Introducing: On Musk with Walter Isaacson

12/12/23 • 3 min

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What is it like to shadow Elon Musk for two years? To sit courtside as he builds a rocket? Or tears apart an engineer? Or couch surfs at the homes of billionaires? And how on earth do you make sense of it all? Walter Isaacson is the biographer of giants: DaVinci, Franklin, Doudna, Jobs...and now Musk, former enfante terrible, rocket launcher, electric car innovator, and Twitter—er, X—disruptor, to put it gently. In this four part series, author Evan Ratliff (Mastermind, Longform Podcast) sits down with Isaacson to draw out the behind-the-scenes stories of this epic biography, and what the writer has learned as an outsider inside Silicon Valley.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen here or on the iHeartRadio app.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

Introducing OUTLAWS: The Good Thief

Vassilis Palaikostas, aka “Greece’s Robin Hood” has been on the lam for 14 years. In his absence, legends of his generosity have grown. But no one knows where he is, or if the stories are even true.

Here’s what we do know: there’s a million Euro bounty out for Vassilis, and a 24-hour task force trying to track him down. When he robs banks, he shares the money with the poor. When he kidnaps industrialists-- and he only kidnaps those who are known for unfair labor practices-- they give baffling interviews showing how he opened their minds. And when he escapes heavily reinforced prisons, as he’s done ... by helicopter ... twice, he does it without harming a guard.

Join host Miles Gray and our team of Greek reporters as we follow Vassilis’ trail from Athens to tiny islands to remote mountain hideouts. Along the way, we’ll meet Vassilis’s inner circle, chat with police chiefs and prime ministers, and work to understand how this thief managed to steal the country’s heart.

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See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Next Episode

Introducing: The Sicilian Inheritance

Every family has an origin story – for author Jo Piazza (Under the Influence, Wilder) her family's is a murder mystery. For as long as she can remember the Piazzas have told the story of their Sicilian roots going back over a hundred years ago: one by one the sons and then their father sailed off to America to carve out a better life. Their mother, Lorenza Marsala was supposed to join them – but she never made it. She was murdered by the Sicilian mafia, they said. The truth of what happened has morphed like a game of telephone through the generations. Various versions of the story claim she was killed by the Black Hand, others insisted she was a witch, killed over a bad spell. Now, Jo is determined to untangle the twisted narrative which just might bridge the gap from cinematic mob fantasies to an unexpected reality. Join her in Sicily on a family vacation/fact finding mission in which she goes to the scene of the crime, confronts mafia experts, consults mediums, and tracks down Italian officials, determined to set the record straight on her great, great grandmother’s mysterious disappearance.

Listen here and subscribe to The Sicilian Inheritance on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts!

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The Last Soviet - Introducing: On Musk with Walter Isaacson

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:02.560

All right, we're ready. Yeah. Five weeks ago I sat down with biographer Walter Isaacson to try and unpack his new six hundred page biography of Elon Musk. Already some stories had jumped off the page. That night, he was deciding whether or not to allow starlink to be enabled to allow a sneak attack on Crimemea. When Isaacson set out to write this biography, he believed he was taking on a world changing figure. Must turns to his security guard, sa