he’s had a pretty horrendous falling out with Sam Altman. Clearly, like any of these people leading the AI revolution, they have enormous qualms, but they’re not going to unilaterally disarm when they’re in a competitive race, and that’s been true throughout history. Whether it was John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil or IBM or Microsoft, where the government has to step in and say we’re going to put rules of the road.
Since your book on Musk came out in 2023, Musk achieved even more prominence via his work with the Trump administration and also faced more backlash for some of the racial and political comments he has made online. Do you find that he’s changed since you spent time with him for the book?
I think the Elon Musk you see in the book is the Elon Musk you see today. Somebody prone to demon mode, also to great engineering triumphs and imagination, and also to having dark conspiratorial political views that I think come from spending too much time wallowing on X as opposed to actually touching grass and getting out there and realizing the world’s not such a horrible place.
And he owns X.
He was prone to going down rabbit holes before he bought Twitter. And one reason he bought Twitter is that he just spent an enormous amount of time on that site. And I think that in some ways, if you go down the rabbit holes of Twitter, it gives you a darker sense of the world and it’s self-reinforcing.
Beyond Musk, was there anything surprising about these guests and what they said about the AI landscape?
I found Peter Thiel particularly interesting because he has been demonized, and of course, he’s on a mission to demonize others through his talks about the Antichrist, and it made me see, in some ways, how he’s helping to push technology forward, but that our technology has inherently become polarizing and divisive, just as the people in the Builders podcast are amazing at pushing things forward, but polarizing and dark and divisive at times when they intersect with the real world. And one thing we biographers try to do is connect the accomplishments of a person with the personality and character of that person, and in some ways the brilliance and genius, but also darkness of the people involved is reflected in the technologies they are creating.
You said you wanted to find out why companies are building autonomous agents if they’re not able to control them. Did you get an answer to that?
I think they’re in a very competitive environment. But when I talked to Dario and Daniela Amodei, or even Elon Musk, they all think that this is a danger, and we have to find some ways to have guardrails, or regulation, or self-regulation, or a pause. And yet, even though they individually feel that way, it’s hard for our governments and our institutions to react quickly enough.
A lot of these names and others like Sam Altman are popping up in popular culture and in Hollywood now. What do you make of the current fascination around them?
I think there’s an understandable backlash against technology and AI because it seems to be removing our control of our lives, and in some ways not being dedicated simply to serving humanity. It seems like a race of people trying to build the biggest and the fastest and the most powerful, and so obviously there’s a reaction to it, and it’s manifest in pushback against data centers, but also in an understandable feeling that a small group of people are in control, and nobody is, and here’s not enough checks on their power.
You have written about these figures, Musk and the others, in the past. But since AI has taken over, has that made you think about them any differently?
I have a new introduction to my book, The Innovators, and a discussion on the Builders series, in which the leaders of the personal computer revolution, Steve Jobs foremost among them, believe strongly in the tight partnership between humans and their machines. Steve believed they were like a bicycle for the mind that augmented our imagination and creativity, rather than try to replace it with artificial intelligence. And the leaps of the people in that book generally came from connecting people more closely to their computers. That’s the tradition of Ada Lovelace, of Doug Engelbart, that reaches its climax in Steve Jobs. What the people creating agentic autonomous agents are doing is they’re getting away from that tradition of making sure we have a tight symbiosis and partnership with our machines, and so I argue we have to go back to the Steve Jobs philosophy of making sure that we and the machines are working together to serve humanity, rather than creating machines that will create artificial intelligence.